Tag: <span>Election 2016</span>

Is This Election Different?

November 26, 2016
Politics
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When I started this blog I mentioned politics as one possible subject, but lately it seems to be the dominant subject. With the election of Trump perhaps that’s unavoidable. I have already said that I don’t know if everything will be okay, though I pointed at some early indications and structural factors which I thought looked encouraging. That was a couple of weeks ago, and you wouldn’t think that I’d already be changing my mind, but I am. In fact, I’m starting to get the feeling that everything won’t be okay.

First I should emphasis that this feeling is very nascent. Just a hint that things may be developing in a way I didn’t expect. Which ironically is exactly what you should expect. As I repeatedly emphasis you can’t predict the future, so, to resort to a cliche, you should expect the unexpected. Part of the reason why these developments are unexpected is that they arrive from an unexpected source. Allow me to explain. I, along with most people in America, expect to be surprised by Trump, but the feeling I’m describing has very little to do with Trump’s actions. So far he’s acting about as I figured. He’s appears to still be running his own Twitter account and making remarks that probably strike a majority of people as not being very presidential. He’s put forth some divisive figures for high level appointments (Bannon and Sessions being chief among them). Most of what he talked about on the campaign trail is still out there, though some of it has been softened, at least a little bit. In other words I see no reason, yet, to modify the assessment I made of Trump in my election post. Trump is not the reason I’m starting to think that things might not be okay. But the opposition to Trump is another matter.

Now this may sound like I’m opposed to any opposition to Trump, which I suppose if taken to it’s logical conclusion would mean that I’m a Trump supporter. Neither of these are true. I’m not opposed to opposition, I think having a vigorous debate has all manner of benefits, including better decisions, and clearer thinking in general. And if you have any doubts you can refer back to the two posts I did on freedom of speech. In other words, I think my full-throated support for freedom of speech is unambiguous.  And insofar as the opposition to Trump falls under the category of free speech, I support it. To the additional question of whether I’m a Trump supporter, I would describe my approach to Trump as more zen. There are things which happen that are beyond our ability to change. Who gets elected as president is one of those things. And freaking out about it has as much utility as freaking out about the weather. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t buy an umbrella.

Having come this far you may be confused. I seem to be simultaneously saying that the opposition to Trump worries me, but that also opposition is a healthy expression of freedom of speech. The resolution of this paradox is that I’m not talking about what’s happening right now I’m talking about the direction I fear things are headed. And I’m talking about when opposition moves from speech to something more concrete.

Obviously I considered the possibility that Trump might win, I would have bet against it, but the chances seemed great enough that I tried to model what it might be like. One obvious place to go when you’re attempting to understand something is to draw on past experience. And in this I was in luck. I had already lived through a time with a very unpopular conservative president who was hated by the left. His name was George W. Bush, and when I considered what the Trump presidency would be like, particularly what the liberal reaction to it would be, I figured it would look similar to opposition during the Bush presidency. It would be nasty, it would be everywhere, it would be filled with outrageous claims, and he would be the butt of basically all of the late night jokes, but after taking all of that into account, he would still be acknowledged, even if reluctantly, to be President. I should add, before continuing, that much of the criticism of Bush was completely justified, though sometimes the amount of criticism he drew for any given item appeared inversely proportional to the actual harm.  

Returning to the most recent election, it appears that things may be playing out differently. Now of course in all of this I’m trying to compare the immediate aftermath of the 2000 election with the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election. Not only is there the problem of distance, distortion and memory, but also in 2000 there was no Facebook, so what I consider a difference in the message my in fact be a difference in the medium. All that said, I don’t recall anyone urging people not to normalize the Bush presidency. (Of course at this point in 2000 no one was quite sure who would be president.) In 2000 people were mad about things, definitely, and there were certainly calls to get rid of the electoral college or to try and flip an elector or two. The same calls are happening now (though Hillary would need 38 faithless electors as compared to the three that Gore needed) but there is also lots of rhetoric of a kind I don’t recall hearing in 2000. Back then my feeling was that people accepted the result, they weren’t happy about it, given the chance they would have loved to impeach Bush, but they agreed that he was president, and treated him as such. I’m getting a different vibe out of things today. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

The first thing I came across which offered a hint to this difference was an article in Slate. It wasn’t critical of Trump, it was critical of Clinton, and not of how she ran her campaign, but of how conciliatory her concession speech was. The article didn’t stop there, it moved on to calling the speech dangerous and even went so far as to say that Clinton might mainly be remembered, “more than anything else, for the toxic, dangerous, and deceptive concession speech she delivered on Wednesday.”

