Minority Rule and Election Strategy

For post-Christmas updates on polling, click here, on in-person appearances, click here, and on the vital importance of minority enfranchisement, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The United States’ biggest problem today is not that its people are divided. It’s not even that private propaganda mills like Fox fuel the division, as does fake news on social media partly pushed by foreign spooks. It’s that the governmental structure enshrined in our Constitution entrenches minority rule.

A recent spreadsheet on this blog shows the extent of the problem. Our nine most populous states, all together, account for 51% of our population, but only 46% of the electoral votes for president, and only 18% of votes in the Senate. It you want to understand why our Senate will likely acquit Trump of serious impeachment charges without a serious trial, you need look no further than that 18%.

But the Senate doesn’t elect presidents. The Electoral College does. And the Electoral College is far less skewed toward minority rule than our Senate. More important, the numbers in that recent spreadsheet are not representative of the Electoral College’s actual division, since big states like California and Texas, or New York and Georgia, don’t usually vote the same way. So it makes better sense to analyze how our red and blue states are actually divided.

The spreadsheet below aggregates the votes in the Electoral College, House and Senate of all states that voted for Trump by a margin of 3% or more in 2016. The 26 states have an absolute majority in the Senate, or 52% of the senators. But their shares of the nation’s total population and its 538 electoral votes are 41.5% and 42.75%, respectively.

Those numbers don’t differ much from each other, or from the consistent polling of Trump’s popular support, which has been stable at about 37% to 40%.

[NOTE: Click on the spreadsheet to get a larger, clearer version.]



This more granular analysis of the Electoral College’s vote distribution suggests some strategies for the Dems to use in the 2020 election, regardless of the Senate’s likely acquittal of Trump. Following is a table of the states that the Dems can expect to win in the presidential election almost regardless of who their candidate is:

Reliably Blue (Democratic) States
State	Electoral Votes
California	55
Colorado	9
Connecticut	7
Delaware	3
District of Columbia	3
Hawaii	4
Illinois	20
Maryland	10
Massachusetts	11
Minnesota*	10
New Jersey	14
New Mexico	5
New York	29
Oregon	7
Rhode Island	4
Vermont	3
Virginia	13
Washington	12
TOTAL	219

* The only state in this table that Trump lost by less than 5% was Minnesota, which he lost by only 1%. I nevertheless include it as a “reliably” Democratic state because of its progressive history and its educated population. Four years of exposure to Trump as president, I think, will only increase his margin of loss there.

Two conclusions jump out from these last two spreadsheets. First, Trump will have an advantage, going into the election, of 230 “reliable” electoral-college votes, versus 219 for the Dems. Second, the total of “committed” states’ votes for both parties is 449, leaving 89 electoral votes up for grabs. The Dems need 51 of those to win, the GOP only 40.

The following table lists, in descending order of their numbers of electoral votes, the states that appear on neither party’s “reliable” list, i.e., the so-called “battleground states.” For each state, the table also lists the margin or Trump’s win or loss in 2016.

States Up for Grabs
State	Electoral Votes	Trump 2016 Margin
Florida	29	2%
Pennsylvania	20	<1%
Michigan	16	<1%
Wisconsin	10	<1%
Nevada	6	-2%
New Hampshire	4	-<1%
Maine	4	-3%

This last table dictates the Dems’ strategy for the 2020 general election, and perhaps for picking a candidate in their primaries. Four points are worth making.

First and most important, Florida is the big prize. The Dems can win without it, but only if they win Pennsylvania. If the Dems lose both Florida and Pennsylvania, they cannot elect a president without some miracle in an even bigger red state. If the Dems win Florida, they can elect a president by winning just one of Michigan or Wisconsin, plus the other almost-reliable three small states.

So the Dems must focus laser-like on Florida. They must do so in picking a candidate. They must concentrate their voter-registration drives there, so as to register as many of the Puerto Rican refugees from Hurricane Maria as possible, and to oppose the Florida GOP’s push to limit Florida’s recent felon re-enfranchisement law. They must also give first priority to their Florida ground game. No single effort will be as important to electing a Democratic president.

Second, Pennsylvania is next most important state. The Dems can win without it only if they win Florida. So registration drives, candidate visits, and get-out-the-vote drives should focus on Pennsylvania as the Dems’ second most important priority.

Third, the two upper-Midwest states (Michigan and Wisconsin) that helped make Trump president in 2016 are still vitally important. If the Dems win both Florida and Pennsylvania, either Michigan or Wisconsin could put them over the top, without any of the three small, almost-reliable states. If the Dems win only one of Florida or Pennsylvania, but not both, they will need one of Michigan or Wisconsin with Florida and both of Michigan and Wisconsin with Pennsylvania.

Finally, the three small Democratic-leaning states (Nevada, New Hampshire and Maine) are important, but not so much relative to the others higher on the list. Their total of fourteen electoral votes could compensate for losing only one bigger state: Wisconsin.

Anyway, all three of these small states are likely to go Democratic. All did in 2016, but by small margins; they are listed as “up for grabs” for that reason only. If we include their total of 14 electoral votes in the Dems’ “reliable” column, they neutralize and reverse the GOP’s electoral-college advantage. But they remain important states whose allegiance neither party should take for granted.

It may seem strange, and a bit sad, that the coming presidential race boils down mostly to two states: Florida and Pennsylvania. But facts are facts. At least both states are highly diverse and more representative than most states of the nation as a whole.

In an earlier essay, I speculated that the Dems might win the presidency, without the upper Midwest states that elected Trump, if only they won Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. That could still happen, and it will become more likely as in-migration and demographic change morph the South. But the Dems lost those states in 2016 by margins of 2%, 5% and 4%, respectively. So Florida, one of our most diverse and fastest growing states, is not just the most important prize, but one of the most attainable, too.

An old business-school motto advises us to spend 80% of our time and effort on the 20% of things that are most important. It’s called the “80/20 rule.” There were many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, but failing to follow the 80/20 Rule was prominent among them. She herself has expressed regret for neglecting Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in her final campaign, where her margins of loss were tiny.

The Dems cannot let that sort of negligence happen again. This time, with our Republic and possibly our species at stake (through global warming), they must be much smarter. They can be sure that Trump and his lackeys, following the 80/20 Rule, will be focusing like lasers on Florida and Pennsylvania.

Endnote: Speaking of global warming, the first spreadsheet above tells a stark cautionary tale. Smaller states whose economies depend primarily on fossil fuels (Texas’ economy is diversified) gave Trump impossible landslide margins in 2016: North Dakota 36%, Oklahoma 36%, West Virginia 42%, and Wyoming 46%.

These percentages are the differences between fractions for Trump and for Clinton! The Dems might be tempted to write these states off as irrevocably red. But they might better be used as testing grounds for policies and messaging aimed at people who fear they won’t have jobs in a transformed energy economy. These states are literally canaries in the coal mines, warning of adamant resistance to acknowledging, let alone fighting, climate change.

Endnote 2: The Fatal Seduction of Polling. I’m leaving this post up until after New Year’s Day because I believe it’s one of the most important ever to appear on this blog. I do not believe that our Republic can survive another four years of a Trump presidency, at least not in any form that someone of my generation would credit as a democracy or egalitarian society.

With that dismal thought in mind, a mathematical truism is worth taking with extreme gravity. Credulousness toward political polling, and gross ignorance of the math behind it, underlay the complacency of the Democrats, our “mainstream” pundits, and the Clinton campaign in 2016.

Take another look at the table of “States Up for Grabs” above. In every single case but Maine’s, the margins of victory, whether of Trump or of Clinton, were smaller than the normal margins of error in political polling, which are typically are in the range of 3%-5%.

More careful polling is unlikely due to the expense and delay it would entail. So similar margins of victory likely will be as undetectable by advance polling in 2020 as they were in 2016.

Accordingly, neither candidate ought to rely on polling to determine how much campaigning to do, or how much effort to exert, in these critical states. That effort must be all out all the time.

This conclusion applies without regard to what statisticians call “systematic bias” in polling. Most expert observers believe that political polling in 2016 was riddled with that sort of bias. But even without it, Nate Silver, who literally wrote the most recent book for non-quants on social polling and error in it, had predicted the chance of Clinton losing in the Electoral College as around 25%.

In real life, that’s a huuuuge number, as Trump himself might say. Imagine being told that you had a one-in-four chance of dying in a certain situation, say, in a cosmetic surgical procedure or in skiing a particular run. You would do everything in your power to avoid that situation, wouldn’t you?

So pols and people who plan campaigns ought to react similarly toward relying on political polling. If they show granular characteristics of state’s likely voters well above any margin of error, polls might be useful in targeting or messaging particular subgroups of a key state. But in predicting the outcome of the “horse race” statewide, let alone in the nation as a whole, polls are likely to be as useless in 2020 as they were in 2016. And that’s true without even factoring in such relative novelties as disinformation on social media, deliberate foreign interference, and rampant “fake news.” So it’s enough for pols to know, as outlined in this blog based on actual critical past performance in a real election, which states are most up for grabs.

In other words, polls might show with somewhat more particularity where within a state to focus a campaign’s all-out effort. Reading into them anything more than that is highly likely to produce failure.

Endnote 3: In-Person Appearances. Donald J. Trump is president of the United States because he’s the greatest political showman since Julius Caesar. He understands the importance of in-person appearances, which he’s perfected in his MAGA-hat rallies.

While everyone else is focusing on relative political novelties—what voters see when alone and staring at their computer screens—Trump has gone back to basics. He understands that we humans are social animals. He knows the staying power of a stadium full of like-minded people, all clapping, shouting and chanting for “their team” and trashing “the enemy.” No pale computer screen viewed in solitude could ever match that.

