THE MORNING AFTER

You have to cut me some slack.  Starting with 1948, when I first got interested in politics, this is my eighteenth presidential contest.  Even if I live to be a hundred, gott sei dank, I will only see four more.  So you must allow me to qvell a little about Bernie.  I know his socialism has more in common with The New Deal than with the Communist Manifesto, and I am well aware that it is only New Hampshire, but this is as close as I am liable to get to the Promised Land.  Sixty percent on a platform of "Democratic Socialism!"  On to that hotbed of radicalism, Nevada.

THE FIRST PRIMARY

As promised, here is my spreadsheet of the Republican primary results with the first data from New Hampshire.  Recall that my estimates are based on the assumption that Trump gets 35-40% of the vote and no other candidate gets more than 25-30%.

State	Pledged Delegates	Likely Trump	Actual Trump	Trump Vote %
New Hampshire	20	7	10	35
South Carolina	50	41
Alabama	47	32
Arkansas	37	14
Georgia	76	40
Massachusetts	39	14
Okalahoma	40	20
Tennessee	55	28
Texas	152	86
Vermont	16	6
Virginia	46	17
Louisiana	44	16
Idaho	29	10
Mississippi	37	14
Michigan	56	21
Puero Rico	20	7
Ohio	63	63
Florida	99	99
Illinois	66	25
Missouri	49	34
North Carolina	72	25
Arizona	58	58
Wisconsin	42	30
New York	92	52
Connecticut	25	14
Delaware	16	16
Maryland	38	29
Pennsylvania	68	14
Rhode Island	16	6
Indiana	54	45
West Virginia	31	18
Oregon	25	9
California	169	145
Montana	24	24
New Jersey	48	48
New Mexico	21	8
South Dakota	26	26
Nebraska	33	33
Washington	41	14
	1940	1208
Caucus States
Iowa	30		7
Nevada	30
Alaska	25
Colorado	34
Minnesota	35
North Dakota	25
Wyoming	26
Kansas	40
Kentucky	42
Maine	20
Hawaii	16
District of Columbia	19
Northern Mariana Islands	6
Virgin Islands	6
Utah	40
	394
Territorial Convention
Guam	6
American Samoa	6
	12
	Trump Total		17
	Needed to Win		1273

AN IDLE THOUGHT WHILE WE WAIT FOR THE RESULTS TO COME IN

I have completed my preparations for the sixth lecture and I will record later today, if the Sears repairman comes when he said he would [I shan't hold my breath], so this morning, during my walk, rather than review what I am going to say, I found myself brooding about the campaign.  I puzzled for a bit over the extraordinary lead that Bernie seems to have with so-called millennials [although, strictly speaking, a millennial would not be old enough to vote, but never mind, as Gilda Radner would say.]  The following thought occurred to me.

These days, an essential part of growing up is making some sort of break with one's parents.  Sometimes, it involves listening to music they hate, or getting a tattoo, or having odd parts of one's body pierced.  I grew up in an FDR family -- we read PM [you had to be there], listened to Bob and Ray every night, and, thanks to my father, were adamantly anti-communist.  But my grandfather, whom I knew as a genial old man, had spent his life as a dedicated socialist, so I skipped a generation and became a socialist.

Now, Bernie and Hillary are only five years apart in age, but Hillary looks like everyone's mother, and Bernie looks like everyone's grandfather.  I just wonder whether that is one secret of his success with the young.

A REPLY TO S. WALLERSTEIN

S. Wallerstein offers the following interesting comment on a story I told in my fifth lecture: 

"You spoke of a group of anthropologists who studied a bar scene in Chicago and you mentioned that when anthropology students who were familiar with the bar scene from their normal social life looked at the results they found them weird because of the difference between how the bar scene is described by anthropologists and how they lived it as normal bar customers. (Not your exact words, but something like that).   Isn't that to be expected with any rigorous description? If a group of doctors describe my physical condition, it will have nothing to do with how I live it and I probably will not understand the technical language. If a group of psychiatrists describe my personality and its disorders, I may be surprised by the terms that they use and I will probably have to resort to Wikipedia to understand them." 

