Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 I made the case in a post here on May 31 that reality wasn't cooperating with our very human desire for nice story lines.  As part of the evidence, I referenced the May 24 Republican primary in Pennsylvania, for the nomination for the US Senate, in which Kathy Barnette, the underdog surprise candidate (THAT is always a nice storyline), faded into relative insignificance at almost the moment the actual counting of ballots began.  Right around the time I wrote that post, the issue has narrowed down to this: would undated signed mail-in ballots be counted? There was nothing fraudulent in the wind: some voters simply forgot to fill out the date line on the outside envelope.  Had those votes been counted, it seems, McCormick might have won. Without those ballots, Oz had his win/  But let's back up. In the final stretch of the campaign, Mehmet Oz remained a favorite almost entirely on the strength of Trump's endorsement. THAT suggested a storyline (Trump still has gr...

  Reading through the morning-after coverage of the big primary night from two weeks ago (North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Oregon) I was looking for some guidance on where we are headed in this mid-term year, and I was struck by the elusiveness of social reality. Our own inner reality, our human nature, dictates that we look for a central theme in the outer reality, specifically in a range of elections across the country. We want a single frame for the night. Lots of important stuff was going on, it seemed all to have SOMETHING to tell us about where all the midterm election jockeying stands, but it refused to gel.  Reporters and pundits seemed to have wanted to write either "Trump still has a firm grip on the GOP" or maybe "Trump no lo nger has a firm grip on the GOP." Instead, they had to acknowledge that he didn't get his way in Idaho or a southwestern corner of North Carolina, but that he had gotten his way in a statewide party primary in NC and in anoth...