Trump’s MAGA-hat rallies also have a multiplier effect. Almost every person present will pass the power on to others by avid word of mouth. And our eyeball- and click-seeking mainstream media multiply the coverage of almost every MAGA-hat rally by televising the juiciest portions, in the case of Fox, over and over again.

Trump also understands his demographic well. His MAGA-hat rallies resemble the baseball, basketball and football games, and the major concerts of rock and country music, with which his key demographic is intimately familiar. He often uses the same stadia.

So if Dems want to peel away some of Trump’s supporters, they are going to have to meet the “Woody Allen” test. They are going to have to show up, at least in key states. Failure to do so is why Clinton lost in the upper-Midwest states, by surprisingly small margins.

That’s one reason why youth and vigor matter. It takes physical stamina to hold all those rallies. And that’s one reason why I think Michael Bloomberg will flame out, after a minor surge, no matter how much of his billions he spends on TV ads in major video markets (most of which are already irrevocably blue or red anyway.) At 77, he’s as old as Joe Biden, only one year younger than Bernie Sanders, and four years older than Trump. As someone who’s already there, I can assure readers that, in your seventies, every single year matters.

Endnote 4: Minority Enfranchisement. The minority rule entrenched in our Senate and (to a lesser extent) our Electoral College is not the only way in which our nation deviates sharply from democracy. There are also extra-constitutional ways, which I would argue are really unconstitutional. They include gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Only our legal system and our pols can handle gerrymandering (at least to the extent of getting an initiative on the ballot). But voter suppression is a different matter. Legal challenges can help. But so can simply registering would-be voters, helping them jump through the hoops that voter suppressors put in their way, waking them up with phone calls and in-person visits, and driving those who need transportation to the polls.

That’s what Stacey Abrams does. Unlike Clinton, she fully internalized the 80/20 Rule: she gave up a chance to run for the U.S. Senate from Georgia to found and run the group Fair Fight Action (sometimes called just “Fair Fight”). That group does all of the above, focusing on African-Americans and other minority groups who’ve been excluded from voting by such things as unfair distribution of polling places, onerous voter-registration requirements, voter-roll purging, fraudulent election announcements, and their own confusion and despair.

The minority groups who’ve been so disenfranchised, including recent immigrants, don’t need training to know how to vote. They’ve been lied to, oppressed and deceived, in the case of many immigrant-citizens for years, and in the case of African-Americans for centuries. All they need is help in seeing how their votes can matter and in jumping through the hoops to cast them.

At the end of the day, supporting organizations like Abrams’s is perhaps more important than supporting your favorite Democratic candidate now. No Dem can be insured of winning without these disenfranchised would-be voters, especially in key states. And at this point no one knows who the Democratic candidate will be, let alone who might best beat Trump.

That’s why I'm giving as much monthly now to Abrams’ Fair Fight (through Act Blue, which makes giving easy and secure and keeps good records) as I give to Elizabeth Warren, my favorite candidate now. (I also give a bit less to through Act Blue to Black Voters Matter, which, to my knowledge, has no one with Abrams’ stellar strategic and executive skills.)

There’s yet another reason to support these groups, and for Democratic pols to make in-person appearances. Both are things that foreign spooks and meddlers can’t do. Several have been jailed for trying, or have fled our country one step ahead of the cops.

The enemy is ever watchful. In the past several weeks, hits on this blog that Google reports as from an “Unknown Region” have increased seven fold. I take that designation to include hits through proxy servers known for “anonymizing” probes by spooks from such places as China, Iran, and Russia. So we all have to assume that everything you read here the enemies of our nation are reading, too.

Those enemies can do a lot of things. They can spread disinformation, propaganda and fake news over social media and their own disguised outlets. They can weaponize these things and target them at individuals identified by analyzing their reading and “likes” on social media. But they can’t hold in-person campaign rallies, and they can’t legally register American voters or personally help them vote. So in-person appearances by our pols and helping the disenfranchised vote could be the salvation of our democracy, not just from minority rule, but from foreign meddling, too.

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The Dems’ December 2019 Debate

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

It was the best of debates. It was the worst of debates.

The seven Democrats onstage strutted their stuff, in eloquent and even gripping terms. Every candidate made a positive impression, including the outliers Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer. Some candidates moved the audience to bursts of applause, to laughter, and perhaps to tears.

By the debate’s end, any sentient observer would have eagerly swapped any of the seven for the cruel, bumbling monster in the White House now. But the debate barely moved the needle in deciding which of the seven could best beat him.

Mainstream pundits no doubt will focus on the candidates’ clashes, of which there were several. Biden sparred with Sanders twice over “Medicare for All,” the coercion it would involve, and the cost of funding it. Biden also ventured a bit of social dominance by telling Sanders to put his hand down while Biden was speaking. Buttigieg sparred with Klobuchar over experience and with Warren over “purity tests” (Buttigieg’s words) in campaign financing, as well as Warren’s net worth (allegedly 100 times Buttigieg’s).

Pundits will search this strong brew for the tea leaves of body language and viewer persuasion. But for me the sagest observation came from Amy Walter, one of PBS’ regular political commentators, during a break. Voters, she said, don’t typically get down into the weeds of policy, let alone second-guess financial accounting. They look for shared values.

Walter implied, but didn’t quite say, that voters want a leader who seems to be on their side. Isn’t that precisely why Trump won?

If you credit Walter’s observation, then Warren probably improved her position the most. In both a long soliloquy about selfies with voters and her closing statement, Warren displayed unarguable empathy for the downtrodden in our land, of whom there are far too many.

So genuine and heartfelt seemed Warren’s emotion as to melt Buttigieg’s attacks based on campaign-financing “purity tests” like snow. Warren is not tone-deaf like Hillary Clinton, who earned big bucks from speaking to Wall Streeters behind closed doors and refused to talk about what she told them. In contrast, Warren claims to take no money at all from the well off.

Not only did Warren show bushels of empathy. She also had a simple and powerful theory why things have gotten so bad for so many: pervasive corruption. That theory fits our incumbent president like a glove.

Trump’s support is solid and invariable precisely because his voters think, as mean and cruel as he is, that he’s on their side. No matter what he says or does, he’s their champion against the corruption and unfairness of politics and the depredations of the oligarchs. (The irony of Trump claiming to be one of the oligarchs, without much evidence of that status, is lost on them.)

As moderator Tim Alberta of Politico reported, President Obama said this week that, if women were in charge, we’d see a significant improvement in just about everything. Without apparent premeditation, Warren keyed on that advice. She put her understanding and real empathy on display, along with with her razor-sharp mind.

All this raised some rather deep questions, to which I have no answer. Trump won the White House as a rough, tough crude guy—a dominant male—who claims to be the champion of the forgotten. What happens when a self-evidently caring female claims the same role, but with far greater empathy, infinitely greater honesty and decency, and a much sharper mind? Can she displace the ogre-champion in at least a few voters’ minds?

Can a nurturing female break the cycle of fear and hate with concern, love and a passel of untried and probably expensive plans? Does the answer differ for male and female voters? Can it change over time, for each individual? If so, how long does the change take? On these questions hangs the fate of the Dems in 2020 and ultimately of our Republic.

In exchanges on Afghanistan, China, national security and our endless wars against a noun (“terror”), Biden came off well. He sported his bona fides and experience to good advantage. But important as foreign policy is, it’s not going to decide the coming election. Voters are much more focused on things at home that directly affect their lives.

That’s why no House Republican voted for impeachment, despite clear evidence of Trump selling out our foreign policy for personal gain. Presumably at least some House Republicans know what their constituents care about. So Biden strutted his personal credentials but probably didn’t boost his “electability.”

Pete Buttigieg, in my view, lost ground in this debate. His complaint about Warren’s “purity tests” may have been well placed in the abstract. But his condemning her net worth was not; it came off as petty, personal and a bit peripheral. More important, Buttigieg failed to tout his experience at McKinsey as giving him a basis for controlling and managing business, having worked in the belly of the beast. That’s a point that Tom Steyer made well, based on his own much longer experience as a successful businessman, now a billionaire.

Buttigieg did show his practical and realistic side in pushing for a public option (not a command) for health insurance and a sensibly flexible approach to ending the war in Afghanistan. In that he held his ground against Klobuchar, who’s also claiming the central ground of “moderation” and realism.

As for Sanders, I think he’s fading. His dogged insistence on Medicare for All, despite its enormous costs and obvious political hurdles, made him seem increasingly doctrinaire, especially as Warren had softened her similar stance just a little bit. He joked about another candidate taking his name “in vain,” suggesting a touch of a messianic complex.

All in all, Sanders is showing increasing signs of his age and the inflexibility that comes with it. I expect him to be the first of the top five to fade, and most of his votes to go to Warren. It’s a said fate for the man who, in 2016, brought the disasters wrought by our oligarchy to the nation’s attention. But politics ain’t beanbag, and Warren is doing everything she can to avoid overt attacks on the man who first diagnosed our nation’s grave ills.

As for Klobuchar, she improved her position with credible attacks on Buttigieg (on experience) and Sanders (on health-insurance funding). She touted her experience in legislating. She forcefully advanced the importance of working together and being practical. And she credibly argued that she has the best chance of delivering the votes of her native Midwest that put Trump over the top in 2016. She’s not the brightest of the lot, nor the clearest on the details of policy, but she’s still a contender.

