The political statistician Nate Silver recently predicted that the Democrats might lose the Senate this fall (insh’Allah). This has caused some consternation over on the Left.
Mr. Silver also moved his blog, recently, from the New York Times to ESPN. In an item published earlier today, he notes that this seems to have ruffled a feather or two also.
10 Comments
The article you link to asserts that Silver “forecasts a Democratic defeat in 2014.” Except he didn’t: his prediction is “a Republican gain of six seats, plus or minus five.” In other words: it’s a toss-up.
It then backs up its assertion that “Democrats despair” with exactly two sources: spokesmen for the DSC and the DSCC, whose jobs are to spin. Asking them their views on Silver’s speculation would be like asking the Yankees front office how the Bronx Bombers will do against the Red Sox this year.
Krugman’s criticisms of Silver concern how his new blog compares with his previous work, not what his predictions are:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/tarnished-silver/
The suggestion that, with the exception of paid spinmeisters, progressives are “fair weather friends” who support Silver when he issues sunny forecasts and deride him when he doesn’t is nonsense.
Republicans will probably do quite well this year. House districts are gerrymandered to the same extent as in 2012. Democrats are defending a number of vulnerable Senators who were swept to victory as a result of Obama’s 2008 landslide. Republicans have continued to place obstacles designed to impede voting by groups who lean Democratic, in a desperate attempt to do whatever they can to prevent a fair fight. Republicans will outspend Democrats by a few hundred million dollars. The governing party historically picks up seats in off-year elections, and the electorate tends to be older and whiter than in Presidential years, even without relying on voter suppression to tilt the scales. Silver is right: Republicans have a substantial advantage and may well recapture the Senate.
However, 2014 is likely to be the swan song for the Republican party and conservatives in general. The older white voters who form the GOP base are aging out (demographers’ euphemism for “dying”). Republicans aren’t doing themselves any favors with the ascendant demographic groups with their harsh rhetoric and inaction on immigration, passing laws which further restrict access to abortion, blocking gun control, and generally adopting agenda which have little appeal outside their base.
As John Boehner recognizes, Republicans are accepting the Faustian bargain of short term gains at the expense of long term decline. Is there “consternation on the Left?” Not if you’re playing the long game.
You may be right. America’s had a good run, but things look irreversible at this point. (The Republican Party can hardly be considered “conservative” anyway, except in relation to the Democrats, and only by a little even so. The Overton Window has been moving at an accelerating pace in recent years, and the Republicans have been scuttling along just behind it, trying to keep up.)
Why would they? Members of those “ascendant demographic groups” are far more likely to consume government services, and be government employees, than the hated demographic group they are so rapidly displacing, with the enthusiastic assistance of the Democrats. Why, then, would they ever prefer a party whose ostensible aim is to reduce the size of government, and return America to a culture of self-reliance?
ΜΟΛΩΠΛΑΒΕ, amigo. If there’s one item on your team’s ruinous agenda that’s going nowhere, it’s more federal gun control. On that one score, I’m optimistic.
Anyway, in general you’re right: in the long run, the prospects for conservatism in America as it is now constituted (especially since 1965) are hopeless. As are the prospects for the nation itself. As Franklin said: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
We’ll sputter along for a little while; there’s a lot of ruin in a nation this size (and it helps that interest rates are still quite low, and that the dollar is still the world’s default currency). Then, as things really start to fall apart, we’ll see secessions, civil disorder, and all the rest.
I know you think I’m crazy. I’ll check in with you in fifteen or twenty years and we’ll see who was right. (Knowing you lefties, though, you’ll say either that whatever happens is totally great, or that it was Bush’s fault.)
The rest of you: keep your powder dry.
Why would conservatives support immigration reform? I dunno, maybe to cut the deficit, grow the economy, and reverse the demographic time bomb so a younger work force can support increasing numbers of retirees?
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44346
Or maybe conservatives recognize that the inscription on the Statue of Liberty is part of American heritage, and the words actually mean something? After all, I keep hearing conservatives proclaim the primacy of these worthy goals, at least in theory. I suppose those goals aren’t as worthy if you have to depend on Those People to help achieve them.
More gun control? We have no gun control, unless you count restrictions on fully automatic weapons and nuclear bombs as gun control. We have a patchwork of porous laws which are easily evaded by anyone with the cash and the desire to acquire weapons of breathtaking lethality. How could you have more of something when you don’t have any of it in the first place?
Bush’s fault? The ruination of the Bush years has been largely mitigated by now, unless you happen to be an Iraqi. The economy is back above where it was when it crashed, we no longer use torture, bin Laden is dead, and the world no longer regards our leader as a buffoonish cowboy. Our troops are out of Iraq and will soon be out of Afghanistan. As in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the cataclysm has passed and life goes on.
The only thing which I expect to be worse in fifteen or twenty years is the environment, at least if you believe what 10,883 out of the 10,885 peer-reviewed scientific papers issued last year report on the subject.
