Slowly he turned*... -- more on Trump and the Nixon Pivot

A quick point: while discussions of Trump's ideology can be interesting, productive, and even important, any attempts to explain his political success using ideology are largely doomed to failure. If you are asking how Trump was able to rise so quickly in defiance of conventional wisdom, you should start by looking at the flaws in that conventional wisdom. After that you should probably focus on the collapse of substantive journalism, the role of celebrity in the 21st-century, and, my personal favorite, the effects of cognitive dissonance on a Republican base that has been asked to believe a steady stream of incredible and contradictory claims for the past couple of decades.

With that out of the way, I wanted to revisit a post from a couple of weeks ago (followed up here). Here's the main argument:

One of the things that struck me about the past two presidential elections was how completely the Nixon pivot had been taken off of the table. Both McCain and Romney dutifully followed the first step during the primaries, but whenever they tried to move back toward the center during the general election, the reaction from the base quickly sent them scurrying back to the right.

Conventional wisdom saw this in terms of ideological extremism but my take-away was quite different.  The GOP base has grown more conservative in the 21st century, but even taking that into account, their willingness to give their nominees any slack is much less than it was at any point in the second half of the 20th Century.

My argument is that this has relatively little to do with ideology and much to do with trust. Many in the base feel (with some justification) that the social contract with the party has been violated. They are no longer willing automatically to extend credit to their party's nominees.

With Trump, however, the Nixon pivot suddenly becomes not only viable but remarkably easy. He has a great personal bond with his supporters, his appeal is not particularly ideological, and he has been able to hold heterodox positions without paying a political penalty.

A pivot to the center would not even require covering any new territory. Trump's "platform" has been so erratic and unpredictable that all he would have to do would be to embrace some of the positions he held then implicitly or explicitly abandoned over the past 12 months. It would seem unlikely that significant portion of his core supporters would abandon him if he changed his mind once again and decided he was for high taxes on rich people.

Fast forward to this recent post by Jonathan Chait:

Trump’s campaign initially emphasized his nativist position on immigration, which caused him to be identified with the Republican right. But Trump has repositioned himself increasingly as the candidate of the populist, disaffected center. Even though Trump has proposed a huge tax cut for the rich, he draws support from Republican voters who are most heavily in favor of raising taxes on the rich. (They have no other candidates to choose from within their party.)

Trump’s populism has slowly intensified. "I don't get along that well with the rich. I don't even like the rich people very much," he recently said. "It's like a weird deal." He has proposed to let the federal government negotiate lower prices for Medicare prescription drugs, a plan horrifying to conservatives (and drug companies). Like other Republicans, he proposes to eliminate Obamacare and replace it with something undefined but wonderful. The reason Trump’s vague repeal-and-replace stance makes them so nervous is that he once advocated single-payer insurance, and he has emphasized, in a way other Republicans have not, the horrors of leaving people who are too poor or sick to afford insurance on their own. Trump’s shorthand description of the travails of the uninsured before Obamacare — people “dying on the street” — alarms conventional conservatives precisely because it captures the broad reality of the suffering that justified Obamacare in the first place, and which would intensify if the law is repealed. The Republican fear is that Trump’s vague promise to replace Obamacare with something terrific is not just a hand-waving tactic to justify repealing Obamacare. Their fear is that he actually means it. Trump's populist positions may place him farther away from the Republican Party's intellectual and financial vanguard, but they draw him closer to its voters.

* In case you were wondering, "Slowly I turned..." aka "Niagara Falls" was a popular vaudeville routine. Pretty much everyone tried their hand at it.

Posts I don't have time to write – two from LGM

1. People the NYT needs to fire to maintain its reputation (and no, it's not Brooks)

Scott Lemieux points us to an especially egregious Maureen Dowd column (and that's a high bar to clear). Lots to complain about here but I did get a chuckle out of this part, though probably not for the reason Dowd intended:

As one Hillary booster in Hollywood marveled: “There’s no chance her husband doesn’t understand the problem. The look on his face during her speeches evokes a retired major league All Star watching his son strike out in a Little League game. This is so fixable.”