Politics is a strange combination of Reason and emotion, just like our species. Whether intuitively or analytically, Warren seems to understand that odd mix better than the rest. She struck no decisive blow last night and offered no stunning insight. But she seems to be making slow and steady progress toward the nomination.

Can her peculiar combination of genuine female empathy with a razor-sharp mind (dulled by a tendency to cling too long to abstract answers), prevail over a half-crazy and cruel ogre-champion of the downtrodden? That appears to be the unanswered question of last night’s debate, and of our age. Only much more careful and nuanced polling can even begin to hazard an answer before next November.

P.S. With PBS and Politico managing the debate, the Dems finally seemed to have gotten the mechanics and the process right. The moderators were tough on timing, consummately professional, and good at following up, especially PBS’ Amna Nawaz. The whole debate was available live and free of charge over the air, on various PBS stations and reportedly on MSNBC, too. And this morning, a complete, apparently human-corrected, electronically searchable transcript appeared in the Washington Post. That’s the least that Americans have a right to expect of our Fourth Estate in covering our most important election since the Civil War.

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The Case for “Mayor Pete”

[For a brief apology for my doubting the strategy and savvy of the House Democratic leadership, click here.]

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is an anomaly. He’s a modest, small-town mayor running against United States senators, a former Vice-President, a billionaire and a less affluent executive. He’s openly gay and happily married to a man.

Yet somehow he seems to be every Democrat’s favorite second choice. He’s mine, too. If the Dems had ranked-preference primaries—which everyone seems to think would be better than what they do have—Mayor Pete would win the Democratic nomination hands down. (The caucuses in Iowa apply a variation of ranked preferences, which may be why Pete now seems to be leading there.)

Why is this so? What’s Pete got? What makes him potentially the best Dem to beat Trump? Let’s analyze.

The first thing to note is something I think everyone sees, but hardly anyone comments on. Pete is preternaturally calm. He exudes inner strength. His flawless, clear and simple English never fails him. I’ve never seen him raise his voice publicly, even when attacked in debates.

This unusually attractive aspect of Pete’s personality makes him a “natural” politician. Just like Barack Obama, he never loses his cool. He comes across as invariably thoughtful, reasonable and decent. In a nation whose media pander to Donald Trump and snarlers like Doug Collins and Jim Jordan, many Americans crave leaders with even tempers as balm for their tortured souls. Pete is not just the antithesis of Trump, but perhaps an antidote.

The second thing about Pete that few seem to have noticed is his extraordinary education. Alone among the leading Democratic candidates, he was a Rhodes Scholar. After graduating from Harvard, he went to Oxford University (UK) to study philosophy, politics and economics.

But here’s the thing. Pete didn’t use his fellowship just to enjoy England and polish off his undergraduate majors in history and literature. He worked hard to become a “quant.”

Here’s how he described his higher education in quantitative economics:

“One calculus equation at a time, I came to understand in thorough mathematical detail why supply and demand cannot be expected to deliver fair prices or efficient outcomes in many situations. Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and buyer have different levels of information about the product.”

At the end of the day, Pete earned a “first” at Oxford, the highest grade in the English system. But he didn’t stop there. He spent an additional 2.5 years at McKinsey & Company, the American consulting behemoth famous for using quantitative analysis to save promising but faltering businesses.

At the moment, Pete’s rivals are using his time at McKinsey to dig for dirt, hoping to prove he consulted for firms that broke the law or abused the public trust. But that’s a fishing expedition at best. The primary significance of Pete’s 2.5 years at McKinsey is that he learned thoroughly what makes business tick, what business people value and demand, and what they do right, as well as wrong. He undoubtedly left McKinsey of his own volition: no one lasts that long at McKinsey without meeting its exacting standards.

So what does all this mean? Private businesses in America are busy supplanting, if not usurping, many of the functions once performed by government. (See this essay for the practical side and this one for the legal side of this phenomenon.) In some ways this transition is inevitable, even a mark of progress, like the last millennium’s transitions from Church to monarchy to democracy.

In order to control or manage this transition successfully, any president must understand business, not just oppose it. Through her detailed academic studies of bankruptcy, her work creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and her work in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren understands better than any living pol how business can go and do wrong. She knows in depth and in detail how bankers can cheat consumers, deprive workers of good jobs, garner riches unfairly, and risk our entire economy to sate their own greed. That’s why, still today, Warren is my favorite candidate.

But that’s only one side of the coin. Pete Buttigieg, it seems, understands (better than anyone with experience in political office) the other side of business. He knows how it works, what makes it run, how it can do good, and how to turn its failures toward success.

From Facebook and Twitter, through Tesla, Ford and Chevy, to the fossil-fuel giants and the solar-array and windmill makers who are trying to replace them, modern business is complex and intricate. You don’t just command it like King Canute trying to command the tides. You have to understand it and regulate and adjust it carefully for the general welfare. And the best way to do that is to convince the masters of business, who by and large are probably smarter than the average pol.

That’s why I think it essential that both Warren and Buttigieg be in the White House. I’d like Warren to hold the top job, if only because it’s long past time that a woman did. Yet I’d be almost as happy if Mayor Pete took the top job, because I believe they’re both smart and decent enough to work well together.

Pete’s final three advantages are practical points that oughtn’t to matter but inevitably will. First, he’s the youngest candidate running. With his brains, his executive experience as mayor, and his superb education, his youth is an advantage: it augurs stamina, vitality and strategic flexibility.

The gravest problems the next president will face are all problems of the future, not the past. Among them, global warming (which threatens to accelerate soon) and the sewer of disinformation and fake news on the Internet are the most urgent. Experience in facing past crises is not much help in facing these unique, rapidly worsening existential threats.

Second, as an openly gay man, Pete may have an unknown but powerful source of private funding. Gay couples, many (if not most) with two jobs and no children, may prove to be an uncorrupted and incorruptible source of campaign funds. Whether this fount of money will exceed that of women (many of whom have husbands and children) backing Warren is an open question. I hope that both will prove equal to the avalanche of corrupted corporate money cravenly backing Trump.

Finally, Pete is not only young but fit and trained in combat for country. It wouldn’t hurt at all for us once again to have a commander in chief who knows what it’s like to spend days in a “kill or be killed” environment before sending others to face it. And it also wouldn’t hurt for the casual bully Trump, who used his size to “stalk” Hillary on the debate stage, to understand in his gut that he faces a better man in every way.

At the end of the day, what matters most is who can beat Trump. I still hope that Warren will prove more practical, drop her politically suicidal push for forced Medicare expansion, and prove wily and flexible enough in debate (whether on the same stage or through Tweets) to defeat the monster now in the White House.

But if she falters, I’m ready to give Mayor Pete my full support, just as are my fiancée and an old friend who’s now a leader in planning for higher education. Both recently told me, to my surprise, that if they had to vote now, Mayor Pete would be their choice. As the days roll into weeks, “now” is getting closer and closer. Sometimes choices made on intuition while under pressure are the best ones.

An Apology for Doubting our House Leaders

Last week, I criticized Speaker Pelosi and the House Dems for appearing to squander our second-to-last chance to get rid of Trump, by making the current impeachment proceedings a truncated affair. Now I’m afraid I owe them all an apology. I failed to factor in the third branch’s calendar.

Officially, the Supreme Court’s current Term ends on October 5, 2020, the first Monday in October. But practically the Court nearly always decides its most important cases by the previous June, in this case June 2020. Either way, our Supreme Court will decide on the release of Trump’s tax returns and his Entire-Executive-Branch stonewalling well before next November’s election.

Trump and his lawyers have made unprecedented, extreme and sweeping claims of privileged secrecy for his tax returns and his actions and discussions as president. No one who has ever attended law school long enough to take constitutional law could imagine that our Supreme Court would uphold those claims. In particular, there is little chance that the Court will protect his tax returns against criminal investigations of others, or that his either his tax returns or discussions with his Executive minions will be immune from investigation in aid of impeachment.

Trump himself can stonewall all he wants. But his tax returns are in the hands of independent corporations, whose managers have promised to do what the courts command. Similarly, his Executive minions are mostly waiting for instructions from the highest court. So it seems highly likely, if not inevitable, that the tax returns and the testimony and documents of Bolton, Giuliani, Mulvaney, Pence and Pompeo, among others, will have been delivered under penalty of perjury before, if not long before, next year’s general election.

Most likely all this will happen by July, when the Democratic primaries will have ended and the party will be united behind a single leader. In the worst case, it will happen by early October, causing an “October surprise” to make Comey’s “inappropriate” remarks about Hillary’s e-mails look like mere trivia.

This schedule will give the Dems three solid advantages. First, it will allow them to complete the vital task of selecting a presidential candidate without the distraction of an ongoing impeachment or trial. Second, the release of the real dirt on Trump will occur after both House and Senate Republicans have irrevocably branded themselves as Trump toadies in the impeachment proceedings and his trial, respectively. Finally, the new revelations will throw the whole general election up in the air—in an atmosphere tainted by facts that Trump has tried strenuously to conceal, thus far successfully—just as the vast majority of voters is starting to focus for the first time.

The timing of these revelations will heavily favor the Democrats. Voters will want to know, for example, why dozens of House Republicans yesterday delayed casting their votes for or against impeachment until long after the official “clock” had run out. What had the GOP leadership, Trump or others offered them, and how had they been threatened, in order to get 100% of them ultimately to vote against impeachment, and a lone GOP dissenter even to change his/her vote? And why did the Senate insist on a show trial without evidence or witnesses?

