The Power of Popular Culture Chapter 6 Part # 1 Why Donald Trump seems to be a Radical Centrist but isn't Radical Centrists take special interest in the view that Donald Trump also is a Radical Centrist. The reason is easy to understand: It is similar to the reason that the Coca Cola company agues that some other cola beverage should not be called a "Coke" and the reason that US Gypsum Company raises objections when another firm's wallboard is referred to as "Sheetrock." The real thing is confused with something that is not the real thing and, in the process, diminishes the value of the original. This is known as "brand dilution." Or "trademark dilution." The authentic does not want to be confused with the imitation. The imitation may damage the reputation of the authentic and result in loss of value that has been painstakingly nurtured at significant cost over many years. In the case of politics, it damages the cause of Radical Centrism when something different is misnamed "Radical Centrism." Which Radical Centrists know all too well inasmuch as some number of libertarians began to call themselves Radical Centrists about a decade ago, and libertarians are anything but Radical Centrists, in some ways they are the exact opposite. Libertarians, when they identify as Radical Centrists, seek to piggyback on the cachet that now attaches to "RC." Radical Centrism is well enough known that it inspires imitators, and those imitators may not really understand what RC is all about and may not care. Their interest is that of a "free rider," taking advantage of the perceived value of a name that is growing in popularity in the political marketplace. The case of libertarianism is similar to that of Donald Trump insofar as there are enough similarities that 'average people' might make the identification in good faith. After all, libertarians, like Radical Centrists, are a third force in politics, neither Left nor Right but independent and outspokenly in favor of free speech. As well, both favor market solutions to problems. But that is where the similarities end. Unlike libertarians, vastly different in fact, Radical Centrists do not for one minute think that freedom is a universal solvent for all problems. On the contrary, the RC view is that while freedom is necessary it is far from sufficient; there also is vital need for community, for upholding values that bring people together, and for government actions in all cases where there is community need that markets are unable to fulfill. And, unlike libertarians, Radical Centrists have no problem in seeing serious limitations in markets and in recognizing market failures for what they are. About the major differences between Radical Centrists and libertarians much more can be said, and has been said, and we have objected repeatedly to libertarian misappropriation of the phrase "Radical Centrism," but this should be enough to get the point across. With respect to Donald Trump, matters are more complicated because Trump is so unsystematic, so disordered as a thinker, that confusion abounds at many levels. Some days he sounds like a liberal, other days like a conservative, still other days as a 'soft authoritarian;' but days after that he is perceived as a free trader, then a protectionist, and then as an opportunist. Radical Centrists also can be misperceived as "all over the map" politically, minus the least suggestion of Fascism or Communism since we are overtly opposed to both, but all over the map, nonetheless. However, our "all-over-the-mapness" is organized around a coherent system of thought that, once it is explained, makes perfectly good sense. In Trump's case little or nothing is coherent, nothing is systematic, and the resemblance to Radical Centrism is accidental. The fact is that Radical Centrist concepts have been in the public domain for a minimum of two decades, especially from 2002 onward, and whomever finds these ideas useful is free to borrow whatever suits his (or her) fancy. Indeed, the first modern version of the philosophy dates to Marilyn Ferguson's 1980 best seller, The Aquarian Conspiracy. Her version of Radical Centrism was focused on such things as the need for heightened awareness of the human need for spiritual growth, the need for community, and the importance of cultivating a new form of morality based on psychological principles, but, looking back, you can see the nucleus of contemporary approaches to RC. One thinker of the era saw this most clearly, was Mark Satin, who launched a newsletter and then a website called The Radical Middle. In the 1990s the concept became predominantly political and was directly related to "Third Way" movements in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. It was also related to home grown American alternatives to our duopolistic political system. By the 'nineties the rise of political Independents was already a factor of consequence, hence Ross Perot's Reform Party of 1992. Some Radical Centrists of that decade came directly from the Reform movement. Others