I find it very difficult to believe this is a real quote, that someone not only provided Dowd with the perfect comment for her piece, but actually did it in the same voice Dowd normally writes in, complete with mannered wording (how often do you hear “evokes” in casual conversation?) and clumsy analogy.

In Dowd's defense, a while back she did take a piece of a Josh Marshall post and run it without quotation marks. Maybe she was just trying to even things out.


2. More on the sad state of journalism, press critics edition (and no, it's not Shafer... this time)

Political conventional wisdom has come in for a pounding recently, particularly with the last of the Republican establishment candidates being skewered for recently restaging outtakes from WestWorld, so we all knew Dylan Byers would spring to the defense and that it would go badly.

Dylan Byers Verified account ‏@DylanByers

Dylan Byers Retweeted Comfortably Smug

Have people really never read Walt Whitman before? Do they not understand the concept of anaphora?

Lemieux has a great deal of fun with this but it's Jonathan Chait who gets in the best shot:

That is not anaphora, because it is not the repetition of the first part of the sentence. This important difference explains why Dickens did not write, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and why Churchill did not say, “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, and we shall fight in … France.”

Nor is it part of some poetic device that makes sense if you watch the context of the speech, which I did, and which is just Rubio cycling through his standard stump lines rather than repeating them for some kind of literary effect.

And this is why Rubio visibly hesitates when he is about to say “throats” for the second time. It is the horrified panic of a candidate who realizes he has just done the one thing he desperately needs at this moment not to do.

"Because you like the story"

Sometimes I use posts as digital refrigerator magnets. A blog is an excellent place to store quotes, facts and news items you might want to use one of these days.

From Paul Krugman:

You are, of course, free to disagree. But you need to carefully explain why you disagree — what evidence do you have suggesting that these scholars’ conclusions, which are based on history and data, not just gut feelings, are wrong?

...

I have some views of my own, of course, but I’m not a political scientist, man — I just read political scientists and take their work very seriously. What I do bring to this kind of discussion, I hope, is an awareness of two kinds of sin that can corrupt political discussion.

The obvious sin involves actually selling one’s views. And that does happen, of course.

But what happens even more, in my experience, is an intellectual sin whose effects can be just as bad: self-indulgence. By this I mean believing things, and advocating for policies, because you like the story rather than because you have any good evidence that it’s true. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years going after this sort of thing on the right, where things like the claim that Barney Frank somehow caused the financial crisis so often prevail in the teeth of overwhelming evidence. But it can happen on the left, too — which is why, for example, I’m still very cautious about claims that inequality is bad for growth.

(Actually, I find myself in a very different situation where I like the story -- or at least agree with the conclusion -- but don't buy some of the arguments, but that's a topic for another post.)

David Frum's well-written Rubio analysis consists of a badly written tweets

These tweets from David Frum brought home a couple of points I've been meaning to make for a while now.

Viewed in certain ways, particularly when you're talking about large grassroots movements, the impact of social media can be tremendous, but this does not mean that a public figure personally has to be on social media to remain relevant, and those that do use it effectively realize that the old rule about different messages working better in different media is especially true with formats like Twitter.

The only politician I can think of who really gets this is Donald Trump. This is, by no means, and original observation; Josh Marshall has been making it for months. Trump uses Twitter to make simple declarations, stake out positions, exchange insults, and toss out one-liners. He keeps up a steady stream of tweets and does a good job staying in the moment of the conversation. On top of this, his long history of making outrageous statements has to a large degree innoculated him from the potential consequences of an otherwise ill considered tweet.

Even more importantly, Trump does not try to force messages into the medium that don't fit. His tweets don't require context nor do you have to read multiple tweets in proper sequence. They lose nothing in the re-tweeting.



Which brings us to David Frum's analysis of last Saturday's GOP debate.As Josh Marshall pointed out, it's a remarkably astute piece of work, concise and insightful. It would make an excellent blog post, but you can't just chop up a post into a bunch of tweets. Even with a very good post (perhaps particularly not with a very good one).

