Envision

There are, I am told, five "noteworthy" candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. One is, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump. The other four are:

• Nikki Haley
• Asa Hutchinson
• Vivek Ramaswamy    
• Corey Stapleton

Otherwise known as people who have zero chance of becoming President of the United States in 2024. Even though Corey Stapleton was the first to announce his candidacy, I'd never heard of him until I looked up the list (and that was mainly because I couldn't recall Vivek Ramaswamy's name). All four of these candidates are going to be running campaigns that will be somewhere between hopeless, utterly quixotic or just simply ignored. The base of the Republican party is currently too enamored of Donald Trump and/or Trumpism (or MAGAism, if you prefer) to give any of them a first thought, let alone a second.

But this is true of most candidates for President, and a lot of other offices, if the voters' guides that the state puts out are any indication. So I always wonder why they do it. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson at least have some name recognition within the party. But Governor Hutchinson is running to be the sort of Republican whose willingness to ignore the anger and fears of the Republican electorate is what led to Donald Trump being elected the first time. There's no sign that Republican voters are ready to give his brand of Conservatism another bite of the apple. Vivek Ramaswamy strikes the correct Culture War notes, but so does Donald Trump.

There may be something to be said for delusion, but all four of the contenders strike me as reasonably intelligent people; one doesn't get to be Ambassador to the United Nations or a successful businessman by being completely out of touch with reality as most people tend to experience it.

And that leaves me with a certain level of curiosity as to what any of them expect to attain by running for President that they couldn't attain without it. Of course, I could be completely wrong about their chances. After all, no-one really took Donald Trump seriously when he announced back in 2015, either.

And that raises the question: What do these people (and a few others) think that they see in the Republican electorate that other people don't? Donald Trump saw a culture of grievance and victimhood that was ripe for exploitation (and he did so, masterfully). Counting Trump out was to either overlook or ignore the bitterness and outrage that other people had been calling out for years.

I don't consider myself a particularly watchful or astute political observer. Sure, I remember the hullabaloo over Barack Obama saying, back in 2008:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

But I didn't pay enough attention to the speech itself to realize that it was an accurate portrayal of the Republican electorate of the time; that only became clear to me once Donald Trump made grievance politics the order of the day. So perhaps there is some other speech that I should have paid more attention to, in order to understand why people who otherwise appear to be simply wasting their time think they have a viable path to the White House.

And so I'm curious. I'm curious what they see that others don't. And whether it's out there in the quantities they think it is.

Not Like The Others

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with moral (or moralized) distinctions is that they can make it difficult for a person to portray what they are doing as being different from what other people do, without also making the case that is it better.

I've been noodling on this idea recently, because I was considering what is sometimes termed the crab mentality. The metaphor was first laid out me by my father, who was using it to explain what he saw as dysfunction in the broader Black community. I've run into it several times since then, and a recent article I was reading on Aeon about "momfluencers," and other forms of family-based influencers.

The common thread is that whether people are comparing a group to a bucket of crabs or noting how people will make questionable choices to satisfy a craving for online engagement and material resources, the critic rarely includes themselves in the actual group of people being criticized. When my father first told me of the crab mentality, he was one of the crabs attempting to break out of the bucket, and being pulled down by others. When Ms. Sebag-Montefiore notes that people will share their children with the world in order to garner attention for brands and material comfort for themselves, she pointedly exempts herself from all of it: the "sharenting," the quest for validation and money and, most pointedly, the quest for self-esteem via buying the "right" brands.

There isn't anything wrong with this, of course, but the moralistic tone that attaches to metaphors like the crab mentality or noting "I have decided that I don’t need their products, or their inspiration. I don’t need to see how they live their lives to know how I should live mine," carry the whiff of condescension. Simply because they do. If I have a place in a crab mentality, I suspect that it isn't that of the bravely non-conformist crab. (I don't know what role a cranky, curmudgeonly crab might have in it.) And what's shielded me from influencer culture is mostly a faint disdain for youth that's (perhaps ironically) persisted from my own youth. But I'm not sure that I understand how to describe my own life choices as simply being different, because they work for me, rather than better, because I'm somehow a more ethical person.

Last One In

Here's a question, if perhaps a somewhat abstract, or maybe even obtuse, one: What is the purpose of values?

