Sunday, August 21, 2016

TRUMP’S ANTI-SCIENCE CAMPAIGN

Donald Trump is often simply wrong about science, denying climate change and furthering the myth that vaccines cause autism. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE / GETTY
By Lawrence M. Krauss, 12:00 A.M.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen Donald Trump lower, again and again, the bar for political discourse. All the while, though, he’s been lowering the scientific bar, too. In May, for instance, while speaking to an audience of West Virginia coal miners, Trump complained that regulations designed to protect the ozone layer had compromised the quality of his hair spray. Those regulations, he continued, were misguided, because hair spray is used mainly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmosphere outside. No wonder Hillary Clinton felt the need to include, in her nomination speech, the phrase “I believe in science.”

Often, Trump is simply wrong about science, even though he should know better. Just as he was a persistent “birther” even after the evidence convincingly showed that President Obama was born in the United States, Trump now continues to propagate the notion that vaccines cause autism in spite of convincing and widely cited evidence to the contrary. (As he put it during a Republican debate, last September, “We’ve had so many instances. . . . A child went to have the vaccine, got very, very sick, and now is autistic.”) In other cases, Trump treats scientific facts the way he treats other facts—he ignores or distorts them whenever it’s convenient. He has denied that climate change is real, calling it pseudoscience and advancing a conspiracy theory that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” But he has also filed a permit request to build a sea wall around one of his golf courses, in Ireland, in order to protect the property from global warming and its consequences. Which Trump is running for President?

Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, has a more consistent record on science; unfortunately, it’s consistently bad. Pence is an evangelical Christian who is adamantly opposed to embryonic-stem-cell research; in a conversation with Chris Matthews, in 2009, Pence hedged on whether he believes in evolution. Even when it comes to more secular matters, Pence has made some outrageous claims. In 2001, he published an essay piece on his campaign Web site claiming that smoking doesn’t kill. As if to support that claim, he noted in the same piece that one out of three smokers dies from smoking-related illnesses. Pence seems to think that thirty-three per cent and zero per cent are the same.

As if all this weren’t enough, Trump has argued for downsizing the Department of Education and said that the U.S. invests too much money in K-12 schooling. He has suggested that he might appoint Ben Carson—a young-Earth, anti-evolution creationist—to advise him on educational reform. He has called the National Institutes of Health “terrible,” and has said that he would eliminate the E.P.A. In April, the science journal Nature reported that his anti-immigrant tirades could be hindering efforts to recruit good scientists and students to the U.S. The list goes on.

The differences between the candidates and their parties could not be more stark. Hillary Clinton has a long history of supporting scientific research; she has long understood the connections between that research and economic development. She has said that, if elected, she would increase funding for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. As a senator, in 2001 and 2002, she co-sponsored legislation that would have expanded support for stem-cell research. While she hasn’t gone as far as Bernie Sanders in arguing for a carbon tax, Clinton has spoken out strongly about the need to address climate change. Recently, she announced that she would seek to install half a billion solar panels by 2020, and to shift a third of America’s electricity production to renewable resources by 2027. Clinton has also endorsed proposals to enhance stem in schools, including new-teacher training. Partly as a response to Sanders’s candidacy, she has even pledged to make public colleges and universities tuition-free for families making an annual salary of less than eighty-five thousand dollars today, and less than a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars by 2021.

On the level of party platforms, too, the differences are extreme. Perhaps in response to Trump’s candidacy, the 2016 Republican Party platform extends policy proposals that were, in 2012, already anti-science. The platform proposes eliminating the current Administration’s Clean Power Plan; prohibiting the E.P.A. from regulating carbon dioxide; officially declaring that climate change is “far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue”; and dissenting from international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. The platform also claims that it is illegal to contribute to the U.N.’s Framework Convention for Climate Change and its Green Climate Fund because of the Palestinian Authority’s membership in the United Nations. It opposes embryonic-stem-cell research and human cloning for research purposes.

The positions taken by Trump and the Republicans have consequences beyond science itself. Essentially, they are betting that, for a significant portion of the country, empirical reality doesn’t matter; they are also signalling that empirical reasoning won’t be the basis of their public policy. Today, of course, we face global challenges such as climate change, which are more urgent than any we have ever confronted. These challenges require a sober assessment of reality. When science is distorted on the campaign trail, it may produce applause lines. But if those distortions lead to bad public policy, the quality of people’s lives will suffer.

Lawrence M. Krauss is the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is chair of the board of sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and is on the board of the Federation of American Scientists. His newest book, “The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far,” will appear in March, 2017.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

POOR AND UNINSURED IN TEXAS

ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH GWILY
By Ricardo Nuila, AUGUST 18, 2016

Without a transplant, Geronimo Oregón would die of liver failure. Could he navigate one of the most restrictive health-care systems in the country?

