Win, lose, or draw, will you thank Donald Trump for his campaign accomplishments?

CPT Jack Durish

Very interesting post. Some very interesting points. This has been the most interesting election cycle ever...or at least in my lifetime. Trump was not my first choice...second or third, eiither...but he did topple the apple cart and that is a VERY good thing.

Here is what has pushed me toward supporting Trump. The first thing was when I was driving with my, then, seven year old daughter told me "I want Donald Trump to win the election!" While shocked, I had to ask her why? Her answer, "I like him because he is funny." Of course I had to ask her, 'Is being funny a good reason to support someone for President?' She answered, "Daddy, I don't trust someone who doesn't have a sense of humor." I DID NOT HAVE ANY THING...especially this cycle...THAT COULD REFUTE HER LOGIC? Her reason was as good...better...than anything else I had actually heard to date.
Also, when I heard the Establishment media pouring out there lies of bigotry and racism...the same things that Hillary decided to call everyone that does not support her...or at least half of us...it just add up to me, that a successful NEW YORK CITY businessman would be successful in that environment IF he was what they were trying to make him out to be? Of course, whenever you actually go back and hear what he said, in context and in its entirety it is pure lies that often is totally generated by either the media or the Clinton campaign? So all there lies makes me wonder what they are so scared of? Last, all the human debris that is lockstep in opposition makes me think that if they do not like him, well he must actually not be too bad? And the last, last, HE IS NOT HILLARY CLINTON. Sometimes, I might not like what he says...or really how he said it...but his words will never be worse than her ACTIONS.

Not entirely sure what those campaign accomplishment are. From what I've seen his campaign has drawn lines in the sand to completely divide American citizens and alienate huge portions of the voting public. For this he deserves thanks???

I've been thinking of putting my thoughts together on this and no surprises I have a somewhat different view. Having said that, I would never claim that he's ineffective, just what he is doing is very bad for us and the fact that he is effective makes it worse. Let me apologize in advance for the marathon length post.

First off, I think if he wins the election it will take some time for the Republican party to recover, if they ever can in their current form. During the last election they did a study on why the lost, understood the changing demographics and realized they needed to expand the size of their tent. Unfortunately, all their previous policies and setup of the primary system has made that change difficult. They didn't end up with someone who will increase the size of the tent, instead they ended up with someone who is extremely divisive and plays directly to the most faithful of the base. The only reason he is not being trounced right now is because the Democrats handed him a gift by nominating a candidate with huge negatives, one the Republican party has been demonizing for 20 years.

If he wins against her, the base of the party will be emboldened, regardless of the character of his presidency. They will continue to push through candidates like him but the Democrats will not continue to put up candidates with Hillary's negatives. This is a recipe for disaster for the Republican party that they will have a hard time recovering from.

This ties into the myth that both sides (including the author above) like to put forth, that there is some silent majority that they are representing. This is wishful thinking and is a good part of the reason the Republicans fooled themselves into thinking they were going to win the last presidential election. Another way of expressing "silent majority" is "a group of people that support us that we can't prove exists". Political parties get themselves into hot water when they start thinking that way and it also leads to them not trusting election results because they can't square the results with their belief in the silent majority. Something they came to believe exists without evidence.

If there is not evidence why do so many people on both sides think there is a silent majority that agrees with them? Some of it is certainly wishful thinking. A lot of it is confirmation bias. I'll talk about this in a minute but it gets down to the fact that as communities we have increasingly been isolating ourselves, talking with people that agree with us and disregarding those and sources that don't. In our heads this quickly leads us to the conclusion that most polls are inaccurate because they don't match with our (limited) experience of what others believe. Then we will talk within our respective bubbles and see that everyone else has the same experience because they are operating in the same bubble we are. So the idea of the silent majority is born. I fooled myself with this one in 2004.

I'll give you an example of this phenomenon that happened with a referendum vote in my town. We have an ordinance called prop 46 that limits the increase in property taxes to the growth in the grand list. There are several problems with this when it comes to the changing funding needs in town and a group forced a referendum to repeal it. I was trying to advise that group by bringing up the positive aspects of prop 46 and what they should do to address these very valid concerns that people would have with such a repeal. Long story short the guy leading the initiative called me to tell me I was making the other members of the group uncomfortable and they were convinced that the majority of people in town supported them. Of course they convinced themselves of that because they didn't want to recognize or even interact with ideas that didn't agree with what they thought internally. Things did not go well for them when that referendum vote happened.

For several years trust in the media has been degrading and certainly Trump has fueled that fire. If it had turned into the idea that people should read news stories, recognize bias and come to their own conclusions based on the facts, I'd agree that this was a good thing. But that's not what happened. Instead people have isolated themselves into camps where they have made up their minds of what is true and disregard any outside information that they don't already believe is true. I.e. this is my conclusion, now let's look for evidence to support it instead of let's look at the entirety of evidence and draw a conclusion.

The problem with this is it is leading to all sorts of confirmation bias, becoming an increasingly divided society and and all sorts of unsupported beliefs such as the silent majority myth. How can we have a functioning democracy when we don't occupy a shared reality (what I mean by that is we don't even agree on the facts of a situation because we don't believe any source that gives facts that don't agree with). I partially blame this on the political discourse and I partially blame this on the blurring of the lines between editorial and news content on news networks. Even in the same news network those two sides are publicly at odds. A good example of this was the recent public Twitter disagreement between Hannity (editorial) and Kelly (news) where Hannity cast doubts on Kelly's impartiality because she didn't support Trump.

If we destroy all credibility in people and institutions that disagree with our beliefs we have no way to judge what is true. What has replaced it is not a better ability on the part of the American people to analyze information and come to their own conclusions but instead intellectual isolation where we no longer take seriously information that challenges our beliefs.

So is Trump being effective? Yes. Is he being effective at things that are leading to good outcomes? No.