At the end of March, I came across an article on Axios that proclaimed: "Rot of nation's core values quantified by single poll." (How's that for click-bait?) The article is a pious lament of the fact that the share of respondents who told a Wall Street Journal/National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey that they found patriotism, religious faith, having children, community involvement, tolerance for others et cereta to be "very important" went down, while the number of respondents citing money as being "very important" went up. This, the author concludes, is evidence that "The poll quantifies a generational and political divide that shows a rot at the very soul of our nation."

First off, the nation's core values have likely always been in flux, especially if one measures them by how people actually behaved, rather than what they would tell someone else. The idea that all people should be treated equally before the law is, effectively, a rather new idea in the United States. Equality being an active value, rather than simply something that people paid lip service to, came about because people's understanding of their interests changed.

And "character" is determined by the way that people act in furtherance of their interests. If people can achieve their interests without seeing a need to be as outwardly (or even inwardly) patriotic as their parents or grandparents, why should this be considered some sort of national rot? Would I prefer that Americans were bigger on tolerance for others? Sure. But if it doesn't get people what they want (and in a society that exhibits low social trust, it clearly doesn't) then it's going to subside.

And that's the problem with the formulation of "a rot at the very soul of our nation." It relies on an understanding that the outward (and often very intolerant) religiosity, for instance, of prior generations of Americans was something they saw as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end that they found worthwhile. Birth rates aren't declining because of some sickness of the soul. Instead, children have gone from an economic necessity to an expensive luxury good. And some people have legitimately found ways to be happy and fulfilled in their lives without being parents. Why should this be considered a bad thing? It's not like the planet, or even the country is going to run out of children anytime soon. And if the nation had no problem importing millions of young families to settle them on land that had formerly been inhabited by the Native Americans, why is there a problem with allowing young families to come to the country now?

Treating core values (and the things that one may not want to be core values) as means, rather than ends, is the trick to keeping them healthy. Want more community involvement? Then community involvement has to come with benefits, and not simply people being shut out from things if they don't play ball. There really isn't a chicken and egg problem here. Piety simply has to make way for understanding how people determine what's important to them.

Mistargeted

 

Forbes has been taking something of a kicking recently, with people sharing the above image on LinkedIn and then declaring that the magazine is obviously incompetent to have featured people an institutions that turned out to be fraudulent, failures or both.

But Forbes is a financial magazine. Not a financial auditor, a financial regulator nor an enforcement body. They have no power to force businesses or individual to turn over their books for scrutiny or to pry into the exact mechanisms that a business might use to conduct day-to-day operations. For Forbes to have seen what was coming, it would have required a level of access that no magazine would ever be expected to have, and that none of Forbes' critics would want the media to have into their own affairs.

True, there are some warning signs that it's reasonable to suggest that a savvy media organization could have found; FTX's lack of internal governance procedures, or Silicon Valley Bank's high exposure to duration risk and uninsured deposits. But a lot of other organizations, like auditors and regulators could, and maybe should, have known about them, too. After all, they have ways of ensuring much deeper access to the inner workings of an organization than a magazine does.

Guess Who's Back

So, I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood yesterday, and guess what?

Even though the tents are still gone, one or more homeless persons with a pair of campers have moved onto the street. (It's not evident in the picture, but the two campers are chained together. You can see it if you look closely.) I'm not sure of what it is about this particular block that draws people here. I know there is a food bank in the area, but I suspect it's about a thirty-five to forty-five minute walk away. So there must be something else that they feel the need to be in proximity to. I would guess the local hospital, but it's a few blocks away; maybe the police are more diligent about preventing long-term camping in the hospital's immediate environs. There has to be something, as the empty area where other homeless people have been setting up their RVs is only a few miles to the south of this spot, and it strikes me as much less likely to result in a towing.

In any event, clearing the tents, and putting up barriers to new ones, only solved part of the problem. Actually, let me rephrase that. It only moved part of the problem. There are homeless people who still see a need to be in this area, and they still understand themselves as being in the right when they use the space. We'll see if they manage to antagonize the local businesses and residents enough that the city of forced to remove them again. Something tells me that they will.

It's worth noting that the city is in a tough spot. The fact that land for new housing has been scarce for the past 20 years, give or take, has resulted in home prices being very high, and many people simply are not interested in that state of affairs ending any time soon. The people who own the local housing stock view those valuations as money rightfully theirs, people who have just bought in aren't interested in being under water to help the homeless and the jurisdictions that collect property taxes need the revenue. And without anywhere nearby that has lower home costs and access to relatively well-paying jobs, the area simply shuffles the homeless from place to place, as they wear out what little welcome they have in one place after another.