The outsized influence of woke ideology

 Yes, the troglodytes of Trumpism/neo-Trumpism have had a field day with the fact that Joe Biden must make good on his campaign pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, but he now has to act resolute in his determination to follow through, doesn't he? He can talk all he wants to about finding a rigorous Constitutional scholar who is also a black woman, but it sure looks like raw affirmative action to a lot of people.

As in across the board:

. . . just over three-quarters of Americans (76%) want Biden to consider "all possible nominees." Just 23% want him to automatically follow through on his history-making commitment that the White House seems keen on seeing through. At a ceremony honoring the retiring justice, Biden told reporters he is able to honor his promise without compromising on quality.

. . . Although the poll's sample size was not large enough to break out results for Black people, only a little more than 1 in 4 nonwhite Americans (28%) wish for Biden to consider only Black women for the vacancy. Democrats are more supportive of Biden's vow (46%) than Americans as a whole, but still a majority of Democrats (54%) also prefer that Biden consider all possible nominees.

Longtime Democratic apparatchik James Carville cites some statistics that his party would do well to consider:

Carville said in [an interview with Vox] that only 6 percent of adults and about 12 percent of Democrats identify as "progressive."

Why does identity-politics militancy and wokeness in general hold such sway over our culture and public policy, then? N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval explains that it is a matter of twenty factors. I won't excerpt from each one, but some of his discussions thereof merit a look:

2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. I mean, did the gaping hole of meaning in people’s lives created by the uprooting forces of secular liquid modernity get resolved in some alternative way while we weren’t looking? You know, the spiritual void that this creepy chimeric faith-ideology and its romantic political crusades rushed to fill in the first place? Has there been some kind of genuine, organized religious revival? Has decadent nihilism stopped being the defining sentiment of the age? Did the young even become hyper-nationalists or revolutionary Marxist class-warriors instead? Have they found an alternative passionate heroic narrative to act out in some new Davos slide deck? No. And in fact, meanwhile, it also seems that…

3. Social atomization hasn’t reversed. It sure seems like the kind of robust communities, civic associations, and “little platoons” which once served to fortify society against the revolutionary (per Burke) and totalitarian (per Arendt) forces that thrive on atomization haven’t suddenly been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact even the most basic such unit, family formation, appears to be continuing to declineprecipitously. And that may be because…

4. Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity. That is: liberalism made the autonomy of the individual its highest good. To maximize individual autonomy, the state therefore found itself obliged (being unable to resist claims that it must enforce an expanding array of rights) to exercise its power to help progressively liberate the individual from all limits and constraints, including from tradition, religion, geography, community, family, and nature itself. (This is certainly deserving of more argument than I have space to recap here; see “Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution” for a bit more.) Liberalism has thus acted as a centrifugal force, severing all the centripetal counter-forces that once kept individuals connected to recognizably human communities and launching them outward towards solitary orbits where they can drift cold and alone in their pods.

From this perspective it is more obvious why the amorphous ideology referred to as “Wokeness” so often seems mixed up and chaotically self-contradictory: it is the confused response to two opposite instincts. On the one hand it is actually a kind of anti-liberal reactionary movement, a blind, emotional scramble to grasp desperately for collectivism in the most basic, tribal sort of community seemingly still available: in identity groups, and in fixed racial identity in particular. But, on the other hand, it simultaneously attempts to continue embracing the boundless autonomy of individual choice as its most sacred principle, celebrating an individual’s right to self-define everything about themselves without limit, up to and including their own concept of material reality. (This cognitive dissonance has never been much more than an ideological speedbump, however – don’t get your hopes up.) And this hyper-individualism has now collided head first with the technological revolution, which increasingly positions itself as offering hope for the boundless potential necessary to escape from any natural limits whatsoever, including by fracturing any solid definition of what we once thought it meant to be human. And, speaking of technology and fracturing, meanwhile…

Most people being on board pales in impact to the fierce determination of an ate-up minority:

8. Majorities don’t matter. Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. If the vast majority generally prefers to eat Food A instead of Food B, but a small minority is absolutely insistent on eating Food B and is willing to start chopping the heads off of anyone who disagrees and serves Food A – and the majority doesn’t care enough to get all bloody dying on this particular culinary hill – all restaurants will soon be serving only Food B, the new national cuisine. This is especially true if the intolerant minority already holds a disproportionate position of influence within the system, given that…

And when that fierce determination lands that minority in positions of societal leadership, the entrenchment is damn hard to reverse:

10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied. Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. 