were disillusioned Marxists; these were years in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. And this was a time when Newt Gingrich took the lead in seeking to find ways for Republicans to work in tandem with Democrats to modernize American politics and pass legislation with bipartisan support. Newt did not stay the course, in a short time he had doubled down on conservative politics, but he had helped set a precedent in the direction of Radical Centrism that others could build upon later. By the end of the decade, moreover, East Coast thinkers at the New America Foundation, associated with The Atlantic Monthly magazine -which I had started reading on a regular basis in 1995 or so- decided that a new kind of political philosophy was needed that could inspire creative new solutions to problems that had no Democratic Party or GOP baggage. The most visible product of that ferment of ideas materialized as a 2001 book by Michael Lind and Ted Halstead, The Radical Center. In this context mention should also be made of Utne Reader, the influential alternative magazine. Utne began to feature stories about Radical Centrism as far back as ca. 1994, which was where I first encountered the phrase. Also contributing to dissemination of Radical Centrism was Jesse Ventura, once a member of the Reform Party, who became governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003, and who sometimes called himself a Radical Centrist, although he did not adopt this nomenclature until later. He was not, not really, because RC is manifestly NOT a combination of social liberalism with fiscal conservatism. That view might be called "Ventura-ism." But actual RC is case-by-case, it is "cafeteria politics" writ large, in which it is regarded as a virtue to mix and match ideas from Left, Right, and "Other" to create functional new approaches to politics. Which is to say that the ideas that characterize RC simply cannot be classified in any conventional way. Another celebrity who contributed to name recognition for Radical Centrism was California's Governor Schwarzenegger, who was in office from 2003 until 2011. Although he did not use the phrase for himself, other people did, and it stuck. That version of RC might be called "hybrid politics" since it was based on a conscious effort to blend ideas from Democrats with ideas from Republicans into a working system. This isn't really Radical Centrism either, since RC also borrows freely from third party ideas and ideas with no political pedigree, and is not limited to whatever may be supported by the DNC or the RNC but mixed together. Bruce Babbitt, governor of Arizona called himself a Radical Centrist in this time period, although his focus was primarily environmental. The Quivira Coalition was founded in the same years, starting in New Mexico. It, too, was focused on the environment and brought together ranchers and business people and ecology-minded college activists and Park Rangers and housewives and many others, eventually throughout the mountain region.. It is not political in the usual sense but is based on creating functioning communities organized around goals that benefit everyone, not any single interest. It remains the largest group in America that self-identifies as Radical Centrist and probably has around 25,000 members, nearly all located in the West. Truly modern Radical Centrism dates to the early 2000s, after 9/11, which was a turning point for any number of people who gravitated into RC. Various one man websites devoted to Radical Centrism arose in these years, at least three developed by 'maverick' journalists. There were also minor Radical Centrist celebrities from that time period, Matt Miller, author of The 2% Solution, and John Avlon, who became a television regular. James Fallows can also be included in this group, a prolific writer with a point-of-view that cannot be pegged, Left or Right. The group I belong to, first known as RadicalCentrism.org, was founded in 2004 and has been online ever since. "Centroids," as we refer to ourselves, now has an active archive of hundreds of papers and a record of countless exchanges of e-mails discussing RC and, along the way, private likes and dislikes, philosophy, religion, history, the world of high tech, science, business, economics, and so forth. Including the vexing question: Why aren't there more women Radical Centrists? Members, so far all men, are located in a dozen states. My contribution to an understanding of Radical Centrism is the concept of "balance." That is, RC not only is cafeteria politics, it presumes commitment to at least rough balance between ideas of Left and Right, insofar as some issues break into liberal and conservative positions by their nature, but with the added caveat that we should seek as close to a 50-50 split as possible on the theory that we have the two parties we do because, structurally, each promotes sets of truths the opposition is unable to recognize as true. . It is up to us to search for these truths and make use of them as part