Tag: Narrative Collapse

Bad is Good

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I’ve read article after article by economists and lefty pundits screaming from the rooftops that the economy is phenomenally good.  It’s so good that only a partisan hack would deny that things are so great that we should skip the election and Joe Biden should be re-elected by acclamation right now.  Chris Hayes had a video in which by turns he was pugnaciously certain that very soon all the gloom and doomers would come around, followed by angrily exasperated that so many people keep expressing dissatisfaction in Biden job satisfaction polls.  “Who are these Putin stooges?” he seems to imply.  “How dare they complain about this incredible “all boats floating” Biden high tide?”

The last guy I read seemed to land on the idea that since the country is riven by dissent and partisan hatred that this is producing a climate of uncertainty that, in turn, leads to unhappiness with the economy and everything else.  It’s interesting that partisan hatred is the problem; not streets full of homeless squatters and rampant crime.  That’s just a rumor.

Now, all of this is just the political theater that goes on in a presidential election year.  When a Republican is the incumbent the media tells us the world is coming to an end.  And when the incumbent is a Dem then all they can say is that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world.  Huzzah!

And usually a goodly number of “moderates” will read these things and say, “Hey, these are smart guys.  This must be true.”

But not this time.

There is a very perceptible change in the mood of the country.  Joe Biden’s approval rating has been flirting with 30%.  That’s disastrous.  Now whenever that number is approached the Dems contract with one of the pliable polling companies to come up with a number closer to 40%.  And no one believes it, but if they do this a few times, it nudges the Real Clear Politics average safely away from the low 30’s.  But as I say, no one believes it.  The changes to the cost of living; food, shelter, fuel and general items has been disastrous for anyone not in the upper, upper middle class.  And for young people hoping to buy a home and start a family it’s apocalyptic.  Everywhere you look you see videos of despairing young people saying they had to give up their apartments and sometimes jobs because they can’t afford to live in the cities.  And young people have been Biden’s and the Democrats’ most reliable voters.  So, there’s no doubt about why this wonderful economy hasn’t been wowing the people being polled.

Okay, so what?

So, nothing maybe.  We know the Democrats can fabricate an enormous number of additional votes by fortifying democracy in urban centers like Philadelphia, Madison, Atlanta and Detroit.  Chances are that’s what they’ll do in November.  After a week or two of discovering bags of votes in the most unlikely places, they’ll wheel old Scranton Joe Biden out for his acceptance speech and Washington DC will get back to business as usual.  So that 30% approval rating might seem to have no practical meaning for us.

And in a sense, it doesn’t.  No one is going to storm the Capitol or the White House.  We’ve seen what happens to those people.  They’re sent to the gulag.  Nope, things are locked down.

And yet.

This is a different country.  Nobody believes the narrative any more.  Even the kids are waking up.  Everything is fake.  And that knowledge and that way of looking at the world will change the way this country performs.  We are becoming a low trust society (at least concerning the federal government and the blue states and cities).  And that changes things like armed forces enlistment and what kind of charities get supported and what organizations people volunteer for.  And it will have a huge impact on where people go to live.  The exodus from California and New York is just the beginning.  All of the states that have pushed the pediatric transgender “affirming treatment” will find that people with kids will think twice before moving there.  And all of the cities that now suffer from endemic theft and violence won’t be seeing much in the way of new residents (except of course for illegal immigrants looking for the expensive benefits of sanctuary).

So, a lot is going to change.  In fact, a lot has already changed because it had to.  The less stupid or less greedy Republican lawmakers already realized that the forever war grift no longer commands the reflexive patriotic approval.  Mike Johnson understands that even if Mitch McConnell is too ossified to see it.

So, things are going to be bad for Dementia Joe.  And that’s good.

When the Narrative Starts to Break Down

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New York City is an enormous place.  Something like eight million people live within the confines of the five boroughs and twelve million more live in the adjacent areas of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and even Pennsylvania that act as bedroom communities for the people who make a living off of that gigantic place.

