Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Ads on a local radio station promoting civic engagement say that New York has among the lowest voter turnouts in the country. (It is not clear whether New York City or the state or both are being referred to.) At least part of the reason for that is the lack of truly contested elections. New York is electing its top state official, the governor. While this is nominally contested, the victor is already clear. Similarly, the state is electing a United States Senator, and that result also seems certain. In my House of Representatives district, the Republicans don’t even have someone on the ballot. Democrats in my district for the state senate and assembly are also unopposed. Only one candidate is listed for the Surrogate’s Court. I can vote for seven other judicial slots. In six of those “races,” the Republicans and Democrats have nominated the same candidate. There are, however, three proposals on the ballot. I don’t know how they will come out. On the other hand, I was not even aware of them until a week ago, and I am not sure that I understand them. Why vote?

 

I am going to vote, but it will be by absentee ballot. I have been supplied an envelope for my ballot. Where the stamps go, the envelope states that sufficient postage must be affixed and continues, “Inquire at the post office as to amount of postage necessary.” Couldn’t one person at the Board of Elections have figured out the necessary postage and stated it on the envelope instead of ordering the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of us voting absentee to go individually to the post office?

 

I want legislation passed that all networks and local stations showing the same sport must use the same in-game graphics. ESPN has one set of graphics and FOX another and so on. I am tired of trying to decipher each one. I should, for example, only have to learn once how the count on a batter is displayed or how many yards for a first down. While they’re at it, please require that everything is big enough so that I can easily see it.

 

What does it mean that some people want secure borders but don’t care about secure elections?

 

An expression I heard for the first time. The man walking behind me answered his phone and told his caller where he was, which was a New York neighborhood with stately homes. After a pause, he said, “I was looking at a studio apartment.” Pause. “It was nice, but it was a boat cavity, but that’s New York.” Pause. “A boat cavity.” Pause. “It was all wood.”

 

News stories tell me about “early voting.” I am confused. I understand that I can be early for a movie, a dinner party, or a doctor’s appointment. That means I have arrived before the scheduled time, and I will have to wait for the movie, the dinner, or the doctor. But if I show up at the polls and am allowed to vote, how can I be early? I have arrived during the scheduled time for voting.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Play’s the (Limited) Thing (concluded)

The dramatist Elmer Rice thought that plays don’t have lasting power because they have to be produced, but he also thought they did not last because plays are written for a group audience, and this limits their quality. The author of a book seeks wide readership, but in an important sense that writer really composes for an audience of one, the solitary reader who can choose where and when to read.  That author has a freedom in determining at what level to pitch his writing. He can seek an audience of an academic, a trained professional, a serious reader, or pitch to a mass market. He can aim for literary or intellectual merit and have a chance of finding the right readership.

The dramatist’s audience, in contrast, requires a group of individuals assembled together at a particular time and place to experience the work together.  The socially indelicate or controversial book can be read in private, but a dramatic performance is public, which makes it subject to many forms of public scrutiny and influence that have little or nothing to do with drama as art. Furthermore, theater-going is generally not inexpensive and the audience is largely limited to the upper economic class. Rice thought that such audiences generally sought mere entertainment and were not particularly sophisticated, having on average, less understanding of the art they are perceiving than concert-goers, visitors to art exhibitions, or readers of serious books. “Rocketing costs have increased the professional theater’s dependence upon an audience that is likely to be better equipped with money than with taste.”

Furthermore, a play’s audience does not have an advantage of the book audience.  The reader can always thumb back if something has been missed, but the playgoer cannot requiring the playwright to repeat important information sometimes undercutting the artistic integrity of the work. “The audience must move forward with the performers, and what is not instantly grasped is forever lost.”

Equally important, Rice felt that the collective behavior of any group, including an audience, was different from the private reactions of individuals.  Writing in mid-career in an introduction to a British collection of his plays, Rice concluded that for whatever reason, those in a group “assume a uniformity of conduct, a sort of common denominator, . .  . which is far below the habitual level of the more intelligent . . . members of the group. . . . [The dramatist] is handicapped by the low level of his audience, which imposes upon him the necessity of over-simplifying and over-emphasizing his points in order to make them at all.” Even so, Rice pronounced “that almost any play is considerably above the level of the audience which it attracts. Anyone who has listened to the comments of an audience, during or after the performance, can say without hesitation that at least one-half of those present have no definite notion of what the author has been driving at, or even what the play is about.”  Rice concluded, “Why, then, is the lot of the dramatist more unhappy than that of his fellow-artists?  For the simple reason that he cannot address himself to the individual judgments of the scattered few to whom he may have something to say. The very nature of his art demands an organisation of his audience, in space and in time. If he writes plays for the theatre, he cannot fail to take the theatre heavily into account; if he writes plays for the library, he is no longer wholly a dramatist.”