Consider this excerpt:

2) But the normal reason to adhere to talking points is determination to advance a controlled message - and to avoid an unhelpful quotation
3) By contrast, Rubio’s 4x repeat was not an act of excessive message discipline. It was a display of panic at a moment of uncertainty
4) Faced with a genuinely new situation, Rubio could not figure out what to do …. and so stumbled into doing precisely the wrong thing

 These points need to be read uninterrupted and in order. All three lose a great deal out of context.

I understand why Frum would want to be on Twitter, but his message does not fit the medium, and that seldom works out well.

Recognition Kalopsia, Confirmation Kalopsia, Narrative Kalopsia

[I admit I am stretching the definition somewhat, but it this point I think that 'kalopsia' can, more or less, be considered flotsam or jetsam and the finder is free to do what he or she chooses with it.]

Another three for the lexicon:

Finding exaggerated value either artistic, intellectual, or historic in something because you feel the thrill of recognition or because it confirms a theory or because it makes for a nice narrative.

There is obviously a great deal of overlap here and I thought about rolling them up into one category, but there are some important distinctions.In most journalistic genres, the narrative variety has hit epidemic levels. In coverage of popular media, however, where fanboy critics exert extraordinary influence, recognition kalopsia is dominant (just drop by the Onion's AV Club sometime for the genre in its refined form).

Scott Lemieux got me thinking about this with a post on LGM which in turn directed me to this excellent essay by Pauline Kael (“Circles and Squares”) which probably made her even more enemies than “Raising Kane” a few years later. Some of the loudest voices in the Kane backlash were those she had demolished in the earlier piece.

"THE MIDDLE CIRCLE"

"... the second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value."

[Andrew Sarris]

Up to this point there has really been no theory, and now, when Sarris begins to work on his foundation, the entire edifice of civilized standards of taste collapses while he's tacking down his floorboards. Traditionally, in any art, the personalities of all those involved in a production have been a factor in judgment, but that the distinguishability of personality should in itself be a criterion of value completely confuses normal judgment. The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better? Hitchcock's personality is certainly more distinguishable in Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, than Carol Reed's in The Stars Look Down, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, An Outcast of the Islands, if for no other reason than because Hitchcock repeats while Reed tackles new subject matter. But how does this distinguishable personality function as a criterion for judging the works? We recognize the hands of Carne and Prevert in Le Jour se Leve, but that is not what makes it a beautiful film; we can just as easily recognize their hands in Quai des Brumes—which is not such a good film. We can recognize that Le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madame De are both the work of Ophuls, but Le Plaisir is not a great film, and Madame De is.

Often the works in which we are most aware of the personality of the director are his worst films—when he falls back on the devices he has already done to death. When a famous director makes a good movie, we look at the movie, we don't think about the director's personality; when he makes a stinker we notice his familiar touches because there's not much else to watch. When Preminger makes an expert, entertaining whodunit like Laura, we don't look for his personality (it has become part of the texture of the film); when he makes an atrocity like Whirlpool, there's plenty of time to look for his "personality" — if that's your idea of a good time.

It could even be argued, I think, that Hitchcock's uniformity, his mastery of tricks, and his cleverness at getting audiences to respond according to his calculations — the feedback he wants and gets from them — reveal not so much a personal style as a personal theory of audience psychology, that his methods and approach are not those of an artist but a prestidigitator. The auteur critics respond just as Hitchcock expects the gullible to respond. This is not so surprising — often the works auteur critics call masterpieces are ones that seem to reveal the contempt of the director for the audience.

Parking and time wasted

This is Joseph

A rather telling statistic:

An IBM survey found that worldwide, urban drivers spend an average of 20 minutes per trip looking for parking.

Is it really such a bad idea to universally charge for parking in public places such that the resource does not become wildly over-used?

Vivid guesses

This passage from Polya's How to Solve It makes a nice companion to the earlier quote from Dwight Eisenhower on planning.

I do, however, have one criterion that I think Polya needed to add. In addition to attentiveness, understanding and interest, to get guesses of real value, the guesser needs independence. If your thinking simply follows the tracks laid down by other, you're probably wasting everyone's time.

Bob Elliott, R.I.P.

Bob Elliot, partner with Ray Goulding in the team Bob and Ray, father of Chris and grandfather of Abby died Tuesday at the age of 92.

