OK, my comment which was "awaiting approval" has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn't gain approval. If so, lj, I think it's important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.
I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links - hopefully here in blue - and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here's cup of tea. But although I don't know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon "cluster of attitudes", and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.
How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid
It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side - and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way - it was just politics, after all - but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.
High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).
Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators - a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.
My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left - see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.) In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination. We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort. Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views - a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions. After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more - way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists. Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious. We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.
In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side - content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place - given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns - and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.
Fun stuff all! The line about Wagner's music is credited to Mark Twain, but a quick gemini check says it was something that Twain quoted of Bill Nye (Not the Science Guy, Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye)
About the synch, I don't really notice is. I don't know if this video has the same synch issues, but it shows Solti in rehearsal and in concert.
Some may recognize the Overture to Tannhauser as the melody that Elmer and Bug sing a love song to each other as Siegfried and Brunhilde. Sadly, What's Opera, Doc is no longer on Youtube.
Bob Altemeyer’s work is less well known than it should be. His research was primarily about authoritarian followers, that is, the people who follow authoritarian leaders. He was warning about the direction the United States was headed in 2006, long before Trump. You can read his last book at this link: https://theauthoritarians.org/
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, sources close to President Donald Trump revealed that he had not yet given up hope that he could win a Nobel Prize in Literature for his latest Truth Social post.
"I'm the only president that uses Truth Social, did you know that? The only one," Trump said. "And I've got some real bangers, let me tell you. Take this most recent one about China. I really scorched those Chinamen. It's a long post. Did you see it? It was almost like writing a book. It was really something." It’s Not Over Yet: Trump Still Hoping For Nobel In Literature For Latest Truth Social Post
Also, if you (or you minions acting on your wishes) order an attack on a vessel in international waters, in contravention of both international law and the laws of your own country, that is going to be pretty much an automatic dis-qualification. If you routinely rant and bluster had loudly threaten in all directions, that isn't going to have a positive impact on the Peace Prize committee.
In short, it's fairly certain that, since he can't fire the committe and replace them with sycophants, he's SOL. Probably permanently.
The Nobel committee is generally swayed by the peaceful delivery of increased individual rights. In addition to his personal antipathy to that idea, Trump is laboring under the handicap of a Supreme Court that is determined to reduce individual rights, not expand them.
@nous, it would be interesting to see the conductor during the actual performance. My impression of the rehearsal is that he's focusing more on individual bits, sort of "remember what I want here" to a particular section of the orchestra. During an actual concert, the conductor is performing for the audience more than directing the musicians.
@wonkie, I forget who said it but, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." :^)
"Ride of the Valkyries" is excellent for the soundtrack of certain sorts of movie scenes, and has been used often for that purpose, probably most famously for the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. (Or perhaps for the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", often referred to as "Kill the Wabbit".) But it's only five minutes out of a five-hour opera. And even in five minutes it suffers from repeated cases of "Oh, yes, there's supposed to be a melody here someplace, isn't there?"
Personally, I think Wagner could have been brilliant writing movie scores where the running time constraint was imposed on him. Think John Williams' score for the original Star Wars, very much in the Wagner mold, and often cited as the best movie score ever written.
My go-to lately for listening is Milt Jackson. Been trying to get some vibes happening, he's more or less the beginning of the modern period on that instrument.
Have also been stumbling through a lot of jazz standards on the piano. Not to perform - I will never be a competent pianist - but just to get an understanding of the harmonic language.
Don't know if I'll live long enough to get anywhere that all of that, but I like it.
Other than pedagogical listening, I continue to be drawn to early European art music. Basically the modal counterpoint from the very late middle ages to the early pre-Baroque Renaissance. Dufay, Machaut, et al. That music is sophisticated but so accessible, and has (to my ear) a very direct emotional impulse. My wife sings with a choir whose director is also a fan of that period, I sometimes get to provide percussion accompaniment, which is always a lot of fun.
I found the video interesting in pieces, but the combination of a uncertain sync between video and audio and the lower fidelity of the audio made it hard for me to stay focused. It made Solti's conducting feel less than intuitive and had me constantly wondering if what he was signaling was the moment I was hearing.