Rice was not alone in seeing the limitations brought by a group audience. Maugham wrote that when assembled as a group, its members only want limited ideas. An audience “likes novelty, but a novelty that will fit in with old notions, so that it excites but does not alarm. It likes ideas, so long as they are put in dramatic form, only they must be ideas that it has itself had, but for want of courage has never expressed.” Arthur Miller agreed after seeing a Greek theater in Sicily that could hold 14,000 that it is “hard to grasp how the tragedies could have been written for such massive crowds when in our time the mass audience all but demanded vulgarization.”

Even with these pessimistic thoughts about the limitations of plays, however, Rice did not abandon the theater. He continued to write play after play, sometimes merely to entertain, sometimes to experiment with form, and sometimes to present ideas. He apparently saw drama’s inherent limitations as a challenge to surmount, and at least some of the time, he succeeded well enough to produce worthy plays.

And even though I appreciate the limited reach of plays, I continue to go because some of the time a production succeeds in producing a memorable event.

Related Posts:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=theatre

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=broadchurch

 

 

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The Play’s the (Limited) Thing

I go to plays even though I am convinced, largely from the writings of Elmer Rice, that plays are a limited art form. Rice, who lived from 1892 to 1967, did many things. He wrote several novels and many short stories, essays, book reviews, and movie, television, and radio scripts. He directed and produced stage performances, helped run theater organizations, and was a noted civil libertarian. But first and foremost, Rice was a prolific and successful playwright. About thirty of his plays were produced on Broadway, and some of his two dozen unproduced plays were published. In 1914, when he was only twenty-one, his1914 On Trial stormed Broadway with its new technique of flashbacks. His expressionist The Adding Machine in 1923 helped usher in a new dramatic era. His 1929 naturalistic Street Scene ran for 601 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize. Dream Girl, a delightful comedy, was a hit in 1945. He wrote plays of political comment, including We the People (1933), Judgment Day (1934) and Flight to the West (1940), which provoked controversies. More than four decades after his debut, Cue for Passion (1958) opened on Broadway.  As a result of this career, in 1958 a writer in the New York Times labeled him, not extravagantly, “Dean of Playwrights.” A student of the theater, Robert Allan Davison later said, “Throughout a fifty-three-year career, Rice showed genius, talent, and wisdom in his exploration of universal and timeless issues through the finely wrought specifics of his drama. Among the forty of his plays produced or published during his lifetime are some of the finest and most innovative plays in the history of the American Theatre.”

Today, however, even though a play of his is occasionally revived, Elmer Rice is largely forgotten even by the play-going public. He would probably not be surprised by his present obscurity because he maintained that although dramatic masterpieces may always endure, the work of a first-rate playwright was less likely to last than the work of other good writers. Rice thought that plays have a limited lasting potential because they are written to be performed, not merely published and read. He noted that “a play that is unperformed quickly falls into oblivion from which it is seldom rescued,” but a play’s production is an expensive, complicated affair. Large amounts of money and the assembled talents of many are required in addition to an author’s words, and each day a play runs continues to bring significant expenses. A new play almost always has to be instantly successful to last more than a brief time, and if its initial production does not succeed, it is unlikely ever to be produced again.  For a play to generate that audience, it must almost always get favorable comments from the handful of critics attending opening night. A result is that few plays are initially produced, few will continue in production or be re-produced, and consequently few will have the chance to endure. Since the producer knows he needs an immediate, sizeable audience to recoup his investment, Rice wrote, “His choice of plays to be produced is determined by his judgment of their potential popularity. This state of things does not make for the choice of plays of great depth or literary value.”

Books are different. Many more books are printed each year than plays are produced. Less money is required to publish a book than to mount a play. Novels, unlike plays, often survive when not immediately successful and even without favorable reviews. While some book reviewers are more influential than others, a book may receive many reviews around the country with none being decisive. And since a distribution system is in place when a book is published, it continues to remain available after its publication date.  Rice noted in his 1959 book about the social structure of the theater, The Living Theatre, “Even if time is required to overcome adverse reviews, it costs nothing to keep the books on the shelves while the public demand develops.”  Consequently, for books, unlike plays, positive word-of-mouth can build over months and years, bringing new audiences to a book long after it is published.