And the generation still getting its worldview formed is warped by being handled with kid gloves:

13. The youth are still coddled and mentally broken. Back in 2015, when most people still thought of what is now referred to as Wokeness only as a bizarre and vaguely amusing phenomenon that was isolated to college campuses, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published an essay titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic (later to become a book of the same name) as an early hypothesis of what was happening. They advanced an essentially psychological explanation for why so many college students were suddenly acting simultaneously like fragile snowflakes and rabid authoritarians: thanks to the embrace of the “self-esteem” movement and “helicopter-parenting” by their Boomer parents, along with liability risk-aversion by institutions, young people had grown up physically and psychologically “coddled” and therefore emotionally fragile. By this the authors specifically meant that they had adopted a number of beliefs totally inverse to the Stoic-derived principles considered best practice by modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. These unhealthy beliefs included: always trusting your feelings, assuming disagreement is always a personal attack, and believing hurtful words lead to real harm, including permanent trauma. Normalization of these beliefs led to a “cult of safety” on campuses, with hyper-attention devoted to the prevention of offense (because it was now actual “violence”). Hence the emergence of such innovations as “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.”

I must admit that I’ve grown a bit skeptical of this explanation by now. As things have progressed, it’s become increasingly clear to me that these claims to offense are often used as cunningly deliberate weapons against empathetic liberals, and are probably frequently evidence less of psychological fragility than of psychopathy. But, it does seem true that Gen Z sadly does indeed suffer from much higher rates of mental illness than older generations (though the millennials are very close). Even before the pandemic, the rate of anxiety and depression recorded in their age group nearly doubled between 2007 and 2018, as they came of age. The suicide rate rose 57%. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%. Only 45% reported their mental health was good overall in 2018. One-third reported having a mental health or substance abuse problem. They are also far and away the loneliest generation. Meanwhile, our whole culture seems to have grown significantly more possessed by emotivism in general, to the point that the decline of rational language and the rise of emotional reasoning can even be tracked quantitatively…

But I digress. If we assume any of this may be causally related to the Revolution, the real question for us here is: has any of this gotten better? Of course not! The pandemic has had a devastating impact on Gen Z’s already fragile mental health. Up to seven in ten now report feeling depressed. Rates of severe depression rose to around 25%. Hospitalization for suicide attempts by girls in particular rose 51% from 2019 to 2021. Meanwhile, far from pulling back at all on the “cult of safety,” colleges have now expanded it to absolutely insane levels. So no, the situation has not improved. And from what we know about how totalitarian cults target and more easily exploit the lonely and vulnerable, we can probably safely assume the Revolutionaries will only have more material to work with moving forward, not less, as college graduates remain fragile and/or “entitled” for the foreseeable future. And speaking of anxious, entitled young people…

But perhaps there will be an insistence among the majority of voters and their Senators on someone who will show she's at least not too badly tainted by that my-experience-as-a-member-of-a-certain-demographic-is-definitely-going-to-influence-my-decisions stuff. And in the meantime, the court as currently comprised is not done with its current term. Also, keep in mind that replacing Breyer doesn't change the balance in terms of how justices are likely to vote on cases. 

 

 

 

 

 

There's not much time left and the VSG is wasting it by focusing on Hunter Biden - say two prominent conservative analysts

 As we know, when the Very Stable Genius becomes obsessed with something, there's no convincing him to ease up.

It's badly damaging his re-election prospects in the case of his preoccupation with Hunter Biden. He's so ate up with it, he wants Attorney General William Barr to "act."

But it looks like exactly the wrong course to at least a couple of figures who would very much like to see optimized prospects for the GOP.

Marc Theissen, a Washington Post columnist and American Enterprise Institute fellow, has been dismaying me for a few years now with his inclination to carry water for the VSG, but has seen enough of what's presently going on to speak plainly:

Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen criticized President Donald Trump on Monday for “yelling” at reporters about the alleged corruption of his opponents, arguing that message is the wrong one in the final stretch of the 2020 campaign.

People are “tired of the chaos,” Thiessen said on Fox News Monday.

Thiessen — a reliable Trump defender on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, where he serves as a columnist — first criticized social media platforms for cracking down on recent reports about files allegedly found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, before arguing that is still not a winning message for Republicans.

