Sanders and Trump

10-29-2017

Sanders and Trump

[caption id="attachment_19265" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0[/caption] Danielle Kurtzleben looks at a new study that shows that more than 1 in 10 people who voted for Bernie Sanders also voted for Donald Trump. This is an important study and shows how many people on both sides of the political spectrum are voting out of anger and protest at the established parties. It also shows that much of their anger and disenchantment has to do with race.

"Fully 12 percent of people who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries voted for President Trump in the general election. That is according to the data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — a massive election survey of around 50,000 people. (For perspective, a run-of-the-mill survey measuring Trump's job approval right now has a sample of 800 to 1,500.) Political science professor Brian Schaffner of University of Massachusetts, Amherst tweeted the data on Wednesday. Schaffner's numbers show that after a bitter Democratic primary, more than 1 in 10 of those who voted in the primaries for the very progressive Sanders ended up voting for the Republican in the general election, rather than for the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. What drove those voters to Trump? Schaffner dug into that, as well. What it wasn't was trade, an issue where Sanders was closer to Trump's philosophy than Clinton's. At least, the issue of trade didn't seem to have that much of an impact.... And then there is race. Nearly half of Sanders-Trump voters disagree with the idea that "white people have advantages." This tracks with broader observations about election 2016 — for example, as I wrote last week, in general, the larger a state's general-election Trump vote, the less likely its residents are to perceive a lot of discrimination in the world, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute. And another postelection study — co-authored by Schaffner — found a "relatively strong indication that racism and sexism were more important in 2016 than they had been in previous elections.""

Form more information visit: http://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds

The Need To Confront Our Shadow

Hannah Arendt insisted that none of us could survive having our motivations and intimate thoughts—the dark truths of our human heart—exposed in the public. That is why we need to wear a public mask. And yet, it is also true that we may need to confront the truth that each of us has a heart of darkness. Alexander Blum agrees and turns to Carl Jung to find insights into the darkness in us all that has helped give rise to Donald Trump.

"Carl Jung was done a disservice by the sanitized spirituality of the New Age movement. Jungian archetypes were shoved into the same bucket as the zodiac, astrology, and healing crystals, lost in the blur of wishful thinking that had captured the late 1960s and 1970s and its desire to create a better society out of love and mercy alone. But the short-lived optimism of the sexual revolution and the hippie movement meant its demise in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration saw the rebels hang up their flowers and instead don suits, taking to Madison Avenue and extinguishing the flame of creative renaissance that wanted so badly to break free from the Cold War West. Perhaps there is some parallel here with the Obama years culminating in the election of Donald Trump. During the Obama Presidency, American progressives became pacified, trading economic arguments for cultural dissatisfaction, forsaking the ideas of the New Deal for an emotional and ideological clamp upon the unconscious forces of racism and sexism. There was a pervasive sense that history had ended, that a centrist Democrat could potentially rule the West forever, and that the shadows of racism, sexism, and hate speech would finally be chased out of public society after the victory of Hillary Clinton, a female President. Jung would not have been surprised by what followed. In The Philosophical Tree, he wrote: Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. American progressives believed that through a respectable politics, the psychology of hatred could be repressed through a combination of censorship and social pressure. They imagined that the march of progress was so inevitable that by shaming and denying the power of our worst impulses, we could create a paradise. But the ghosts of theosophy still haunt our politics. It seems today that the branches of the Jewish Kabbala’s Tree of Sephirot, answering to a cosmic balance between mercy and severity (as Valentin Tomberg wrote in his mystical magnum opus Meditations on the Tarot), has been ignored in favor of mercy alone. Compassion, empathy, and tolerance – all bundled into the package of political correctness – these forces alone would squash the shadow, our lower nature, and save us. Such was the promise of contemporary political correctness. But Jung would suggest that the politically correct are ignoring the very real severity in their own nature: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is…if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”"

Form more information visit: http://quillette.com/2017/10/02/jung-trumpian-shadow/

21st Century Censorship

Tim Wu argues that with technologies like Twitter, Facebook and Google, we need a new revitalized idea of free speech.

"But in the 21st century, censorship works differently, as the writer and academic Zeynep Tufekci has illustrated. The complete suppression of dissenting speech isn’t feasible in our “cheap speech” era. Instead, the world’s most sophisticated censors, including Russia and China, have spent a decade pioneering tools and techniques that are better suited to the internet age. Unfortunately, those new censorship tools have become unwelcome imports in the United States, with catastrophic results for our democracy. The Russian government was among the first to recognize that speech itself could be used as a tool of suppression and control. The agents of its “web brigade,” often called the “troll army,” disseminate pro-government news, generate false stories and coordinate swarm attacks on critics of the government. The Chinese government has perfected “reverse censorship,” whereby disfavored speech is drowned out by “floods” of distraction or pro-government sentiment. As the journalist Peter Pomerantsev writes, these techniques employ information “in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze.” Our distressing state of public discourse stems from the widespread use of these new tools of censorship and speech control, including by the White House. The administration habitually crosses the line between fact and propaganda. Instead of taking action itself, it demands that others punish its supposed enemies. To add to the mess, it is apparent that the Russian government and possibly others hope to manipulate American political debate, as its exploitation of Facebook and Twitter in the last election shows."

Form more information visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/twitter-first-amendment.html