So my apologies to Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler and the others for doubting them. Br’er Rabbit could not have done a better job of suckering the boss men into the briar patch. It will be fun to watch not just the president, but his lackeys and sycophants in Congress, as they succumb, one by one, to their own greed, impatience, grasping for power, and short-term thinking, on global warming, democracy, the rule of law, the gravity of impeachment, and just about everything else.

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Feedback that Could Decimate our Species

A Case of Reporters’ Negligence

[UPDATE (12/17/19): for the “hydrogen bomb” analogy to explain triggering in positive feedback, click here. NOTE TO READERS: Unlike most, this post contains two short principal essays. Both deal with existential threats to our species, the first (immediately below) with global warming, and the second (further below, entitled “Our Second-to-Last Chance”) with the menace of a second term of Trump’s presidency. Both threats are dire: global warming could extinguish our species, and another term of Trump could impair our species’ chances of reducing it, as well as extinguish the world’s wealthiest and most powerful democracy.]

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Over 6.5 years ago, I wrote a post about positive feedback in global warming. After explaining what the words “positive feedback” mean to an engineer or scientist, I outlined its two major known sources in global warming: the melting of Earth’s ice, and the release of methane from melting permafrost and dissociating methane hydrates in the deep oceans.

Only this week, more than half a decade later, has the concept reached our mainstream press. Andrew Freedman of the Washington Post published a story on it Tuesday, which David Leonhardt of the New York Times picked up in his e-mail opinion newsletter yesterday.

Unfortunately, Freedman muddied the waters by devoting the last half of his story to the fish disappearing from Arctic waters and the far-north native communities suffering from melting permafrost. And David Leonhardt, for some reason, failed to use the key technical term “positive feedback,” instead referring to a “tipping point.”

I consider Leonhardt to be the best of the best of our American journalists. That’s why I subscribe to his “opinion” newsletter (really, superb and superbly succinct analysis), for which you have to sign up specially.

But “tipping point” has become a weak cliché, used for everything from routine business reversals to politics. It also misrepresents the nature of positive feedback as an inflection point rather than a continuous if explosive process. Reporters ought to use the technical term “positive feedback” precisely because it’s unfamiliar to readers without technical backgrounds. Once explained, it might force them to think beyond their comfort zones.

Positive feedback is a nonlinear phenomenon that can force changes in physical systems in impossibly short times. The example most familiar to ordinary people—at least those of my age—is amplifier screech. In the old days, whenever you brought a microphone too close to a speaker driven by its amplified output, you got an instantaneous blast of sound that drove the speakers to their maximum output. The blast of sound occurred far too fast for anyone to stop it by turning the volume down, or to protect their eardrums by covering their ears. The screech continued, limited only by the speakers’ maximum output, until someone moved the microphone away (or disconnected it), or cut power to the audio system.

In global warming, positive feedback is just as nonlinear as in amplifier screech. On a geological time scale, it can occur just as suddenly. But its consequences are infinitely more dire than hurt ears or even impaired hearing. It could decimate or extinguish our species and devastate Earth’s existing biosphere. It could produce an extinction event comparable to the meteoric impact that extinguished the dinosaurs.

Of the several sources of positive feedback discussed in my 2013 post, the release of carbon from melting permafrost is proving to be the most dangerous. But the similar release of methane from disassociating methane hydrates in the deep oceans could prove to be even more menacing once well studied. There are three points about these phenomena that any reporter investigating current research should understand:

First, the positive feedback from melting permafrost alone could rapidly exceed the effect of all of humanity’s emissions of carbon from burning fossil fuels since the dawn of human civilization. Melting permafrost releases not just carbon dioxide, but also methane, which is over ten times more powerful as a greenhouse gas. The methane comes from the decaying of thawed ancient vegetation as microbes begin their work.

As for the quantities of greenhouse gases released from this single source, Freedman got it right:

“There has been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as what is contained in the atmosphere, could be released as the permafrost melts.”

The second vital point is that this release, and the acceleration of global warming which it causes, could occur unimaginably quickly on a geological time scale. Compared to the steady drip, drip, drip of carbon dioxide from human exhaust pipes and smokestacks, it would be more like an explosion of greenhouse gases. The same point applies, but with much more uncertainty, to the poorly measured dissociation of deep-ocean methane hydrates.

It took over a century and a half for humanity to add to the CO₂ already in the atmosphere (about 300 ppm) to reach the amount present today (407 ppm), which is rapidly heating our planet. Studies of the end of the last ice age suggest that similar positive feedback, from deep-sea methane hydrates, with a release triggered this time by human activity, could cause global average temperatures to rise by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit in just “a few decades” (emphasis added).

The final and perhaps most crucial point is uncertainty. While the general phenomena of positive feedback from melting permafrost and dissociating methane hydrates is well understood, their actual geographic extent and magnitudes are not well known.

The problem has nothing to do with the theory of positive feedback from these sources, which is rock solid. It’s simply a matter of lack of data.

The Earth’s rapidly melting permafrost is in sparsely populated and economically unimportant areas like the far norths of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia and Siberia. These places are enormous in area, difficult to reach and difficult, expensive and uncomfortable to work in. The full extent of positive feedback arising from them (which of course affects the entire globe) is unknown for those reasons and no others. (The Antarctic continent harbors nothing similar to melting permafrost because it’s mostly still frozen and surrounded at similar southern latitudes by the Antarctic Ocean, not permafrost.)

As for disassociating methane hydrates, its places of occurrence are even more remote, less accessible, and less studied. They’re at the bottoms of the Earth’s oceans.

So positive feedback in global warming from these sources is the “wild card” of climate change. It’s a gigantic lever that could literally move the Earth into an entirely new climate regime. Its “length” is unknown and poorly studied.

Yet these sources of positive feedback are emerging as the chief accelerants of global warming. In other words, they are the most menacing phenomena of all. They could give our species and most of our fellow creatures on Earth today the coup de grace.

So reporters who cover climate change should be jumping all over these two sources of positive feedback. They should be pressing scientists for answers in every story. They should be reading study summaries like this one, and beating a path to the office of its author.

The dismal state of public knowledge about global warming derives not just from massive disinformation put out by the fossil-fuel barons, the GOP and our president. More subtly, it arises from the rich and the powerful browbeating the scientists who study global warming into making only the most cautions and rock-solid public statements.

But if reporters study what scientists are saying among themselves when not under attack, they will discover emerging truths that are infinitely more horrifying than the most “alarmist” of official reports today. Only if and when they do so will our species have a decent chance of facing the juggernaut of warming that’s coming our way before it’s too late.

Footnote: Today many sound systems have automatic dynamic range control—a form of negative feedback consciously supplied by system engineers. So the phenomenon of amplifier screech is less familiar to the younger generation than to us geezers. But it remains distinctive and unforgettable to anyone who has ever heard it. Just superimpose that auditory mental image on the heating of our planet, and you can get a rough idea of the existential menace that confronts us.

Human Triggering of a “Natural” Cataclysm

For days I’ve been considering how to explain the global cataclysm of positive feedback in global warming without the aid nonlinear mathematics. The best way, I think, is to conceive of human-caused global warming as a mere trigger for a much larger “natural” phenomenon.

The human-caused part of the cataclysm is the steady (and steadily increasing) drip, drip, drip of carbon dioxide from the exhaust pipes and smokestacks of industrialized human civilization. Over the last century and a half, that drip, drip, drip has heated our planet to the point where global permafrost is starting to melt, releasing vast stores of greenhouse gases from decaying ancient vegetation.

Those vast stores of greenhouse gases are both far more voluminous and far more dangerous than the drip, drip, drip of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Scientists estimate today that, if all the permafrost melts, the store of “carbon” in the global atmosphere today will approximately double. That means an increase from today’s roughly 407 ppm (parts per million) to 814 ppm, or nearly three times the “normal” i.e., pre-industrial, level of 300 ppm. But molecule-for-molecule, the methane resulting from decomposing, melting permafrost produces ten to twenty times as much planetary heating.

So as all the permafrost melts, we’re talking about an explosion of global warming, from “natural” sources in permafrost, about thirty times the magnitude of the one caused by all the human fossil-fuel burning considered in the official reports on climate change so far.

You can make a good analogy to a hydrogen bomb, which, just so, uses a much smaller artificial trigger for a “natural” phenomenon. Small amounts of conventional high explosives, arrayed around fissionable material, trigger a near-instantaneous fission explosion like that in a conventional “atomic bomb.” That artificial explosion of nuclear fission, in turn, provokes a fusion reaction in heavy hydrogen very much like the “natural” fusion that energizes our Sun every day. The resulting “natural” fusion explosion, triggered ultimately by the artificial one, is millions of times more powerful than the puny explosion of man-made stuff that triggered it.

Just so, the melting of permafrost triggered by the warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels is now creating a much larger “natural” phenomenon like the one that ended the last ice age. The trouble is, whereas the “natural” explosion of warming that ended the last ice age began from a baseline of ice, the similar “natural” explosion of greenhouse gases we are now triggering starts from a baseline of global climate that is already measurably warmer than the one in which we evolved. If the result is global average warming of 30 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades, as scientists estimate for ending the last ice age, then human civilization will be unviable except near and beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles long before the end of this century.

To put it simply, our burning of fossils fuels is triggering a much larger explosion of greenhouse gases analogous to the “natural” fusion explosion in a hydrogen bomb. And that’s without even considering the additional triggered explosion of greenhouse gases from dissociating methane hydrates in our warming deep seas. That release, which may have actually ended the last ice age, is the most uncertain of the two triggered “natural” positive-feedback phenomena just now coming under serious study.

Our Second-to-Last Chance

This coming Wednesday, when the gavel comes down in the House to announce Donald Trump’s impeachment, the Democrats will have squandered our second-to-last chance to keep our Republic. The very last chance, of course, will come with next year’s general election.