of the Radical Centrist "project." We insist, however, that Other sources of truth exist and it is our responsibility to identify them regardless of their origins within libertarianism (yes, libertarians espouse a number of truths), with the Greens or Constitution Party, or, for that matter, from existentialist philosophy teachers, innovative business thinkers, social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt, and whomever else offers good ideas that have promise for the future. Hence, in reality we strive for something like a 40-40 Left/Right balance, with maybe 20% of the concepts we make use of derived from elsewhere or from our own original thinking. In any given year the actual numbers might be 50-40-10 or maybe 40-35-25, but the idea is balance along these lines. If you cannot find some semblance of balance you aren't really trying, doubtless because you are a political partisan. To be a Radical Centrist you need to be an owl, or a platypus, rather than a donkey or an elephant. Senator Mark Warner might disagree. He was elected as a Democrat from Virginia in 2008, and re-elected despite the Republican sweep of 2014, but he self-identifies as a Radical Centrist and tries to be true to his ideals despite pressures from other Democrats. Who also self identifies with Radical Centrism is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. As the Wikipedia article about RC notes, in 2010 Friedman was calling for "a _Tea Party_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement) of the radical center." Some people whom you would not suspect are in the Radical Centrist camp include economist Jeffrey Sachs who, in a 2011 book, said that we need an "alliance for the Radical Center." Who thinks like Radical centrists, certainly as often as not, are Republican Maine senator, Susan Collins, linguist John McWhorter, and columnist Ross Douthat. Our view of Douthat is that he is one of us even if he doesn't know it. Special mention should be made of John Lawrence Hill, a professor at Indiana University. His 2009 book, The Political Centrist, received a good deal of attention at the time and Hill appeared on C-Span. There are a number of commonalities between Hill's views and "orthodox" RC. And now there is Donald Trump, not a Radical Centrist by objective standards, but someone who has been called exactly that, starting in 2015. We can now see how it may have happened that Trump 'borrowed' Radical Centrist ideas and maybe even something of an RC philosophy. Is this really possible? Could Trump have heard of Radical Centrism? The nature of Popular Culture is that it is virtually impossible to track the ideas that are carried in the winds of public opinion. But no-one doubts the fact that social atmospherics exist and that ideas are transmitted just about everywhere through the medium of Popular Culture. The best guess is that he might simply be "picking things up from the air," as we often do, selecting topical issues and making them his own.
Trump reads the New York Times, maybe he has some familiarity with what is now known as The Atlantic magazine. He watches television and has Internet access. More to the point, he knows many people who have their fingers in the air as part of their modus operandi; any of these men or women might have passed along bits and pieces of RC, and maybe some detailed references -which he then processed in his own inimitable style. In any event, the identification of Trump with Radical Centrism is now part of Popular Culture. It may be a minor theme but the fact is that it is "out there" and Radical Centrists need to deal with it. How did this happen? . The place to begin, to find an answer, is with a Michael Dougherty story that was published in the November 30, 2015, issue of The Week. The title gets right to cases: Donald Trump and the revenge of the radical Center. Dougherty's first point was that Trump supporters consist of a "forgotten part of the Nixon-Reagan coalition." And, since they have been ignored, they have become angry, if not 'mad as hell.' " These people, who soon became Trump voters, had "learned to distrust its leaders on immigration, to be suspicious of a turbo-charged capitalism that threatens their way of life." They include large numbers of people "to whom the dogmas of conservatism are as foreign to their experience as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville." It should be noted that a connection to Nixon is not simple metaphor. During an interview show on C-Span with someone with first hand information, it seems that Trump knew RMN. Nixon, in fact, had perceived something about Trump that suggested a successful future in politics. At one point Nixon invited Trump to spend an afternoon together to discuss the political world. Whatever your opinion of Nixon's morality, or his policies, few people are dismissive of his political intelligence. Nixon recognized from an early date that Trump could play in the big leagues. This also says that Trump's ideas were compatible with the ideology