You could make a case for Bob and Ray being the most influential comedy act of their time and the one that has held up the best, but it can be extraordinarily difficult explaining just what was and is so funny about them. In an era when the familiar sobriquet "man of a thousand voices" was often not much of an exaggeration, they had maybe a half-dozen voices between them. The other shows of the time, whether they were comedies like the Goon Show or the latest from Stan Freberg, dramas like Gunsmoke or anthologies like CBS Radio Workshop featured large, versatile casts, elaborate production and beautifully edited sound montages.

By comparison, Bob and Ray were mainly just two guys talking in bland voices, deadpan, minimal, but once you get into the rhythms and the world, they were funnier and have aged better than any of their contemporaries. It's not comedy that lends itself to ready explanation but Adam Bernstein doe a remarkably good job in his Washington Post obituary:

With masterly comic timing — Mr. Elliott with a nasal deadpan, Goulding with booming authority — Bob and Ray mocked the cliches and banalities of newscasts, politics, sports and advertising. The characters they played were inept, pompous or shady — logic-free “experts,” sore political losers, dense reporters and dimwitted everymen.

One of their favorite skits involved Wally Ballou interviewing a paperclip company tycoon who tackles “waste and inefficiency” by running a sweatshop of indentured servants. Employees, who earn 14 cents a week, are bound by a “99-year sweetheart contract” and imprisoned if they try to quit.

“How can anybody possibly live on 14 cents a week?” Ballou asks.

Goulding, as the industrialist, replies defensively, “We don’t pry into the personal lives of our employees, Wally.”

Their playfully warped sensibilities often involved sly commentaries of the conventions of radio and TV, and the people who take those mediums seriously.

New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes once wrote: “They work masterfully close to the very things they are gently mocking, and this gives their sensible nonsense its special flavor. For one thing it shows just how much arrant nonsense we actually accept in television.”

...

The venture into political lampooning was rare. More typical of their output were fake commercials hawking membership in Heightwatchers International (sold with “six ample servings of low vitamins and nutrients in artificial colorings”) and series such as “Down the Byways,” which spoofed broadcaster Charles Kuralt’s TV essays on vanishing Americana by visiting with “one of the last of the small-town grouches.”

They always closed their show with the same signoff: “This is Ray Goulding, reminding you to write if you get work.” “And Bob Elliott, reminding you to hang by your thumbs.”

Bob and Ray’s admirers extended far beyond show business figures such as Allen and Letterman. One of their most devoted fans was novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who once wrote in a foreword to the 1975 collection “Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray”: “They feature Americans who are almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane.

“And while other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray’s characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. . . . Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.”

Iowa -- land of red squares

I generally try to cut back on my political news consumption during and immediately after the Iowa caucuses. Though the event does bring some new information to the table, it also inevitably brings a great deal more noise. I did decide to bend my rules a bit for these two Krugman posts and was well rewarded for my time. In particular, I thought his discussion of Iowa as a Schelling focal point was as insightful as any piece of political analysis I've seen in 2016.

For those of us who were a bit vague on the term, he provided this helpful link:

Consider a simple example: two people unable to communicate with each other are each shown a panel of four squares and asked to select one; if and only if they both select the same one, they will each receive a prize. Three of the squares are blue and one is red. Assuming they each know nothing about the other player, but that they each do want to win the prize, then they will, reasonably, both choose the red square. Of course, the red square is not in a sense a better square; they could win by both choosing any square. And it is only the "right" square to select if a player can be sure that the other player has selected it; but by hypothesis neither can. However, it is the most salient and notable square, so—lacking any other one—most people will choose it, and this will in fact (often) work.

And here's how Krugman connects the concept to Iowa:

How does this apply to news coverage and punditry? Well, it’s obvious that the media have strong herding instincts; almost everyone wants to be somewhere close to the middle of the pack, telling the prevailing narrative. But there are many narratives that could, in fact, prevail. Partly that’s because such narratives can be self-fulfilling, and partly it’s because actually being, you know, right isn’t that important compared with being on top of the trend. So anything that gives special salience to a particular narrative can produce convergence on that narrative, even if everyone realizes that what’s going on is basically stupid.