W. Somerset Maugham is a case in point. He may not be considered a major writer today, but you can still find books containing his stories and novels. As long as you can, Maugham’s works still live as does the work of any novelist or short story writer if there is someone somewhere still reading it. Maugham, however, was also a successful playwright–he had ten plays produced in seven years with several of them running simultaneously in London. Few now have the opportunity to see those stage pieces. Without productions, those works, even if first-rate, cannot live. If he only wrote plays, Maugham’s name would be recognized by almost no one today. Even though successful, Maugham stopped writing plays. He concluded in The Summing Up, a book of reflections, “that a prose play was scarcely less ephemeral than a news sheet” and abandoned the theater.

(concluded on October 26)

Related Posts:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=theatre

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=broadchurch

 

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First Car. First Day in Court (concluded)

 

I was quick to find injustice in those days, and a ticket for an unsafe vehicle because my car did not have a bumper struck me as a major injustice. No one else of Chicago’s Finest apparently saw a dangerous car when I drove past them. What was it with this one cop who viewed my beloved transportation differently? I was not wimpishly going to pay the fine. No! I was going to fight. I sent the ticket in with an angry slash across the not-guilty box, knowing it would mean a trip to traffic court.

I was a law student after all, and I knew how to do legal research. In these pre-computer-research-days, this required hitting the books and took some time. I could not find any case that said a car without a front bumper was unsafe. On the other hand, I did not find a case that said such a car was kosher. I started to look for legal definitions of “unsafe vehicle” in cases and statutes. I read all legal decisions that had any mention of a bumper. Using what legal writing skill I had obtained, I wrote a memorandum explaining why I had not violated the law. A car was unsafe, I said, if some condition made it unreasonably dangerous for the driver or passengers of the car or for other drivers, passengers, cars, or pedestrians and cited cases to that effect. The absence of the front bumper did not increase the risk to anyone or any other vehicle. Mine did not meet the definition of an unsafe vehicle. The point to a bumper, an insurance case suggested, was to protect the car from excessive damage, not to protect others. Q.E.D.

Taking public transportation, I went off to traffic court on the appointed day. I found a huge, packed room with a judge upfront, a court officer hovering near him, and a prosecuting attorney off to the side. Cases were called. People moved forward. Things were said at the front of the room that I could not hear. Stuff was happening, but I had no idea what it was.

I heard something like a reasonable facsimile of my name announced. I went forward and stood in front of the bench. The judge asked me how I was pleading. I said that I was not guilty. I continued that I was charged with driving an unsafe vehicle because my car did not have a front bumper and that, after research, it was clear that a car sans fender was not legally unsafe. I started to hand up to him my legal argument that I had worked on for a couple days. He looked not so much bemused as condescending and told me to hand my only copy of the papers to the prosecutor and that we would discuss my argument after the prosecutor had a chance to read what I had written.

After a recess, my case was called again. The prosecutor said he had read my pages, which he held, and continued, “I think this young man has a good point.” I tried not to smile, but I am sure that I beamed. Being a lawyer was going to be great! Visions of future, momentous victories flashed before me. Then the judge, without lifting his eyes from whatever was occupying him on the bench and without asking either the prosecutor or me anything, said, “I don’t. Guilty. That will be a $75 fine and court costs.” And my first episode of legal advocacy ended.

Shortly after this day of ignominy, I drove three hours to the ancestral home. The father, although clearly not pleased with my car purchase, came up with a solution. He got a 2 x 6 piece of lumber, cut it to the width of the car, and bolted it to the front of my beloved VW. Before doing so, he even lovingly put on a coat of varnish that gave the wood an orange tint that almost made it blend in with the many rust spots on the car.

I never again got stopped for driving an unsafe vehicle, but when I looked at that bolted-on hunk of solid wood, I would think that if I ever nudged a pedestrian with it, he or she would more likely need an ACL repair than if it were not there. Without it, the pedestrian would have come in contact with the sloping “trunk”—the engine was in the rear and storage went up front (although it could not have held more than a half-filled duffle bag). The trunk’s lid was made of such thin sheet metal that it looked as if it would crumple if sneezed on and that hypothetical pedestrian would have had the impact cushioned. The car was more unsafe with that board.

