The 2022 Midterm Playing Field

The party controlling the White House nearly always loses seats in the House and Senate in midterm elections. Reporters and pundits spend inordinate amounts of time and ink/pixels on stories built on that premise because

1. the thesis is true most of the time and requires no research on the reporter or pundit's part
2. it allows the reporter or pundit to demonstrate how knowing / jaded they are, again without doing any actual work
3. for a more adventurous reporter, it sets up an easy secondary theme of "beating expectations" followed by the inevitable crashing back to earth story when expectations aren't beaten
4. the copy practically writes itself

To the extent horse race coverage dominates media, the media fails MISERABLY at describing the actual state of the country, how it got here, what the competitors are proposing and what is likely to happen in response to those proposals.

That's exactly where things stand in 2022.

In summer 2022, anger over the Dobbs decision ending federal protection for abortion access and a sudden surge of legislative wins by the Biden Administration after an anemic start led many liberal outlets to run stories hinting (hoping?) that the normal midterm trend could be avoided. Now as hidden conservative leaning independents who normally seem reluctant to publicly profess support for MAGA type alternatives get closer to election day, those tailwinds seem to have vanished and all reporting has shifted from the "surprise" dynamic on to the "told you so" dynamic.

That's horse race reporting at its worst. Republicans likely to win (yawn...), oh wait, the Dems might retain control in both, oh wait, maybe just the Senate, oh nope, looks like Republicans will take control of the House and Senate after all. SURPRISE. Meanwhile, the media has failed to report that the horse race being described is being run on a track bearing no resemblence to prior horse races and the jockeys and their owners have vastly different definitions of a "win" which has nothing to do with satisfying the spectators in the stands.

A better understanding of the true stakes for 2022 requires a mental model of the competing political parties which try to react to issues facing the country for their own preservation and sustenance. Since American politics has been distorted into a false two-party duopoly subsequently entrenched at the federal and state level by parliamentary rules that cripple the ability of any alternate parties to coexist, current dynamics lend themselves to being viewed as a one-dimensional tug of war on a football field.

Decades ago, most Americans viewed the political landscape like this:

• Democratic policies left of the 50, with ideas all over but predominately centered somewhere between the 30 and 35 yard lines
• Republican policies right of the 50, with ideas all over but predominately centered somewhere between the 30 and 35 yard lines
• policy debates and resulting legislation and judicial rulings generally landing in the middle ground between the 40 yard lines
• Democratic voter preferences distributed primarily towards the 35 but tailing off towards the extreme left goal line
• Republican voter preferences distributed primarily towards the 35 but tailing off towards the extreme right goal line
• independent voter preferences distributed evenly between the 45 and 45 in the middle, swinging either way year to year, issue by issue

The playing field in 2022 is VASTLY different:

• Democratic policies shifted net right, still spread evenly between 30L and 35R, partly to try to coopt winning voting trends in financial / social policies
• Republican policies shifted right and unevenly spread, concentrated towards more extreme policies closer to the goal line than midfield
• policy debates and resulting legislation shifted from midfield to a range somewhere between the 30R to 35R yard lines
• a reduced number of consistent Democratic voters, with tailing off numbers preferring policies at the goal line extreme
• a reduced number of consistent Republican voters, with INCREASING numbers preferring policies at the goal line extreme
• a growing number of independent voters, likely turned off by more extreme Republican proposals while unwilling to trust Democrats to fend off those policies without enacting more liberal policies undesired by voters with older country-club, non-evangelical Republican preferences

What are the consequences of these shifts in politicians, policies and voters? None of them are good.

Democracy

There are 106 Republican members of the US House who signed an amicus brief sent to the US Supreme Court on December 10, 2020 which reflects the most arrogant, anti-democratic stance ever taken regarding elections and fifty one constitutions -- THE Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitutions of all fifty states. The brief was submitted as an effort to grease the mental skids in the USSC regarding the cases Donald Trump and his clown circus legal team were bringing in multiple states in support of a concept of "legislative control" of all aspects of the "electoral process" controlling the final selection of a President.

The amicus brief argued that ANYTHING regarding a state's final submission of electors could ONLY be controlled by the state legislature. A state's submission CANNOT be affected by elected officials (even Governors or Secretaries of State). Only the function within each legislature that controls the state's final slate of electors can affect the "electoral" process. By their bizarre interpretation of their bizarre theory, that means any states that changed voting eligibility rules, changed mail-in balloting rules, changed drop-off balloting sites, etc. via directives from a Governor, Secretary of State or county level elected official or appointee made those electoral choices invalid.

Unsurprisingly, these fraudulent objections were only being raised in states Trump lost. No objections were filed in states won by Trump. More disturbingly, by filing this amicus brief, this group of Republicans were arguing that individuals OUTSIDE a state who held no elected or appointed role WITHIN a state DO HAVE the right to interfere with that state's voting process and trigger a committee within the legislature to ALTER a state's result from the choice made by the voters to a choice made by a committee which -- due to gerrymandering -- likely will NOT remotely reflect the actual preferences of ALL voters throughout the state.

Presumably, all of these 106 Republican House members are running for re-election because they are all in safe seats. More importantly, this thinking is polluting state races for Secretary of State and Attorney General roles -- roles which will come immediately to the fore the next time this ploy is attempted. And until Trump and all of the members of his legal team that pursued these efforts through the courts are criminally punished, others WILL try this ploy again in future Presidential elections.

What effect is the authoritarian posturing of the Republican Part having on America?

Prior to the January 6 insurrection, then-acting Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler publicly called for the Republican Secretary of State for Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to resign, citing bogus claims of fraud being pushed by Trump's legal team and co-conspirators. Loeffler's request was purely a ploy to curry favor with extremist Republicans prior to the January 5 runoff election between her and now-Senator Ralph Warnock. Immediately after her call for Raffensperger to resign, threatening texts, voice messages and emails began arriving not only for Raffensperger but his wife and family members and election officials across the state.

On October 19, 2022, a 25 year old Pennsylvania man named Robert Vargo was indicted by a US grand jury for threating to kill Bernie Thompson -- chair of the January 6 Committee investigating the Trump-led insurrection -- as well as his family and President Joe Biden.

On October 20, 2022, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs referred a set of complaints from Maricopa Country involving voters being intimidated while dropping off ballots at designated boxes by persons touting weapons, wearing camouflage and masks hiding their faces. Recall that Maricopa County is the largest county by far in Arizona and suffered decades of imfamy from the actions of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, noted for financial fraud, discriminatory policing and civil rights abuses against immigrants and citizens alike.