Wait, what? Her concession speech is going to be more important than being first lady? Senator from New York? Secretary of State? While I suppose that’s possible I think we may have wandered into the realm of hyperbole. And when you’re getting that level of outrage about Clinton, you can only imagine how the article writer feels about Trump himself.

As a source for this claim the author drew on the opinions of a Russian dissident, author of a previous article titled, Autocracy: Rules for Survival. The basic claim of both articles is that Trump is a tyrant in the making who will dismantle the judiciary, muzzle the press and turn the police into virtual death squads, and that only by continuing to fight him tooth and nail and most of all by refusing normalize him, that is treat him as a normal president winning a typical election, is there any hope.

I’ve mentioned the word “normalize” now a couple of times and this appears to be the favorite term for describing what we definitely should not be doing now that the election is over. Again, I could be misremembering or overlooking things, but this feels qualitatively different than when Bush was elected. I certainly don’t remember anyone criticizing Gore when he finally conceded for being too nice. And a search around the terms “george bush” and “normalize” brings up hardly anything, while doing the same search on Trump brings up all the articles I already linked to plus thousands more. In other words, in answer to the question posed in the blog title, this election is starting to appear qualitatively different than even the hotly contested 2000 election.

But what are people hoping to achieve when they warn against any attempts to normalize Trump? And how is this different than the derision and hate that Bush was subjected to? This is where we start to get into the realm of speculation, and as I’ve have said, it’s just a feeling, I could easily be wrong, but it also represents a hypothesis, something that should be kept out and occasionally compared against reality to see if the events and facts which have developed in the interim support this theory or are pointing in a different direction.

In any case, as I read it, when people caution against treating either Trump or his presidency as normal they are make a judgement call that he is so bad that extraordinary measures are called for. Extraordinary measures like seceding. I already mentioned the idea of California seceding in my post about the election, but in this context it seems like yet another way that this election is different. Of course, you might retort, that Texas was talking of seceding long before California and mostly in response to Obama (though they did pre-emptively bring up the threat again as a possible response to Clinton winning.) This fact doesn’t make things better, it makes things worse. And opens up the idea that it’s not just the election of Trump that is different but that things are moving in an alarming direction, possibly even in the absence of Trump.

So, yes, I think it’s safe to say that this election is different than the 2000 election. Trump’s presidency will be more divisive and uglier than Bush’s and it’s becoming apparent that the level of push-back and rage is greater than any modern election. Of course the divisiveness and outrage is not greater than in any previous election. Perhaps when I mentioned the potential secession of Texas and California your mind already went in this direction, but if you’re looking for a more divisive election I would direct you to the election of Abraham Lincoln. Indisputably that election was more divisive, but comparing this election to the election of 1860 should not bring any comfort, and in fact this is the situation that has been gnawing away at the edge of my consciousness.  

Libertarians are fond of talking about how every law ever passed is ultimately enforced at the end of a gun barrel. In a similar fashion at some point if two groups just can’t agree, then, ultimately, the issue is going to be decided by force. Oliver Wendell Holmes, perhaps the best known of all the Supreme Court justices, said as much:

Between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy but force.

Historically this is how it has been. All important issues have ultimately been decided by the shedding of blood. Recent history is an anomaly, and not even much of an anomaly if you consider what’s currently taking place in Syria. However if we restrict ourselves to just the US, we still only have to go back as far as the Civil War, before we see the roll of bloodshed in deciding between two inconsistent worldviews.

