Author: Marc Stier

Mitchell Swan just proposed an interesting idea–perhaps the relatively low Democratic turnout has arisen because the differences between Clinton and Sanders are actually not that great, especially compared to the differences between both Democrats and the Republicans. Now, I know that the Bernie and Hillary partisans don’t think the premise is true You see huge differences between Hillary and Bernie. But maybe your vehemence–and your efforts to focus increasingly on relatively trivial matters that are of no interest to the vast majority of voters–is a product of that lack of broad difference. It’s a combination of the imperatives of competition and what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” Continue reading

Trump has given self-promotion a bad name. But can I just point out that a few weeks before the reigning genius of political prognostication, Nate Silver, wrote a long post about why the Trump campaign would soon collapse, I wrote a long post explaining why Trump had a really good chance to win. My argument was not only about the appeal of Trump to the white working class base / old middle class of the Republican Party, which I’ve argued is motivated far more by race, anti-feminism, and fear of foreign enemies than economic conservatism. I also pointed to Trump’s media skills and ability to finance. My argument also rested on there being no dominant candidate in moderately conservative (which for Republicans means not totally loony) lane and that Rubio / Bush / Kasich / Walker would divide up that tendency. I think this is as important as Trump’s ability… Continue reading

Here in a nutshell is why Scalia’s originalist theory of constitutional interpretation doesn’t make sense and can’t be consistently followed by him or anyone else. Scalia says we should be guided by the “meaning of the words” of the Constitution not by the intent of the Framers in achieving certain goals in using those words (which is why he was disdainful of Courts examining legislative history.) 1. But the most important word such as “freedom of speech” and “due process of law” are abstract concepts only given meaning within a large theoretical understanding of politics, our rights, etc. 2. There has never been any time in our history in which there was only one political theory that everyone accepted. As a result, the meaning of these abstract words have always been contested. 3. The Framers were well aware of this. It they wanted to avoid, rather than encourage, Courts to… Continue reading

Given that we are in relentless pursuit of every mistaken political position and illegitimate friendship Clinton and Sanders have taken and made in their lives, I decided to put all my Facebook friends under the same scrutiny. I made a list of the 100 most important issues of my lifetime, starting with the Cuban Missile crisis. And I made a list of the most odious people in national, state, and local politics. I was going to ask all of you to indicate your position on those issues AT THE TIME (anyone can be right after the fact). And I was going to require that you all indicate if you ever had a conversation with the odious people in which you didn’t tell them how horrible they were. My plan was to de-friend anyone who did not score at least a 95%. Because, if you were wrong about the 1994 crime… Continue reading