Thus, should Rubio’s third-place finish in a small state really have caused him to shoot up so dramatically in market estimates of his probability of winning the GOP nomination? No, yet that’s what happened.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the results were in all important respects a tie — but Clinton was a whisker ahead. Did that whisker matter? I’m pretty sure it did, a lot. If Sanders had come in even slightly ahead, the news would have been full of Clinton-is-doomed reports. Instead, the coverage has, as best I can tell, been rather subdued. Everyone knows that a fraction of a point in the vote makes no objective difference; but everyone also knows that “Iowa almost tied!” isn’t the same kind of focal point for Clinton doom stories as “Clinton defeated!” And so the coverage is radically different — and the betting markets have treated Iowa on the Democratic side as a non-event.

On a related note, there's an observation I've shared recently with friends and I've been meaning to work into a post. Back when Krugman first got serious about being a pundit, he was remarkably strong in two areas: economics (unsurprisingly) and press criticism ("Shape of Earth—Views Differ" alone would earn him the honor), but rather weak when it came to  politics. This was particularly notable around 2008 and 2009.

But Krugman did a couple of remarkable things (at least remarkable for an NYT columnist): he admitted his mistakes and he learned from them. His political analyses have improved steadily while the quality and credibility of most political commentators have fallen down a mine shaft.

Data based decisions work badly with fraudulent data

One of the points that Joseph and I have been hammering away at for years now is that, as proposed, most of the proposed incentive and metric-based models of the education reform movement are dangerously vulnerable to gaming, data cooking, and out-and-out fraud.

Back in 2010, this position was very much on the fringe. Today, not so much.


From Marilou Johanek, columnist for the Toledo Blade (via Charles Pierce)

Former ODE school choice director David Hansen, the man in charge of charter school oversight, engaged in a fraudulent scheme to boost the evaluations of some charters. Mr. Hansen, whose wife worked as the governor’s chief of staff until she left to manage his presidential campaign, admitted scrubbing data on failing online and dropout recovery-charters to improve their standing in the state.

Some outraged state school board members charged Mr. Hansen with breaking the law and demanded an impartial investigation. Team Kasich quashed that notion and contained the political damage.

Then-state superintendent Richard Ross professed no prior knowledge of the fraud perpetrated on his watch by his subordinate to promote an administration mandate. Unexplained is why Mr. Ross forwarded Mr. Hansen’s falsified data to the U.S. Department of Education for funding, despite the controversy over his cooked books.

ODE’s discredited charter czar quietly resigned from the department, followed by the retirement of the superintendent months later. The department that had allowed the data scam to proceed in a calculated move for public dollars — without regard for educational accountability — vowed to enact internal reforms. No need for outside scrutiny.

Chagrined state lawmakers who were previously in no hurry to pass charter school reform, finally approved legislation to take the heat off Mr. Kasich. The changes will only be meaningful if they are implemented by the Kasich people running the ODE.

Public education advocates aren’t holding their breath for wholesale reform of the charter school industry in Ohio, which is fine with the Kasich administration. It pushed a potential political liability off the radar to let Mr. Kasich spin on the campaign trail without distraction.

And on a completely unrelated note.

A while back, I collected all of those 2010 education reform post in a Kindle single called Things I Saw at the Counter-Reformation. If you would like to see how the arguments hold up, check it out.

The Other Half of the Problem

You probably all remember the issues the New York Times had with bad information from anonymous sources on the Hillary Clinton email story and the social media accounts of the San Bernardino shooters. More recently, our blog had a long post questioning the ethics of a New York Times Magazine piece that allowed a controversial scholar to present her side of an academic dispute in the most favorable conditions imaginable.

These and other incidents certainly suggest that the NYT needs to re-examine its standards and practices regarding sources, but to get a full sense of the problem you should take a look at the following from TPM's account of the reaction to the Sean Penn/Rolling Stone interview with "El Chapo":

New York Times editor Dean Baquet told Margaret Sullivan, the paper's public editor, on Monday that he "would have walked away from the interview." The newspaper's standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, said the paper does not grant "prepublication approval to anyone."