In general, appointed election officials and volunteers across the country have been verbally accosted in person or on the phone, even receiving death threats. The Washington Post reported that election supervisors in 10 of 17 counties in Nevada have quit, been forced out or announced their resignation. And this is even happening in bright red communities where Republican candidates already win by landslide margins or may even run unopposed. This behavior is clearly not driven by any actual statistically valid chance of an election being lost due to errors (legitimate or fraudulently injected) throwing a razor thin race. This is sheer, paranoid insanity with an industrial-strength stupidity chaser.

Amid this environment, there are people running for offices directly managing elections who espouse the fraudulent election claims for 2020 and / or advocate for policies which weaken transparency around balloting and counting processes and destroy voting rights protections now abandoned by Federal courts due to recent Supreme Court rulings.

Water and Energy

It is quite likely that the two most important warning signs of impending calamity facing the United States are the water levels in Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam and Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam. Mead was last full in 1983, Powell in 1999. Both are now around twenty five percent full, posing two IMMEDIATE problems. Both lakes are near "dead pool" levels where reservoir levels are not high enough to drive turbines for electricity, posing IMMEDIATE risk to residential and commercial energy users in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Specifically, Glen Canyon is designed with 1320 megawatts of generation capacity (11.56 billion kW annually) but due to low water levels, is only generating about 5.0 billion kW annually, about 43% of maximum capacity. Hoover Dam is designed with 2080 megawatts of capacity (18.2 billion kW annually) but is only generating about 4.5 billion kW annually, about 25% of capacity.

If dead pool levels are reached, that production must be replaced by natural gas, coal, or solar, nearly instantaneously -- that's about 1084 megawatts needed.. Between 2012 and 2020, the US added 35,302 megawatts of gas generation capacity and 891,383 megawatts of capacity derived from wind, solar, biomass, etc. Those rates imply that it may be possible to absorb that draw of 1084 megawatts but that may trigger other stresses on the grid that require planning and engineering before the need becomes critical for tens of millions of people. Despite the urgency and the impact beyond the five Colorado River Basin states, no race anywhere in the country is addressing issues related to utility regulation on pricing and grid operations required for "dead pool" survival, even though those measures could be required WITHIN A YEAR.

If both reservoirs reach "dead pool" status, that obviously means water volumes released downstream will be drastically curtailed, crippling availability for residential users and vast stretches of farmland growing a third of vegetables sold in the US and seventy five percent of fruits and nuts. Again, no race in the country is addressing the status of water rights debates underway between the five states and the Department of Interior. Nor is any race addressing prioritizations that should be made about residential versus farm use or prioritization of water for different crops. Should limited reservoir water really be allocated to almond crops that require twenty three gallons per ounce of final product? A study from 2015 by the California Department of Water Resources found annual water consumption for almond production amounted to 3.4 billion cubic meters. In the same period, water consumption of all residential users in Los Angeles was 0.85 billion cubic meters.

Economics

The general Republican "shift alt-right" on policies and the concentration of those policies in the goal line area boils down to a doubling down on three key failed solutions to every problem -- lower taxes, reduced constraints on business and draconian cuts to spending on social programs such as healthcare, welfare and public works.

US debt currently totals $24.8 trillion dollars and the yearly interest payments on that debt amount to roughly $502 billion, which is eight percent of the yearly $6.271 trillion budget. That debt load is being carried by an economy creating $19.9 trillion of goods and services.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/#causes-and-surpluses

How do world markets react when politicians keep trying the same solutions while citizens and economic output and productivity suffer? The United Kingdom serves as a useful real-life thought exercise. Conservatives have controlled Parliament since 2016 and between 2016 and October 2022, the party has burned through four Prime Ministers -- David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss -- and is attempting to select a fifth to avoid calling an early general election which would likely remove their majority in Parliament. Since 2016, the UK economy SHRUNK three years in a row, had a slight increase in 2019, tanked 10.94% due to COVID in 2020 and rebounded 16 percent in 2021.

During that time, Conservative leaders did nothing to rein in abuses in the financial sector that have made London a haven for money laundering for Russian oligarchs. Conservatives continued proposing tax reductions and failed to appreciate the stresses from the longer term trend in anemic UK grown dating back to 2006 prior to the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown. Those stresses and frustrations became associated (fairly or unfairly) with EU membership, leading to an exit vote which created further economic disruption and efficiencies. Most recently, Liz Truss famously failed to outlast a head of lettuce in her stint as Prime Minister due to her reckless economic plan which called for MORE tax cuts without matching spending reductions. Within HOURS, world financial markets voted with their proverbial feet, tanking the value of the pound, spiking UK interest rates and raising mortgage / credit card payments for UK families by hundreds per month. Needlessly.

In America, Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy is promising to resume hostage tactics over periodic renewals in the debt ceiling, threatening government shutdowns if drastic spending cuts are not applied to social programs in exchange for permitting increased borrowing to cover existing debts. How much could one needless drama over debt ceiling renewal cost Americans? America currently has $31.2 trillion in cumulative debt and pays $400 billion yearly in interest, reflecting an average interest rate for the bonds for that debt around 1.2% -- due to artificially suppressed interest rates dating back to the 2008 financial meltdown. However, all NEW yearly deficits generate new borrowing at prevailing interest rates. When the government is running $1.0 trillion dollar deficits, each 1% increase in interest rates costs $10 billion dollars minimum in extra interest expenses. (NOTE: current estimates reflect $38 billion, likely reflecting some of the longer term $31.2 trillion is also floating on short-term bonds.) Thus, any needless theatre in managing ongoing authorizations to pay interest expenses for programs Congress already enacted has the potential to spook markets and increase borrowing costs between $10 and $38 billion per temper tantrum. That's just the cost to the federal government. Interest rate spikes also immediately impact credit cards, adjustable mortgages, etc. for individuals as well.

Russia / China

The world has watched Vladimir Putin attack and sustain a war on Ukraine for eight months, causing roughly 7.7 million citizens to flee the country, adding to refugee strains already causing economic and political problems across Europe. Over the eight months, Russian leaders have ordered attacks on population centers and established tactics for dealing with civilians that both constitute war crimes on a massive scale. Russia has even held workers at the largest nuclear power plant in Eastern Europe hostage while lobbing artillery fire around the plant, risking not only electrical grid failures but Chernobyl scale nuclear catastrophe. As of October, it appears as though Russian troops are abandoning positions around Kherson and conducting "mass evacuations" of the Ukrainian civilians there while simultaneously preparing to bomb a dam upstream of Kherson and 80 other communities, both to further cripple Ukrainian electric supply and to wipe all of those communities off the map.

