There is increasing panic among the GOPe about the possibility that Trump could win the nomination. The “Anyone But Trump” fixation is obsessing the usual suspects.
Megan McArdle: As I see it, there are basically three strategies you can follow:
Anyone but Trump: It doesn’t matter, as long as you vote against Trump. Democrats in open primary states can play, too.
Vote the leader: Pick the winner in your state, and force the nomination selection to the convention.
Attempt to generate an actual alternative front-runner by voting for the national poll leader, or the most plausible candidate — probably Marco Rubio, given that he seems to have the most support from the highest number of GOP coalitions, but possibly Ted Cruz, since he appears to be the next most appealing to Trump voters.
I’ll just start by asking: Which of these would someone follow if their main priority is to defeat Trump? Or am I thinking about it all wrong?
Sean Trende: No, I think you have it basically right. I actually think that, for now, their best chance lies behind Door No. 2.
Why are the elites so obsessed with keeping Trump away from the levers of power ? This is not limited to the USA. Germany is having its own voter revolt.
The anti-immigrant AFD – Alternative for Germany – party has scored massive gains in municipal weekend elections which reflect growing public anger at the refugee policies of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The polls for councils in the state of Hesse saw the AFD make significant inroads on the two main established parties – Merkel’s conservative CDU and the centre-left SPD – to come in third with 13.2 percent of the vote, knocking the environmental Greens into fourth place.
Frankfurt CDU politician Markus Frank said: ‘The preliminary result of the AfD is frightening. I had expected a maximum five percent.’
Where does this voter anger come from ?
Maybe it is one manifestation of the Principle Agent Problem.
A world where Angela Merkel feels compelled to accept millions of migrants for Europe even to the detriment of Germany and where president Obama feels he can sign major international treaties with Iran without reference to Congress is an unstable world locked in a game that is no longer transparent. Who do politicians work for? It creates a world of dubious loyalties and unpredictable coalitions.
If the obvious conflict of interest has been ignored by the politicians, it has not been lost on the voters. Many plainly sense what economists call an principal-agent problem, which may be the source of the current voter revolt. Bobbitt comes near to the identifying one of the causes of Market State failure when he observes that president Obama saw the ISIS problem from the standpoint of the international system rather than as president of the United States.
I think this is it. The “Market State” is a vision of a state which no longer is concerned with its own citizens. It is a citizen of the world.
In an interview in 2014, he described his vision of a new geopolitical balance of power in the region. “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if . . . you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran . . . If you can start unwinding some of [the distrust among the states of the region], that creates a new equilibrium. And so I think each individual piece of the puzzle is meant to paint a picture in which conflicts and competition still exist in the region but that it is contained.”
What Obama did by putting “the interest of citizens throughout the region” in the forefront was unconsciously subordinate the claims of principal, the American people.
Angela Merkel did much the same thing by being more concerned about Muslim refugees than about Germans. Then came New Year’s Eve in Cologne.
A 26-year-old Algerian man has become the first person arrested in connection with a string of sexual assaults during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne that sparked a debate about Germany’s ability to integrate migrants.
Prosecutors said on Monday the unidentified asylum seeker had been arrested at a refugee home in the nearby town of Kerpen over the weekend. He is accused of groping a woman and robbing her phone, the prosecutor’s office spokesma,n Ulrich Bremer, told the Associated Press.
Two other Algerian asylum seekers, aged 22 and 24, were also arrested in Kerpen and the western city of Aachen respectively over the weekend, both for robbery, said Bremer.
The number of people accused of committing crimes in Cologne on New Year’s Eve now stands at 21, of whom eight are in detention, he said.
They are all Islamic “migrants.”
What has this to do with Trump ?
“it was only after “the San Bernardino killings in December 2015, [that] Obama acknowledged in a televised address to the nation that the US was at war, a concession he must have made with some reluctance.”
But Bobbitt has not taken his insight to its logical conclusion. Obama’s reluctance to recognize a threat to his country represents an unnatural state of affairs. The efficient cause of the current crisis lay in breaking the former chain of political accountability without replacing it with another. If there is any truth to Anne Applebaum’s belief that “we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union and maybe the end of the liberal world order as we know it,” it must be that the fuse was lit before Trump; perhaps in 2008 or earlier.
The fate of the State depends as much on principal/agent considerations as much as on Bobbit’s duality of strategy and law. What happens if those other considerations are added to his analysis?
Trump’s two most powerful issues are illegal immigration and Muslim immigration. Both issues had been ignored for years.
The core problem is thus the revolt of the elites against the values of the wider community: “[T]he new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.” For too many of these elites, the values of “Middle America” – a/k/a “fly-over country” – are mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women. “Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.”
Charles Murray has been warning about this for a few years. From Niall Ferguson’s review of “Coming Apart:”
No doubt the same politically correct critics will complain about this book, because it is almost entirely devoted to the problem of social polarization within “white America.” They will have to ignore one of Coming Apart’s most surprising findings: that race is not a significant determinant of social polarization in today’s America. It is class that really matters.
Murray meticulously chronicles and measures the emergence of two wholly distinct classes: a new upper class, first identified in The Bell Curve as “the cognitive elite,” and a new “lower class,” which he is too polite to give a name. And he vividly localizes his argument by imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one college degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any. (Read: Tonyville and Trashtown.)
The key point is that the four great social trends of the past half-century–the decline of marriage, of the work ethic, of respect for the law and of religious observance–have affected Fishtown much more than Belmont. As a consequence, the traditional bonds of civil society have atrophied in Fishtown. And that, Murray concludes, is why people there are so very unhappy–and dysfunctional.
The “Stop Trump” movement is almost all coming from the elites and the wannabe elites.
Tags: economics, Obama, politics, Republicans