And along with that enormity is an enormously difficult and dangerous job of keeping such a place safe.  Along with the NYPD there are the police departments of all the adjacent communities and the state troopers of New York and the adjacent states.  All told, there are tens of thousands of police officers in the New York City area but compare that to twenty million people and you realize the necessity for maintaining the respect and legitimacy of police officers in the New York City area.

Back when I was a young man living in New York in the nineteen seventies and eighties, crime was a frightening fact of life.  Even the “safe” neighborhoods had been invaded by violent criminals who “mugged” the unsuspecting and often weaker members of the community wherever the opportunity offered.  The democrat mayors of the city payed lip service to policing the problems but because of their dependence on votes from the African American and Latino communities they were careful never to embrace too openly the law and order aspect of the city’s responsibilities.  But when David Dinkins became the first African American mayor in 1990 his first responsibility was to his ethnic constituency and that ensured the effective handcuffing of the NYPD and gave a carte blanche to criminals.

But back then even New York liberals knew that unfettered criminality would destroy their home.  So, they did the unthinkable, they elected Rudy Giuliani mayor.  Giuliani was a republican and a former US Attorney who had prosecuted mafia bosses and high-profile criminals.  He put in place a highly effective neighborhood policing strategy that targeted both low level crime (broken windows offenses) and serious crime (robbery and violent crime) and in the space of a few years made New York City one of the safest big cities in the United States.  But being a republican, albeit a relatively liberal one, and having made his reputation by embracing law enforcement, the democratic City Council enacted term limits for the first time in city history to prevent him from governing for more than eight years.

His successor Michael Bloomberg ran as a republican (in name only) and saw the mayoral term limit law removed so that he could serve for twelve years.  Being a creature of the liberal establishment Bloomberg would often excoriate any police incident that showed up in the bleeding-heart liberal New York media.  But he was at least smart enough to mostly leave in place the police practices that Giuliani had pioneered.

But then two things happened.  Barack Obama became President of the Unites States and Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York.  Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder used the Justice Department to criminalize and prosecute police officers whenever an opportunity arose in the media that could be construed as police brutality against African American criminals.  It spawned the Black Lives Matters organization which was responsible for the deaths of police officers in several American cities.  But de Blasio embraced it and has effectively handcuffed police effectiveness in New York City.  As part of his police policy, “stop and frisk” and broken windows policing have been eliminated.  Due to this, quality of life crimes have started to proliferate again.  And more recently, violent crime, which until recently had been close to non-existent is becoming a day to day reality for the first time since the early nineteen nineties.

And that’s where we are today.  The progressives have a firm hold on New York City politics but the demographics of left-wing politics have changed.  New York is a minority majority city and the old left-wing ethnicities are no longer in control.  It may no longer be possible for a Rudy Giuliani type reformer to be brought in to clean up de Blasio’s crime problem.

When anti-Semitism against the easily recognizable Orthodox Jewish community is being perpetrated by African Americans, both on a day to day low level harassment basis and in deadly attacks as have recently occurred, it becomes difficult for de Blasio and the other New York progressives to get people to believe that white supremacists are responsible for the problem.  I mean he’ll still try, but as seen in that link, it’s getting a little thick.

So, where does this leave the New York Jewish community?  Their voting record, with exceptions, puts them squarely in line with progressive candidates on the local, state and national level.  So, essentially, they have themselves helped to create this monster by electing Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio to the positions that allowed them to hamstring the only entity that could have protected them, the New York Police Department.  And once the police saw that their bosses no longer had their backs, they stopped doing their jobs.  Why risk being sent to prison for trying to prevent crime?  Now they just clean up the pieces after the damage is done.

Some in the Jewish community are advocating for a return to sane police policy but the more pragmatic voices, knowing the reality of where they are, are calling for their communities to hire private armed security forces for their houses of worship.  And that is indeed highly ironic.  After eliminating the public security force that made it possible for all of New York City to thrive they now are forced to provide for themselves a private police force to protect them from the criminals they have empowered.