Insofar as things aren’t decided by bloodshed, it’s because we have replaced that idea with the idea of settling issues through the will of the people and the rule of law, but if you decide that this time, with this election, that you’re no longer going to follow the system (and I’m aware that Clinton won the popular vote, but recall that’s not the system) then you’re implicitly opting to decide things by force. Perhaps you disagree, and think that this one time you can ignore the results of the system, achieve the desired outcome of keeping Trump from being President, and that everything will be fine. If this is what you’re thinking I would say that at best this line of thinking is delusional and at worst it’s deadly. Things are decided either by force or by the rule of law, there’s not some hidden third option. If you abandon the rule of law than, you’re choosing force, even if you don’t realize it.  Which is not to say that this automatically means a second Civil War, but you’re definitely entering into uncharted territory, where at a minimum things are going to be decided by the threat of force.

You may counter that civil society is already only maintained by the threat of force. However, by making laws which restrict and codify the use of force, we greatly minimize its use. Which is not to say that force isn’t sometimes, or even often, used in an inconsistent and unfair manner. The rule of law isn’t perfect, but it’s vastly preferable to the alternative methods, particularly when you’re talking methods which have historically been used for deciding who is going to be king (or in our case president).

To return to the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote are we dealing with two groups who both want a different kind of world? Do we have Texas secessionists on one side and California secessionists on the other? Does the election of Trump mark the beginning of a permanent split between those two worlds? These are the thoughts I’ve been having over the last couple of weeks.

You can judge for yourself whether there’s anything to worry about, whether we’re seeing the beginning of a great schism or whether things will eventually normalize over the objections of a vocal minority. In case it’s not clear, my own opinion is that it’s far too early to tell, though some of the trends are worrying.

For the rest of the post I want to focus on what to do if this is in fact what’s happening. What are the current remedies if we’ve finally reached a point past which no compromise is possible? If our current course is leading us to either a giant secession crisis, or worse still a second Civil War, is there some way to avoid that?

As usual I offer the caveat that individually there’s very little we can do about politics or the weather, and probably the best course of action is to make sure you have an adequate stock of umbrellas. That said it’s still a subject worth discussing.

To start let’s examine our options if we decide that our highest value is to keep the country together. This was basically the thinking during the Civil War so there is some precedent for it. If this is what we decide then we have three possible strategies.

The first strategy is that of the status quo. Sure there are currently some disagreements, and some anger. But perhaps rather than looking all the way back to the Civil War, a better example is the Civil Rights Era. And a better analogy for the 2016 election is the 1968 election, the last time a third party candidate won any electoral votes. Times seemed pretty tumultuous then as well. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 and the country was convulsed with race riots. It appeared that the gains made by the 1964 Civil Rights Act might be overturned, and yet, even though Nixon was elected President the country stayed together, the wounds eventually healed and we made it through. Under this strategy, perhaps you agree that things look ugly, but you don’t think any major changes need to be made. Everything will eventually work itself out, the rule of law and compromise will eventually win out in the end

But what if you pursue this strategy and it doesn’t work out? The rifts keep widening, things get worse. States vote to secede, and the country starts breaking apart. This brings us to our second strategy, if you can’t keep things together by the normal methods then the only other alternative is to keep things together through force, and just like in 1861 you go to war. In other words this isn’t exactly a different strategy, but an extension of the status quo, let’s-keep-everything-together strategy. Which further means that if the initial, trust-in-the-status-quo strategy doesn’t work out then you might very well find yourself in a situation where bloodshed is the only option. I would hope that there would be no bloodshed, but if you really are intent on keeping the two worlds together, whether your goal is to preserve the union or to dictate a set of laws and policies to an unwilling minority, then eventually it will come to bloodshed.

If you have doubts about the status quo, and if you don’t like the idea of a second Civil War, then you probably aren’t thrilled with either of the first two options, and you may be eager to hear what the third strategy is for keeping the country together. I’ve already said that there are two ways to decide something, you can decide things through the use of force or you can decide them via a system of law. If we reject force then we have to do something about the system. Right now the system is dominated by the federal government. The bulk of the tax burden is determined at the federal level, as is environmental regulation, discrimination laws, the legality of abortion and same-sex marriage, not to mention educational standards, healthcare and entitlements. In that list there’s a lot for California and Texas to disagree about, but what if there wasn’t. It’s interesting and ironic that so much is determined by the “federal” government, because under a truly federal system you would expect most of the aforementioned issues to be decided at the state level, which would allow California and Texas to be different, but that’s not the case.

