monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

@Baldimo,

Yup. And he went on to be a substitute teacher. Everyone expected him to be much more politically active in his youth and right after the terrific eulogy for his father there was a lot of noise about him ... and nothing ... for well over a decade.

The party changed direction after his father. Justin wasn't part of the Liberal party's power group of the last three decades. He worked around them -won the party leadership. Then the party tanked completely in the next election. The NDP was expected to win the most recent federal election. It was theirs to lose. Justin shook everyone up. None of the Conservative's regular negative campaigning worked - it backfired spectacularly (they should have known better - their last round of negative campaigning gave Canada Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien).

Both major opposition parties are now looking for new leaders. He changed the political landscape here completely.

__

He's more like a throwback to his maternal grandfather than to his father. His father was a politician I respected. I can appreciate Justin for what he's done as a politician but I'm not a fan of most of his platform.

(I know - tmi but I rarely indulge like this Smile

)

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

But whom should I study?

Justin Trudeau. Take a look at how he upended Stephen Harper - to the point Mr. Harper left the leadership.

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@cicerone imposter,

Yep, nothing but BS from you.

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Arendt is worth attending to here regarding notions we might come on the "inevitability" of outcomes (for example, Trump's win or Sanders' following):

Quote:

The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don’t know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history.

Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages—had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?

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@ehBeth,

Quote:

(I know - tmi but I rarely indulge like this Smile )

Hardly tmi.

That's an interesting example here, beth. As Arendt suggest, his incredible win looks inevitable only after it happened. I can lay out some version of the line of causation that got us here but only after the fact. Here in BC, we thought (pretty much everyone) that Clark's reign was done for. Joke's on us.

Perhaps you are thinking of youth and charisma (and the inherent supposition that comes of "fresh start" and rejection of an older, more staid or encrusted generation)? He's certainly like his father in those as factors in his win.

Edit: but I should note that this seems to me more a marketing or presentation factor than anything else. If you took all of Hillary's political ideas and repackaged them in a 35 year old redhead, what would the last election have looked like?

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@blatham,

I don't think youth and charisma did it. It didn't hurt but his messaging was what people were talking about. I hadn't heard that much political chat on the sidewalks and porches of my neighbourhood in the 20 years I've been here. People talked about election issues.

Canadian politicians generally skew younger than those in the US but the last election was amazing. In our riding we had 4 very young candidates walking up and down the streets talking to people constantly. Some days we'd see 2 of them on our block - and they engaged - they asked a lot of questions - and when they were asked questions they didn't know answers to, they got answers and came back. I haven't seen anything like that before.

My mother campaigned for Trudeau in the 60's and took me along as a canvasser for him as well as Committee for an Independent Canada. I was in the midst of Trudeaumania as a kid. Met PET back in the day.

Trudeaumania was a thing, but Justin's campaign was about a lot more than personality (and I still didn't vote for him Smile

).

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

If you took all of Hillary's political ideas and repackaged them in a 35 year old redhead, what would the last election have looked like?

I don't think stale ideas in a young person would have made a difference.

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@blatham,

Quote:

But whom should I study?

:-)

Interesting question, at several levels. I'm tired so will just throw in a few things. One is that past philosophers and thinkers could only base anything they said based upon past history; they could not predict the future and thus cannot help us much politically.

Anyway, as Merleau-Ponty once put it, the politics of philosophers is that which no one follows. Same more or less is true for political scientists: their thinking is slave to past ideas and views, too preachy to be operative, too fact-based to allow for the invention of any new dream. And yet if we don't dream our future, somedy else will dream it for us... his way.

So whom should you study? My primary response is Study life. Listen to what ordinary people around you say. Read the international news for parallels. Don't rely too much on intellectuals at this point. They are as lost as anybody else.

Listen perhaps more intently to what Sanders said.

Then if you REALLY want to read stuff, Piketty is the hot thing these days.