Those in the more upscale New York City communities were in the vanguard of movements such as Black Lives Matter and other initiatives begun during the Obama and de Blasio administrations.  Now they are living with the results of those movements.  Currently it is still at the periphery of their community, with the non-progressive elements such as the Orthodox community bearing the brunt of the problem.  But just as back in the 1980s these problems eventually find their way back to the “safe” neighborhoods.  The question for them will be what happens when the Narrative breaks down on their own doorstep?

 

“Narrative Collapse” or “And Now They Know That We Know it Too”

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As the Conservative Treehouse linked to the results of the Harvard-Harris monthly poll we find three very encouraging results.  Look at the answer percentages on these three questions:

Do you think current border security is adequate or inadequate? 61% Inadequate / 39% Adequate

Do you support or oppose building a combination of physical and electronic barriers across the U.S.-Mexico border?  60% Support / 40% Oppose

Do you think that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, known as ICE, should be disbanded or not?   31% Disbanded / 69% Not Disbanded

And this poll skews to the left with 37% Democrat, 32% Republican and 29% Independent.  Look at that number, 60% support building a wall.  That represents basically all the Republicans and all the Independents.  But if you go to the Harris Poll site and look up Harvard Harris you’ll see this headline:

“Latest Harvard-Harris Poll Finds More than 6 in 10 Registered Voters Oppose Border Wall Between U.S. and Mexico.”

But that’s the opposite result.  How can that be?  Well the poll they tout was taken back in April and preceded this one.  But wait a minute, you might say, how could 20% of the country change its mind in a month or two?  And you would be right.  That doesn’t happen.  The older poll reflects what we’ve been fed from pollsters for the last decade.  Americans want more immigration and they love those whacky, fun-loving drug runners from M13.  We can’t get enough of their idiosyncratic drive by machine gunning and intimidation of our high school children.  What’s not to love?

So how did the new headline occur?  I don’t think you’ll find a documented answer that makes sense.  I’ll give you my theory.

The narrative collapsed.

The people who put out these polls have a pretty wide latitude when it comes to selecting the participants, phrasing the questions and massaging the data they receive.  And I think they use this elasticity to produce results like the 99.9% certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.  So, I’m guessing that the difference between the April poll and the June poll was relatively large, not twenty percent but maybe five percent.  But my guess is that the real percentages in those two polls were 65% and 70%.  But you’d say, wait a minute, that’s impossible.  How could a 65% majority for the wall be turned into a 40% minority?  That’s a 25% inaccuracy.  And why then would they not just adjust the 70% to 45%.  My theory is they’ve been maintaining the same narrative that they fabricated to prop up the Obama presidency and they juiced it as hard as they could during the Clinton campaign and they held out hope that the Resistance would bring down Trump’s popularity and allow his presidency to collapse.  But the numbers keep moving farther and farther in the other direction and now they’re literally afraid of being caught cooking the books and losing their gig.  After all, other pollsters are already showing different results on these same poll questions and it must be getting a little thick for our friends at Harris and Gallup.  They don’t want to be the ones flapping in the breeze when the next Brexit or Trumpocalypse occurs.  It might mean having to get real jobs.  So the jig is up and they’ll have to start only slightly slightly tipping the scales, let’s say 5 to 10%.

And that got me thinking, what would it look like if the narrative collapsed completely?  And what would it take to cause that implosion?  My guess is that what would cause the implosion would be the success of the Trump Revolution.  Specifically, if the Republicans hold onto the House and expand their lead in the Senate and use this majority to provide President Trump with the funds to build the wall and enforce the immigration laws and the country supports this effort by re-electing him convincingly, then all of this would be enough to collapse the Narrative completely.

So this is the long answer for why those poll answers seem so different from expectations.  But there’s a short answer too.  A one-word answer.  Trump.

Ever since the primary debates he’s been telling us the Emperor’s New Clothes are fake news.  Jeb! told us that illegal immigration was love.  Trump told us it was crime.  The Media and the pollsters said Trump was part of a small, shrinking, bigoted minority.  The election showed that wasn’t so.  He keeps hammering away at the lies and evasions.  And he’s definitely winning.  And they know it.  And now they know that we know it too.