At least we are in agreement on the coming extinction of conservatism. It’s too bad, really: back when people like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley were around, conservatives had interesting ideas to offer. Now that the voices of reason have been supplanted by bug-eyed hysteria, we only have the left side of the house which relies on such quaint notions as facts, logic, and ratiocination. At least someone’s still around to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
* * * *
More on the spat between Paul Krugman and Nate Silver:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/why-paul-krugman-turned-against-nate-silver.html
Sorry Pete – the spam filter had blocked this when you first posted it. I had accidentally turned on the “hallucination” filter.
Too busy to respond just now. Hoping others will.
“Obama’s 2008 landslide”
In 2008, Obama got 52.9% of the popular vote. Heck of a landslide, Brownie, heck of a landslide.
“inscription on the Statue of Liberty”
Last time I checked, Emma Lazarus wasn’t one of the writers of the Constitution. What other third rate poetry do you want to write into the law of the land? Wreck of the Hesperus? Ode to a Grecian Urn? There was an old hermit named Dave?
“the world no longer regards our leader as a buffoonish cowboy”
Yeah, Putin is sure showing Obama a lot of respect right now.
“We have no gun control”
That will certainly come as a relief to all those folks…
http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2014/02/breaking-news-gun-confiscation-letters-sent-out-in-connecticut-2600370.html
Thanks for writing, One Eyed Man. I never realized that it was possible to get your head this far up your ass before. Ya learn something new every day…
It’s fatiguing to argue these things with you again and again.
Unlike you, I don’t think we are ushering in a glorious future for the nation by throwing open the borders to millions of unskilled, poorly assimilating, low-IQ immigrants from profoundly alien cultures — thereby further eroding the nation’s social and linguistic cohesion, depressing wages for those low-income workers who are already here, and placing ever-greater stress on public services — just in the hope that they will outbreed the nation’s traditional stock fast enough, and become net producers of revenue soon enough, that the government can begin to suck money out of them in time to stave off total economic collapse. I guess that means I’m just a glass-half-empty kind of guy.
As for the Statue of Liberty, I guess you must be referring to that familiar poem by Emma Lazarus, a Zionist zealot who was perfectly happy to invite the huddled masses of the world to America, as long as they stayed out of her own people’s proposed homeland.
(Surveying the 20th-century welfare state, Viktor Frankl proposed the we needed another statue as a counterpoise: a Statue of Responsibility, to be erected on the West Coast.)
No gun control? You’re off your meds. Try getting a carry permit in New York. And all firearms exhibit “breathtaking lethality”, for God’s sake; they’re guns. That’s what they’re for. Despite their fetishization by ignorant coastal hoplophobes, AR-15s are no more or less lethal than any other semiautomatic weapon — and rifles cause fewer homicides each year than hammers and clubs.
No gun control?? So befevered with the zeal to restrict and infringe this basic Constitutional right are the Democrats of my state that they passed, in the middle of the night, before legislators even had a chance to read the bill, a law of such gobsmacking stupidity that it even wound up outlawing the sale of magazines that the police used in their own weapons.
And so on. I could go on (and on and on…), but as I said, it’s just so horribly fatiguing, and so completely futile.
You are in deep denial, my friend.
I never understood how someone who emigrated to America from his land of birth, and was welcomed by those of us whose families have been here for a few generations, could be so opposed to others seeking the same blessings which you received. But hey: once you’ve climbed the ladder, why not pull it up so others can’t get on?
As for gun control: regardless of what New York State laws are, anyone with the money and desire can buy whatever weaponry they want at neighboring states or have it shipped up Route 95 from Virginia. Which is no gun control at all.
However, this is getting tedious, and I’m disinclined to repeat arguments we’ve had before, so this is my last word on the subject. I will leave the floor to you and the odious Toddy Cat.
Perhaps I can help you to understand.
What I did was to move, with my British family, from a part of the British commonwealth to an English-speaking nation originally founded as a British colony. The cultural, ethnic, and demographic distance was essentially zero.
Cultural distance matters, because it has a profound effect on assimilation and social tension — and until 1965, our immigration policy reflected that. Indeed, even the suicidal Immigration Act of that year was sold to Congress only after impassioned insistence by Edward Kennedy that it would never alter the traditional demographic makeup of the United States (because even he realized how important that was). At the time my family came here, immigration rates were low, and our sensible immigration laws favored easily assimilable applicants.
Now we have imported more immigrants in the past 35 years from Mexico alone than all the Europeans who came here in the previous 400.
Here’s a trenchant excerpt from Lawrence Auster’s 2002 essay on this topic (my emphasis):
Auster’s best work on this subject is his 1990 essay The Path To National Suicide. I invite readers to see also my own, far briefer post, Simple Common Sense About Diversity and Immigration.
Culture matters. Assimilation matters. Numbers matter.
Excuse me, but that’s already illegal. The fact that criminals ignore the law is no reason further to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves against such people.
I immigrated to (NOT emigrated to) America from my land of birth, and I never opposed or begrudged legal immigration for anyone else. But then, I do make a distinction between legal and illegal behavior, unlike stupid lefties who don’t.