2018-06-26

Establishment Collapse: Trump Rises in Polls, Harley Workers Support Him

It's too early to say it is over, but the pedophrasty and moral panic over the child separation at the border could mark the real turning point for the establishment and The Narrative. President Trump's poll numbers went up, not down.

BI: Trump's poll numbers are surging as he faces some of the biggest controversies of his presidency
But even as some officials in the Trump administration are shouted out of restaurants and called fascists to their face, Trump's polling numbers have been steady — even rising — over the past several weeks.

Both a Gallup poll and the RealClearPolitics average of polls put Trump around a 45% approval rating, with that number rising steadily throughout June. That's just 1 point lower than President Barack Obama polled at this point in his presidency.

Over the same period, Trump's border practices drove at least one mainstream news anchor to tears and sparked round-the-clock coverage of family separations. Other than Trump's policy of separating migrant families at the border, which he reversed amid the scrutiny, analysts say his overall immigration policy looks a lot like Obama's.
Trump is also rising in Florida, a key state in the presidential election: Poll: Trump approval numbers rising in Florida

Only a week ago, amid the crisis, I posted: GOP Can Sweep Midterms With Hardline Immigration. And not too surprisingly, Trump shifted from sounding conciliatory amid the moral panic to a hardline on illegal immigration: Trump Goes All-in on Immigration, Moral Panic Intensifies

This week Trump further escalated saying he wants illegal aliens who cross the border illegally to be immediately deported. No court cases: Trump says illegal immigrants should be deported with 'no judges or court cases'

Meanwhile at Harley-Davidson, the workers are siding with Trump and against management.

ZH: Most Harley-Davidson Workers Back Trump, Blame Only The EU
But this decision hasn't translated into worker anger directed at the president. An informal survey of workers during a smoke break at the factory by the FT found that most - if not all - support President Trump's bid to revive American manufacturing by instigating a trade fight, even if Harley's EU sales have risen as a percentage of the company's overall sales in recent years.
As I've warned, negative social mood will tend to support a trade war. When mood is negative, conflict and tensions rise. If the public enters "war mode" on the trade war, then they will not care about economic losses in the short-term anymore than they care about losing lives, material and wealth in a real war. Real wars are as stupid as trade wars using strict accounting. Yet countries repeatedly go to war.

Independent Analysis

Let me take a moment to review some predictions made on this blog. I said immigration would become a big issue at least as far back as 2012. That's the earliest post I could find, although I'd been thinking about it longer. By 2014 I warned it was going to hit the U.S. In 2014, I saw President Trump coming. I bet on him to win. I made a ton of money doing it. I saw yuan devaluation coming long before it happened and in my opinion, the big devaluation hasn't happened yet (nor is it due to the trade war). I saw a trade war with China coming, along with the breakdown of popular and academic support for free trade. Back at least as far as 2014, when I wrote that post. I saw the coalition that would bring Trump to power. I saw the Treasury and Washington descending, manufacturing and national security ascendant.

I don't own a time machine and I don't have occult powers. I have a couple advantages on the experts though. One is I don't believe The Narrative.

Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams
Bigoteering

Originates with Tim Ferriss, describes tagging someone (or someone’s opinions) as “racist”, “chauvinist” or somethinglikeit-ist in situations where these are not warranted. This is a shoddy manipulation to exploit the stigmas accompanying such labels and force the opponent to spent time and energy explaining “why he/she is not a bigot”.

Note that it is the true victims of racism that are insulted by virtue-peddling bigoteers.

Example: Both the Kurds who are asking for independence and the Arabs who refuse to grant it accuse one another of “racism”. Likewise, Arabists accuse localists (such as those who claim Phoenician or Coptic culture and habits away from Arab domination) of racism, forgetting that Arabism is grounded in a fundamentally imperialist and supremacist ideology. A localist wants others to leave him alone (leave me alone, I leave you alone, thus executing the moral symmetry of the silver rule), while Arabists want non-Sunni minorities to be their dhimmi servants or second class citizens under the cover of “nonsectarianism”.
The establishment in the West is in full on collapse. Fundamental collapse down to its core. This is a multi-century event, not a short-term one. Flaws in the Enlightenment are being exposed by science, and yet most of the establishment doesn't even believe in the Enlightenment anymore, at least not the American founders' version. They believe in equality, the French Revolution version that unleased communism and fascism in the 20th Century. On the other side, anyone who points out the Emperor Has No Clothes is hit with a bigoteering attack. The Establishment and The Narrative are doing industrial-scale bigoteering.

It's not enough to realize The Narrative creates a false picture of reality. The next step is trying to see reality clearly. To do that, you need a highly objective way of organizing and sorting through information. To make predictions, you need a way to model the future. Demographic changes and similar data are useful, but a key variable that has helped me is Socionomic theory. It posits that mood drives and influences human society. It allows you to make two predictions, one for a rising mood and one for a falling mood. Since mood was trending negative, I could predict trade wars were coming. I could see that immigration policy was extremist and going to blow up in the establishment's face. If social mood was rising, I would not predict a trade war or immigration restrictions. Candidate Trump would have fizzled out like Dick Gephart and Pat Buchanan did in the last 1980s and early 1990s. Trump's message wasn't far removed from those candidates, but his vote total was because social mood had declined greatly over three decades.

Nassim Taleb calls much of the establishment "intellectual yet idiots" or IYIs. Not every mainstream expert or pundit is clueless, but there's a very good chance many are dummies parroting The Narrative to protect their sinecure. When someone argues that mass immigration policy is a net negative, the "establishment" doesn't dig into the numbers to find out the truth. They call the person a racist or a Nazi and move along. Even if the people doing this at the start were smart, it has really dumbed down the establishment over the decades. Opponents of The Narrative have to debate from a young age and never stop. The Establishment lives in a safe space where debate is forbidden. Opponents have to dig and find every piece of evidence for every one of their claims. The Establishment can call you a name and "win."

I'll finish with another prediction. Many people think Trump will lose support if the stock market falls and the U.S. economy goes into recession. Yet look how the workers at Harley are responding to a tough economic situation. They aren't bolting from Trump, they're supporting him more. When/if the stock market crashes or goes into a bear market, and there's some fraud uncovered, shenanigans, the Federal Reserve drops the ball as it always does...President Trump won't bail them out. He might jail them. After seeing the establishment defend Wall Street at the expense of Main Street for a decade, do you think voters would run from Trump, or embrace him all the more tightly?

Once voters have a non-establishment choice they will vote for it. Italy's new government has picked a fight with the EU on immigration and moved towards deporting all migrants in their country. The parties are polling at a combined 60 percent. They are the new political establishment in Italy. Support may even rise if mood turns more negative and the economy sours because economics declines as an issue. Moreover, 10 years of a depression makes voters less sensitive to economic pain. If the stock market falls 50 percent, many of the populist voters won't notice. They are on government assistance or work in jobs that are recession resistant because any job that isn't is already gone. They might see things like gas prices and rents go down.

It goes against everything I've witnessed in politics to this point, but the old model of politics doesn't work anymore. These are "revolutionary" times. Even still, it's a stretch. I offer it as an extreme example of how far mainstream thinking is from actual events. Whether I would bet on support rising in an economic downturn depends on the odds offered. Everything is a probability. That said, I'm rather confident that if the economy weakens, the establishment and The Narrative will be out screaming its the end of Trump or whatever "populist" is in power at the time, and that will make for some pretty good odds.


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