which characterized the Republican leadership in the early 1970s -and later. As Dougherty continued: The piece of the Nixon coalition that Trump has activated cares not for the ordered liberty of conservatism, nor the egalitarian project of progressivism. It cares about fairness, and just rewards for work and loyalty. There is nothing moderate about it. This is the radical center. And it explains why when Trump's support is measured, it is almost always found to be strongest among "moderate" or "liberal" Republicans." To clarify this further, Trump's supporters "are weakly attached to the Republican Party. They won't blame him for being the same way." That was the view from 2015, which was borne out by election results in November of 2016. Moreover, Trump is "someone who can't be bought by the people who downsized them [his supporters]. Or at least, he is their revenge." "These are the voters who hate modern, tight-suited, Democratic-style liberalism not because it offends God, but because it is "killing" the America they knew. It threatens their jobs with globalization and immigration." But they also hate Right-wing gentry elitists "who flippantly tell them to get retrained in computers at age 58, and warn that Medicare might be cut." But the GOP establishment did not listen; the establishment could not listen. Why not? For them it is a problem of the first magnitude that it is costly to maintain the family's five cars, that with all the taxes they can't afford a new swimming pool this year, and so forth. They do not live in the same world as 95% of the population and yet they urge policies toward that 95% which assume that, of course, the burning issue for "everyone" is the need for astute stock portfolio management -not survival, not being able to afford basic repairs for their one 15 year old car, and not having enough money to pay the dentist. Trump voters are people who know damned well that it is impossible to talk with the political upper crust. The social elite refuses to listen. A rebellion has been brewing for a long time. Think back to the Pat Buchanan insurgency of the early and mid 1990s. There was Buchanan's memorable 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention, the so-called "culture war" monologue. Of which the late Molly Ivins said: "It sounded better in the original German." But by 1996 Buchanan had inspired the 'fear of the Lord' in the souls of the GOP leadership class, especially after he won New Hampshire in the first primary election that year. Yet because the establishment successfully fought back the Buchanan movement with every smear in the book, and with a budget that was on the order of 20 times what Pat could spend, it was assumed that the establishment was safe from challenge in perpetuity. It wasn't. Mike Huckabee came close in 2008. Trump pulled it off in 2016. It wasn't only clamor from populists that was a problem. "Even conservative wonks have been warning for years that the GOP was offering little of economic substance to their base of voters, save for the vain hope of transforming them into an ersatz investor class by privatizing Social Security, and making them manage health savings accounts." What appeals strongly to the monied class means almost nothing to the non-money class, people who must choose between food on the table and investing in the stock market. For them there is only one choice. There is far more to it than economics, which is the thrust of the Dougherty article, but economics is important: Trump's candidacy is teaching the GOP that it has to deliver for voters who feel economic insecurity. If they don't, the radical middle will rise not just to embarrass them, but to wound them as well." Here is one way to think about Radical Centrism. It is framed in such a way that we realize that Donald Trump tested the appeal of a Radical Centrist approach to politics and it worked. Big Time. If only Trump's version of RC was nor such an undisciplined mess. Trump's candidacy was also a mess. Despite his native intelligence, his inborn 'smarts,' he is a man who has never taken serious interest in cultivating his mind. Doing so seems to have never held much or any interest. Why bother with all that culture stuff if you can shoot from the hip and get your way? Why bother when you start your adult life with a billion dollars in the bank to do with as you please? Its all there, waiting for you, new cars, sexy women, deluxe accommodations, vacations in warmer climes whenever you want. What is the point of philosophy stuff, or psychology stuff, or history stuff, or literature stuff, or theology stuff, or any other kind of highbrow brainiac stuff? That the upper crust regards you as a barbarian if you don't never seems to have crossed Trump's mind. And that is the least important reason..... As Michael Sandel has observed, there are "goods" that lose value when money is part of the picture, in this case respect. One might add that this applies to self-respect just as well but Mr. Trump seems to be oblivious to such