In spite of the horrors seen so far, the state of the war boils down to these points:

• Ukraine has used western weapons with extreme efficacy to destroy Russian forces
• Russia has not been able to reach air superiority to protect its supply lines, triggering massive losses of troops and equipment before every reaching any traditional front
• the readiness of Russian equipment that DOES make it to a front makes it clear internal corruption siphoned off vast sums of money intended to maintain readiness, leaving traditional capabilities impaired to laughable levels
• Russia has had to widen conscription, triggering vastly larger political risks against Putin's control
• Russia's performance to date has demonstrated the country is no longer a true military or economic superpower, only an impotent has-been with dangerous nuclear weapons
• No American troops have been required or even requested

It's possible to encapsulate everything Americans need to understand about the importance of policies related to China into one acronym -- TSMC. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is a chip fabricator in Taiwan which is the sole source for many of the most widely used chips used as computer CPUs, phone / tablet processors, engine control units for cars and trucks, etc. Manufacturers all over the world are still kicking themselves for scrambling the chip supply chain by evolving it to boil down to a single supplier (dumb), then cancelling sustaining orders for highly commoditized units (dumber) allowing surges in demand in other sectors to take up capacity, only to renew demand for existing chips which cannot be had until backlogs for different chips clear and a new equilibrium is reached.

If the impact was limited to the latest iPhone or GoPro camera, chip shortages wouldn't be so dangerous. Unfortunately, the same chip manufacturing capacity is required to keep pace with orders for chips used in advanced weapons systems, including those being rapidly consumed in Ukraine out of US and NATO stocks. At some point, those weapons have to be replaced, requiring new chips. New systems are being developed requiring new designs that should not be restricted to manufacturing in a single facility that might fall under direct control of China to choke off supply or steal intellectual property behind the designs.

Are world chip supplies at risk? Risks of continued or widened chip shortages are not confined to events involving global pandemics or catastrophic weather and earthquakes. Risks are also driven by how Chinese President Xi Jinping reads the game board. Jinping's control over the Chinese Communist Party was strengthened in meetings concluded October 22, 2022 and China adopted a more militant written stance regarding Taiwan, stating an aim to "Resolutely oppose and contain Taiwan independence." China has been tightening control over Honk Kong for several years, presumably as a dry run on tactics to use if a more militant approach to Taiwan is adopted. At least some realpolitik junkies have been hypothesizing that China has also been watching the world's response to Putin's attempt at annexing Ukraine as an indicator about how much effort might be exerted by the West to protect Taiwan. Taiwanese leaders actually view TSMC status as global single-point-of-failure as thier mutually assured destruction ace in the hole, knowing the world economy would collapse if TSMC operations are materially curtailed or zeroed due to political strife.

The Republican reaction to these conditions is bluntly INSANE. It is absolutely clear that the Ukraine conflict is contributing to Putin's downfall in a manner as minimally impactful to American citizens as could be wished for, and burning through Russia's conventional fighting machinery like Sherman through Atlanta. It is fairly obvious that China is looking at Putin's military losses and crippling economic impacts and likely becoming less eager to consider a takeover in Taiwan. Despite these obvious signs, numerous zombie-Republicans including Kevin McCarthy are publicly stating that American funding for weapons and support of Ukraine will be curtailed if Republicans win control of the House and Senate. Any reduction in aid to Ukraine would provide immediate military relief to a regime committing war crimes and provide precisely the wrong signal to both Russia and China about America's resolve to protect our democratic and economic interests.

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American voters are not seeing coverage addressing the current situation in these terms. Voters are being fed the normal horse race coverage with a chaser of "pocketbook" issues about high gas prices, rising interest rates and shortages of new cars. There are worse fates awaiting the country than $4.79 gas and 8% inflation if voters fail to step back from the line of scrimmage and look at the entire field and the position of both teams. They could be sitting in the dark without running water waiting for news from America's latest war in Europe. Will the voters figure this out?

We'll know in two weeks.

WTH

Well Raise My Rent

What's triggering massive increases in rents across the country?

Wealthy workers fleeing expensive tech and finance centers, leveraging work-from-home arrangements and moving to cheaper areas but driving up home prices and apartment prices?

Lower and middle income workers benefiting from higher wages and bidding up apartment rents with their new found cashflow?

Or maybe some of the biggest real estate management firms controlling lopsided shares of all apartment units in an area have started using a single software product that leverages big data to optimize rent adjustments, essentially automating the type of pricing described in Econ 101 as inefficient monopolistic behavior.

ProPublica posted a story at https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent describing how software from the firm RealPage called YieldStar promises 4-7 percent higher "yield" for landlords. Using the software, landlords can alter rents on open units in real time while waiting to land the next tenant. In economics pricing theory terms, doing so essentially allows the landlord to set the rent on the next apartment unit at exactly the marginal value of the next most likely buyer, as predicted from data reflecting recent rentals to other tenants.

How pervasive and influential is this approach? Per ProPublica, in one area of Seattle, 70 percent of apartment units are controlled by ten real estate management firms and ALL of those firms use YieldStar. That essentially means those ten firms have perfect information about the willingness to pay of every tenant who moved in or renewed in those units and could adjust individual rents conceptually just up to each tenant's -- ahem -- walkaway point where if it went any higher, the tenant might not rent or renew.

There are federal and state laws that literally prevent per-consumer pricing based on anti-discrimination laws but this software allows landlords to get this ---->||<---- close by pricing all available units at a given point in time at a price that can be optimized daily, which is almost the same thing unless a complex has multiple open units and multiple potential tenants pondering a lease.

In a information-driven economy, beware of parties leaping to old conclusions about the causes of economic issues -- unproductive workers, printing money, deficit spending, entitlement programs, etc. The causes may very well stem from new exploitive "efficiencies" that are further squeezing supply chains and shifting "economic rents" to the alpha players in the economy. In this case, literally.

WTH

Defeating Kooksterism

A prior book review of American Psychosis by David Corn ended by listing and attempting to answer a series of questions about conspiratorial thinking, paranoia and plain kooksterism as they interact with society and government. All of the analysis attempted to omit terminology associated with current tribal factions in current American politics and focus on the problem at the most generic level possible. The last question in the analysis merited a more thorough answer that didn't fit a shorter review. It is treated as a dedicated topic here.

