The Coming Trump Trainwreck

Let's make the following assumption: Hillary Clinton is about to win the Presidency, and the Democratic Party is about to regain control of the U.S. Senate. Control of the House may remain in Republican hands.

Further, let's assume that Trump responds to the loss with his usual grace. He announces that (a) the election was rigged, (b) all major media, including Fox News, were part of the rigging, and (c) he'll keep the revolution going, he's going to create the Trump News Network, offering Movement News (after a lot of gastroenterology jokes, that phrase will be abandoned).

Assume all that, with some slight variations at your discretion. What does this mean? What will our politics look like during the first four years of the HRC administration?

I suspect that the Grand Old Party is headed for its final crack-up. The Reagan coalition has consisted, roughly speaking, of three parts: white nationalists (more or less openly avowed, or hotly denied, to be such); small government conservatives (like Ron and then Rand Paul, and at least arguably Ted Cruz), and big government conservatives (think of the Bush family, or Irving and Bill Kristol, or the fellow pictured above, Evan McMullin). It is reasonable to suppose, given the above assumptions, that those three parts will come unglued, and there will be three parties where there now are one.

The three opposition parties will give HRC little trouble. This scenario has her party winning control of the House in 2018, and essentially redefining the Supreme Court over the course of her first term. Voila! the U.S. has its "fourth republic," something far more along European social democratic lines than anything anyone expected before Trump came down that escalator.

For those who came in late, I think of the first Republic as the period beginning with the ratification of the US constitution and continuing until sectional rivalry really got out of hand and a civil war became necessary. The second Republic began when the victors in that war created three sweeping new constitutional amendments and continued until the stock market crash of 1929 and its aftermath. The third republic was in place by the time the Supreme Court caved to Roosevelt's demands in 1937, and continued until ... well, let's say the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Now the fallout from that third disaster has finally settled and -- again given the above assumptions, the fourth republic is at hands, its outlines are predictable.

I'm not cheer leading for it, just describing events as I see them. Feel free to comment but please don't shoot the piano player.

For me, the intriguing question is what happens THEN? Over time, I'm sure (and not too much of it) something will emerge as the ONE key opposition party to the HRC Dems. Perhaps the core of the new opposition will incorporate one or more of the three parts of the old Republican Party, and will combine it with disaffected Dems after some crisis within their ranks. What its broad features will be, I don't pretend to know. I've been as speculative already as I dare.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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