An argument about whether federalism is actually dead, is beside the point. Whether federalism has died or just evolved, the point is not to argue semantics, but to figure out ways in which Texas and California could both exist in the same nation without Texas seceding if Clinton is elected and California seceding when Trump get’s elected. And more importantly to keep the country together without having to resort to force. I know that for many people the idea of allowing individual states to make their own environmental regulations, their own decision on same sex marriage, and their own labor laws is terrifying, but is it more terrifying than going to war in order to just have one standard for all those things? I personally think that, when the total number of deaths is taken into account, it may have been a mistake to not just let the South secede, but if we were going to have a big war over something at least the elimination of slavery was a cause worth fighting for. Are the issues which divide us today similarly important? I’m personally not willing to have my son’s fight and possible die in a war to keep either California or Texas in the country. And I assume a lot of people feel similarly.

This brings us to the final possible strategy. The strategy to pursue if preserving the USA isn’t your highest goal. This strategy might be most usefully described as the right of exit. If California wants to leave, then let them, same with Texas, same with New Jersey. Obviously this may mean that some people aren’t as happy being in Texas as they once were when the Texas was obligated to follow all the federal regulations. They should have a right of exit as well. I don’t know that the right of exit has a corresponding right of entry (a topic which is already controversial), but I assume that it would work itself out. Of course this would be an experiment on a massive scale, and who knows what would happen, though Europe may provide a preview of this process if things continue to head the way they’ve been.

Of all the strategies I think a return to a greater degree of federalism and state autonomy would work out best in the long run. Not only is this what the founders had in mind, but I think it provides the best trade off between joining the two different kinds of worlds, while avoiding most of the chaos occasioned by a completely break up of the United States. That said of all the possible strategies I’ve described it may be the most difficult to actually implement. Rolling back the trend of a century is unquestionably more difficult than just maintaining the status quo, and probably more difficult than the other two options as well.

This post has engaged in a lot of speculation, and as with many things I write about hopefully none of this will happen. Hopefully, the status quo will work, Trump will be a great president, and everything will be rainbows and unicorns. If I had to guess, I think we’ll survive the Trump presidency without having to worry about a second civil war, or states seceding, or whether we should have been trying to restore federalism this whole time. But even if we do, I don’t like the direction things are headed.

I Don’t Know If Everything Will Be Okay: My Thoughts On the Election

November 12, 2016
Politics
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You may be familiar with the website Cracked. I spend more time on it than I should, and I definitely have a dysfunctional relationship with it. Sometimes I think it’s the worst clickbait site out there, more information free than even Buzzfeed. Other times, while still annoyed by their tendency to split test their titles until the most sensational, least accurate title wins out, I think they might actually have some interesting articles. This may seem like a strange way to start a post about the election, but it’s going somewhere.

In the wake of the election Cracked had an article, titled Dear White People Stop Saying Everything Will Be Okay (though by the time you get to it it may be titled “Five Reassuring Things White People Say (that are pure B.S.)”). And in case you didn’t know it, I am white. And I’m going to follow this injunction. I’m not going to tell you that everything will be okay. How could I possibly know that? In fact the theme of this blog is that things are not going to be okay (and certainly that they’re not going to be okay in the absence of God, for my non-religious friends this is the first and last religious reference.) If you want to be told that everything will be okay I would point you at the recent article from Wait but Why. If you’d rather stick with someone who has no illusions about his ability to predict the future you’re in the right place.

To be frank, Trump could end up being a horrible president. He could not only be as bad as people thought, he could be worse. He could be the person most responsible for the eventual destruction of the planet, whether through a full on exchange of nukes with Russia, or something more subtle. But, once you start talking about things that could happen, then in the end Clinton also could be and do all those things, in fact there are credible arguments that Clinton could have been even more likely to do some of those things.

We just don’t know. We guess; we estimate; we might even create models to predict what will happen, and coincidently enough, we just got a great example of how models and predictions can be wrong, really wrong. So the first thing I want to talk about is the pre-election predictions, because everyone recognizes that they were wrong, and yet now, both people who are enthusiastic about the election and people who are devastated by the election are making pre-presidency predictions, without recognizing that these predictions are even more likely to be wrong than the pre-election ones. At least the predictions about who would win the election were based on lots of data and dealing with a very narrow question. On the other hand, how Trump will be as president is a huge question with very little data. So yeah, I’m not going to say that everything will be okay because I don’t know, and neither does anyone else really.