Chasing down the audio recording in full fidelity on Apple Music and losing the video completely eliminated that feeling of disorientation, as did chasing down a more recent live performance video from Dudamel where the conducting seemed better matched to the audio.
Between watching that and another performance with Gatti conducting, I started to really get a sense for the different impressions that one can get based on where one's visual attention is drawn. The gaze plays a powerful role in what the ear seems to hear in these videos.
Solti's Bayreuth Ring* (his first I think) had a making-of made as a feature of its own.
A film team officially accompanied the production and the rehearsals. Something quite uncommon at the time. In addition there was an audio feature using the recordings to explain Wagner's leitmotif technique in detail.
*that's where the clip comes from if I am not mistaken
One thing that I have found effective in teaching is that the moments when I am being critical of something are always more powerful for the class when I can find a way to tell them from the perspective of "we," rather than "I," and when that narrative incorporates how "I" learned to view the problem through a perspective that helps put "us" back in a position with more agency to address "our" problem.
That, and starting with questions and listening rather than with advice and instructions seem to be the magic mix.
Funny. It sounds triumphant to me, but maybe because I associate with the film "Excalibur." It is a triumphant scene, so whoever selected it for the soundtrack must have agreed with me. And I like it. To me, it's kind of metal. \m/
This post was about how Dem pols should talk and I firmly believe they should be VERY LOUD AND HARSH IN THEIR CRITICISMS of the R party. Use the F word. Actually, both of them.
However, I don't think they should say anything about MAGAs and should talk to them. The goal must be to defuse the polarization.
As for me, I have MAGA friends and acquaintances and no desire to hurt their feelings. However, I also think that I'm not going to be complicit. At all. So, I post stuff on FB that flat out contradicts a lot of MAGA beliefs. For example, I posted an article about Saint Charlie of Free Speech for Conservatives Only and how people who criticized him have been attacked. At least one of my FB friends loves Kirk.
We still seem to be friends.
My biggest complaint about the assessment culture that has set in across academia (and the overall rise of big quant that coincides with the monetization of big data) is that there are a lot more people with the tools to gather and measure the data than there are people who have the understanding, expertise, and rigor to tease out when the things we measure actually measure the right things.
I'm interested in reading Limits of the Numerical one of these days: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo146791774.html
It seems the sort of book that can take on the technocratic push for quantitative over qualitative data gathering and analysis. I find that the voices that most often get amplified in management meetings dealing in quantitative assessment are the voices that are on the wrong side of Einstein's admonition that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
My natural impulses don't always tend toward kindness, but I made a rational decision at some point that I should try to be kind because it seems to be the best way to live, both for the people around me and myself. (That's not to say I don't regularly fail at it, but it's still a goal I strive for.)
That said, it can be complicated. You aren't being kind to someone when you allow someone else to be unkind that person if you're in a position to do something about it. You also can't be kind to one person when someone else will suffer for it, at least when that suffering outweighs the kindness.
How can I (or anyone) be kind to someone who is MAGA? That's generally complicated because the MAGA movement is largely unkind. What I'm talking about here is something other than, say, helping someone who is broken down on the side of the road if they have a tRump bumper sticker. I do mean how you interact where politics is involved somehow.
I don't know. Maybe it's not possible. To take it to an extreme, how could you be kind to tRump, himself? I write his name "tRump." It doesn't really affect him because he's almost certainly never going to see it, but it still isn't kind, right? Am I failing, or is he not deserving of kindness?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
OK, my comment which was "awaiting approval" has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn't gain approval. If so, lj, I think it's important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.
"
I have just copied something quite long, which is "awaiting approval". I don't know why - maybe the length.
"
I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links - hopefully here in blue - and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here's cup of tea. But although I don't know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon "cluster of attitudes", and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.
How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment
Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid
It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side - and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way - it was just politics, after all - but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.
High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).
Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators - a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.
My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left - see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.)
In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination.
We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort.
Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views - a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions.
After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more - way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists.
Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious.
We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.