“This election is not going to turn on Hunter Biden,” he said. “This is not the closing argument that Donald Trump wants to be make in his last two weeks. This is not what he should be talking about.”

Voters “don’t care about Hunter Biden,” he said. “They don’t care about this. They care about the economy and they care about not having four more years of chaos.”

Thiessen then brought up an exchange Trump had on Monday in which he called a reporter “a criminal” for not covering the Hunter Biden story.

“You just showed a clip of yelling at that reporter saying ‘He’s a criminal, and you’re a criminal.’ And I watched that clip and I said, ‘Oh my gosh if he does that during the debate on Thursday, that’s going to be a disaster.'”

GOP pollster Frank Luntz paints an even starker picture:

Prominent Republican pollster Frank Luntz blasted President Trump and his campaign on Tuesday for focusing on Hunter Biden in the stretch run to Election Day, calling Trump’s campaign the worst he’s ever seen and saying the president’s advisers should be “brought up on charges of political malpractice.”

Speaking at a briefing for the British strategic advising company Global Counsel, Luntz said Trump’s advisers have “their heads up their asses” if they think Hunter Biden will be a winning issue for them.

“I’ve never seen a campaign more mis-calibrated than the Trump campaign. Frankly, his staff ought to be brought up on charges of political malpractice,” Luntz said. 

“It is the worst campaign I’ve ever seen and I’ve been watching them since 1980. They’re on the wrong issues. They’re on the wrong message. They’ve got their heads up their assess. … Your damn job is to get your candidate to talk about things that are relevant to the people you need to reach. And if you can’t do your damn job then get out.”

And now there's even more fodder for such assessments, what with the way the VSG acted like a big baby regarding his 60 minutes interview with Leslie Stahl. 

Behold the fruits of your enthusiasm, Trumpists. 

 

 

Friday roundup

 There used to be a frequent commenter here at LITD who, when Supreme Court rulings like Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges would come up, would chime in with some variant on "stare decisis, baby!" to which I'd respond by bringing up Dredd Scott or Plessey v. Ferguson, and a stalemate would ensue. For anyone interested in a sound contemplation of the concept, I recommend an essay at Law & Liberty by Marc O. DiGirolami entitled "Integrating Originalism and Stare Decisis." The author says that judges should heed the guidance of a "legal thread connecting a long and lasting line of cases," but also take heed of instances when their gut tells them that evil is afoot.

Peter Heck at The Resurgent on the latest degree to which Jen Hatmaker has departed from sound Christian doctrine:

[W]hat strikes me . . . is why someone like Hatmaker, who is so infatuated with gaining earthly audiences and inviting the thunderous applause of men that she willfully invents her own religion, is so stubborn in her desire to rebrand her humanist idolatry as Christianity.

If she wasn’t, this wouldn’t be a column worth writing. If she wasn’t, her Facebook meanderings would be indistinguishable from, and no more noteworthy than, the vast majority of posts made by the world for the world. But Hatmaker is intent not only on identifying herself as a Christian, but misleading whoever will pay attention to her that her mind is a better barometer for real faith than the teachings of Christ’s church.

The post-American public's estimation of the sports world is underwater:

The sports industry now has a negative image, on balance, among Americans as a whole, with 30% viewing it positively and 40% negatively, for a -10 net-positive score. This contrasts with the +20 net positive image it enjoyed in 2019, when 45% viewed it positively and 25% negatively.

This slide in the sports industry's image comes as professional and college leagues are struggling, and not always successfully, to maintain regular schedules and playing seasons amid the pandemic. Professional football, baseball and basketball games have also become focal points for public displays of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

While it's not clear how much the various challenges and controversies swirling around the industry are each responsible for its slide in popularity, it is notable that sports has lost more support from Republicans and independents than from Democrats. In fact, Democrats' view of the sports industry has not changed significantly in the past year, while Republicans' has slipped from a +11 net-positive score in 2019 to a net -35 today, and independents' from +26 to -10.

I know that in some quarters Ben Sasse has come in for castigation for not seeming to maintain the fierce opposition to the Very Stable Genius on display in his legendary February 2016 open letter to Trump supporters , but I've never lost faith in him. There are a great many Republican legislators, state and federal, who I have watched with dismay suffocate their principles to climb aboard the Trump train, but I'm confident Ben has never done so. More than that, he acts on his principles in concrete ways, such as with his latest proposal:

Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) called to repeal the 17th Amendment on Tuesday, which would eliminate the requirement that U.S. senators be elected by popular votes.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Make the Senate Great Again,” Sasse called for an end to the amendment, among other changes to the Senate “aimed at promoting debate, not ending it.”