considerations. If he can buy it, it is good, end of story. Or this is the unmistakable impression. However, many people -hopefully most people- do not see things this way. Family rapport counts to them more than money, so may community harmony, love of learning, interest in the arts to the point of becoming informed about the arts, understanding one another, and much else is in this category. And who is more déclassé about such things as someone who is ignorant of psychology, ignorant of history, ignorant of the best person-to-person communication skills, artless with words, who has a tiny vocabulary, who has no sense of personal style beyond asserting one's ego? Trump is hardly the only one to whom these kinds of criticisms apply, or apply more often that otherwise. Who hasn't met men in particular (women seem to be more attuned to the value of these qualities), who don't recognize the importance of, well, being civilized? Some things are very basic. When someone has a limited vocabulary, for instance, there is no optimal choice of words to express one's feelings adequately. And malapropisms cause embarrassment that is resented, followed by blaming someone else for putting you in a situation where an educated vocabulary is what is most needed. Lack of skill in self expression, the kind of quality that comes with, let us say, learning to speak in public, learning how to analyze one's psychological processes, or study of writing, simply is not there to draw on when needed. The result is frustration that creates anger which, in turn, leads to outbursts. None of which is helpful to anyone. People with few verbal skills may not even realize where the problem lies. They have so devalued such things that doing something about their shortcomings may be literally unthinkable. For them psychology is girl stuff, being artful with language is sissy stuff, learning how best to get along with others is regarded as needless because, you see, all that is necessary is pulling rank, or barging ahead, or asserting commonplaces as if critical thinking is a lot of trouble that can be dispensed with, no penalty incurred. So, it isn't just Trump. But it is Trump, and everyone notices. How did he manage to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania??? . As president he is John Wayne performing Shakespeare. To be sure he follows a much worse actor, Barack Obama pretending to be Abraham Lincoln. In reality Obama was closer to Forest Gump. No president in US history has been more incompetent. Trump would have been impossible except for Barack Hussein. And except for the most uninspiring candidate the Democratic Party has ever nominated, Hillary Rodham. About Obama, it hardly is the case that those who regard him as a failure are all Republicans. For many months many Democrats have expressed their dismay at how Obama squandered his golden opportunity and repeatedly demonstrated monumental bad judgement. And nothing has been worse -unless it was Obama's failures with respect to national security- than how badly he mangled cultural issues, that is, the values that hold our society together which he set out to destroy, one by one. The political Left has no ability to fathom just how wrong it is about nearly everything when we are discussing social issues. Let us leave aside economic grievances, about which it is the political Right where most of the problems reside. But to focus on social values... Take your pick: Islam, homosexuality, transgender issues like males using women's public bathrooms, women in combat where they generally are a liability to the war fighting mission of the Armed Services, equal pay for unequal work (pay primary school teachers the same as electrical engineers), illegal immigration which by definition is a criminal offense, anti-evolution views (feminists are vehemently opposed to sociobiology), and on and on through a list of similar positions and grievances almost all of which are irrational and Marxist-derived. It is necessary to make this clear because nothing said here in criticism of Donald Trump is intended to be supportive of his natural political enemies on the Left. And there is a great deal to say in criticism of Mr. Trump, someone singularly unqualified to serve as president of the United States. But nothing said now should be remotely interpreted as favorable to the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. See the New York Times article of January 14, 2017, by Peter Wehner, in which he outlined 8 years of failure on the part of Barack Obama. As the sub-head put it: The Obama years, which left us divided and angry, paved the way for the ascent of Donald J. Trump One thing Wehner does not buy is the false "explanation" that Trump won because of massive white bigotry. He made the same observation that others have made, that Obama carried white-majority states easily that Hillary lost. Plus, the racist explanation overlooks (does not begin to acknowledge) the fact that "the Obama presidency has been characterized by injurious