I hope I’m wrong. I’ve never hoped I’m wrong so much. But I have to call things as I see them.

At this moment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the Democrats’ acting leader. President Obama, the party’s titular head, holds no office. What’s more, he’s keeping his own counsel. He emerged from silence only briefly, just to call out an obvious political blunder: Sanders’ and Warrens’ endorsement of politically impossible and coercive “Medicare for All.”

Pelosi is the grizzled general in the field. She’s in command. She’s the only real leader that the Dems and normal Americans have got. She’s also the one with the longest, most active and grittiest experience, eclipsing even Joe Biden’s.

Pelosi wants to keep impeachment short, sweet, simple and clean, like the proverbial rifle shot. Apparently, she wants to return the primary and general campaigns to policy and real politics as quickly as possible. She seems to think that “kitchen-table” issues will ultimately prevail and jar Trump’s supporters out of their delusions.

But nothing about Donald Trump or his misrule is short, sweet, simple or clean. As I see it, next year’s political Armageddon will not be about policy or real politics at all. It will be all about a single man, a fundamentally bent but gifted demagogue—a “natural,” if you will. Just as much, it will be about the fundamental, natal flaw of our Republic: the one that engraves popular-minority rule into the stone of our Senate and our Electoral College.

Next year’s election will be all about an Electoral College in which the nine states that hold 51% of our population have—all together—only 46% of the vote. Next year’s trial of and attempt to remove Trump from the White House will be about a Senate in which those same states—all together—have a mere 18% of the vote.

Trump and his Republicans no more intend to make next year’s election about policy and real politics than Trump has done and does in running his perpetual campaign so far. He and his lackeys will base their push for power on division, resentment, hate, and the sort of crude medieval social dominance, backed by violence or its constant threat, that once characterized the age of kings.

If they win, our Republic will be no more. As a good and honest Catholic, Speaker Pelosi ought to know. Catholics attribute to Ignatius Loyola the words, “Give me the child for the first seven years, and I will give you the man.” Their Church has endured for nearly two millennia, through good times and bad, under that principle. By January 2025, when and if a twice-victorious Trump leaves office, he will have had the nation’s children under his spell for eight long years. At least he will in the homes of his avid supporters.

During that time, he will have taught us all that lying pays. He will have inculcated the “value” of an “alternate reality” in politics and public life. He will have replaced the rule of law that once distinguished our nation with loyalty to a single, deeply flawed man.

He will have taught us that politics is entertainment, just as Caesar did with his gladiators’ mortal combat and his public sacrifices of Christians to lions. He will have driven the professionals, experts, and honest public servants out of our federal government and replaced them with snarling, nasty, thoughtless and perpetually angry lackeys like Reps. Collins and Jordan.

No, next year’s election will not be about policy or real politics. At least it won’t be for those voters who count the most: the ones who took a gamble on Trump in 2016 and would now follow him into Hell. Those voters may well fix the outcome of the 2020 election, just as they did in 2016. For the rest of us, the best remedy will be to get them to see Trump as a man.

No one can count on the ever-looming economic recession or depression to save us. Our economy will likely muddle on for a least twelve more months. The long time lag between any change in economic policy and its effect will make sure of that.

And Trump will have policy “triumphs” to boast of and blow out of all proportion. The USMCA no doubt will become law, as it should: it’s only a modest change from old NAFTA, and many of the changes benefit American workers. Trump will also get credit from farmers and workers for reversing the damage that his own suicidal trade war with China has caused. He’ll be like the robber who stabs a victim and then offers to take him to the hospital.

No, policy and real politics won’t win the day, at least not with Trump’s current supporters. Even on health insurance, he will downplay his and his party’s perpetual opposition to any real expansion. He will offer some ginned-up, fictitious plan to expand health insurance, just as Nixon offered his “secret plan for peace” in Vietnam before ramping up the bombing runs.

In my view, the only thing that will win the day for sure is to get a minority of Trump voters to see who and what he is. It may take as few as 10%. But at least some of them have to stop seeing him as their champion. They have to stop adoring him as the sick stand-up comic who validates their darkest and most hostile and hateful dreams. They have to stop seeing politics, which has given them nothing for decades, as mere dark entertainment. They have to have some real hope.

Trump’s own rank and file must begin to see him as the enemy of everything that our nation once stood for. The believers among them must see him as the antithesis of all that Jesus advised, from giving the poor succor to loving one’s neighbors and enemies.

You can’t open their eyes with the corruption of foreign policy for personal gain. That’s far too abstract and remote from most people’s personal lives to hit home. So, for that matter, is Ukraine generally. Ditto obstruction of justice or of Congress.

These things may be anathema to anyone who’s been to law school or who’s had a good course in civics and still remembers it. But the vast majority of Trump’s supporters have done neither. Their infrequent thoughts about politics revolve mostly around pols like Hillary Clinton who backed Wall Street as it left them and their families to twist in the winds of globalism.

So, as poll after poll has shown, the Articles of Impeachment now awaiting whole-House approval will do nothing to change voters’ minds. They are but words on paper. They are weak abstractions in a stark field of broken promises, lost jobs, lost homes, lost communities, deaths from opiate addiction, and dismal personal futures.

With the Articles of Impeachment now proposed, Trump’s acquittal will be a foregone conclusion. The Senate’s trial will be yet another demonstration of the power of popular-minority rule in America. And Trump and his apologists will use the acquittal, quite effectively, as “conclusive” evidence of Trump’s innocence of all wrongdoing.

By taking the “rifle-shot” approach (two shots, in fact: corruption of foreign policy and obstruction of Congress), the House is preaching to the choir. It’s doing nothing to sway Trump’s partisans. Instead, it’s giving them a bold excuse to continue to see him as their noble champion who’s done no wrong and is persecuted merely for being on their side.

What the nation needs now is a very different kind of show. It needs an extended examination of all the myriad ways in which Trump’s sick rule has fallen short of competence, coherence, the rule of law, proper procedure, expertise, his oath of office, and the basic canons of democracy and human decency.

That can’t be done in two fortnights. It can’t be done with “rifle shots” based on legal abstractions that have no direct application to voters’ lives. The Dems need an antidote, in the House proceedings, to the daily show that Trump’s Tweets, public rants and MAGA-hat rallies provide.

Trump’s greatest single skill may be dominating the daily news, on TV, radio, and social media. Without an antidote to that, the Democrats have no chance of stripping away his hard support.

Perhaps Dem-leaning billionaires like Bloomberg and Steyer can pony up the money to level the playing field with paid political advertising, especially on Fox. But the most effective and cheapest expedient would be an expanded impeachment process. That would command the media’s attention daily, just as Trump does, and just as impeachment has already done for several weeks.

In order to work, additional impeachment counts must not be as soporific to ordinary voters as the two now on offer. They must focus on things that matter to real people, not legal abstractions such as obstruction of justice. They must expose the swindling of students and ex-students burdened with debt, the abuse of troops sent to fight in the Middle East without any coherent strategy, and the misuse of tariffs and other economic incentives that destroy, not create, good jobs for our middle class while aiding Trump’s own social class and his personal business empire.

Will any of this happen? Probably not. The die appears to be cast. The Dems will forward their two pale, abstract Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, where they will die a quick death under popular-minority rule and the continued scorn and ridicule of Trump’s GOP lackeys.

If, as appears likely, Trump shuns or severely limits debates in the general campaign, that contest will devolve into paid political advertising, including on social media, and a ceaseless struggle to dominate the “news.” Already Trump has demonstrated consummate skill in news domination, so there can be no assurance of a Democratic victory.

With our Republic at stake, that’s too big a risk to take. There are a few days left for Speaker Pelosi and her House Dems to reconsider and act to reduce that risk. Brand new articles of impeachment, focusing on ways in which Trump’s corruption and lawlessness have made ordinary voters’ lives harder, might just do the trick.

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“Identity Politics” and Human Survival

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

In my last essay, I pointed out an astonishing fact. The members of the House Judiciary Committee, which is even now drafting articles of impeachment, split neatly into two different tribes.

One tribe—the Democrats—has rough gender parity and “looks like America.” A third of its members are African-Americans, and three are otherwise outsiders to our dominant ethnic group of non-Hispanic whites. The other tribe—the Republicans—is 100% non-Hispanic white and 88% male.

Is my pointing out this simple fact playing “identity politics”? Am I “playing the race (or gender) card,” albeit putatively against my own “race” and gender? (I’m a male, non-Hispanic white and also a not-very-observant Jew.)

Or is this incontestable fact critical to understanding where we Americans now stand in our own history and our struggle to realize our own ideals? Read on.

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly in this blog [see, for example, this post and this one], Republicans and so-called “conservatives” are masters of the art of “applied philology.” The phrase “identity politics” is a brilliant example. While avoiding specific mention of gender, race, national origin or sexual identity, it subtly implies that those who raise the question of apparent categorical exclusion from politics and power are doing something wrong. It takes the onus off the sexist or bigot and throws it on the egalitarian.

That’s absolutely brilliant propaganda and PR, but is it wisdom?

To analyze, let’s throw away all the loaded words and look at things straight. Women today are no minority; they are an absolute majority of our people and our voters. Demographers tell us we Americans will have a “majority-minority” nation by 2043, just a bit over one generation away. So we can safely assume that so-called “people of color,” including Hispanics regardless of actual “color,” comprise somewhere between one-third and one-half of our total population right now.