One important point to make about the language in this commentary. Language about ideas is highly subjective so words like "fringe" are typically used pejoratively to reference "bad" ideas espoused by opponents. In a complicated, highly technical and globally interrelated world, no one can understand the entire spectrum of thought so there will always be ideas on the "fringe" of people's understanding that may be the idea everyone needs the most. Fringe ideas are not what this commentary addresses. Instead, this commentary will address thinking which unduly relies upon vague labels with connotations of enemies and conspiracies, unduly links problems in a variety of areas to a single oversimplified cause and single group and freely invents facts and events to suit a story or theory. This type of thinking is kooksterism.

How can kooksterism be differentiated from legitimate debate?

Kooksterism is driven primarily by ignorance, a lack of transparency and apathy. Ignorance acts as the intellectual equivalent of a compromised immune system. Humans are bombarded with great / good / meh / bad / wrong / deadly ideas continuously. Like a biological immune system, knowledge of all ideas is useful to properly understand the entire environment and respond to it appropriately but once ideas tagged on the lower end of the spectrum are tagged and neutralized, they need to consume as little resources as possible. Public processes lacking transparency aid kooksterism by hiding information that feeds this intellectual defense system. How can the success or failure of a law or regulation be accurately evaluated if statistics are being withheld or purposely distorted? Apathy aids kooksterism by allowing bad ideas to gain acceptance as long as their negative consequences are limited to "others."

Ensuring a proper "immune system response" to kooksterism starts with recognizing the use of communication patterns that are INVARIABLY used when fringe groups attempt to spread falsehoods. Exposure to these patterns requires defensive listening skills to pick up the patterns, strip the vitriolic fluff from the message to access the real content then debate what's left on any merits that might remain.

Examples of communication requiring defensive listening skills are easy to provide. After fifty years of cold war, every American SHOULD have a gut instinct that knows to immediately REJECT statements that read like this:

Comrade Kim Il Sung — who paid foremost attention to strengthening the revolutionary armed forces throughout the entire period of the long revolutionary activities — performed the military miracle of the 20th century of defeating the two most outrageous imperialisms in one generation, and prepared a powerful military guarantee for sovereignty of the country and prosperity of the nation for all ages by raising the people’s army into a revolutionary strong army of one-a-match-for-a hundred, and arming all the people and fortifying the whole land. Great Comrade Kim Jong Il — who put forward inheriting and completing the military-first revolutionary cause of chuch’e pioneered by Comrade Kim Il Sung as his lifelong mission — opened the highest stage of the development of our revolutionary armed forces with his extraordinary sagacity, outstanding art of command, and matchless pluck. During the period of the gravest ordeal for our revolution, Comrade Kim Jong Il strengthened! and developed the people’s army into the most elite combat ranks, led to constant victories, the unprecedented battles to protect socialism, and achieved the great historic feats of enhancing our country to the status of a world-class militarily powerful state through the ever-victorious military-first politics.

That's from a transcript of a speech given by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on April 15, 2012. (See ttps://www.northkoreatech.org/2012/04/18/english-transcript-of-kim-jong-uns-speech/. The average American likely rolled their eyes at the first or second occurance of revolutionary or maybe miracle or imperialisms. It takes zero conscious effort. Enough trigger words are said and -- CLICK -- this is BS. Stop processing it.

Or this example:

I cannot help but go back to the time when the Soviet Union was formed, when Russia was creating modern Ukraine. It was Russia that created modern Ukraine, giving it significant swathes of land, historical lands of Russia, along with the people, who no one asked about where and how they want to live, how they see the future of their children, and in which country. The same thing happened when the Soviet Union broke apart. The elites decided everything among themselves, and no one asked millions of ordinary citizens anything.

Only now, only modern Russia has given the residents of the Lugansk People's Republic, the Donetsk People's Republic, Zaporozhye and Kherson the right to choose. People came to the referendum and made their choice to be with their historical homeland, Russia.

Just an episode from what happened two, three or four days ago. The elections were going on in Lugansk, and people were standing in line in the street waiting to get into the polling station. The artillery shelling began. A shell landed nearby, not far away, but no one left the line to the polling station. Amazing!

That's a portion of Vladmir Putin's address at a public concert ostensibly "celebrating" the annexing of territories in Ukraine via sham referendums. (See http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69470). Same thing. Historical lands. Elites. Historical homeland. Two or three magic words in and the average American spots this for exactly what it is.

The odd, triggering tone isn't solely due to poor idiomatic translations between languages - like dialogue in a Borat skit. The odd tone is sensed because a very high percentage of the content involves fluff words such as elites, homeland / motherland, "the people's (fill in the blank) ", revolution, historical victories, ad nauseum. What remains is entirely devoid of importance -- like filler in an a essay assignment for a fifth grader falling short of the required minimum length -- or one hundred percent false.

So now we have a calibration baseline from arguably the two most unhinged psychopaths on the planet. Now compare those ramblings to this:

What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of Communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here in as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out. We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood in the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. It is a stunning, detailed affidavit because he was with Hugo Chavez while … He was being briefed on how it worked, he was with Hugo Chavez when he saw it operate to make sure the election came out his way. That was the express purpose for creating this software. He has seen it operate and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here, that that was what had gone on.

The machines were easily accessible to hackers. There’s video on the net that will explain to you how a kid with a cell phone can hack one of these voting machines. There’s been no oversight of Dominion or its software. Workers in each county were trained by Dominion, but there’s no evidence of any monitoring otherwise. We have testimony of different workers admitting that they were trained how to dispose of Trump votes and add to Biden votes. The software has a feature pursuant to which you can drag and drop any number of batches of votes to the candidate of your choice, or simply throw them away. So we have mathematical evidence in a number of states of massive quantities of Trump votes being trashed, just simply put in the trash like you would on your computer with any file and Biden votes being injected. That’s addition to the flipping.

Yep. The world is watching this. I have gotten multiple emails from people in other countries who watched the same pattern happened there. We have witness testimony that the same things were done in those countries, as this was exported from Venezuela by Maduro and by Mr. Chavez and by Cuba. Of course, we know China also has a substantial presence in Venezuela and substantial interest in making sure that President Trump does not continue in office. This is the consummate foreign interference in our election in the most criminal way you can possibly imagine. It must be shut down.