I had that car for another six months. On a trip to visit a friend in Madison, thick black smoke started billowing out of the engine in some godforsaken part of Wisconsin—the first of a succession of cars that went kaput in highly inconvenient places. I limped into a garage/service station and sold it on the spot for $25 and called my friend to pick me up.

But that first day in court did teach me a lesson that I was to carry forward to the time when I was an actual attorney: Never trust a judge.

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

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First Car. First Day in Court (continued).

 

My first car, bought to get me from my inexpensive neighborhood to my Chicago law school, had some problems. The inside handle on the driver’s side did not work. I would have to lower the window and open the door from the outside to get out. It did not have a radio. I bought a small transistor radio and propped it on the dashboard so I could listen to the great Larry Lujack. That soon got stolen, and I learned to hide the radio when I parked the car. The heat could not be turned off, which was a considerable defect in a sweltering Chicago summer. It did not have a gas gauge. It had a reserve tank. A lever needed to be turned when the car was filled up and then flipped back. When the main gas tank emptied, the lever would be flipped back for more gas. The first time I drove the car, I ran out of gas, but nothing happened when I engaged the reserve tank. It had not been filled. I coasted to a stop in some not entirely safe place and trudged to a filling station for a can of gas. I learned to note the mileage when I filled up so that I could determine when I needed gas. The car was underpowered. On the highway, it was pedal to the metal, but even so, that VW could not make seventy. To pass a truck on the interstate that was going a few miles an hour slower, I would have to channel my NASCAR and get as close to the semi as possible to draft it, and then pull sharply to the left to slingshot myself around it. Scary, but, hey, I was young. The girlfriend—soon to be the spouse—did not appreciate the skill and derring-do of the maneuver. I learned that the road surfaces in Wisconsin and Illinois must have had slightly different compositions, because the car went a tad faster in Wisconsin. When the temperatures hovered near zero, as they often did in those Chicago winters, the car might not start, but if I could get the car rolling down even the slightest of hills or from pushing, I could pop the clutch, and the car would spring (an exaggeration) to life.

The car, however, had positive qualities. The steering and brakes worked, and it took me to many parts of Chicago I would not have otherwise experienced. I loved that car.

But it had one other flaw: It did not have a front bumper. This seemed unimportant. It had no effect on my driving. The steering was not affected. The brakes were not affected. But one day driving in perhaps a part of Chicago that was the farthest away from the university campus and my apartment, I was pulled over by a police officer. I had not been speeding. I didn’t think that I had run a light or a stop sign. I lowered my window, and the officer did that slow walk over to my car. (Are they taught not to walk quickly to a car they pulled over? Is this done to increase the pulled-over driver’s tension? Does that tension serve a purpose or do the cops just like increasing the driver’s concern? Is it merely a little power play?) “Your car does not have a front bumper,” the uniformed man said. He imparted this wisdom as if the fender must have just fallen off and I had not notice or that I had not otherwise been aware that in the bumper department the car was deficient to the tune of one. I said, “Yes.” He said, “You are driving an unsafe vehicle,” pronouncing that last word in three distinct syllables with the last one sounding like ‘kill’. I had run my course of snappy comebacks and was quiet for a bit but finally responded, “I wasn’t aware that made it unsafe.” This was the truth; I had never before contemplated this particular issue. I waited; he pondered. He broke the silence. “I am just giving you a warning. Get it fixed.” I thanked him. He walked more quickly back to his vehicle and drove off.

I didn’t know where to get a bumper for an old VW or who would attach it. I did figure that it would probably cost more than the car was worth–money I did not have. By then I had driven the car for more than half a year all over Chicago. The car, no doubt, had been seen by many police officers who apparently had not considered it a death-dealing or maiming missile. I had only been in the Chicago neighborhood where I had been stopped by happenstance. I determined that it would be easy to avoid it in the future where that one cop was stationed. So, I did; I stayed out of it.

I continued to drive it to school and many other parts of Chicago, Illinois, and Wisconsin without a problem. Then months later I saw the bubble light of a cop car behind me in the university neighborhood, and I pull over. Wondering what I had done wrong, I looked at the rear view mirror to see a cop slowly, slowly approaching me. It was the same friggin’ one who stopped me before! He immediately said, “I see you didn’t get it fixed. You’re getting a ticket for an unsafe vehicle.” And he immediately wrote it out.