As I said remembering how wrong the polls were can help us have some perspective on how wrong we might be about a Trump presidency (and remember we could be wrong in either direction). I should pause before I discuss the predictions and, in the interest of full disclosure, mention that there is definitely some schadenfreude going on here, not because I really wanted Trump to win, but because as someone who is constantly pointing out the difficulty of predicting the future, when someone smugly does just that and ends up being really wrong, it does give me a certain amount of validation. In any event my favorite example of being really wrong is is Sam Wang from the Princeton Election Consortium, who gave Clinton a 99% chance of winning the election. This is bad enough, but then outlets like Wired and DailyKos decided to double down and not only hail the genius of Sam Wang, but dismiss Nate Silver as an idiot. Now of course Silver was wrong as well, but he was a lot less wrong. To take a more limited example Matt Grossman of Michigan State said that Clinton was ahead by 19 points in Michigan, a state that Trump won. This wasn’t months ago, this was a week before the election. (Perhaps, one clue that it was wrong should have been the fact that in the same poll Gary Johnson was getting 11% of the vote.)

In their defense people like Wang and Silver will argue that the polls were not off by that much. Nate Silver posted an article about how if only 1 person in 100 had switched votes Clinton would have easily won. What this amounts to is that the polls were off by 2%, which is not that much, and the sort of thing that could slip in unnoticed, and be due to any of a 100 different factors operating in isolation or in combination.This is totally fair, but it doesn’t matter if the polls were only off by 0.1% or if Trump’s margin of victory was only 537 votes. (As was the case with Bush, another person who won the election but lost the popular vote.) He still gets 100% of the presidency. Most things are like this, a tiny error in some part of our calculations can still have huge consequences. In this sense it doesn’t matter if the odds of a Clinton presidency were 65.1% or 65.2% the key thing was for them to be right about who would actually win, and everyone (or at least mostly everyone) was wrong about that.

Before leaving our discussion of polling I’d like to point out one final thing. Yes, a tiny switch in the voting and the nation would be having a very different discussion right now, but as Andrew Gelman, a noted statistician, points out there are two ways to view the election. The first way to view it, is as the probability that Trump would be president given what we knew Tuesday morning. The second way is to view it as the probability that Trump would be president given what we knew when the race first started. Under the first view Trump’s victory was not that unlikely, despite what Sam Wang said. Under the second view it was fantastically unlikely. Gelman points out that a lot of the shock people are feeling is based on still being stuck in the second view, the probability of him going all the way.

Being stuck in the second view obviously causes problems, but for the moment I’d like to look at how we got from here to there. How did something which seemed so unlikely when Trump first announced his candidacy (One commentator said he was more likely to play in the NBA finals than win the nomination) end up being our reality on November 9th?

Obviously this is not the first attempt at an explanation, pundits have had essentially no other job since Trump entered the race than explaining and/or dismissing his rise, but I’d like to focus on two explanations which I don’t think got much play, but may be more significant than people realized.

I know a fair number of political junkies and as you can imagine there was a lot of discussion in the aftermath of the election. One comment in particular jumped out at me, from one of my more liberal friends, he mentioned that there is a history in the US, going all the way back to the revolution, of saying “Screw you, I do what I want!” And that’s what this looked like to him. In response I pointed out that in order for that to happen that someone had to be trying to tell them what to do, and in my opinion that was one of the overlooked factors. All the individuals telling people how evil they were for even thinking about voting for Trump. Everyone seems to agree that Clinton lost some voters when called half of Trump’s supporters a basket of deplorables, but what about when the Huffington Post decided to add the following to all of their articles:

Note to our readers: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

Did that hurt or help Trump? And is it possible that the net effect of Joss Whedon getting all his rich friends together to record a video (which I enjoyed by the way) was to create more Trump voters, while convincing no one new to vote for Clinton?

I am not saying that any one of these things was enough to push the election to Trump, but together, to borrow a term from the other side, they created a climate of badgering, smugness and disapproval. Was it enough to swing the election? Hard to say, but as we saw above it was very close, so if this hectoring created any net Trump voters (particularly in the state of Pennsylvania) then it may very well have been what pushed it over the top. I think it certainly created the nucleus of hard-core supporters that got him the nomination and kept him in the race.