Pretty much anytime you point out an issue with the New York Times' ethics or quality control, this will be the other half of the problem: The paper really does see itself as a gold standard, not perfect perhaps, but far better than any of its peers. This attitude effectively prevents any serious self examination let alone real attempts at reform.

Would have New York Times have published the Sean Penn piece? I have no idea. Have they recently published articles that gave sources an inappropriate level of influence and thus misinformed their readers? Unquestionably. What's worse, the Rolling Stone piece came with a disclaimer.

The New York Times simply leaves it to us to it figure out on our own.

Remember that pivot thing?

Before we get started, a quick caveat. As mentioned before (probably at greater length than necessary), much if not most of the mainstream press have fallen into the trap of using style with substance when it comes to Donald Trump. Trump may come off more like a heel in a professional wrestling match that as an elder statesman, but in terms of stances on every issue with the possible exception of immigration, he is completely in line with the rest of the GOP field.

On the other hand, it would be just as dangerous to assume Trump is a closet liberal or even centrist. Though the cartoonish persona makes it difficult to speculate as to what is going on in the man's head, there is absolutely no reason to give any more weight to his comments about big tax increases on millionaires than to his promises of huge tax cuts for millionaires.

Only thing we can say with confidence is Trump is incredibly erratic, has shown no consistent devotion to anything or anyone other than his own self-interest, and is even willing to sacrifice that in the pursuit of attention. At least you could count on Nixon to be predictably evil.


So, just to be clear, I have no idea where a Trump presidency would end up on the ideological spectrum. All I'm saying is that if Trump gets the nomination, he will be the first GOP candidate in a long time with the freedom to run far to the right  then fast to the center.

With that in mind, check out this recent quote from Charles Pierce:

But something else has been going on in the last couple of weeks, too. A startling amount of coherence has started to become evident in the Trump campaign. Up until now, the only real underlying philosophy to the enterprise has been I am Donald Trump and you're not, and neither are those losers, either. But, whether or not he's picked this up in his travels, or whether or not this was going to be the pitch all along, He, Trump now has the stirrings of the beginnings of a message in his madness. You could see it in the glee with which he slapped Fox News around on Tuesday. He now is running quite clearly on the idea that Republican voters have been played for rubes and suckers by the major institutions of their party and by the conservative movement. He is so confident in this role that he can even come out quite clearly in favor of an idea he shares with practically every Democratic politician alive.

Pierce was referring to this:

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has embraced a policy that liberals love: allowing Medicare to negotiate for drugs. He told a New Hampshire crowd that doing so could save "$300 billion per year."

"We don’t do it," Trump said. "Why? Because of the drug companies."

Democrats have tried to give Medicare this power since at least 2003, when Medicare Part D, which gives beneficiaries prescription drug benefits, passed. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and President Barack Obama all agree with Trump that Medicare ought to have the authority to push back against drug companies that ask for really high prices.

I think we need to think more carefully about how to make situations like this one less unfair

This is Joseph.

I always find stories like this one amazing.  From the Trustee report:

Alpha Natural Resources, Inc. ... filed the KEIP Motion requesting, inter alia, authority to pay 15 of its most highly compensated executives bonuses totaling over $11.9 Million in 2016. Alpha seeks this relief while at the same time incurring more than $1.3 Billion in losses for 2015. Alpha seeks this relief while at the same time seeking to cut off the health and life insurance benefits to some 1,200 rank-and-file retirees because it claims it desperately needs to save $3 Million a year. Alpha seeks this relief after demonstrating to this Court that it is so hopelessly insolvent that its shareholders have no chance of seeing any return on their investments into the companies.

Can you guess the ending:

Sadly, the Trustee's biting prose was for naught. In a closed courtroom, a bankruptcy judge approved the bonus plan.

I am not against being compassionate to executives.  Like it or lump it, it is very hard to shut down a company and it is very unpleasant work.  What I find more painful is that the same compassion doesn't seem to be present towards workers, who are also making a painful adjustment.

I can't but think that there should be some approach to make the pain either lesser or more equally distributed.