In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side - content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place - given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns - and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.
On “Bathtub Bug is Dead”
Woodlouse - Types, Habitat, Diet, Lifespan, Life Cycle, & Pictures
"
wonkie, you can't just leave it there! What kind of crustacean?
On “Weekend music thread #1”
Fun stuff all! The line about Wagner's music is credited to Mark Twain, but a quick gemini check says it was something that Twain quoted of Bill Nye (Not the Science Guy, Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye)
About the synch, I don't really notice is. I don't know if this video has the same synch issues, but it shows Solti in rehearsal and in concert.
https://youtu.be/2L85eTSWrmg?si=ZhwNpAPkM4weqDyu
Some may recognize the Overture to Tannhauser as the melody that Elmer and Bug sing a love song to each other as Siegfried and Brunhilde. Sadly, What's Opera, Doc is no longer on Youtube.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
Bob Altemeyer’s work is less well known than it should be. His research was primarily about authoritarian followers, that is, the people who follow authoritarian leaders. He was warning about the direction the United States was headed in 2006, long before Trump. You can read his last book at this link: https://theauthoritarians.org/
On “…..”
Charles, that's an impressive imitation of the Onion. Well done! (It's really hard to parody him)
"
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, sources close to President Donald Trump revealed that he had not yet given up hope that he could win a Nobel Prize in Literature for his latest Truth Social post.
"I'm the only president that uses Truth Social, did you know that? The only one," Trump said. "And I've got some real bangers, let me tell you. Take this most recent one about China. I really scorched those Chinamen. It's a long post. Did you see it? It was almost like writing a book. It was really something."
It’s Not Over Yet: Trump Still Hoping For Nobel In Literature For Latest Truth Social Post
"
Also, if you (or you minions acting on your wishes) order an attack on a vessel in international waters, in contravention of both international law and the laws of your own country, that is going to be pretty much an automatic dis-qualification. If you routinely rant and bluster had loudly threaten in all directions, that isn't going to have a positive impact on the Peace Prize committee.
In short, it's fairly certain that, since he can't fire the committe and replace them with sycophants, he's SOL. Probably permanently.
"
The Nobel committee is generally swayed by the peaceful delivery of increased individual rights. In addition to his personal antipathy to that idea, Trump is laboring under the handicap of a Supreme Court that is determined to reduce individual rights, not expand them.
"
No prize for Donald. The world is so unfair, to him most of all.
Better luck next year.
On “Weekend music thread #1”
@nous, it would be interesting to see the conductor during the actual performance. My impression of the rehearsal is that he's focusing more on individual bits, sort of "remember what I want here" to a particular section of the orchestra. During an actual concert, the conductor is performing for the audience more than directing the musicians.
"
@wonkie, I forget who said it but, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." :^)
"Ride of the Valkyries" is excellent for the soundtrack of certain sorts of movie scenes, and has been used often for that purpose, probably most famously for the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. (Or perhaps for the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", often referred to as "Kill the Wabbit".) But it's only five minutes out of a five-hour opera. And even in five minutes it suffers from repeated cases of "Oh, yes, there's supposed to be a melody here someplace, isn't there?"
Personally, I think Wagner could have been brilliant writing movie scores where the running time constraint was imposed on him. Think John Williams' score for the original Star Wars, very much in the Wagner mold, and often cited as the best movie score ever written.
"
My go-to lately for listening is Milt Jackson. Been trying to get some vibes happening, he's more or less the beginning of the modern period on that instrument.
Have also been stumbling through a lot of jazz standards on the piano. Not to perform - I will never be a competent pianist - but just to get an understanding of the harmonic language.
Don't know if I'll live long enough to get anywhere that all of that, but I like it.
Other than pedagogical listening, I continue to be drawn to early European art music. Basically the modal counterpoint from the very late middle ages to the early pre-Baroque Renaissance. Dufay, Machaut, et al. That music is sophisticated but so accessible, and has (to my ear) a very direct emotional impulse. My wife sings with a choir whose director is also a fan of that period, I sometimes get to provide percussion accompaniment, which is always a lot of fun.
