A democratic polity does not elect a technocrat-in-chief, but politicians whose role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details. Paul Ryan’s various budgets haven’t been wrong because they require giant magic asterices to make the numbers add up. They have been wrong because the interests and values Paul Ryan represents are wrong. The magic asterices don’t reflect dumb mistakes, but smart politics.
.. expertise on technocratic matters ought not translate to any deference on interests and values
.. If you are honest, you will follow your own theory where it leads, as Bryan Caplan has, and work to limit democracy. But Caplan, whom I love, is mistaken, because he begins with a mistaken theory of politics. If you want to see how that theory of politics works in the real world, look no farther than the European Union, which is a real-time experiment in demoting democratic adjudication of values in favor of technocratic adjudication of facts.
Pew Research: Typology Group Profiles: Disaffecteds
11% OF ADULT POPULATION /11% OF REGISTERED VOTERS
Basic Description: The most financially stressed of the eight typology groups, Disaffecteds are very critical of both business and government. They are sympathetic to the poor and supportive of social welfare programs. Most are skeptical about immigrants and doubtful that the U.S. can solve its current problems. They are pessimistic about their own financial future.
Fully 71% have experienced unemployment in their household in the past 12 months. About half (48%) describe their household as “struggling.”
Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature
Repeatedly underestimated as a court jester or silly showman, Mr. Trump muscled his way into the Republican elite by force of will. He badgered a skittish Mitt Romney into accepting his endorsement on national television, and became a celebrity fixture at conservative gatherings. He abandoned his tightfisted inclinations and cut five- and six-figure checks in a bid for clout as a political donor. He courted conservative media leaders as deftly as he had the New York tabloids.
.. “I realized that unless I actually ran, I wouldn’t be taken seriously,”
.. he tested the themes that would one day frame his presidential campaign: American economic decline, and the weakness and cluelessness of politicians in Washington.
.. Over the next few months, Mr. Trump met quietly with Republican pollsters who tested a political message and gauged his image across the country
.. Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, wrote a column on his website envisioning a Trump candidacy steamrolling to the nomination, powered by wall-to-wall media attention.
.. While he saw himself as an important spokesman on economic issues and a credible champion for the party, the Romney campaign viewed him as an unpredictable attention-seeker with no real political foundation.
.. Mr. Trump was drawing presidential candidates seeking his support to his Fifth Avenue high-rise. In September 2011, Mr. Romney made the trip, entering and exiting discreetly, with no cameras on hand to capture the event.
.. Mr. Trump reached out to say he wanted to endorse Mr. Romney at a Trump property in the state. Wary of such a spectacle in a crucial state, Mr. Romney’s aides began a concerted effort to relegate Mr. Trump’s endorsement to a sideshow.
The Romney campaign conducted polling in four states that showed Mr. Trump unpopular everywhere but Nevada, and suggested to Mr. Trump that they hold an endorsement event there, far away from Florida voters
.. In an appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity, the Romney campaign stressed that his endorsement was so vital — with such potential to ripple in the media — that it would be a mistake to dilute the impact with a question-and-answer session.
.. Mr. Obama, in a speech on Friday, said Republicans had long treated Mr. Trump’s provocations as “a hoot” — just as long as they were directed at the president.
.. Mr. Trump had struck up a friendship in 2009 with David N. Bossie, the president of the conservative group Citizens United, who met Mr. Trump through the casino magnate Steve Wynn.
.. Mr. Trump began a relationship with Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, who was trying to rescue the party from debt.
.. In 2014, he cut a quarter-million dollar check to the Republican Governors Association, in response to a personal entreaty from the group’s chairman — Chris Christie.
.. Mr. Trump peppered Mr. Gingrich with questions about the experience of running for president, asking about how a campaign is set up, what it is like to run and what it would cost.
.. Pundits seemed unaware of the spade work he had done throughout that spring, taking a half dozen trips to early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and using forums hosted by Mr. Bossie’s group to road test a potential campaign.
Googling Is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen
Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.
.. Plato argued in “The Republic” that the fact that democracies couldn’t control that flow and point it toward truth was one reason they often dissolved into tyranny. In a different vein, Noam Chomsky argued in the 1980s that consent was being “manufactured” by Big Media — large consolidated content-delivery companies (like this newspaper) that could cause opinions to sway one way or the other at their whim.
.. searching the Internet can get you to information that would back up almost any claim of fact, no matter how unfounded. It is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.
.. Search for “what really happened to the dinosaurs” and one of the top results is likely to be from a site called answersingenesis.org — not, I suggest, a good source of information on the T-Rex.
.. We no longer disagree just over values. Nor do we disagree just over the facts. We disagree over whose source — whose fountain of facts — is the right one.