(Concluded on October 22)

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

 

 

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First Car. First Day in Court.

My first car led to my first day in court. I loved that car. I had different emotions about that court appearance.

I was in law school in Chicago. Part of the reason I was in law school there was because I had wanted to live in a big city. I had grown up in a small Wisconsin town and gone to a New Jersey college that seemed, and in many ways was, isolated from the world. Even so, that college had been good for me. My high school education had been adequate at best, and the college presented, through its professors, courses, and classmates, new intellectual frontiers. I learned much there, including that I could more than hold myself with the “best.” In our self-congratulatory way, all of us at the college–students, faculty and administrators–placed ourselves in that “best” category. We were the elite.

The school also exposed me to new social settings. My town had only public high schools, but now I encountered a prep school culture. My father was a janitor, and almost all my classmates came from higher, often much higher, economic circumstances. I learned not to be intimidated by money and social standing.

After a while, however, the conformity and the political and societal apathy the place generated began to weigh on me. There was a bigger world. I spent quite a few college weekends taking the bus into New York and walking its streets, which, to me in those days, meant the streets of Manhattan. I felt drawn to the bustle and energy and was convinced that I needed to experience big city life. Law school presented that opportunity.

My classmates who had their choice of law schools overwhelmingly opted for the one in what I thought was in another isolated spot. I did not want to be in New Haven, but I thought Boston would be ok. Even though I had become fascinated with New York, almost no one, if they had other choices, opted for what was then the law school there, and I, too, fell into that category. The feeling about Chicago was even stronger, not because the law school did not have prestige, but because it was in Chicago. While I admit that I had absorbed some East Coast snobbery, I did not fear the Midwest. After all, I had grown up there.

After the admission letters arrived, twenty-one of us could choose between New Haven and Boston. Nineteen picked Connecticut; one chose Massachusetts. I was the only one who picked Illinois.

Money was the deciding factor. Chicago was certainly a city, and in those days, I also put Boston in that category. But I wasn’t going to law school just to get out of small-town life. I actually did want to become a lawyer. However, I knew that I was not going to be the kind of lawyer who would make much money (some predictions turn out to be true). I was going to be the kind of lawyer who fought for civil liberties and civil rights, for the downtrodden, against “the man,” be that corporations or the government.

I did not have the resources to pay for law school. I needed financial aid. The new Haven and Chicago schools offered respectable aid packages, and I thought that along with part-time work, I could manage. The Boston school, however, dangled a package that was half scholarship and half loan. If I matriculated there, by graduation I would have what a sizeable debt. I did not want loan payments to be a determinant of what kind of legal position I would have to take upon graduation. So off I went to Chicago with its scholarship offer. I wrote to the other schools explaining the reasons for my Chicago choice, hoping they would up their antes. New Haven responded with a gracious congratulatory note. Boston wrote, in effect, that it did not have to buy students and that it was not unhappy to see me go elsewhere.

I started to experience Chicago. It was scary and exhilarating and had many places to explore and experience. All of that excited me; I belonged in a big city. At first, I lived in the university neighborhood, but while it was in the city, it did not truly feel part of the city. It was its own enclave, and I wanted more of the real Chicago. Besides the apartment was terrible. I found a cheap apartment (no central heat) several miles west of the campus in one of Chicago’s many ethnic neighborhoods—this one was primarily Polish-American. But now I needed a car to get to my classes. I went to used car lots and found a VW beetle. The odometer said something like 50,000 miles, but that I am sure was misleading. Either it meant 150,000 or it had been turned back. The dealership did not seem high on the integrity scale. The spare tire, which was in the car when I first saw it, had disappeared when I bought it, which I only discovered some time later. It cost $300, which I did not have, but the brother lent me money.

(continued on Oct.19)

Related Post:

https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Hillbilly+Chicago

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Supposedly when Margot Asquith met Jean Harlow, Harlow kept pronouncing all the letters in Margot.  In exasperation, Asquith finally said, “The ‘t’ in Margot is silent just like the ‘t’ in Harlow.”

“That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of desire.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

The ad for a New York City restaurant said: “Farm to table Greek food.” I had some questions.