That's lawyer Sidney Powell, speaking at a press conference (see https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/rudy-giuliani-trump-campaign-press-conference-transcript-november-19-election-fraud-claims) on November 18, 2020 on behalf of Trump the President and Trump the campaign as his team began fouling the courts in five states with bogus claims about voting machine fraud. A feature pursuant...? exported from Venezuela by Maduro? I guess that's why Trump recently hired a three million dollar lawyer registered as an actual foreign agent of the Maduro government in Venezuela.

Or this:

The facts matter. The truth matters. And if you are fair reporters, you will cover that fairly and appropriately and you will allow coverage of our media team here and our legal team. That is absolutely shocking, that all you cover are around the margins, and I’ve seen all of you taking pictures right now, and I can anticipate what your headlines are going to be. If you are not willing to talk about the evidence that has been presented, then that is absolutely unacceptable for journalistic standards. This is an opening statement. This is something where we have told you what the evidence will show and we have given you a brief description. That happens in a courtroom all the time, where that’s not the fact-finding process, that is just an overview. That is what we have given you today, because the American people deserve to know what we have uncovered in the last couple of weeks. Remember, this is such a short timeframe, and this is an elite strikeforce team that is working on behalf of the President and the campaign to make sure that our Constitution is protected. We are a nation of rules, not a nation of rulers. There is not someone that just gets to pick who the next President is outside the will of the American people. That is our task, because when we talk about voter fraud, it’s actually election official fraud. That cannot stand. The Constitution requires that the State Legislatures are the ones that make election law. It still has to go by the US Constitution. But what has happened in this case is that state and local level officials and all the way up, have changed the rules. That’s what the Democrats do. If they don’t like the rules, they change them and they change them at the last minute, they manipulate them. They want to tear down our American system.

That's fellow Team Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis at the same 11/18/2020 press conference explaining to the press that what they just heard was only a "summary" of the facts of their case and that no reasonable reporter would expect ACTUAL facts to be provided to back up such claims until some point in the never-specified future because the "elite strike force" is extremely busy fighting for the American people and the Constitution.

Or this:

The Framers of the United States Constitution provided that presidential electors be appointed in a manner directed by the state “Legislature[s].” Art. II, § 1, cl. 2. The legislature of every Defendant state had established detailed rules by which that state’s appointment of presidential electors should have been conducted. However, in the months before the 2020 election, those rules were deliberately changed by both state and non-state actors. The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties.

That is an excerpt of the amicus brief submitted on December 10, 2020 by one hundred and six US House members to the US Supreme Court in order to grease the skids for other legal finagling aimed at overturning a Biden win. Note the tone of the language… Non-state actors? Private parties? Usurped? Note that while complaining of these unauthorized changes to voting rules, only the results in states found to have been won by Biden were targeted with lawsuits, yet possibly ALL FIFTY STATES altered rules for registration, mail-in voting and ballot drop-offs to avoid mass spreader events at the polling booth while Covid was still killing 3,000+ people per day.

These "friends of the court" were arguing elected and appointed officials at the state level had usurped the authority of their state legislature to choose their electors. These "friends" were also arguing that the Vice President's role did not have the Constitutional authority to decide between dueling slates of electors if that situation arose. Yet these "friends" were arguing unelected, unappointed partisans in TEXAS, MISSOURI and OTHER STATES could interfere with GEORGIA'S selection of electors -- because those outside partisans who were not Vice President or an elected or appointed official of GEORGIA didn't like Georgia's outcome. It's tough to comprehend the sheer level of hypocrisy, flawed jurisprudence and criminality in that argument.

Anyone who reads at an 8th grade level can spot the wild-eyed, tin-foil-hat madness in those public statements. And the United States got to the point where people of that mental caliber were aiding and abetting a criminal fraud and insurrection on behalf of an equally mentally deficient client who somehow was elected President.

How can this type of propaganda be thwarted?

First, conserve energy. People CREATING this type of communication are already effectively lost. They are likely the ones expecting to profit from it -- either as its end result or merely collecting fees for creating and distributing it or collecting fees for defending it in the courts. There is probably a twenty to one ratio of time required to research and refute claims provided in the types of communiques illustrated above. That lopsided ratio makes it easy for fringe actors to succeed at swamping real debate about real issues with a disproportionately small effort spreading nonsense.

Second, as communications like this are shared or summarized, don't just pass it along with a thumbs down or try to paraphrase it (and possibly helping to cloud the flaws). Provide a blueprint for recipients to register the flaws and find their own way out of the maze of twisted logic:

• show me names, job titles, employers of the alleged actors
• show me names, job titles, employers, background of the experts you are citing in your statements
• show me exact dates and times
• show me statistics from a known government agency or public filings of actors involved
• after eliminating trigger words, see if the remaining content explains anything about an underlying issue and claimed cause/effect relationships

Can kooksterism be reversed or eliminated?

This is the most difficult question to address. It is also where the immune system analogy begins failing and more difficult realities for individuals and groups have to be considered.

As discussed in the prior post, the negative feedback cycles so helpful in aiding kooksterism cannot be completely eliminated. Human thinking and psychology exhibit certain traits that tend to over-weight them, almost as a mechanism to see if there's anything to them that MIGHT be useful before snuffing them out. No one lives in a perfect world free of all bad information. Like a functioning immune system charged with a sufficient baseline of white blood cells, it should be possible for most people to encounter a wide variety of mild doses of bad ideas and fend them off by comparing them with a middle-of-the-road perspective provided by a baseline of actual knowledge. As long as the dose of bad ideas remains mild enough in degree and short enough in duration, most people will see through the worst ideas at the fringe and keep them in check in the larger society.

When a subset of humans learn how to leverage bad ideas for extreme profit or to gain undue power over others, the exposure to bad ideas can be extended in duration and made more toxic. This is the danger point for both individuals and society.

For people affected by extended, intense immersion in bad ideas, the recovery paths are far more difficult -- both for the individual, their family and society. For these cases, the only recovery point likely left is that of a teachable moment -- a point at which actual PHYSICAL reality (physical health, physical security, financial security) is threatened or destroyed by forces so obviously linked to choices made by the person experiencing the threat that it overwhelms the mental energy required to continue denying the cause and effect. Teachable moments are NOT day-to-day corrective inputs most people use to continually update their model of the world. For this level of dysfunction, "teachable moments" are not just losing an argument, losing a job, losing $100,000 in a retirement account, etc. Teachable moments for people at this level of disconnect will likely involve being financially wiped out to nothing, experiencing catastrophic illness or, more tragically, loss of life.

