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Trudeau Popularity - or not (various polling, etc.)

Is the light starting to dawn?

David Brooks in the New York Times.

What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?​

August 2, 2023

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.
What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”
In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.
I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.
So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.
This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”
The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.
Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”
Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”
Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.
It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we road in on.
If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.
Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.
But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.
The post What if We’re the Bad Guys Here? appeared first on New York Times.

He still can't get over his hatred but at least he is starting to take notice.

Legally the 2020 election wasn't stolen. Because all the rules were changed legally. Some folks just don't like the idea of changing the rules.
Legally the 2020 election wasn't decided until January the 6th 2021 when it was certified by the President of the Senate, the Vice President of the United States - Mike Pence.

Trump was within his rights to keep fighting right up until the President of the Senate made the final arbitration. There is nothing in the rule book, then or now, that says he had to concede on November 4th. The US system only mandates a 14 day transition period between January 6th and January 20th.

And it is well established practice in the US to have public demonstrations and rallies in support of causes.

Half of the US sees the problem in that light.

The entire population of DC and the readers of the NYT and Washington Post as well as the other half of the population disagree.

They can't keep calling each other names forever.
 
Trump was within his rights to keep fighting right up until the President of the Senate made the final arbitration.

US Politics dragged into Canadian Politics.

Canadian Politics dragged into US Politics.

if people would stop trying to drag Canada into the alt-XXXXXXX world -- in this, and other, threads.

I had to check the top of the screen to ensure this wasn't a Canadian politics thread. ;)

And vice versa. :)
 
US Politics dragged into Canadian Politics.

Canadian Politics dragged into US Politics.





And vice versa. :)

The problem you face is that US kids go to British schools. Canadian kids go to US schools. The Guardian and the Mail report on US politics. Trudeau's separation made the front pages across the English speaking world. Canadian, American, British, Kiwi and Aussie politicians, bureaucrats, judges and politicians all read the same papers and journals and drink at the same bars.

National borders are not a thing.
 
Assumed Global Politics was created for global politics. :salute:


Legally the 2020 election wasn't stolen. Because all the rules were changed legally. Some folks just don't like the idea of changing the rules.
Legally the 2020 election wasn't decided until January the 6th 2021 when it was certified by the President of the Senate, the Vice President of the United States - Mike Pence.

Trump was within his rights to keep fighting right up until the President of the Senate made the final arbitration. There is nothing in the rule book, then or now, that says he had to concede on November 4th. The US system only mandates a 14 day transition period between January 6th and January 20th.

And this for U.S. Politics.

 
Is the light starting to dawn?

David Brooks in the New York Times.



He still can't get over his hatred but at least he is starting to take notice.

Legally the 2020 election wasn't stolen. Because all the rules were changed legally. Some folks just don't like the idea of changing the rules.
Legally the 2020 election wasn't decided until January the 6th 2021 when it was certified by the President of the Senate, the Vice President of the United States - Mike Pence.

Trump was within his rights to keep fighting right up until the President of the Senate made the final arbitration. There is nothing in the rule book, then or now, that says he had to concede on November 4th. The US system only mandates a 14 day transition period between January 6th and January 20th.

And it is well established practice in the US to have public demonstrations and rallies in support of causes.

Half of the US sees the problem in that light.

The entire population of DC and the readers of the NYT and Washington Post as well as the other half of the population disagree.

They can't keep calling each other names forever.
Identified flaws, as listed by Kirkhill aside, that is the best damn article I've read on the subject for a long, long time.
Tanks! K
 
Assumed Global Politics was created for global politics. :salute:





And this for U.S. Politics.


Fair Comment.
 
Unmitigated gaul. Has he ever taken responsibility for anything?

Pierre Poilievre & The Conservatives Opposed Bill C-18, Yet The Liberals Are Now Trying To Blame Him For Bill C-18’s Consequences​

 
Interesting theory. It hadn’t crossed my mind.

Not sure I would agree with all of it. I doubt that it would be orchestrated to that degree but possibly taken as an opportunity and seizing on it would not be beyond the realm of possible.

Ok I will post the craziest theory yet. I didn't make this one...but it's on the interwebz.

Now with the married breakdown public. Justin comes out as LGBTQ..Gay or Bi... This will shield him from any attacks from the opposition with the powerfull LGBTQ armour. And garner much sympathy for now just being able to live his true self and life. And electoral win!

He would just state the very few mistakes he made (sic) were a product of not be able to be his true self and the anguish it caused by the evil right and the patriarchy. But now together we can stop the evil and smash the patriarchy. Vote Liberal.

Could work.
 
Ok I will post the craziest theory yet. I didn't make this one...but it's on the interwebz.

Now with the married breakdown public. Justin comes out as LGBTQ..Gay or Bi... This will shield him from any attacks from the opposition with the powerfull LGBTQ armour. And garner much sympathy for now just being able to live his true self and life. And electoral win!

He would just state the very few mistakes he made (sic) were a product of not be able to be his true self and the anguish it caused by the evil right and the patriarchy. But now together we can stop the evil and smash the patriarchy. Vote Liberal.

Could work.

Best yet, Canadians are stupid enough to believe it!
 