He also recommended abolishing standing committees, requiring senators to show up for debates, implementing 12-year term limits, and requiring senators to live together in dorms when in Washington.

“What would the Founding Fathers think of America if they came back to life?” Sasse wrote. “Their eyes would surely bug out first at our technology and wealth. But I suspect they’d also be stunned by the deformed structure of our government. The Congress they envisioned is all but dead. The Senate in particular is supposed to be the place where Americans hammer out our biggest challenges with debate. That hasn’t happened for decades—and the rot is bipartisan.”

Love this paragraph:

“Different states bring different solutions to the table, and that ought to be reflected in the Senate’s national debate,” he wrote. “The old saying used to be that all politics is local, but today—thanks to the internet, 24/7 cable news and a cottage industry dedicated to political addiction—politics is polarized and national. That would change if state legislatures had direct control over who serves in the Senate.”

A Chinese pharmaceutical company that is ultimately state-owned has been injecting thousands of people with experimental COVID-19 vaccines before Phase 3 clinical trials are completed. 

Dave Boucher and Todd Spangler at the Detroit Free Press enumerate the wild claims the VSG made at last night's rally about the auto industry in Michigan:

President Donald Trump made wildly inaccurate claims at a rally outside Saginaw on Thursday night, suggesting he has revitalized auto manufacturing in the state when it actually lost jobs even before coronavirus hit in March.

"We brought you a lot of car plants, we brought you a lot ... and we’re going to bring you a lot more," Trump began his speech at MBS International Airport in Freeland.

But only one new major assembly facility, a Jeep plant on Detroit's east side, has been announced during Trump's term, while General Motors underwent a divisive 40-day strike last year and announced the idling of four U.S. plants, including two in Michigan. One of those, Detroit-Hamtramck, has since been revived and is being retooled to build electric cars and SUVs. Warren transmission was revived most recently to make face masks, though its future is uncertain.

Navya, a French shuttle maker, announced it could employ 50 or so people at a plant in Saline, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor; Waymo, which makes self-driving cars, said last year it would employ 100 people at an assembly plant in Detroit and could someday expand that number to 400.

That's hardly a signal of a vast resurgence. Trump has also apparently made similar exaggerated claims in other campaign stops, with the Washington Post saying he has been "bragging about imaginary auto plants."

His signature foul mouth and his signature transactional framing of the case for his reelection were on display:

At another point in the wide-ranging speech, Trump repeated, "You better vote for me, I got you so many damn car plants."

Over 10 percent of Oregon residents have been told to flee the fires scorching their state. 

The VSG's weird remarks about generals, soldiers and companies that make bombs

 1.) What he said:

President Trump said Monday that he has the support of U.S. troops, if not necessarily their bosses in the Pentagon.

“I'm not saying the military is in love with me, the soldiers are," Trump said at a Labor Day press conference. 

"The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't," the commander in chief continued, "because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies — that make the bombs, and make the planes, and make everything else — stay happy. But we're getting out of the endless wars."

2.) One has to believe that a big motivation was the results of an IVMF poll that, mind you, was conducted prior to The Atlantic/FoxNews/AP/WaPo story:

The latest Military Times poll shows a continued decline in active-duty service members’ views of President Donald Trump and a slight but significant preference for former Vice President Joe Biden in the upcoming November election among troops surveyed.

The results, collected before the political conventions earlier this month, appear to undercut claims from the president that his support among military members is strong thanks to big defense budget increases in recent years and promised moves to draw down troops from overseas conflict zones.

But the Military Times Polls, surveying active-duty troops in partnership with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, have seen a steady drop in troops’ opinion of the commander in chief since his election four years ago.

In the latest results — based on 1,018 active-duty troops surveyed in late July and early August — nearly half of respondents (49.9 percent) had an unfavorable view of the president, compared to about 38 percent who had a favorable view. Questions in the poll had a margin of error of up to 2 percent.

Among all survey participants, 42 percent said they “strongly” disapprove of Trump’s time in office.

3.) He's also clearly trying to frame this in Trumpist terms - that is, regular folks versus elites. But his use of the terms "top people" and "soldiers" rather than officers and enlisted shows that he's not too familiar with military categorizations.