A voter in Florida supporting state and national politicians who vote against hurricane relief for citizens in other states because the politicians say people need to be self-reliant and big government programs will waste money won't ever learn the folly of that belief watching a sunset from their veranda overlooking the ocean. It is a near certitude that same voter WILL learn the value of collective public aid after spending two days in the attic to escape eight feet of water in their home, only to emerge and see their entire town destroyed in a hurricane.

There's no point in debating the value of regulations on energy utilities, chemical companies and telecommunications providers with a pro-business diehard in Texas in May when temperatures are in the 80s. Instead, have that conversation with a Texas resident in February after a cold snap triggers a statewide power grid failure, freezing then bursting pipes in tens of thousands of homes that require gutting the entire house. Explain to them that "pro-bidness" policies didn't force the energy company to harden its facilities for predictable weather. Maybe remind them the exact same cold snap scenario caused a similar grid failure ten years prior and no one did anything then either. Explain to them that their homeowner's insurance might not cover "flooding" or might not cover interim living expenses for months as they wait for rebuilding. Explain to them that reconstruction is going to take three times as long because 700,000 workers throughout the US workforce died from COVID crippling our entire supply chain but we don't want to allow immigration from Mexico, Venezuela or Ukraine because America is for "Americans."

The problem with teachable moments is their damage is not restricted to the individual with the broken thinking. Damage extends to their family, community and the entire country. The abysmal vaccination rates in the world's richest country didn't stick it to know-it-all doctors and faceless government bureaucrats trying to destroy millions of people's sense of freedom. It contributed to killing over one million people, causing immense human suffering for families losing a loved one and crippling nearly every aspect of our economy and extending the pandemic needlessly.

As one of MANY examples of a teachable moment that has ricocheted through the entire country, results from ACT test results for the high school senior class of 2022 were announced on October 12, 2022. The average ACT score dropped from 20.3 to 19.8 (with a perfect score being 36). The average score hasn't been that low since 1991. Equally horrifying, forty two percent of takers in the class of 2022 failed to meet the minimum achievement bar on ANY segment of the test. That figure was thirty eight percent in 2021. Even worse, average scores on the ACT or SAT tests are not indicative of the ENTIRE high school graduating class of roughly 3.85 million students. Only about thirty six percent take the ACT and only about thirty eight percent take the SAT. Standardized tests may be highly flawed and may not accurately predict success in college as claimed but results ARE standardized among the pool taking them and allow some trending over time. The current trend is not good for the future inventiveness and productivity of America.

WTH

BOOK REVIEW: American Psychosis

American Psychosis - A Historical Investigation of How The Republican Party Went Crazy -- David Corn, 337 pages (388 pages including notes and index)

American Psychosis covers the evolution of electoral strategy within the Republican Party from its formation in the 1850s to the present. In its three hundred and thirty seven pages, author David Corn draws out three key areas of consistency across all of that history:

• the presence of conflicting core goals from the party's inception that repeatedly complicated attracting independent voters as political winds shifted decade to decade, yielding razor thin election wins rather than landslides party leaders felt they should have achieved or deserved
• a consistent presence of paranoid, fantastical, truth-denying fringe elements who were always available to provide extra votes if the party core could stomach dealing with them
• a consistent pattern of party leaders and front-runners choosing immediate expediency over long-term principals -- choices that not only starved legitimate issues of the attention they deserved but instead lent credence and financial support to fringe elements, mainstreaming those fringe ideas not only within the Republican Party but the general public

Here is how Corn summarizes his thesis for the book in the first chapter:

There are no Big Bangs in history. No events that materialize -- or explode -- out of nothing. January 6 seemed a break from the past and from the nation's political reality. But no person -- not even Trump - could have engineered such a profound rupture on his or her own. This was an instance of a man meeting a moment shaped by the actions and inactions of others over a lengthy stretch. The GOP had long played with and stoked the fires of extremism for political advantage. It had encouraged and exploited a psychosis. This sickness reached an apotheosis on that cloudy and chilly winter afternoon. Yet it had been years in the making.

For reasons to be addressed later, this book won't serve as an educational aid for those holding the fringe beliefs now crippling the ability of the United States to tackle real problems. The nature of their belief system is antithetical to "book learnin'" and -- as often said -- it is easier to fool an ignorant person than it is to convince an ignorant person they've been fooled. For those that have yet to sail off the edge of a flat earth, the book is a useful read because it corrects a false (wishful?) belief that current problems with extremism and sheer kooksterism appeared from nowhere or could have been caused by a single person. Reading this history raises additional questions about more universal problems with human psychology, social / economic / military unrest and power that merit public debate.

Rather than attempting to recap the entire book, this review will only summarize a few of the more important or less known aspects of the history that underpin the key bullets above. An outline of questions stemming from this history will be provided along with some analysis / opinion.

Conflicting Goals from Inception

The first key point made in the book is that at its founding, the Republican Party combined two political interests that today are typically seen as politically opposed. One faction focused improving economic fairness and bolstering key national assets like railroads, public universities and ending slavery. The other faction focused on helping business and the wealthy through tariffs, tax breaks, friendly regulation, etc. Neither of these policy areas were well matched to Democratic Party tenets at the time so these factions had nowhere to go but the new Republican Party.

This dynamic created perpetual power struggles within the party and they began IMMEDIATELY after the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination as Andrew Johnson became President and fought most actions aimed at assisting newly freed blacks in the South. Each subsequent election over the ensuing decades essentially pitted the two factions against each other as the party gauged its overall prospects against the competition. If the competition was weak, both factions might get a few pet issues pushed during the campaign and subsequent legislative / executive control. If the party's position was thought to be weak, expediency would jettison anything controversial or requiring a conscience and the easy positions would be espoused.

As described in the book, the collection of issues and goals claimed by the Republican Party ceded so much centrist ground to the Democratic Party that, over time, most elections involved razor thin margins and left Republicans with little political capital to last over multiple terms to do difficult but worthy things. It also created a dependency on devising issues to turn out the factions of potential voters whose issues only found support in the Republican Party in order to win. (Sound familiar?)

