Marc Stier at Large

The Republican establishment is still so upper-class WASP. They’ve been happy to run on racism and sexism and militarism for years. But they insisted on being polite about it, using the appropriate code words and deniable symbols like Willie Horton. Their problem with Trump is not his racism and sexism and militarism. It’s his vulgarity and bad manners. He doesn’t know which fork and knife to use when he’s skewering Black people to secure the votes of white working people for the corporate elite. Continue reading

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