4.) I don't think his "wonderful companies . . . that make the bombs . . . and planes" remark was a sop to the peacenik crowd. He never had them and never will. It's just a reflection of his incoherent approach to foreign policy, talking about getting out of endless wars one moment and a strong America on the world stage the next. And it's reflective of his tendency to shoot off his mouth about something (defense contractors) with no consideration that he will be needing to deal with them in the future, and a track record of diplomacy would serve him better than one of disparagement. 

5.) This once again shows his preoccupation with being admired. It's so central to his worldview that he makes no attempt to temper it.

 

The Very Stable Genius seems not to have a clue about the position he's in

Nobody in the country beyond him and his die-hard base thinks his prospects are good.

As Peggy Noonan puts it at the Wall Street Journal, 

He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows. 

As Windsor Mann puts it at The Week:

Trump's challenge as a non-challenger is to talk about anything other than his record. At his rally in Tulsa last weekend, he spent nearly 15 minutestalking about his ability to walk down a ramp and to sip water with one hand. This week — as seven states reported their highest numbers of coronavirus hospitalizations and as 1.5 million Americans filed for unemployment — Trump said the lobster industry was "back, bigger and better than anyone thought possible."

Trump isn't talking about the issues that matter most. He's talking about lobsters, "Obamagate," flag burning, and Confederate monuments because he doesn't want — can't afford — to talk about three crises: the health crisis, the economic crisis, and his presidency.
With nothing to brag about, he is spouting Nixonian catchphrases about "THE SILENT MAJORITY," notwithstanding the fact that his base is neither silent nor the majority. Trump seems to think that by saying or tweeting something, his words will become actualized — that if he says his supporters are the majority, that means they are. Instead of persuading people to support him, Trump is deceiving himself into believing they already do.

To many voters in 2016, the idea of an outsider "shaking things up" was vaguely appealing, precisely because it was so vague. As a political neophyte, Trump could make sweeping promises without having to defend or explain anything. His inexperience was a boon. Having never been tested in politics, he had never failed. He talked like a regular guy, which is to say, like someone who had no idea what he was talking about. He still talks that way.
Now we know the consequences of a Trump presidency: mass death, mass unemployment, civil unrest, an erosion of democratic norms at home, and growing distrust of America abroad. Trump may not learn from experience, but voters do.

As Tucker Carlson put it in the monologue to his FNC show last night,

Not many people are saying this out loud on the Right, but President Trump could well lose this election . . .  

What seemed awful the other day is normal now . . . If you don't vigorously defend your own worldview, then you lose. Bad ideas spread and quickly congeal into conventional wisdom. This is especially true right now, as everything in American life is up for grabs . . . Once big things start changing, they change more quickly than we expect. All of this means that this is precisely the time - tonight - to defend the institutions that we desperately need to keep in this country. Those institutions include the nuclear family, our freedom of speech, shall, independent businesses, absolute colorblindness under the law, the noble tradition of nonviolent protest . .  Those are the things that make America worth living in. We need to defend these things with everything we have. All of us, including the president. That is his hope of re-election . . . 

As Erick Erickson puts it in his Substack newsletter,

The election is not today. That is really good news for President Trump. If the election were today, the President would be toast. It is really ugly out there right now.

As Jonathan Easley and Brett Samuels put it at The Hill,

There is frustration in Trump World over the president's lack of discipline and his confrontational tone during a time of high anxiety over the coronavirus and civil unrest around the death of George Floyd while in police custody.  

And right there, face to face, on the FNC program of one of his most slavish devotees, the VSG did nothing to disabuse us of the notion that he is without a rudder:

Fox News’ Sean Hannity teed one up for the president during a Thursday interview that was filled with simple, leading questions.

Hannity asked Trump: “If you hear in 131 days from now, at some point in the night or early morning: ‘We can now project Donald J. Trump has been re-elected the 45th president of the United States’—let’s talk. What’s at stake in this election as you compare and contrast, and what is one of your top priority items for a second term?”

A completely stumped Trump decided to riff and wound up rambling off a mess of words that were tailor-made for the viral comedic sensation Sarah Cooper’s next lip-synch video.

“Well, one of the things that will be really great, you know, the word experience is still good,” Trump said while turning to the audience. “I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s an, a very important meaning.”

The president continued to answer the question about some of the important issues he’d conquer during a second term if given the chance.

“I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, ‘This is great,'” Trump said. “But I didn’t know very many people in Washington, it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now, I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration.”