Paranoia at Every Phase

Much of modern political writing from the left and the right quicky resorts to pat phrases that become an internal shorthand for true believers and true opponents alike. One of the most common shibboleths seen in writings about politics between the late 1950s to roughly 1990 involves mentioning membership in the John Birch Society. Saying it to an ultra-conservative is mentally decoded as "ah… one of US." Saying it to pretty much anyone else is mentally decoded as "ah… one of THOSE." The John Birch Society was created by candy mogul Robert Welch and eleven wealthy men (including Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries) invited to a meeting at Welch's home in 1958 to hear his theories on the forces threatening America and his plan for defeating those forces. As Welch described it, communists had a well-coordinated plan to topple America by subverting its currency, sparking racial unrest and taking over churches, unions, government agencies, etc. Even Sputnik was a distraction to convince America to focus on military capabilities instead of the subversion within. Welch's solution? Establish a centrally controlled (of course…) board of wealthy business leaders who would manage local chapters of members who would fight the subversion at the local level.

Okay, but who's the John Birch guy? John Birch was a Baptist missionary turned US military intelligence office working in China who was killed by communists within days of World War II ending. Welch wrote a glory-drenched biography of Birch earlier in the 1950s and used Birch as a martyr figure -- the first casualty of a new cold war against communism -- to hype the importance of his new organization's operations. In some sense, it was a perfect name. It was meaningless / bland to outsiders without context and to get the context, you had to be exposed to paranoid, conspiracy-driven thinking.

But the paranoid fringe wasn't introduced into American politics (Republican or Democratic) by the John Birch Society or even Joe McCarthy in the 1940s and 1950s. It can be traced back to 1798 when a prominent preacher supporting the Federalist Party and President John Adams referenced crackpot theories in a book published the year before that described a secret Masonic society called the Illuminati (ahhhh, THAT'S where THAT reference comes from…) that was -- according to media of the day -- bent on "rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe." The fears expressed in the book had an easily explainable origin -- the French Revolution toppled a king and scared the bejeezus out of the established order in Europe. Those European fears were Americanized and turned into fears about French operatives working with Jefferson to eliminate the "Christian underpinnings" of American's government.

The resulting turmoil resulted in the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which every middle-school American history student recognizes as one of the first examples of truly awful legislation enacted by a country that had yet to find its civil sea legs. The same paranoia about the Illuminati was later broadened to all Masonic groups and litmus tests about being anti-Mason became core to the Whig party which eventually replaced the Federalist Party when it fell by the wayside by the 1830s.

Mainstreaming the Fringe

Throughout American Psychosis, the author provides example after example -- election after election -- of how the Republican Party's choice of initial platform issues left it feeling perpetually at risk at the ballot box, leading to short term tactics that surrendered power within the party from centrist thinkers to those on the fringes.

• while watching KKK thinking incorporated into Democratic Party platforms and tactics in the late 1800s, Republicans countered by leveraging anti-Catholicsm and anti-immigrant sentiment as a key part of protecting its base
• satisfied the KKK had sufficiently compromised the Democratic Presidential candidate selection for 1924, Calvin Coolidge refused to publicly reject the KKK on behalf of Republicans, even though he won in a landslide and had the "juice" to make a meaningful condemnation
• American First adherents influenced Republican Party decisions right up until Pearl Harbor - which was then turned into a conspiracy theory that Roosevelt allowed the attack to eliminate opposition to entering the war
• in 1952, Eisenhower was aboard a train whistle-stop campaigning IN Wisconsin WITH Joe McCarthy and failed to refute McCarthy's facts and condemn his tactics, despite the fact that McCarthy's nonsense really took root by claiming George C Marshall and his recovery plan for Europe was a conspiracy to topple the US when Eisenhower SERVED with Marshall in WWII and obviously knew Marshall to be of unimpeachable character
• after Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for President in 1964, party elder Eisenhower gathered party leaders after the contentious convention to drive an agreement between moderates and Goldwater ultra-conservative backers regarding how much participation fringers would have in the campaign -- the group could not bring itself to publicly condemn the Bircher fringe, Goldwater was correctly tagged as giving support to Bircher thinking and lost in a popular vote landslide
• Goldwater's loss taught Ronald Reagan to negotiate with the fringe to offer private access to power in exchange for a lower public profile that might repel other voters or drive Democratic turnout, allowing him to win the California Governor race in 1966.
• Nixon's 1968 run for President expanded the Reagan lesson by refusing to condemn racist policies touted by Independent George Wallace, essentially winking to voters that Nixon agreed with Wallace's racism but implying that voting for Wallace would only aid LBJ

There are entire chapters devoted to the evolution of smear tactics first pioneered by Lee Atwater and Roger Stone but those details are likely more familiar to most Americans and don't need summarization here. The most interesting conclusion from the more recent iterations of Republican tactics is the skullduggery isn't limited to Democratic opponents. Smearing opponents through racism and scandal is equally effective on primary opponents at all levels.

---

So if people most in need of learning the lessons from this book aren't likely to read it, what IS the value of this book? If one imagines re-reading the book after substituting all references to Republican and Democrat with some other duopoly (Hobbit / Dwarve?) carrying no visceral political baggage with the words, the book triggers important questions that are not explicitly itemized or covered in the book itself.

• Are there aspects of party-driven democratic systems (election laws, federal / state segmentation, party-based legislative rules in federal / state / local government) that will always spontaneously trigger the creation of fringe movements that move harmful ideas from the edges into the core of public thought?
• Are there aspects of human psychology that will always spontaneously trigger the creation of fringe elements and their subsequent mainstreaming?
• Are these systemic or psychological predispositions (if they exist) made more dangerous with modern telecommunication technologies and mediums?
• Are there unique aspects of principles within specific parties or specific locations along an abstract, unbranded political spectrum that are more prone to being corrupted by fringe thinking?
• What can rational thinking people of all stripes do to combat this corrosive fringe thinking?

Attempts at addressing some of these questions are provided below.

Do party-based mechanisms inevitably pull bad fringe ideas into mainstream public thought?

The real value of political parties lies in their ability to find commonality among millions of ideas and boil them down to s smaller number of simple ideas that can be efficiently communicated so people can act as a group to get something done. Three hundred and fifty million Americans might have ideas on accelerating the shift from fossil fuels but it is impossible to evaluate and choose among three hundred and fifty million ideas. It's likely not possible with only twenty ideas. Parties help boil down choices to digestible options (maybe conservative = offer investment incentives to business to build electric or hydrogen vehicles, maybe liberal = impose taxes on gas guzzlers, set ever-higher fuel efficiency and pollution requirements). However, the use of parties within politics to simplify discussion of issues is equivalent to digitizing an Ansel Adams print of Moon and Half Dome -- with two bits of resolution per pixel. Two bits only allows four distinct shades -- 00, 01, 10, 11. It is impossible to preserve the nuance of an Ansel Adams black and white print with four shades -- information is GOING to be lost. Or distorted.