I said that this didn’t get much play, and that was true before the election. Now that the election is over lots of people are pointing it out. So far I’ve seen articles about the Unbearable Smugness of the Press, another commentator saying Trump was elected (and the Brexit happened) because people were tired of being labeled as bigots and racists, and finally Reason Magazine saying that Trump won because political correctness inspired a terrifying backlash. Perhaps you feel that Trump, and anyone who voted for him, is racist, and that regardless of whether it’s going to cost Clinton the election, it’s still important to point it out, that’s certainly your right, but in the long run it might be more effective for your candidate to win.

The second explanation I’d like to look at might be called the, “what’s good for the goose” explanation. And this goes beyond the election into the presidency, but let’s start with the election, in particular voting as a racial block. Much has been made of the fact that 53% of white women voted for Trump, despite his apparent misogyny. And some are even saying that because of this obvious racism that white women sold out the world. But at the same time you read about people who are shocked that Latinos didn’t vote in greater numbers and that up to 29% of them may have actually voted for Trump. But then another article comes along and assures us that no, it’s okay, Latinos did vote as a block and only 18% of them voted for Trump. This is not new of course, minorities have been voting as a block for a long time. It’s expected, but it was also expected that whites wouldn’t vote as a block, but why?

I’m not going to get into whether it’s right or wrong to vote as a racial block, it’s one of those intersections of a lot of different principles (charity, justice, equality, etc.) where things get really muddy. But no one should be surprised if after decades of urging blacks and latinos to view the election in terms of race, that at least some whites start viewing it in terms of race as well. And you don’t even have to imagine some grand conspiracy for this to happen. Most people vote based on their perceived self interest, not on what’s best for the world, and it’s not inconceivable that these interests will align in a way that looks racial, even if that race is white.

This gets into the subject of those tactics, which seem great if your side is the only one using them, but aren’t so great when the other side starts using them. And here we move from talking about the election to talking about Trump’s presidency.

Regardless of your opinion on whether Trump will make a good president or a bad president. It is certainly true that recent developments will make him a more consequential president than he might otherwise have been. I already talked about how dangerous the temptation is to restrict free speech because not only is it the best protection against a bad leader, but you can create tools to use while you’re in power which then backfire on you when you’re out of power. There are lots of examples of expanded executive powers which fit this model. Dan Carlin of the Common Sense and Hardcore History podcasts talks a lot about this. He’s particularly worried about surveillance powers and executive orders. I’m more interested in the Supreme Court. There are a lot of things where liberals couldn’t wait for public opinion to catch up and so they relied on the courts to change them, but now that the court has done that, they can reverse it, and they can do it even if, in the interim, public opinion has caught up.

Also, with the Supreme Court acting more and more as the de facto rulers of the whole country, I know that there are a lot of Republicans out there who voted for Trump just because they didn’t want Clinton appointing four justices. That was their single issue, and they ignored or held their nose about everything else.  Combine this with Dan Carlin’s list of concerns, and a federal bureaucracy that’s more powerful than ever, and if Trump is going to be a bad President he’s going to have a lot more tools at his disposal than he otherwise would have. In short, people arguing for limited government weren’t always doing it because they’re jerks. (I mean sometimes they were, but not always.) They may have genuinely recognized the danger and the fragility that comes from too much centralization.

As I’ve said, I don’t know what will happen under a Trump Presidency. He could be good, he could be horrible, he could be worse than horrible, but before ending I’ll run through what I think might happen in a half dozen different areas:

First, let’s start with immigration. This is one area where Trump took a lot of heat and got a lot of support. I have seen some Trump defenders say that he’s going to walk back some of his more extreme comments when he’s President. And if you look at his plan for the first 100 days it does appear that he might be doing that, at least somewhat. There is no mention of deporting everyone who’s here illegally or banning all Muslims (the word Muslim doesn’t appear anywhere in the plan). Combine this with the normal difficulties of getting things done in Washington and  his immigration policy may be less draconian than people feared.