Without taking a breath, Trump then pivoted to his former national security adviser John Bolton, whose new book about his time in the White House has gotten under the president’s skin—but also, who has nothing to do with the question Hannity asked.

“You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. The only thing he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people,” Trump said.

As those of us who always saw the colossal mistake the Republican Party was making in getting behind this guy, who watched the at least 100 reasons he was unfit to be president present themselves, we knew this day would come.

It's going to be what it's going to be. It seems likely that November 3rd is going to be a big night for Democrats, and that will be horrible for America. We'll get identity politics and the erasure of Western civilization's history on steroids, redistribution like we've never seen, and the imposition of such utter fictions as that the global climate is in trouble requiring the urgent reversal of human advancement, and that there are more than two genders.

Donald Trump may win, and that will horrible, too.

It's hard not to conclude that our civilization is not only well past its peak, but unraveling by the hour.

The Very Stable Genius thinks he can stamp his foot and his bad poll numbers will go away

He just can't believe that it would be the case that he's trailing. So he has his campaign send this:

President Donald Trump's campaign is demanding CNN retract and apologize for a recent poll that showed him well behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The demand, coming in the form of a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker, was immediately rejected by the network.

"We stand by our poll," said Matt Dornic, a CNN spokesman.

The CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released on Monday shows Trump trailing the former vice president by 14 points, 55%-41%, among registered voters. It also finds the President's approval rating at 38% -- his worst mark since January 2019, and roughly on par with approval ratings for one-term Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush at this point in their reelection years -- and his disapproval rating at 57%. 

Soon after the poll was released, Trump tweeted that he had hired Republican pollster McLaughlin & Associates to "analyze" the CNN poll and others, "which I felt were FAKE based on the incredible enthusiasm we are receiving." McLaughlin ranks as one of the least accurate pollsters in the industry, as measured by FiveThirtyEight. 

Several other polls released over the past few weeks -- including polls by ABC News/Washington Post, Monmouth University, NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac University and Fox News -- also show Biden well ahead of Trump. These polls, averaged with the CNN poll, find Biden up by double digits, a result well outside any margin of error.
In the letter to Zucker, the Trump campaign argued that the CNN poll is "designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling."

"It's a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President," read the letter, signed by the Trump campaign's senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis and chief operating officer Michael Glassner.

The campaign formally requested that CNN retract the poll and publish a "full, fair, and conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification to correct its misleading conclusions."

The letter, which heavily cites findings by McLaughlin, makes several incorrect and misleading claims.

"It's a poll of 1,259 adults -- not even registered voters, let alone likely voters," the letter says, citing a McLaughlin memo from earlier this week.

While it's accurate that 1,259 adults were reached on landlines or cell phones by a live interviewer for the survey, the 14-point margin by which Trump is trailing Biden came from a question posed only to 1,125 registered voters. It's typical for polling to sample registered voters rather than likely ones at this stage of the race, as it's difficult to project whether voters will participate in an election that is five months away. CNN, as do most public pollsters, typically reports results from likely voters around Labor Day. 

Reality's a bitch, ain't it, Mr. President? Here's a tip: It won't get any less so between now and November. Time to drastically shift strategy. Or maybe consider dropping out.

Outside the sphere of the throne-sniffers, the VSG's support is not in good shape

This:

The conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports poll released Thursday found that 23 percent of likely Republican voters across the country think that their party should "find someone other than Trump to be their nominee," according to the survey results.

The poll found that 70 percent said the Republican Party should stick with Trump, while 7 percent were undecided.

And aging boomers had been assumed to be his demographic stronghold. Not so fast:

Just a few weeks ago, the Pew Research Center announced that millennials overtook baby boomers as the largest generation in the country. More than 72 million strong, those born between 1981 and 1996 eclipsed their elders, a demographic reality that was inevitable. 

For the last decade, I have been one of the loudest voices preaching that Republicans are in trouble with this massive cohort of younger voters, that policy positions on both cultural and economic issues have increasingly put the GOP out of step with the millennial generation. Many of these trends have continued with the emergence of Generation Z, which tends to share many of the political views of its elder brothers and sisters, with a dash of heightened worry about climate change and emphasis on gender, racial, and gay and transgender equality. 

I am here to tell Republicans that while their struggle with younger voters still remains a critical long-term challenge, an even graver short-term threat has emerged: declining support among seniors. 