Is it rational to exclude 76% (38% out of 50%+) of our majority-plus (of females) from full participation in one of the most important committees in “the people’s House”? Is it rational to exclude independently (with some overlap) 100% of what amounts to 33% to 50% of our population? Is that exclusion small-d “democratic”? Is it civilized?

What makes all this puzzling (if one assumes that our species is rational) is that we’re talking about politics. The three greatest politicians in recent human history were all “people of color”: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. The greatest politician of all time may have been Queen Elizabeth I, who took an island nation riven by internecine warfare and jump-started the rational, scientific, business and commercial culture now known as “Anglo-American.” Despite Trump and Brexit, that culture still inspires all humans today.

All three of the great men of color freed their people from oppression by tribes with vastly superior weapons. They did so effectively and without violence. What could be more “civilized” than that? What skills could be more essential in a world threatened by nuclear weapons that is pursuing still more?

Gandhi and Mandela freed the vast majority of people in their lands from domination by a violent minority (the Brits and the Boers, respectively). Mandela did so by negotiating from inside a prison cell. King freed his people from legalized oppression by the vast majority in the United States. (We know now that his success was only partial; but he restarted the process after our Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction.) If you were to base a tribalist opinion on these stunning facts, you would have to conclude that people of color make better pols than more violent whites.

As for women, for most of human history they’ve been playing the role that our species’ biological evolution assigned them: creating, nurturing and training the next generation. It’s only been during the last century or so that advances in science, technology, household appliances, and medicine have given them the time and leisure to play other roles than their species-sustaining one. (Queen Elizabeth I had to forsake her evolutionary role as mother.)

There’s a species-survival angle to women’s “liberation.” An explosion of population and pollution worldwide now threatens massive degradation of our environment, even changing the global climate in which our species evolved. Ever-greater population density also threatens us with catastrophic pandemics. Under these circumstances, the notion of employing half our species exclusively in making more babies seems a bit irrational.

“Politics” is the means by which we humans plan our future together as a species. Including all of us in that project is not just a matter of “fairness” and “justice,” although it is that. It’s also a matter of survival, at both the national and the global level. We Americans need all hands on deck to compete with a rising China, which self-evidently doesn’t play by the same rules and has over four times our population. And we humans need all hands on deck in order to avoid extinguishing ourselves with climate change, nuclear proliferation, failure to contain the next pandemic, or endless war.

To reach these goals, we must recognize, educate, and exploit the native talent of every individual, regardless of gender, race, creed, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or anything else irrelevant to clear thinking, wisdom and good judgment. Anybody excluded, for whatever bigoted reason, could be our next Elizabeth I, Gandhi, King or Mandela, or maybe the next Greta Thunberg. Advocating and struggling for that sort of society is not “playing identity politics” or “playing the race (or gender, or other minority) card.” It’s advancing our species’ prospects for survival and happiness.

For Americans, it’s something especially dear. It’s bringing Tom Jefferson’s credo “all . . . are created equal” closer to practical reality. Jefferson may have been a slave owner whose human “property” had to be sold after he died to pay his debts. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon his succinct moral and practical credo.

Jefferson himself didn’t follow it. We today don’t either, although we’re coming closer. Yet we still pursue it because it makes our nation, with all its troubles, the envy of our entire species. It also blazes a pragmatic path to species survival.

So the next time you hear people disparaging “identify politics,” know where they stand. We are much less likely to survive as a species if we don’t get this right.

Footnote: Bigots accusing egalitarians of bigotry is just one small example of what psychologists call “projection,” i.e., falsely seeing and decrying in others undesirable traits that you possess yourself. Projection has become a fixed feature of Republican campaign tactics and ideology. For other examples, read this Washington Post editorial, cataloguing several recent acts of projection by Bill Barr, our latest Attorney General. As this piece points out, persistent projection is particularly egregious in a supposedly professional official charged with enforcing the law free from bias, relying only on facts.

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The Big Picture

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Wednesday the nation’s top experts on impeachment tried to teach our House and our people how that process ought to work. Collectively, the four testifying professors represented at least a person-century of study, research and thinking. All were articulate—at times eloquent and moving. All quoted our Founders at length and verbatim. All were clear and forceful. Every witness made some sense.

But what changed? Nothing. The distinguished witnesses convinced no one.

The House Judiciary Committee remains divided on party lines. Every vote (all of which were procedural) was strictly on party lines. Republican members accused Democrats of having made up their minds mere days after Trump’s election, and years before the events at issue had even occurred. Democrats looked and sounded genuinely aggrieved and offended by the President’s behavior, and worried about our nation’s future.

The GOP phalanx on the Judiciary Committee took at face value the Tweets and public rants of the alleged perp (Trump), who refuses to testify under oath and has ordered his underlings not to do so. They valued the “corroboration” of President Zelensky of Ukraine, who also has not testified and whose nation’s security seems to hang on Trump’s every whim. They ignored the contrary testimony of witnesses who did testify under oath, at considerable risk to their careers and even their personal safety. They also ignored the ocean of circumstantial evidence of at-least-attempted extortion. And they spent much of their time ranting and raving about process and fairness, rather than the facts of the case.

Doug Collins (R., GA), the Ranking Member, and Jim Jordan (R., OH) were particularly egregious ranters. They all but snarled and shouted as they played the roles of enraged bosses—angry, physically big, middle-aged white men whose word used to be law.

Like many of the GOP members, these two personified the old joke among lawyers: if the facts are on your side, argue the facts; if the law is on your side, argue the law; if neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table. Collins and Jordan have both made their reputations as consummate table-pounders. (I don’t watch hearings often, but I’ve not seen any pols like them in my 74 years. They were so abrasive, aggressive, angry and downright nasty that I found myself wondering whether they had learned their political “skills” at the Genghis Khan School of Diplomacy.

So what’s going on here? Why are the Republican members playing the victims in this extreme and angry way? Why are they painting President Trump a victim? They know their colleagues in the Senate have the votes to block Trump’s removal without breaking a sweat. And that’s exactly what they, like the rest of us, think is going to happen. So why are they ranting and raving and portraying Trump as the second coming of Joan of Arc, about to be unjustly burned at the stake?

To understand the answers, you have to see the big picture. It shows a nation that is no longer a democracy, if it ever was. We haven’t been one for several decades. Not even close. At least we haven’t been if that word means majority rule.

Today the only part of our three branches of our government that operates by majority rule is our House of Representatives. Numbers, as usual, tell that tale. In the table below, I’ve tallied the votes in our Electoral College, House and Senate controlled by all of our nine most populous states, which together hold a majority of our total population.

Together these nine states have 51% of our people and command 46% of votes in the Electoral College, 53% of votes in the House, and 18% of votes in the Senate. The latter fact is the predominant reason, if not the only one, why Mitch McConnell is Senate Majority Leader.

Think about that. Two out of the last three presidents (including Trump) reached office with nationwide popular-vote minorities. That’s due to the Electoral College’s malapportionment. The Supreme Court is tilting sharply right while the country is moving slowly left. Why? Because 67% of the last three presidents reached the White House on minorities of the popular vote, and a majority of the nation’s people have less than one-fifth of the votes in the Senate, which confirms Supreme-Court Justices.

So not surprisingly, our House of Representatives is today the only part of our government that operates under the basic principle of democracy as understood since ancient Greece and Rome: popular-majority rule.

That’s why the House Judiciary Committee, which held yesterday’s hearings, looks a lot like America, with plenty of female and minority members. But this pleasing picture depends on which party you’re talking about. Here’s a table of the demographics of the House Judiciary Committee by party:

House Judiciary Committee Demographics by Party
Party	Men	Women	Whites*	African- Americans	Chinese- Americans	Hispanic- Americans	Indian- Americans
Dems	13	11	11	8	1	3	1
GOP	15	2	17	0	0	0	0

* Non-Hispanic whites, i.e., not “people of color”

Only the Democratic contingent looks like America. The Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are 100% white—with no “people of color” whatsoever—and 88% male.

Why does this matter? It matters because the future of our nation is a multicultural, multi-religious, multi-racial, multiethnic society with gender equality. It’s far too late to turn back. By 2043, the inexorable force of demographics will make us a majority-minority nation, i.e., one in which a majority of our population and of voters will be what we now call “minorities.” Most of us will be so-called “people of color,” not non-Hispanic whites. And females are already a majority of our people and a majority of voters.

So what we have now is a truly egalitarian society waiting to be born, with an old guard of white male bosses trying to abort it. The old guard not only counts on the unfairness of minority rule in the Electoral College, the Senate and consequently our Supreme Court. It also is the prime mover in gerrymandering, vote suppression, and dirty stunts like McConnell’s stealing a Supreme-Court appointment from President Obama.

Of course the smart ones among the old guard know their minority power is doomed. The forces of demographics are inexorable, if only because “people of color” and recent immigrants tend to have more children than old-time white citizens. (That’s one big reason why our minority bosses want to stop immigration cold.) In addition, people are starting to move away from the big cities into the small towns and rural areas, bringing their big-city politics and culture to where the Electoral College and Senate votes are.

Most young people think differently and want the future now. So do an unknown number of old white folks like me. So sooner or later—maybe sooner than the demographers think—the force of sheer numbers will overcome even the gross perversions of majority rule inherent in our Electoral College and Senate.

What do you do when you think your unfair power is doomed and you don’t trust the coming majority, in part because you and/or your ancestors have grievously wronged them? You do everything possible to keep things as they are. You stop at nothing. You even support a supreme leader who already has given every indication of stopping at nothing to stay in power. He may become our nation’s first emperor, but he will be your emperor. Or so you think.