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@ehBeth,

I helped out back then too though not old enough to vote. We smoked weed and plastered posters up the Fraser Canyon and tried to get into bed with the pretty girls in orange skirts. A hell of a summer, that one.

Why do you suppose Justin's campaign brought out a lot of younger volunteers, candidates and voters? What did you hear him saying that caught their attention? (though we both know it wasn't just younger Canadians who voted for him just as it wasn't just younger Canadians who supported his father).

Sanders brought out a lot of younger people too, of course. Trump, on the other hand, relied and relies on a base that is mainly my age. What do you see going on here?

1 Reply

@blatham,

blatham wrote:

Why do you suppose Justin's campaign brought out a lot of younger volunteers, candidates and voters?

ít didn't. our politicians have historically been younger. Look at Joe Clark. Even Stephen Harper was about the same age as Justin Trudeau when first sworn in.

The previous federal election had an enormous crowd of young candidates running under Jack Layton's banner. Several of them had to leave university to serve.

You have to look at Trudeau's messaging, not his style.

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@Olivier5,

I read a lot but I consider economics to be rather like the dark and dangerous forest in fairy tales (by which I don't mean to imply "false" but rather that I just won't come out alive and uneaten).

I did listen to Sanders but came away unconvinced that the conditions were in place that would allow him to get from his A to his desired B.

Edit: ps... I do appreciate how well respected he is.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

So whom should you study? My primary response is Study life. Listen to what ordinary people around you say. Read the international news for parallels. Don't rely too much on intellectuals at this point.

exactly.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

Quote:

You have to look at Trudeau's messaging, not his style.

Don't mean to press you but I'm not getting this. I admit that my attention for years has been down south rather than to home. Can you give me some notions of what you perceived his messaging to be during the campaign that worked so well for him?

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@blatham,

I'm no fan of economy either but facts are facts and the economy sustains everything else.

Irrespective of what you thought of Sanders as presidential material, listen to what he said about lobbies, wealth concentration, etc. The message, not the man. It is the strength and public resonance of this message which made his run viable, against all apparent odds. Washington IS broken. It is paid-for.

(another piece that shaped my views on this is this study by political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern)

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@Olivier5,

That link got me to some Italian error page (never been there before, lovely views of the Mediterranean, though) and a link to a New Yorker piece by Cassidy on the US as oligarchy.

I really have no problem with that description of how power works in America (and elsewhere). It is what I hold to be the case (though in Trump, we have something far worse and more threatening).

I'm beginning to suspect that our notions aren't greatly different though we probably differ on how to get out of the situation. But that's a commonplace species of disagreement and I'm not uncomfortable that we manifest it.

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@Olivier5,

What do you blame for the shift of weath to the already wealthy?

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@blatham,

Think of Obama's appeal to hope.

Trudeau's messaging was positive. He stepped right over the Conservatives negative ads, much as Chretien did. It worked.

The messaging was primarily about what was going to be done, rather than what they were not going to do. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/justin-trudeau-year-one-1.3811125
we will restore funding
we can etc

Harper went with a lot of : we can't, we won't, you can't, he can't etc. Lots of nos in the Conservative messaging.

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Winner of our "Mistakes-Were-Made" award

Quote:

In New Jersey, the latest Quinnipiac poll found Gov. Chris Christie (R) with an approval rating of just 17%. That's one of the lowest I've ever seen, and it's lower than Richard Nixon's at the height of Watergate.

Steve Benen

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@ehBeth,

Right. That differentiation I was aware of. But it seems to me that positive/negative frame was the case in the US election as well. My supposition was that (for the reasons we all know, including age and and her long period in the public eye) Hillary couldn't really pull that off credibly.

I have to run again. Thanks for the conversation, madam.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

Olivier5 wrote:
So whom should you study? My primary response is Study life. Listen to what ordinary people around you say. Read the international news for parallels. Don't rely too much on intellectuals at this point.

exactly.

I find this all really ******* condescending and assumptive.

1 Reply

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