incompetence, in particular with regard to his signature achievement, Obamacare. The unveiling of the website was a disaster, and the promises the president made — that Americans could keep their doctors and plans if they chose to — were false. Mr. Obama guaranteed lower insurance costs to families and lower health costs to the taxpayer; instead, costs rose. Several of the state-run exchanges appear to be headed for collapse." None of this counts? As Wehner continued: "Overseas, the Obama years have been defined by spreading disorder and chaos, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, with nations collapsing and borders dissolving. More terrorist safe havens have been established than ever before. Russia and China have become more aggressive and significantly increased their geopolitical influence. America is now held in brazen contempt by our enemies and mistrusted by many of our allies." ..."Mr. Obama never seemed to consider things from a different point of view from his own. He has shown withering disdain for his opponents, constantly impugning their motives even as he testified to the purity of his own. It was his arrogance that proved to be Mr. Obama’s undoing. (Even leaders of his own party felt Mr. Obama’s derision, as if dealing with them was somehow beneath him.) " "Mr. Obama dismissed those who disagreed with him like a professor forced to deal with simple-minded, wayward students. He warned us against retreating into our bubbles, but he was never able to escape his own." And so, while Barack Hussein promised the end to that form of politics which “breeds division and conflict and cynicism,” what he delivered was his own version of divisive and cynical politics. "Obama was the object of extravagant hopes that he nurtured and encouraged," which his most fervent followers believed in with the ardor of religious converts, about which his actual record has been nothing but years of false promise. Years in which, while Wehner didn't say so, the mainstream media continued to worship him as a god. But how could the scribbling class or the bloviating class see the obvious? By definition they don't have any religion no matter how over-the-top their devotion to Obama has been, since, after all, the only people who are spiritual fanatics are those backward dolts who live for “guns or religion.” As the article concluded: "In many ways Barack Obama and Donald Trump could not be more different. Mr. Obama is equable and graceful; Mr. Trump is erratic and graceless. Yet one cannot make sense of the incoming presidency without understanding the failures of the outgoing one." All of which is only to offer a minimalist critique of Obama, but at least it is real and makes some valid points. And it tells us that even Obama's supporters have observed that the emperor has no clothes. When all is said he will have almost no legacy. Or as Newt Gingrich put it, by the time Trump gets done, the Obama legacy will have "shrunk to the size of a golf ball." But let us focus on Donald J. Trump. Which is to discuss a train wreck we can see coming a mile ahead, and there seems to be no way of stopping it. Trump's hubris won't allow any such thing. An article in the January 14, 2017 issue of Forbes, "The Problematic Boss," makes the following observation about the new president: "[ Trump] held a press conference on Wednesday January 11 -his first in six months- that displayed a character that was often unresponsive to the questions being asked, self-congratulatory, superficial, thin-skinned, resentful, exasperated, unbalanced, impulsive, chaotic, combative, disrespectful, exuding braggadocio and narcissism and evincing no more than a semblance of an attachment to veracity or legality. (For instance, the Washington Post counted at least fifteen "unsubstantiated claims" in the course of the brief session)." As Maureen Dowd has put it: "He has a tenuous relationship with the truth and an inch-deep understanding of policy." These assessments will not be argued with here; personally they seem excessive, but it is difficult to argue with the spirit in which they were written. However, is this all there is to be said? Not hardly. Take Dowd's elaboration on Trump: "For all the Republican establishment’s self-righteous bleating, Trump is nothing more than an unvarnished, cruder version. For years, it has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enabling gun nuts." Put this way, there cannot be an argument; the KKK is on the rise again, hide in the basement and be sure to take a change of underwear. However, it is entirely possible to disagree. Not that the Republican Party does not have its share of miscreants but even if we grant that there are, say, a good many angry white men involved, what about the merits of their anger? And are Trump voters a basket of deplorable racists? Indeed, the whole racist trope, while you surely can find miscellaneous racists here and there, strikes me as anti-white reverse racist. That is, just as there are self-hating Jews, there are white Democrats