This is the big picture in our nation today. And it’s why the Dems’ impeachment strategy is all wrong.

The GOP are putting all their chips on the table and risking our nation’s decay into empire—with a modern Caligula in charge!—just to extend a bit the dismal life of their fading ancien regime. Meanwhile, the Dems’ fret about the niceties of health-insurance programs that are no more than pipe dreams while that ancien regime lasts. They worry (God help us!) about whether they’ll have to attend some impeachment hearings during their campaigns. And they obsess over the fates of wobbly Dems in red states. (How many careers of pols in both parties have ended already, while Trump lies and Tweets, Congress does nothing, and the nation rots?)

As history stands today, there is nothing that matters more than impeaching and removing Trump or beating him next November. With the GOP having a majority in the Senate, and two-thirds required to remove, the chances of removing him after impeachment are infinitesimal. But the chances of beating him are much better if the impeachment process continues right up to the presidential election. And if the Dems’ keep the House and improve their position in the Senate, they could even roll that process over into a second Trump term. That might restrain his and his party’s excesses.

Of all the professorial witnesses at yesterday’s hearing, Jonathan Turley was the most prophetic. Although outnumbered three to one, he kept his cool. Most importantly, while supposedly testifying for the GOP, he offered the Dems invaluable advice. They are moving too fast. They are spreading their net of impeachment articles much too narrowly. And if they stay on their present course of speed above thoroughness and persuasiveness, they will further divide the nation and leave half of it behind.

Furthermore, the Dems will fall right into an obvious trap that Trump has already sprung once. By what amounts to obstruction of justice, Trump and his minions have buried the Muller Report under an avalanche of lies, spin, distortion and distraction. The Dems foolishly aided that effort by failing to include a count based on the Muller Report in their current impeachment proceedings—a blunder they are now reportedly rethinking.

In so doing, the Dems allowed Trump and his lackeys to falsely claim exoneration and millions of followers to credit that claim. The Mueller Report and its more-than-credible charges of treachery and obstruction of justice are, in public opinion, hanging by a thread.

Behind closed doors, Republicans are no doubt licking their chops in anticipation of pulling off the same trick again. If the Dems proceed on their accelerated schedule, the GOP-controlled Senate will acquit Trump before even the primary campaigns begin, and Trump will go into the general election with a valid claim of complete and total exoneration and a strengthened claim of having been the victim of a “witch hunt.” With those “victories” under his belt, he will also pull out all the stops in asking for foreign assistance in swaying the election yet again.

One reason for the GOP’s abrasive rants yesterday about victimhood was to strengthen Trump’s hand when that time comes. The other was to tap into the well-justified anger and resentment that drives Trump’s backers to follow him into Hell.

As all four witnesses in yesterday’s hearings affirmed, our Founders designed impeachment as a tool to keep a rogue president from going rogue again and again. We now know how Trump operates, because he’s already repeated his sins. He made his extortionate phone call with Zelensky mere days after a weak Muller Report (and Barr’s spin) appeared to exonerate him. In the “court” of public opinion, a claim of exoneration would be even harder to counter after the GOP-controlled Senate acquits him.

If the impeachment process ends in acquittal before next November’s election, two things will happen. First, Trump’s chances of winning a second term will increase substantially. Second, Trump will be encouraged to act like an emperor without restraint, both during the general-election campaign and if he wins. He will pull out all the stops. He will accelerate his push to corrupt and subvert everyone and everything to his will, including Russians and any other foreigners who want him as our boss.

There is no turning back the clock. Now that it has begun, the impeachment process is the fulcrum on which the fate of our nation balances. It also augurs the fate of the GOP’s last-ditch effort to preserve their ancien regime as long as possible. Impeachment is now part of a political death match that cannot be stopped.

Either way it comes out, careers will end, regimes will change, and mountains will move. But isn’t it better to fight the good fight and fall on your sword if you have to, than to knuckle under to the same kind of craven impulses that make even once-thoughtful and patriotic Republicans kow-tow to Trump?

As Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon, “alea jacta est,” “the die is cast.” The GOP cast it when they cast their lot with Trump, knowing full well who and what he is. The Dems cast it when they started the impeachment process. Now they must broaden that process, strengthen it, and expand it to cover all of Trump’s many sins against democracy and the rule of law. Then they must make sure it lasts at least until November 3 of next year, or close enough so that the Senate cannot act.

In this and all else, they should work with the steely resolve of a Mitch McConnell coolly lowering Merrick Garland’s nomination into the sewer without so much as a hearing. Tit for tat is not a pleasant thing in what’s supposed to be a reasoned democracy. But it’s appropriate now against a party and a presidency that have abandoned all traces of decency and, to preserve their minority power, are setting our nation on a clear path toward empire and tyranny.

Minority Rule in the United States
State	2019 Population	Electoral Votes	House Members	Senators
California	39,747,267	55	53	2
Texas	29,087,070	38	36	2
Florida	21,646,155	29	27	2
New York	19,491,339	29	27	2
Pennsylvania	12,813,969	20	18	2
Illinois	12,700,381	20	18	2
Ohio	11,718,568	18	16	2
Georgia	10,627,767	16	14	2
North Carolina	10,497,741	15	13	2
Nine Most Populous States	168,330,266	249	231	18
All States	330,000,000	538	435	100
Percentage for the Nine	51%	46%	53%	18%

I know, I know. California doesn’t usually vote with Texas, nor New York with Georgia. But the basic point of this table still stands. No matter what states you aggregate together, the Electoral College still favors land over people, and the Senate grossly under-represents the more populated states. This table is just a cute way of illustrating how badly skewed our governmental structure is. If all these big states did vote together, they would invariably lose the presidency and have virtually no power in the Senate, despite having an absolute majority of our people.

I don’t know what the ancient Greeks or Romans would call this. They certainly wouldn’t call it “democracy.”

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The Paradox of Power

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The paradox of power explains a lot about our species’ current discontents. That may be so for every species that evolved as individuals, rather than in hives or collectives like ants, bees and termites.

Individual organisms compete individually for food, territory, sexual partners, and clan or tribal leadership. They fight; they can even kill. So fighting in the form of real, physical combat is part of our species’ biological evolution.

Yet evolution also keeps that combat from becoming too extreme. If individuals mostly fight to the death, a species can slowly extinguish itself with mortal combat. That’s why, in most mammalian species, battles between males for mates seem more like rituals than the do-or-die combat of prey versus predator. Stags and bulls, for example, could use their sharp horns to gore each other’s vital organs, but they don’t. They just bang, push and shove to determine dominance, in a ritual struggle as circumscribed as a boxing match.

Relative to many other species on our planet, we humans are small, weak and slow. We lack size, weight, and innate weapons like sharp horns, teeth and claws. But as we began to cooperate, we developed tools and weapons far more formidable. We also developed a thing called “civilization,” which reduces violent competition and increases cooperation among us by giving us rules and order.

Our civilization is not instinctual like the “hive mind” of ants, bees and termites. Instead, it’s voluntary and conscious. It’s a product of our social evolution in law and custom. So it can can change and develop much faster than our biological evolution. It can grow as we learn from experience.

The “social contract” that created civilization forced us to abandon some of our urge to fight and to dominate. What we got in return was the power collectively to dominate all other species on our small planet. That’s the paradox of power: we gained global dominance as a species by suppressing much of our urge to dominate other members of our own species as individuals.

But civilization is not hard-wired in us like our blood lust, anger and rage. So the lines between the two sides of the paradox of power can and do shift. When that happens, civilization can retrogress.

The mother of all retrogressions, of course, is war. For millennia, we saw war as reason for “legitimate” killing, an “exception” to the social contract. War can also lead to genocide, which slows evolution by narrowing the gene pool and social diversity.

Today, our weapons have the power to slow or stop our species’ evolution. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they came within minutes of probable species’ self-extinction. So we’re trying to suppress war as part of our “social contract,” our global civilization. The various nuclear-test-ban treaties, the bilateral disarmament treaties of the US with the Soviets and now Russia, the UN, the WTO and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are all parts of that effort. Unfortunately, we humans got serious about this effort only during the last century, and its ultimate success or failure is still a matter of conjecture.

After war, the second most powerful cause of civilization retrogressing is its effect on the individual’s power. For each individual, civilization is a straitjacket. It forces us to use our training and our conscious minds to control our natural, biological-evolutionary tendency to fight and dominate others.

These constraints of civilization have to act in the moment, tamping down everything from road rage to males’ desire to take an attractive female by force. In contrast, civilization’s benefits always lie in the future. Civilization thus demands the same delayed gratification in everyday life as in reducing global warming: valuing future consequences, perceived by Reason, over immediate power and passions. Neither effort is going especially well today.

That’s the paradox of power. Virtually any human living in a modern city can ride a subway farther and faster (and with less effort and attention) than an ancient Roman centurion could charge on his sturdy chariot drawn by a mighty team of horses. But the tradeoff is reading the signs and obeying all those nagging orders to stay behind the yellow line.

Riding a subway, you don’t quite get the same rush of mastery, dominance and “freedom” as the centurion on his chariot behind thundering hooves. Yet millions go farther and faster that way, every day. We accept the same tradeoff in New York City, Washington, D.C., Paris, London, Tokyo and Moscow.

So what does all this have to do with the state of global politics today? Plenty. People’s urge to fight and dominate is strongest when they are unhappy. They get most unhappy when something threatens their survival.

Isn’t that precisely the case with Trump’s most intransigent voters? They had happy, tranquil middle-class lives, with a suburban house, two cars, kids in college, annual vacations, and a powerboat or RV in the back yard. Now their jobs are gone, and with them their marriages, homes, factories, towns and prosperity. Their kids have fled to the coasts or into drugs. They are angry as hell, and understandably so. Hence Trump.

