Member-only story
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There is a reasonable feeling among rural, blue collar Americans (who are far more likely to join the army than their white collar brethren) that Joe Biden is just another neoliberal, armchair war-hawk with disastrous judgement. The contempt that many Biden voters have for Trump voters is absurd, considering that (in many cases) a vote for Trump is a vote against endless, off-the-books wars; corrosive globalization; and an endemic, blind expertism — think lockdowns — which hurt some people and places far more than others.
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Biden, with the help of the highly corporate DNC, took down a populist in the primary and then again in the general. Is this cause for celebration — or is celebration the symptom of a profound failure of imagination?
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Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. — Thomas Kuhn
If you put down the zesty Trader Joe’s snacks and stopped refreshing 538 for even a second, you might have noticed that polls have been wrong for two consecutive media cycles. Why? I suspect that a profound disjunction has opened up between public and private belief. Trumpism has been widely conflated — perversely and absurdly — with the 20th century’s worst political crimes. If expressing a preference is associated with world-historical evil, and good for a public shaming, people won’t accurately express their real opinions. It’s not particularly hard to figure out.