"
I found the video interesting in pieces, but the combination of a uncertain sync between video and audio and the lower fidelity of the audio made it hard for me to stay focused. It made Solti's conducting feel less than intuitive and had me constantly wondering if what he was signaling was the moment I was hearing.
Chasing down the audio recording in full fidelity on Apple Music and losing the video completely eliminated that feeling of disorientation, as did chasing down a more recent live performance video from Dudamel where the conducting seemed better matched to the audio.
Between watching that and another performance with Gatti conducting, I started to really get a sense for the different impressions that one can get based on where one's visual attention is drawn. The gaze plays a powerful role in what the ear seems to hear in these videos.
"
Solti's Bayreuth Ring* (his first I think) had a making-of made as a feature of its own.
A film team officially accompanied the production and the rehearsals. Something quite uncommon at the time. In addition there was an audio feature using the recordings to explain Wagner's leitmotif technique in detail.
*that's where the clip comes from if I am not mistaken
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
One thing that I have found effective in teaching is that the moments when I am being critical of something are always more powerful for the class when I can find a way to tell them from the perspective of "we," rather than "I," and when that narrative incorporates how "I" learned to view the problem through a perspective that helps put "us" back in a position with more agency to address "our" problem.
That, and starting with questions and listening rather than with advice and instructions seem to be the magic mix.
On “Weekend music thread #1”
Okay, it's not me. Doesn't like backslash.
"
That is "\m/."
"
Funny. It sounds triumphant to me, but maybe because I associate with the film "Excalibur." It is a triumphant scene, so whoever selected it for the soundtrack must have agreed with me. And I like it. To me, it's kind of metal. \m/
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
This post was about how Dem pols should talk and I firmly believe they should be VERY LOUD AND HARSH IN THEIR CRITICISMS of the R party. Use the F word. Actually, both of them.
However, I don't think they should say anything about MAGAs and should talk to them. The goal must be to defuse the polarization.
As for me, I have MAGA friends and acquaintances and no desire to hurt their feelings. However, I also think that I'm not going to be complicit. At all. So, I post stuff on FB that flat out contradicts a lot of MAGA beliefs. For example, I posted an article about Saint Charlie of Free Speech for Conservatives Only and how people who criticized him have been attacked. At least one of my FB friends loves Kirk.
We still seem to be friends.
On “Weekend music thread #1”
That's so apocalyptic, JP. Does it reflect your state of mind? I think I would tear my ears off if I had to listen to that all day.
Paul and I are the opposite; our home is nearly always silent. No radio, no TV.
On “Chinese corruption”
My biggest complaint about the assessment culture that has set in across academia (and the overall rise of big quant that coincides with the monetization of big data) is that there are a lot more people with the tools to gather and measure the data than there are people who have the understanding, expertise, and rigor to tease out when the things we measure actually measure the right things.
I'm interested in reading Limits of the Numerical one of these days: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo146791774.html
It seems the sort of book that can take on the technocratic push for quantitative over qualitative data gathering and analysis. I find that the voices that most often get amplified in management meetings dealing in quantitative assessment are the voices that are on the wrong side of Einstein's admonition that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
My natural impulses don't always tend toward kindness, but I made a rational decision at some point that I should try to be kind because it seems to be the best way to live, both for the people around me and myself. (That's not to say I don't regularly fail at it, but it's still a goal I strive for.)
That said, it can be complicated. You aren't being kind to someone when you allow someone else to be unkind that person if you're in a position to do something about it. You also can't be kind to one person when someone else will suffer for it, at least when that suffering outweighs the kindness.
How can I (or anyone) be kind to someone who is MAGA? That's generally complicated because the MAGA movement is largely unkind. What I'm talking about here is something other than, say, helping someone who is broken down on the side of the road if they have a tRump bumper sticker. I do mean how you interact where politics is involved somehow.
I don't know. Maybe it's not possible. To take it to an extreme, how could you be kind to tRump, himself? I write his name "tRump." It doesn't really affect him because he's almost certainly never going to see it, but it still isn't kind, right? Am I failing, or is he not deserving of kindness?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.