It can be said America has a two-bit political system -- we only have Democrat, Republican, Libertarian and (sometimes) Green denominations -- with some Independents floating between them. Once politicians win office, America is further distorted into a one-bit resolution world of (0) Democrat and (1) Republican because legislative rules make it impossible for candidates outside the two parties to control any legislative work -- minor party politicians are limited to shifting their alliances vote by vote between the two big dogs as best they can to promote their interests. In a world with very complex legal, economic, social, ecological and technical problems, it is highly likely some of the right ideas needed cannot fit into the neat boundaries arbitrarily chosen by existing parties.

By artificially constraining ideas into the brand space of a small number of parties, it becomes possible for really bad fringe ideas to become homogenized somewhat in a larger party brand while they continue to evolve and become more unhinged. Of course, it is problematic beforehand to differentiate a "bad fringe" idea that needs to be stomped out from a "fringe idea" that might avoid some future calamity by better preparing the country for some economic, social or ecological shock. Nonetheless, the risk is present and magnified by the oversimplification created by a limited-party system.

Is human psychology predisposed to conspiracy thinking and paranoia?

Centuries of recorded history would appear to make that answer a definite yes. But it is important for people to understand what drives that predisposition. It definitely starts with ignorance. It is impossible to have a rational conversation on any contentious issue if the parties to the conversation do not share a common understanding of facts. Ignorance of facts extends to ignorance of basic physical science, biology and even simple economics. Without a grounding in these areas, it is impossible for someone to appreciate the nearly infinite number of factors that affect their daily life and how uncontrollable / random those factors often are. If your life is being turned upside down in a world in which you understand virtually nothing about the forces (natural and man-made) at work, it's much easier to conclude an individual or small identifiable group is responsible / accountable and shift blame for your plight to that group.

With ignorance as a key ingredient, the impacts of all the other psychological tendencies become amplified. A generally ignorant person likely lacks any understanding of how fear distorts decision making and also likely lacks any understanding of how leaders learn to exploit those distorted decision processes for their benefit. A generally ignorant person is also likely innumerate and unable to understand the math and statistics that would otherwise help identify life-changing scams (stock pump and dump schemes for a firm with zero profits) or understand why voting for someone promising EVER LOWER TAXES won't keep the drinking water clean or rebuild seventy-year old bridges at risk of collapse in the middle of rush hour. But conspiracy theories don't require understanding complexity. They solve all problems by assigning blame to hidden, monolithic "others" operating to take away freedom and prosperity.

Is kooksterism being made worse because of unique aspects of modern communications?

The examples Corn provides in American Psyschosis begin in 1798, only ten years after ratification of our current Constitution ("U.S. version 2.0"). Those examples make it clear that the organizational names and the "others" involved with conspiracy thinking change over the decades to reflect current fears but the underlying forces blamed as part of conspiracy theories are disturbingly familiar -- immigrants, religious minorities, foreign governments, unions, communists, etc. Internet era communication tools don't seem to change the plot and actors in conspiracy stories, they just simplify their distribution.

Search engines certainly make it easier for like-minded kooks to find each other. This has the additional consequence of making such groups seem larger in footprint / influence than they really are. (Sure, WatchingTheHerd has a blog with INTERNATIONAL reach but, on the other hand, total page reads over 18 years total 11,625. Yawn.) The legitimization of anything seen on the Internet may also help convince new recruits of the voracity of the organization they found online as well as the validity of their own kooky ideas that got them searching in the first place.

Private chat rooms and "disappearing message" platforms pose more unique concerns since they aid in the communication of strategies that might stray into actual criminal conspiracy and auto-destruction of potential evidence of such crimes. On the other hand, I would bet that for every group that succeeded in hiding their tracks with these technologies, there are a dozen others too ignorant to administer them correctly and thus leave behind the best audit trail possible -- full text messages with timestamps, IP addresses and all recipients identified.

Are there unique aspects of political thought along the spectrum that make conspiracy based kooksterism more likely at some points of the spectrum over others?

I would argue it is absolutely the case that generically labeled "conservatism" is more prone to this bug than "liberalism".

• conservatism by definition leans towards preservation of the status quo over change
• preservation of the status quo predominately benefits the wealthy, that's why they want it preserved - they're already on top of the economic / social / power ladder
• the very word conservative implies a focus on keeping what one has, which mentally predisposes one to viewing all change as a zero-sum game where if others gain, I lose
• conservatives typically value individualism over group identification and tend to be suspicious of ideas promoted by large groups or aimed at helping large groups
• an affinity for individualism increases the propensity to resist control exerted by larger groups, something particularly challenging in a democracy when your candidate / party loses an election
• conservatism is more likely to expect "public goods" such as educational systems, roads, railroads, bridges, etc. to be provided by proper incentives to private entities and are thus more prone to underfunding such efforts from the public sector
• since market failures OFTEN produce underspending on such public goods, education levels of the general public may be far below optimal values, making it easier to mislead or scam the public at large
• conservative thinking, while promoting the value of the individual above the group, tends to view education as a means to ensure the individual can find useful employment as the primary goal rather than protecting the individual's independence of thought

As a broad generalization, the dynamics of conservatism seem to precondition its adherents to fear change, focus on education as a means for income only, avoid most new ideas but adopt a smaller set of ideas without much critical thought.

In contrast,

• liberalism assumes the status quo is not optimal for all and has room for improvement
• liberalism assumes the best way to imrove the status quo for the general public is to improve the rights and opportunities of all individuals
• liberalism sets the expectation that changes are not only inevitable but signs of progress rather than signs of likely backsliding to be feared
• liberalism tends to promote individualism in the context of "politically correct" group boundaries but also tends to promote education as both an economic and civic value

As a broad generalization, the underlying dynamics of liberalism seem to precondition its adherents to expect change, pursue education for use beyond mere income, seek out new ideas and critically evaluate them and toss them aside or adopt them based on a grounding in basic math, science and history.

What can rational thinking people of all stripes do to combat this corrosive fringe thinking? Can it be avoided? Can it be reversed?

This is the most important question in the near term not only for the United States but for any democracy navigating extreme economic / social / technological / demographic changes. Answering this question will require doubling the length of this commentary so an attempt at an answer will be published in a subsequent post.

WTH