who seem to be self-hating Caucasians. This kind of phenomenon is just as unattractive when it is found on the Left, where it goes unacknowledged, as it is when found on the Right. It may be even more ugly on the Left, these days the source of most of the overt anti-Semitism in the United States. Maureen Dowd does provide us with an example of poetic metaphor in revulsion at Donald Trump, however, and has that kind of usefulness. Radical Centrists have also had unflattering things to say about Mr. Trump. The difference is that we are simultaneously impressed by some of what he has done and also dismayed or even repulsed. Trump isn't all bad, in other words, and any 'critique' of the man that ignores his accomplishments is defective. He has actually delivered on a good number of his campaign promises, some of which, although controversial, nonetheless are popular, like restricting immigration from a number of Muslim nations. Not that the so-called mainstream media gets the point. It is unable to escape a mindset it carefully cultivated throughout the Obama years, based on unadmitted ignorance of Islam and upon the view that all religions share the same morality, which is a blatant falsehood. Similarly with respect to border security and indefensible deference to transgender creatures who, according to Thomas Szasz, no conservative he, should not even exist. To make this clear, however, the Radical Centrists that I know are less than sanguine about the concept: Trump = Radical Centrist. It isn't that we regard him as lacking various talents and the man is smart in the sense of media savvy, ability to communicate with voters, and sometimes inspired choices in the people who he surrounds himself with. All of that deserves respect. He also is a builder, especially of hotels and golf courses, but in any case, he knows how to get things done. But what he is doing -inadvertently or not- is popularizing something of Radical Centrism in such a distorted version that it causes us genuine grief. There is a lot that he does right, however, and this side of him should not be overlooked. Recently, for instance, Trump has taken important steps to restore jobs in America, especially in the manufacturing sector but in many other areas as well. And he has called for something long overdue, redressing obscene trade imbalances wherever you look, with far more wealth going out than coming in, resulting in colossal balance-of-trade deficits. It is about time that someone in power addressed this issue with something other than ill-advised free trade recommendations that make the problem worse. What Trump does right -such as getting elected. even though Hillary outspent him, $1.5 billion to roughly 700 million- can be momentous. Conventional wisdom says that you cannot win when you campaign at 2 :1 disadvantage. But he won anyway. How was this possible? See Forbes for December 20, 2016. The feature story was all about how Jared Kushner approached the campaign as if he was running a start-up. That strategy worked and Trump recognized its strengths when the plan was first presented to him and gave his whole-hearted approval. Regardless, and there is much more to be said in defense of Donald Trump, he manifestly deserves criticism. Trump, again and again, doesn't know what he is doing. His public comments, while they may well elicit favorable reactions from crowds of supporters, often evade issues, misconstrue news stories the way he mangled a Fox TV report about Sweden, and are based more than anything on his emotional state-of-the-moment rather than carefully researched and thought-through conclusions. About Sweden, however, because of how careless he is as a thinker, Trump should have known, long before late February, that there have been massive problems with Muslim immigrants, including numerous examples of rape, far beyond any kind of historical precedent, and large scale anti-Semitism to the extent that the once thriving Jewish population of Malmo is now virtually gone; the Jews of the city have fled an masse. In any case, the day after Trump's blunder, claiming that there had been Muslim riots, there were, in fact, riots in Sweden resulting in considerable property damage, especially torched automobiles. As Bill O'Reilly pointed out, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC reported on Trump's mistake; none reported on the actual riots, none. Regardless, Trump's mistakes never cease, there is an endless supply. Each not only is an embarrassment to the Trump administration, it makes everyone else cringe. Hence an unshakable apprehension, or fear, on the part of Radical Centrists. Especially if some sort of public identification sticks that Trump is a Radical Centrist even though he is no such thing. What if he explodes? Or some kind of imbroglio or scandal or God-knows-what. If the identification was widely accepted we would then look bad to others. Too much is at stake for us to tolerate that kind of association -at all. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
