Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, October 26, 2020

Hoovervirus

 Jon Chait makes the case that Trump's failures recall Hoover. Trump, like Hoover, came to office as a businessman (though Hoover was a true self-made man) and when faced with a crisis, both men were paralyzed by ideological rigor mortis.

As Chait notes, when (please polls, be right) Trump loses, it will be chalked up to his personality. What's missing is that Trump was able to mobilize whites without college by abandoning normal Republican economic policies in 2016. The fact that he has governed as a bog standard Republican has escaped the motivated reasoning of his followers. (I swear to God, I saw a Trump sign that said "Promises Kept". WTF?) Still, it will be hard for a non-Trump Republicans to tap into that populist bullshit that Trump tapped into four years ago.

The poll numbers really haven't moved in a year. Trump's only hope was to have a strong response to Covid, but his party's ideology made that impossible.

Anyway, maybe he is the next Hoover. Let's hope so.



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