Because of recent movies and documentaries, clips are being played of the most famous passage from President John F. Kennedy’s Let’s-Go-Mooning Speech: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” Memorable. Inspirational. But piffle. No country, no one, should choose to do something because it is hard. Building a perpetual motion machine is hard. Turning lead into gold is hard. Hopping on one foot for twenty-four straight hours is hard. Their difficulty is not a reason to commit to attempting them. The easiness of doing something is also not a reason to do or not to do it. The starting point should not be the difficulty or ease of a project. The starting point should be whether the goal is worth the effort.

I sporadically post First Sentences. For whatever the reason, these are sentences that attract me. My standard is that it be the first sentence, and not more, of the introduction or the initial chapter of a book I am reading or one that I have read that is on my shelves. I don’t do research and find books that I have read but no longer have. If any such opening passages have intrigued you, please feel free to send them to me through the contact link so that I can post them.

A hurricane pummels a state rife with conservative politicians. These are the officeholders who, when running for office, label opponents as devoted to tax-and-spend, who decry Washington, who almost weep over Big Government. But in the aftermath of the storm they beseech Washington for tax dollars to be spent on them by big government agencies. Hypocrisy never seems to occur to them. Irony is beyond them.

The academic paper’s “basic premise appears to be that if you are truly stupid you not only do things stupidly but are in all likelihood too stupid to realize how stupidly you are doing them.” Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain.

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What Trump Revolution? (Concluded)

The real takeaway from the 2016 election is not that Trump did so well, but that Clinton did so poorly. Even with more voters in 2016 than 2012, Clinton got slightly fewer votes than Obama—65,853,516 to 65,899,660—with a big drop in the percentage of the ballots. Obama got a majority of the vote, 51.6 percent, while Clinton got 48.18 percent. Trump did not get a higher percentage than Romney four years earlier, but Clinton got significantly less than Obama. Wasn’t the revolution not so much for Trump as against Clinton?

Perhaps the real revolution in 2016 was not for Trump but in favor of third parties. Obama and Romney together got 98.8 percent of the vote. Clinton and Trump together got 94.3 percent. The combined Libertarian and Green vote increased by over 300 percent. That third-party total went from 1.7 million in 2012 to 5.9 million in 2016.

Much has been made of states that Obama won, but whose electoral votes went to Trump and swung the election to him. Let’s look more closely at three of them: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Trump did significantly better than Romney had done in Pennsylvania. Trump got 2,912,941 votes while Romney got 2,619,583. This increase had two components. About 376,000 more ballots were cast in 2016 than in 2012, but in addition Trump did better percentagewise. He got 48.8 percent (Clinton got 47.6 percent) while Romney got 46.8 percent (Obama got 52.0 percent) of the Pennsylvania vote. This would indicate some sort of Trump Revolution, but, if so, it was a limited one. It did not reach a majority. But notice something else. Trump and Clinton together garnered 96.4 percent of the total ballots, while in 2012, the major candidates received 98.8 percent. The third parties nearly trebled their votes in the four years, from 69,000 to 192,000. Their share went from 1.3 percent in 2012 to 3.6 in 2016. Trump won the Pennsylvania plurality by 70,000 votes while the third-party votes increased by much more than that. If Pennsylvania indicated a Trump Revolution, it also indicated a Third-Party Revolution, a move to third parties that allowed Trump to get the plurality and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. Remember Stacey who could not vote for Trump, but distrusted Clinton so she voted Green? We don’t know how she would have voted if there had been a different Democratic candidate, but did Trump really carry Pennsylvania because of a Trump Revolution or because Clinton, whatever the reasons, was not a good candidate and a sizeable number of voters went to third parties as a result?

The Michigan turnout did not increase in 2016 as much as the Pennsylvania vote did—65,000 more ballots were cast than in 2012. Trump, however, did get 265,00 more votes than Romney and garnered 47.3 percent of the total compared to Romney’s 44.6. But again “others” made the difference. In 2012, only 1.4 percent of the ballots were not cast for the major parties, while in 2016 it was 5.2 percent, with the totals increasing from 65,000 to 250,000. Trump’s plurality (again not a majority) was a mere 10,000 votes. The move to third parties again allowed him to win a plurality and get all of Michigan’s electoral votes.

In Wisconsin, 128,000 fewer ballots were cast in 2016 than four years earlier, and Trump got only 1,500 more votes than Romney. That doesn’t indicate a Trump Revolution as much as a lack of enthusiasm for both major candidates. However, Trump did win the plurality at 47.9 percent compared to Romney’s losing percentage at 45.9. Trump’s margin was 27,000 votes, and again the third parties swung the state. In 2012, they got 28,000 votes and 0.9 percent of the total. In 2016, third parties garnered 137,000 votes accounting for 5.4%.