The difference between the medical description and the ethnographic description is this [the psychiatric description poses an additional problem, to which I shall return]:  My physical constitution is [mostly] independent of my self-understanding or my conceptual and social processes.  But my being as a social person is historically and socially constructed in part through my self-understandings [and misunderstandings, of course].  This is what distinguishes a fourth century A. D. Roman from an eleventh century A. D. Mongol or a twentieth century A. D. New Yorker [like myself].  My self-descriptions are a part of who I am.  Hence, an ethnographer's attempt to capture the lineaments of my society and my social being must include those self-understandings in a way that is comprehensible to me, whereas the physician's description of my medical condition need not be comprehensible to me at all. 

There is actually more going on here than just this, but since I shall be talking about that something more in my next lecture, I do not want to show my hand here.  As a non-spoiler preview, it will have to do with the way the Zhu understand and deploy  their kinship relations, as contrasted with the way ethnographers conceptualize those same kinship relations.  If I may be deliberately provocative, we shall see that the Zhu act in very much the same fashion with regard to kinship as the characters in a Jane Austen novel.

To return briefly to the question of a psychiatric description:  the sort of therapy pioneered by Freud essentially requires [among other things] that the patient come to a better understanding of his or her neuroses [see my tutorial, "The Thought of Sigmund Freud"] as opposed to the therapeutic interventions of psychiatrists who see their patients' problems as caused by chemical imbalances, correctible with medications.  If they, rather than Freud, are correct, then the patient's self-understanding is, by and large, irrelevant. 

LECTURES ON IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE

I have now posted URLs to the first Ideological Critique five lectures at the top of this blog, just in case anyone is having trouble finding them.  Copy the URL and paste into your command line.  Hit "enter" and there you are.

JUST SAYIN'

Lecture Five is now on YouTube.

Enjoy.

A RESPONSE TO PLGOLD2792

Someone with the impenetrable webname plgold2792 makes the following request:  "would you mind pointing me in the direction of your other posts on why it makes an important difference to elect a Democrat rather than a Republican? I would welcome your analysis, considering that I myself am worried about this question: I like Jill Stein of the Green Party better than even Sanders, and am back and forth about how to proceed."  I cannot recall a post in which I argued this proposition, but I am happy to make some remarks about it here.  Since I cannot for the life of me tell whether plgold2792 is male or female [or even more than one person], I shall adopt the convention of assuming plgold2792 is female.  Nothing of significance turns on this assumption.

Why, she asks, does it make an important difference to elect a Democrat rather than a Republican?  In order to simplify and focus my remarks, I am going to assume that Clinton and Rubio are the nominees.  If Trump is the Republican nominee [which I still think is likely] the entire argument changes.  As far as foreign policy is concerned, there is nothing much to choose between the two.  Both will pursue a relatively hawkish version of the imperial project that has defined American foreign policy for the last sixty-five years.  Let me turn to domestic policy.  First of all, Clinton will appoint liberal Supreme Court justices and Circuit Courts of Appeal judges.  This will protect such rights to reproductive health as women now have, and may also reverse the efforts by the High Court to completely gut voting rights protections.  Rubio will appoint justices who continue the assault on union rights, on the plutocratization of American politics [if I may coin a phrase], and much else besides.  This, by itself, is enough to make the election of Clinton essential.

Clinton will not be able, with the House firmly in the control of the Republicans, to sponsor and sign any legislation, however timidly progressive, but she will be able to use the very considerable executive authority of the Presidency to make small but nevertheless significant advances in reasonably progressive policies [saving only the reining in of Wall Street, which she will pretend to do but will in fact not undertake at all.]  In particular, I would point out that Clinton would almost certainly continue Obama's efforts to advance the American and international response to global warming, a subject that I assume is important to plgold2792 inasmuch as she is drawn to the Green Party.

Rubio, on the other hand, would, if he won, probably hold control of the Senate as well, and then a flood of anti-environmental legislation would result, along with the revocation of Obama's executive actions.  The Congress would further restrict women's access to reproductive health, it would undo as much as it could of the Affordable Care Act, it would give massive tax breaks to the rich, and it would advance the agenda of multi-national capital at the expense of American workers.

All in all, this litany of horribles, in my opinion, justifies holding one's nose and voting for Clinton.