Despite double-digit losses among young voters over the last decade, Republicans have still maintained some electoral successes due to their support among older voters. The generation gap has cut both ways, with poor showings among the young being matched by strong showings among the old. And though millennials now outnumber boomers in raw numbers, older voters remain more likely to show up at the polls ( increases in youth participation in the last midterm elections notwithstanding).

And Biden's lead is the steadiest against an incumbent since 1944:

(CNN)Poll of the week: A new Monmouth University poll finds that former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump 50% to 41%. When Rep. Justin Amash is included as the Libertarian Party candidate, it's Biden 47%, Trump 40% and Amash 5%. 

The poll is largely in line with the average poll since April that puts Biden 6 points ahead of Trump nationally. 

What's the point: Biden's lead is about as steady as it can possibly be. Not only is he up 6 points over the last month or so, but the average of polls since the beginning of the year has him ahead by 6 points. Moreover, all the polls taken since the beginning of 2019 have him up 6 points. 

The steadiness in the polls is record breaking. Biden's advantage is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944. That could mean it'll be harder to change the trajectory of the race going forward, though this remains more than close enough that either candidate could easily win.

Team VSG has some rethinking to do.

 

Thursday roundup

The Justice Department has dropped its prosecution of Michael Flynn.

David French at The Dispatch has a comprehensive and well-thought-out-on-the-legal-and-moral-levels piece about the Ahmaud Arbery shooting in Georgia.

Great piece at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission website by Andrew T. Walker entitled "How Religious Liberty Made Me a Baptist, Part 1."

Erick Erickson at The Resurgent has a balanced and carefully considered take on Shelly Luther, the Dallas hair salon owner who was sentenced to a week in jail.

Great piece by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative entitled "Mask Truthers." A taste:

Note well, though, that the mask truthers aren’t refusing to wear masks because they don’t believe they help. That might or might not be true, but it’s a defensible position. They’re refusing to wear masks because they see them as a symbol of social control.

This is not the kind of conservatism I signed up for. In fact, one reason I consider myself a conservative is because, according to Russell Kirk, conservatism proper rejects ideological thinking. He wrote:

Ideology, in short, is a political formula that promises mankind an earthly paradise; but in cruel fact what ideology has created is a series of terrestrial hells. I set down below some of the vices of ideology.

1. Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution. Ideology inherits the fanaticism that sometimes has afflicted religious faith, and applies that intolerant belief to concerns secular.
2. Ideology makes political compromise impossible: the ideologue will accept no deviation from the Absolute Truth of his secular revelation. This narrow vision brings about civil war, extirpation of “reactionaries”, and the destruction of beneficial functioning social institutions. …

Now I contrast with those three failings certain principles of the politics of prudence.

1. As I put it earlier, ideology is inverted religion. But the prudential politician knows that “Utopia” means “Nowhere”; that we cannot march to an earthly Zion; that human nature and human institutions are imperfectible; that aggressive “righteousness” in politics ends in slaughter. True religion is a discipline for the soul, not for the state.

2. Ideology makes political compromise impossible, I pointed out. The prudential politician, au contraire, is well aware that the primary purpose of the state is to keep the peace. This can be achieved only by maintaining a tolerable balance among great interests in society. Parties, interests, and social classes and groups must arrive at compromises, if bowie-knives are to be kept from throats.

Hannah Arendt, talking about the kinds of men that brought totalitarianism to Russia and Germany (here she speaks of writers and intellectuals):

To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content…

Arendt goes on:

The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.

If there's a benign explanation for this, it had better come out quickly: the Trump administration has shelved the detailed CDC guidelines for faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials re: reopening society. It basically fleshes out the federal-level three-phase plan that Doctors Birx and Fauci set forth a few weeks ago. For reasons that presently elude us, the White House has shelved this document. Indeed, it told agency scientists it "would never see the light of day." 

The president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners was in the Oval Office - to be recognized for her role in addressing the pandemic - and she happened to mention that PPE availability had been sporadic in some areas of the country. The VSG immediately shot back, saying, "Maybe sporadically for you, but not sporadic for a number of other people, because I've heard the opposite." He then reinforced his attitude with a bit of body language, folding his arms as he bragged about how his administration had rebuilt the government's PPE supply after the previous administration had let it dwindle. The video is here. 

Great S.E. Cupp piece entitled "The President Is Not Well."

My latest at Precipice is entitled "An Absolutist Grapples With Ambiguity."