What does this indicate? Was there a Trump Revolution that has changed the electoral landscape? Trump took these three key states, but he did not get a majority in any of them. In other words, the majority actually voted against Trump. In each of them, he won because Clinton performed poorly as much as Trump performed well. As a result, the third parties surged tipping each state to Trump.

What does this mean for the future? Is there an enduring Trump Revolution that has shifted the electoral patterns? Perhaps the first thing to note is that, of course, he did not get the majority of the vote in the country. He did not even get the plurality. What is seldom noted is that the percentage he did get was not better than what Romney got four years earlier. This certainly is not a revolution.

In some key states, however, he did do better than Romney, but even so, he did not get a majority in them, and third parties surged. Of course, the best guarantee of his winning such states the next time is to get more than 50 percent of the vote. At least so far, however, polls do not indicate that this is likely. Trump’s favorability ratings consistently hover just above 40 percent, and while he does much to appeal to what is called his base, he is not attracting voters outside that base.

If his support continues at less than 50 percent, Trump has to pray (although I doubt he does) that the third-party surge will continue on into the next presidential election, so he can win electoral votes with only pluralities. The real question, then, for the future is not whether there has been a Trump Revolution, but whether there has been a Third-Party Revolution. That seems unlikely. Wasn’t the increase in third-party votes in 2016 just the result, a circumstance unlikely to repeat itself?

 

Posted on by rjonakait

What Trump Revolution? (continued)

Many of the analyses of why Trump won are based on the premise that the 2016 election produced an enduring, seismic shift in the electorate.  An anecdote in Eliza Griswold’s book should make us rethink whether there truly was such a Trump Revolution. Amity and Prosperity is the story of a rural family in southwestern Pennsylvania and the problems they face when fracking starts nearby. Stacey, the main character, “didn’t buy the Trump craze” in 2016. Although she had had troubles with the EPA, she thought it should exist. She doubted that fracking could save Appalachia. Trump, to her, was just another pandering politician. On the other hand, she did not like Hillary Clinton either. She thought that Clinton was corrupt and no better on fracking than Trump. Stacey voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

So, did Trump actually attract a new crop of voters to the Republican candidate? The answer seems to be yes. Many counties, like Stacey’s, swung from Obama in 2012 to Trump four years later. But perhaps many of the new Republican voters were not swinging to Trump as much as they were swinging away from Clinton. It turns out that for large swathes of previously Democratic voters she was not an attractive candidate. Some of those voters stayed home; some voted for Trump; and some voted for a third-party candidate. Why the antipathy for Clinton? Many reasons have been given. Some of her supporters claim that it was because she is a woman. Perhaps that was part of it. I once said to a friend who wanted to sit out the election because he liked neither major candidate, “Assess how you feel about Bill Clinton. Is your assessment of Hillary Clinton lower? If so, why? Her policies are similar to his and she has had more experience than he had when he ran for President. How much of the lower assessment is merely because she is a woman?” He pondered and just replied that for whatever the reason, he was not as enthusiastic about her as he had been for Bill. (He did end up voting for Hillary because he came to believe it was most to stop the Donald.)

I was not an enthusiastic supporter of hers, and I hope her gender was not the reason. I would like to think my lack of enthusiasm had good reasons, but I am not sure that another phenomenon did not affect me as well as many others. Hillary Clinton has been regularly attacked by the right wing for a long time, at least since her husband ran for the presidency a quarter-century ago. Few modern public figures have been vilified as much and for as long as she has been. This drumbeat of castigation surely affected many, and I wondered if I were truly immune. As Pierre Augustin Caron de Beumarchais has been quoted as saying, “Villify! Villify! Some of it will always stick.”

No matter whether those who distrusted Clinton had good reasons or not, many in 2016 found they could not vote for her, and at least some of them voted for Trump. If, however, these Trump votes were not as much affirmative votes for him as votes against Clinton, they don’t seem to herald an enduring Trump Revolution.

On the other hand, much reporting indicates that many previous Obama voters were affirmatively attracted to Trump and that is what made for the Trump Revolt. The implication is that something historic was going on, but that assumption should be questioned. Doesn’t something similar happen every time the White House changes parties? When Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower, at least some Ike voters did not vote for the 1960 Republican candidate. Similar electoral movements have occurred when Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama were elected president. Was the Trump election really different?