[p.s. from Mark:

I wanted to add a couple of quick points to Joseph's post. First, this observation from Scott Lemieux:

This is an extreme case, but it pretty much defines how the wealthy define incentives differently for themselves and for ordinary workers. For the latter, a middle-class salary will make them lazy and in any case is an unnecessary expense. For those at the top, a multi-million dollar salary isn’t enough incentive to do your job. Note, too, how contradictory ideas about responsibility seamlessly replace each other depending on what’s necessary to justify the looting of the workers and shareholders. When the company goes into bankruptcy less than a five years after you take it over, doesn’t that suggest that you’re massively incompetent and don’t even justify a six-figure salary, let alone a seven-figure one supplemented by performance bonuses(!)? Why no, because the market for coal collapsed, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not our fault. But when it comes time to get de facto retention bonuses, these same people become absolutely indispensable supermen with irreplaceable skills. Obviously, Alpha’s executives can’t simultaneously by caretakers who preside over a company whose profits are determined almost entirely by factors beyond their control and people with unique skills the company absolutely cannot afford to lose and must be retained at any price, but whatever it takes.

Second, we're talking about the latest incarnation of these guys.]

Only Trump can go to Nixonland?

To win the Republican nomination, Nixon told Dole, "you have to run as far as you can to the right because that's where 40% of the people who decide the nomination are. And to get elected you have to run as fast as you can back to the middle, because only about 4% of the nation's voters are on the extreme right wing."

Letters From Nixon Shape Dole's Campaign Strategy
LA Times, May 07, 1995

One of the things that struck me about the past two presidential elections was how completely the Nixon pivot had been taken off of the table. Both McCain and Romney dutifully followed the first step during the primaries, but whenever they tried to move back toward the center during the general election, the reaction from the base quickly sent them scurrying back to the right.

Conventional wisdom saw this in terms of ideological extremism but my take-away was quite different.  The GOP base has grown more conservative in the 21st century, but even taking that into account, their willingness to give their nominees any slack is much less than it was at any point in the second half of the 20th Century.

My argument is that this has relatively little to do with ideology and much to do with trust. Many in the base feel (with some justification) that the social contract with the party has been violated. They are no longer willing automatically to extend credit to their party's nominees.

With Trump, however, the Nixon pivot suddenly becomes not only viable but remarkably easy. He has a great personal bond with his supporters, his appeal is not particularly ideological, and he has been able to hold heterodox positions without paying a political penalty.

A pivot to the center would not even require covering any new territory. Trump's "platform" has been so erratic and unpredictable that all he would have to do would be to embrace some of the positions he held then implicitly or explicitly abandoned over the past 12 months. It would seem unlikely that significant portion of his core supporters would abandon him if he changed his mind once again and decided he was for high taxes on rich people.

Josh Marshall (one of the few journalists who has done a good job keeping up with the story) has recently started discussing a related scenario:

For committed conservatives, there is a real and I believe justified fear that Trump could come into office, be hardcore for a year or two and then pull what Arnold Schwarzenegger did in his latter years as governor of California. In other words, shape-shift into a sort of moderate, Bloombergesque sort of Republican. Republicans can tolerate than in New York where nothing better is on offer and perhaps in California too. But not in the White House.

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) is also suggesting that Trump might do something of a Nixon pivot and that it might work out well for the party.

"Ted Cruz is a rigid ideologue," Dent told the New York Times in an interview published on Tuesday. "Donald Trump is ideologically scattered and malleable. In my view, a more rigid ideology would have a much harder time assembling a winning general election coalition than the less doctrinaire candidate."

VFX paradox

In case you're coming in late, we have an ongoing thread about how, despite conventional wisdom about cost spirals, the part of film-making where technology has most increased productivity (visual special effects) is the same part that has been driving up budgets and delaying release dates.

One more example:

EXCLUSIVE: Focus Features is moving its action disaster pic London Has Fallen from the post MLK frame of January 22, 2016 to March 4, 2016. The first film, Olympus Has Fallen, went out in March 2013 becoming a surprise spring hit for its distributor Film District with a $30.4M opening weekend and a domestic cume of $98.9M.  London‘s release date change stems from a couple of factors, in particular, the film is coming off strong research screenings, making a spring break launch prime for the sequel.  In addition, more time is needed to complete the film’s VFX.