Some males may be obsessed with him.

But, he seems more popular with females,

The biggest divide in Canadian politics? Men vs. Women.

If only men voted, the Liberal and Conservatives would be in a statistical tie. Only women: the Liberals win a crushing 226 seats.

 
Ok I will post the craziest theory yet. I didn't make this one...but it's on the interwebz.

Now with the married breakdown public. Justin comes out as LGBTQ..Gay or Bi... This will shield him from any attacks from the opposition with the powerfull LGBTQ armour. And garner much sympathy for now just being able to live his true self and life. And electoral win!

He would just state the very few mistakes he made (sic) were a product of not be able to be his true self and the anguish it caused by the evil right and the patriarchy. But now together we can stop the evil and smash the patriarchy. Vote Liberal.

Could work.

It's interesting. But by and large I think Canadians are over the whole LGBTQ+ thing and really don't care.

I think it probably entrench him deeper in the far left, but I don't see it bringing in new votes.
 
Ok I will post the craziest theory yet. I didn't make this one...but it's on the interwebz.

Now with the married breakdown public. Justin comes out as LGBTQ..Gay or Bi... This will shield him from any attacks from the opposition with the powerfull LGBTQ armour. And garner much sympathy for now just being able to live his true self and life. And electoral win!

He would just state the very few mistakes he made (sic) were a product of not be able to be his true self and the anguish it caused by the evil right and the patriarchy. But now together we can stop the evil and smash the patriarchy. Vote Liberal.

Could work.

JT and Sophie Gregoire being separated had to have been the worst kept secret in Ottawa.
 
On more less crazy theories and wall maps…

Despite this being 2023 where more than half of marriages end in a breakup and is more or less normal these days I think long term this is more of a hinderance. It shouldn’t be but it probably will be.

We don’t really have a First Lady role but the Trudeaus created something akin to that as a couple. I’m pretty sure she has been the more active PMs wife on a more political scale than any other that I can think of. She has appeared and spoken at political rallies, taken up causes etc etc. I am sure this also stems from her being a minor celebrity prior to her meeting JT. That is on them though. They created that image.

So a breakup is probably a liability. Conspiracies, innuendos etc will be rife by less serious people and spread. I can imagine what will happen when either are « spotted » with someone else or whatnot. This story is far from over.

Remember the Peter MacKay rumours and soap opera drama?

I have more reason to believe that this is an opportune (certainly not orchestrated) off-ramp for JT but I’m not sure he will take it.
 
On more less crazy theories and wall maps…

Despite this being 2023 where more than half of marriages end in a breakup and is more or less normal these days I think long term this is more of a hinderance. It shouldn’t be but it probably will be.

We don’t really have a First Lady role but the Trudeaus created something akin to that as a couple. I’m pretty sure she has been the more active PMs wife on a more political scale than any other that I can think of. She has appeared and spoken at political rallies, taken up causes etc etc. I am sure this also stems from her being a minor celebrity prior to her meeting JT. That is on them though. They created that image.

So a breakup is probably a liability. Conspiracies, innuendos etc will be rife by less serious people and spread. I can imagine what will happen when either are « spotted » with someone else or whatnot. This story is far from over.

Remember the Peter MacKay rumours and soap opera drama?

I have more reason to believe that this is an opportune (certainly not orchestrated) off-ramp for JT but I’m not sure he will take it.

I'm happy to see JT and Sophie experience some adversity. But I feel bad for the kids.

I'm not sure if it will influence politics much though. The rest of country has beat up the institution of marriage enough, it would be highly hypocritical to turn that on a politician.
 
I'm happy to see JT and Sophie experience some adversity. But I feel bad for the kids.
I can’t speak to Sophie. But JT lost his father at younger age than some, his youngest brother died in an avalanche. So I would say despite being privileged he has faced some adversity in his life.

I'm not sure if it will influence politics much though. The rest of country has beat up the institution of marriage enough, it would be highly hypocritical to turn that on a politician.
Yeah, that’s the question. I tend to agree with that as well.

People that hate him will still hate him. He may garner some sympathy from some quarters but I doubt it would move the needle by much. Now if some people use this to push their agenda (one way or another) it could.

I’m pretty sure his political opponents won’t be daft enough to do that. But as we’ve seen there are some people with no filter…
 
Now there are a lot of female voters out there thinking “Hey, I have a shot now!”
...and...
He may garner some sympathy from some quarters but I doubt it would move the needle by much.
My gut tells me that is how this may play out at election time, which I believe will be sooner rather than later. Buffed up appearance, single, rich, charismatic. A lot will depend on how well he plays this new part of "single dad" in the public eye.
 
...and...

My gut tells me that is how this may play out at election time, which I believe will be sooner rather than later. Buffed up appearance, single, rich, charismatic. A lot will depend on how well he plays this new part of "single dad" in the public eye.

Does he still carry his backers? Whoever they may be.
 
JT and Sophie Gregoire being separated had to have been the worst kept secret in Ottawa.
Every PM is allegedly on the outs with their spouse. One spouse was alleged to have been in a same sex relationship with a member of their RCMP protective detail.

That one rumour is eventually proven does not mean much.
 
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