We also know (although he may not want to believe it) that Trump did not even get the plurality of the vote. Whatever the revolution, it was not a majority one. And even if it is true that he attracted many voters that had not before voted Republican, we should also realize that he drove away many voters who could have been expected to vote Republican.

Compare 2012 and 2016 election results. (Different sources do not always give the same nationwide vote totals, but, for consistency, I am using figures from the Federal Election Commission website.) In 2012, Mitt Romney got 60,932,152 votes. Four years later, Trump received 62,984,825. Trump got two million more votes than Romney but that does not mean that he made great inroads into previously Democratic voters.          Instead, about 7.5 million more people voted in 2016 than 2012. With more voters as the country’s population increased, it is not surprising that Trump got more votes than Romney. More interesting than the vote totals for Romney and Trump is the percentage of the vote for each. Romney received 47.21 percent of the nationwide ballots, while Trump got 46.09 percent. In other words, there was no dramatic swing to him compared to the previous election. Analyses I have seen expend a good deal of effort dissecting the voters Trump attracted; they also ought to equally examine the voters Trump drove away. For example, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics mentions that “Trump’s margin was weaker than Romney’s in 86 of the 100 most educated counties—a fact that held true regardless of the jurisdiction’s normal partisan leanings.” But the authors set out only to interview voters in some swing states who shifted from Obama to Trump when there were at least as many voters who swung away from him. If that first group constitutes some new populist coalition, how should we label the at-least-as-significant second group?

(concluded October 12)

Posted on by rjonakait

What Trump Revolution?

 

Trump won. People were shocked. Analyses followed. I have had conversations, heard talks, looked at websites, read newspapers and magazine articles that seek to explain how we got our President. I have also read books that shed varying degrees of light on 2016, including Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America; Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light; Salena Zito and Brad Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land; Amy Goldstein, Janesville: An American Story: and J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy.

All these books have merit. They indicate that there was not one, simple answer as to how it happened, but all point to a white working-class economic insecurity that was a major force. For some, this got tied up with a racial resentment that included hostility to legal and illegal immigrants. Some felt that “Washington” had intruded too much into their lives and had made the country worse.

One author suggests that strong roots of the surprise victory go back to the Vietnam War. The contention is that many from the Rust Belt and Appalachia who believed in America and its leaders went off to war forty years ago. They were not welcomed back as heroes, but, instead, were shunned by the country that had sent them off. They left with expectations of lives of increasing prosperity, which the factories and mines had given previous generations, but returned to an industrial economy in decline. The coastal elites and Washington did not seem to care about them or their increasing economic plight until Trump came along. I thought there might be merit in this analysis, and if so, perhaps it should be extended to our more recent Mideast wars. How can you not feel disillusionment if you suffered the privations and horrors of Afghanistan and Iraq and returned to parts of America in decline with the powerful indifferent to those declines?

Zito and Todd’s book presents a different insight. The authors interviewed voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa who voted for Obama in 2012 and for Trump four years later. One of those interviewees referred to the Trump converts as “this interesting group of people who placed him in the White House because a variety of different people wanted to be part of something larger than themselves. It means it makes me more important, it makes the individual more important, believing that they are contributing directly or indirectly to whatever they are doing.” And when I look at the audiences at a Trump rally, including the ones after he was elected, the audience gives the impression of not being merely a collection of individuals, but as being a component of a movement that transcends the individuals.

I was reminded of a book I read decades ago, The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick. She interviewed Americans who had subscribed to communism in the 1930s and stayed with the Party until 1956. I was struck by what seemed to be a religious-like fervor in many who must have been atheists. They did not expect that communism’s promises would be fulfilled in their lifetime but still enthusiastically supported the cause because they were part of movement bigger than themselves and hoping to bring about a better world after they were gone. One of them said, “It was life, the only life I ever knew, and it was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never again expect to know. . . . We literally felt we were making history.”

Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.”

People want to feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves. They feel power being part of a movement. They feel important being in the vanguard of a new history. People have felt that from Trump; they feel that they are transforming America. Reagan gave that transformative feeling, and so did Obama to many. Hillary Clinton may have given a comparable feeling to some, but that movement feeling was smaller than it was for Trump and for Obama. By allying yourself with Trump, you hoped to become part of something more important than yourself.