Second, another place where people are scared is LGBT rights. Despite the expansion of executive power I don’t know that there’s a lot he can do here outside of getting the Supreme Court to undo the blanket legalization for same sex marriage. (And remember that all the Supreme Court can do is send it back to the states, where, one could argue, it should have been in the first place.) Also from what I can tell Trump’s social conservative urges are nearly non-existent. Certainly nothing about this appears in his plan for the first 100 days nor was the idea that prominent in his campaign. That said if he manages to appoint four conservative justices there’s no telling what they might do. But of all the Republicans in the primaries I think Trump was the most socially liberal.

Third, people also seem to be worried about whether Trump will keep abortion legal. This is another area where Trump doesn’t seem to have strong feelings, but a court with four Trump justices could still reverse Roe vs. Wade (and once again remember this just moves it back to the states.) For whatever reason this strikes me as more likely. For one, Roe v. Wade is considered a poorly constructed ruling even by some people who support it, plus it appears to have been bubbling to the top more in the last few years. Despite all this I still don’t think it’s going to happen, but I think we’ll actually see a substantial challenge.

Now that we’ve covered the relatively mundane topics, topics where there’s almost certainly going to be some noise made, we can move on to what we might term black swans.

In the fourth position, and our first black swan is something which is definitely going to make some noise, the question is whether it’s going to go anywhere. I’m talking about California seceding.  What was once the cause of a few thousand hardcore supporters is now being seriously considered. The consensus is that to do it cleanly would require a constitutional amendment. But historically it’s far more common for a nation to break apart through bloodshed and war than through a vote, though I doubt the Californians have the stomach for that, but probably neither do the rest of us. When I consider the difficulties I think more likely than either a specifically Californian Constitutional Amendment or war would, be an amendment making it easier for any state to leave. Or alternatively a new Constitutional Convention, which is actually something provided for in the Constitution.

For numbers five and six we’ll finally deal with the two greatest fears cited by opponents of Donald Trump: dictatorship and nuclear war. I’m not sure how to evaluate the possibility of a dictatorship. I mean obviously it is possible, I just don’t immediately see how to get from here to there, but I’ll see what I can come up with. Let’s start with the premise that dictatorship requires some kind of force, and while force can be applied without guns, eventually if you really want to get someone to do something guns are going to enter into the equation at some point. So who has guns? Obviously the military does, also in the US there is a vast stock of guns in private ownership, and then there’s the police. But if it came to it private gun owners (if unified) are a bigger deal than the police, but the military is a bigger deal than them all. Thus, to exercise force you need to control one level and the levels above you need to be sidelined. For example it’s sufficient to control the police if both military and private gun owners are uninvolved, which is, broadly speaking, the situation we have now. But if someone controls the military it doesn’t matter how many cops or private citizens oppose him. And Trump does, sort of, control the military now, but he can’t just immediately declare martial law, the military would tell him to go suck it. He needs an excuse. Perhaps the War on Terror. Perhaps the war against California after they secede. But regardless of the excuse it has to be a big enough excuse to derail the normal process of elections. And that’s where I have a hard time seeing how to get from here to there. But perhaps I just lack imagination on this front.

As far as Trump controlling the nukes. This worries me too. If the worry is just all out nuclear war with Russia, he actually worries me slightly less than Clinton did. The other possibility for all out war is China and here he’s kind of a black box, though it’s widely understood that China prefered Trump, for whatever that’s worth. Where Trump concerns me more is in the area of using tactical nukes, say in the Middle East somewhere. I this front I’m not sure what warnings or consolation to offer. I think we’ll just have to wait and see.

And of course that’s the primary advice I have, wait and see. There should definitely be some red lines even for those people who think Trump is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But these red lines should always be there for every President. And by red lines I mean acts by Trump that should cause us to take to the streets with signs and shouting and if necessary, man the barricades. Red lines like if he starts abusing the power of military, or if he starts censoring people, or if he tries to pack the Supreme Court, or most especially if he tries to start messing with the election. Of course there are a lot of small steps between where we are and General Trump, Dictator for Life, Beloved and Eternal Leader. And it’s important that, unlike the frog, we don’t allow ourselves to be slowly boiled. But based on what I’ve seen on social media and the news since Tuesday I have no doubt that there will always be people willing to call out Trump the minute he tries to raise the temperature.