We humans didn’t evolve fighting abstractions. We evolved fighting other clans and tribes for territory, food and mates. So in order to break their social contract and accept Trump as their champion, his legions must have concrete enemies.

The enemies don’t have actually to be at fault. All they have to have is plausible guilt. Trump’s lies and demagoguery do the rest. And so we have immigrants (especially Hispanics and dark-skinned people), Muslims, globalist Democrats, and the elite generally, including “establishment” figures like Hillary Clinton, taking the heat. Journalists who try to tell us what’s going on become “enemies of the people.”

There’s yet another twist to the story, which explains why so many “normal” or “mainstream” Republicans have gone to bat for Trump. The straitjacket of civilization particularly galls business people, who are used to having lots of personal power in their everyday work. Part of the attraction of business as a career is becoming a king or queen, or at least a duke or duchess, every day when you walk through the door.

For decades the GOP has nurtured the myth of Ayn Rand’s John Galt. According to that myth, an entrepreneur, by dint of his or her intelligence, skill, foresight and hard work, becomes a billionaire all alone. The social contract, with all its laws, regulations and public hearings, only holds him or her back. So the more you weaken the social contract, the more you help business people use their skills, take their personal risks, realize their personal dreams, and grow the economy.

Today this simplistic story is the GOP’s core myth. It’s why even serious Republicans want to drown government in a bathtub. And millions of people believe it who will never own a business or come close to being rich. Polls show, for example, that Americans believe 38% of Republicans make over $250,000 a year, while the actual figure is 2%. (No, that’s not a typo.)

This myth is so powerful and durable precisely because it’s not a product of Reason. It arises out of our instinctual lust for personal, individual power and dominance, which is perennially at war with our civilization. It resolves the power paradox in favor of individual mastery and dominance. It’s as close to being hard-wired by biological evolution as any political ideology. That’s why it’s been so effective politically, attracting and holding millions of people who will never be bosses no matter what they do.

This week proof sprang from an unlikely source: the first African-American billionaire. Robert Johnson got rich by building and selling Black Entertainment Television. Not long ago he met with Trump, who offered him a job. When asked why he had refused, Johnson mentioned neither his race nor his record as a lifelong Democrat. Instead, he cited his life as a businessman: “As an entrepreneur trying to work in a government structure where you got to go through 15 different layers of decision-making to get what you want done doesn’t fit my mold[.]”

Ayn Rand herself could not have better shown how the paradox of power drives Republican thinking and why it makes most business people “mainstream” Republicans. The same instinct also explains why “mainstream” Republicans who abhor Trump’s lying, bigotry, insults and cheating follow him anyway. Not only is Trump a striking, if repellent, figure of a powerful man—a living caricature of a leader. He also fits right into the Republican myth of personal, individual power—even as against civilization—being the driver of progress. In that worldview, Republicans and Trump are the real “progressives,” just like John Galt in Ayn Rand’s durable myth.

All this suggests how hard it will be to win over the folk who wear red “MAGA” caps and would follow Trump into Hell. For them, it’s not about social programs, nuances of policy, Reason or decency. It’ not even about who could really bring back good jobs. It’s about who can be despairing workers’ most feared champion in their quest for personal and tribal power and dominance, after the social contract, global civilization and the elite left them hanging out to dry.

Their very loyalty to Trump demonstrates and reinforces their inner abandonment of civilization and readiness to fight. So appeals to Reason, with better health insurance and more rational trade policy, are unlikely to reach them. They are in full combat mode.

To the extent Trump’s lies and insults seem to increase his social dominance, they only boost his attractiveness as a leader. If you doubt that, consider just two things. First, ask yourself what, if any, specific policies, laws or regulations out of Trump’s nearly three years in office have helped bring back jobs and the formerly good lives of Trump’s angry supporters? (Hint: bashing China and praising El-Sisi, Erdoğan, Kim, MBS and Putin don’t create a single onshore job.) Second, watch any Trump rally and assess how much he relies on policy (or even cause and effect) versus playing the social-dominance game.

So who can lure away Trump’s legions? Probably someone with the social-dominance skills of a fraternity president, not a president of the United States.

That’s precisely the skill that George W. Bush used to defeat John Kerry. And that’s the self-evident object of almost all the lies, false self-aggrandizement, nicknames and insults that Trump dishes out every day. To the people who follow him, these things are all signs of social dominance. In their despair, they crave a powerful champion reminiscent of the dominant alpha male of our biological-evolutionary past, however much their intellect and decency may nag at their unconscious minds.

The social dominance game may seem unpresidential, even puerile. But Trump plays it in virtually every rally and Tweet. He won the White House in large measure by doing so. The junior Bush played much the same game repeatedly (although less outrageously) to become and stay president of the United States. The game is not rational, but instinctual. It has precursors hard-wired by our human evolution—the tribal leadership of a dominant alpha male.

Combat between the alpha male and the losing beta male, or occasional physical chastisement of errant females, was hardly the ape analogue of decency or chivalry. Yet even today, there are times, like the present, when it really works.

So a Democratic challenger must know or learn how to play this game in order to meet Trump on his own ground. Appeals to programs, statistics and Reason, let alone kindness and decency, will not likely work with Trump’s followers, who have already resolved the power paradox in favor of the strong individual.

This doesn’t require Democrats to stoop to Trump’s level and mimic his lies, insults, bragging and general nastiness. Doing that would risk losing a substantial part of the majority, which views the power paradox the other way, favoring civilization.

But a winning Democrat at least should know how to parry Trump’s lies, insults, bragging and general nastiness, without seeming weak or appealing to the norms of civilization, in which Trump’s followers have lost faith. A winner need not go “toe to toe” with Trump using the same repellent tactics; but he or she must be able to knock Trump down, maybe without him even noticing, with emotional ju-jitsu.

A successful rival must take Trump and his followers aback, at least occasionally, by winning the social-dominance game in real time, whether in debates or on social media. He or she can do that with humor, as Reagan did (“There you go again!”) or with a pointed observation like Lloyd Bentsen’s to Dan Quayle (“I knew Jack Kennedy, and you’re no Jack Kennedy!”).

The riposte needn’t stoop to Trump’s level, but it must get through to those who do. It’s a skill that has always had value in politics, but the succession of Dubya and Trump have made it a modern sine qua non. Just ask Jeb Bush or John Kasich.

Of course playing and winning the social dominance game has little to do with policy or progress, or with real modern life for that matter. But facts are facts and Trump is real. No Democrat today can hope to pull many of his rank-and-file loyalists away without having and using that skill.

If you put this lens in your bifocals, it’s hard to see any Democratic candidate today who can do the job. Tulsi Gabbard tried in attacking Pete Buttigieg during the last debate, but her attempt was so awkward and rough that it probably backfired. Maybe Buttigieg himself, with skills learned defending our nation, might do a better job.

Anyway, voters who are buying what Trump sells every day are not going to be satisfied with statistics, projections and plans, whether on offer by Warren or anyone else. That conclusion stands independently of Trump’s incessant tarring of Warren and Sanders alike as “socialists”—a combination of social-dominance scorn and more pedestrian political demagoguery.

Perhaps the Dems can win the presidency just by attracting and motivating their own base with unprecedented enthusiasm. That’s one branch of conventional wisdom. Maybe they can win just by holding their ground and keeping Trump’s base from growing. Maybe, as Mark Shields seems to believe [Set the timer at 4:35.], they can win by giving decency and squeaky cleanness another chance .

But if they want to win both ways—by motivating their own base and eroding Trump’s—the Democrats are going to have to look harder for a candidate skilled at playing the fraternity-style social-dominance game. Our species’ biological-evolutionary instinct to follow the dominant leader is not about to disappear anytime soon.

Footnote: A demagogue’s choice of enemies doesn’t even have to make historical or logical sense. Trump hardly ever mentions the capitalists who sold our workers’ jobs to China for profit. He hardly ever mentions the bankers who, by causing the Crash of 2008 and procuring their own bailout, created the perfect economic storm, which finished off many Midwest factories and their workers. He doesn’t mention these culprits because he can increase his own political power and dominance by downplaying the real responsibility of the social class to which he aspires and the powerful people who support him with money and ideology.

Endnote: Careful readers will have noted references in this post to the dominant alpha male from our biological-evolutionary past. What do those references portend for female candidates like Warren?

For starters, females face a steeper uphill climb than do males. But you already knew that.

The two most dominant female leaders from recent history have been Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Angela Merkel in Germany. Both nations are known, if not remarkable, for their high level of civilization and decency and their general tendency toward clear thinking (today’s Brexit fever excluded).

A century ago, both nations stood at the apex of human civilization. After the last century’s unpleasantness, Germany is back in that position again, a global leader in middle-sized-firm (Mittelstand) industry, disarming, fighting global warming, accepting refugees, and honestly appraising past sins.

Women may have a better chance to become supreme leaders in societies like these, which rely more on Reason and less on instinct. But Margaret Thatcher also had something else. She was renowned for marching into meetings and establishing her dominance by asserting “I’m the boss!” or words to that effect. Just like Trump, she was quick to fire underlings who crossed her or made mistakes.

If you compare how appeals to pure Reason fare in modern Britain and Germany, on the one hand, and in our nation on the other, you may come to the conclusion that Thatcher’s approach would work better here. If so, Warren had better start playing the social-dominance game soon, lest she and her marvelous plans for curing our ills get left behind on instinct, not merit.

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