Geronimo Oregón was wheeled out of the intensive-care unit at Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital on April 17, 2016, his body wired with electrodes and his mother at his side. He had arrived in the emergency room six days earlier, complaining of confusion, stomach pain, and shortness of breath. Physicians had drained nearly half a gallon of fluid from around his right lung, corrected his sodium imbalance (a cause of his confusion), and relieved the worst of his pain. Now Oregón was being transferred to the step-down unit, a kind of limbo between the I.C.U. and the general ward. His new room had a vacuum pump on the wall. When the suction was on, a bright yellow fluid drained out of a tube in his nose and into a clear cannister. Every part of his body—his belly, his face, his eyes—was the same vivid shade. He had jaundice, the result of old red blood cells leaking into his tissues rather than being cleared from his body as waste. In medicine, this is known as a stigmata, a physical mark of illness. Oregón was dying of liver failure. A calculation made using his blood work showed that, unless he received a liver transplant, he had only an eighteen per cent chance of surviving the next ninety days.

I have been an internist at Ben Taub for the past six years. In that time, I have rarely seen patients who lack health insurance, like Oregón, make it to the transplant list. The hospital is part of Harris Health, a county-funded network that provides care for the indigent, but as with most safety nets it does not cover organ transplantation, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This may be why, when I took over Oregón’s care, I fixated on the tube in his nose. Rather than prolonging his life with invasive equipment, shouldn’t my colleagues and I gear our treatment toward helping him die comfortably? Normally, we would have recommended against resuscitation efforts, such as shocking his heart if it stopped or connecting him to a ventilator. But when we explained this to Oregón and his mother, Emma, she put a stop to the conversation. Her son, she pointed out, was only thirty-six years old—much too young to die. The medical team decided that addressing Oregón’s breathlessness would be a top priority, even if it meant performing more procedures.

Then a medical student noticed something in Oregón’s history that the rest of us had missed: he used to have Medicaid, but it was taken away. The second part of the revelation was not so surprising. Texas is perhaps the worst state in the union to live in as someone who is poor and terminally ill—a direct result of the political bickering surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. In its original form, the legislation would have helped Oregón. It was designed to insure that all Americans—particularly those who worked but did not have employer-sponsored health care—received basic coverage. As part of this goal, the law mandated that states extend Medicaid to any adult under the age of sixty-five who earned as much as a hundred and thirty-eight per cent of the federal poverty level (F.P.L.). Oregón made only six hundred dollars a month, or sixty-one per cent of the F.P.L. at the time, working as a gas-station attendant. But after the U.S. Supreme Court struck the mandate down, in 2012, some states—including mine—chose to reject the Medicaid expansion and the federal dollars that came with it. Texas now has the strictest Medicaid qualifications in the country. According to a 2015 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, for an adult in a family of three to receive coverage, his household income must be less than four thousand dollars per year, just nineteen per cent of the F.P.L. In most cases, childless adults, no matter how little they earn, cannot receive coverage at all.

My colleagues and I had assumed, from experience, that Texas would not fund a transplant for Oregón. But the first part of the medical student’s discovery—that he had ever had coverage to begin with—gave us hope. How, we wondered, did Oregón qualify for Medicaid in the first place? Could he again?

Oregón was born in Mexico City, raised in the state of Michoacán, and brought to Houston illegally when he was nine. His father had largely abandoned the family years earlier, leaving Emma to make ends meet by working night jobs. The money was enough at first, but then, when Oregón was thirteen, he began having seizures in school. Emma took him to Ben Taub, where he was diagnosed with epilepsy. Medication brought his convulsions under control, but he never returned to school. His father, believing that Oregón would receive better treatment in Mexico, demanded that he be sent to live with his grandparents in Michoacán. Emma eventually relented out of fear of her ex-husband, who had been abusive toward her in the past. Back in Mexico, Oregón’s grandparents put him to work tending their livestock. He didn’t return home to Houston until the age of twenty, this time as a legal U.S. resident. He had only a sixth-grade education, but he was bilingual; he joined the Job Corps, a federal career-training program, and found employment immediately.

Oregón worked low-paying jobs—as a dishwasher, a cook, and at the gas station—for most of his adult life, always making enough to pay his portion of the rent that he shared with his mother. He received affordable medical care, including treatment for his epilepsy, through Harris Health. In December of 2010, Oregón’s primary-care doctor detected early signs of liver damage—the beginning of a condition called cirrhosis—in his blood work, diagnosing it as a result of hepatitis C infection. Hep C, a virus, can be transmitted through contact with infected blood or, more rarely, through unprotected sex, and is a common cause of liver disease. According to the World Health Organization, hundreds of thousands of people die of complications from the virus annually, and as many as thirty per cent of patients with chronic hep C infection develop cirrhosis within twenty years. Since Oregón was young and never drank—alcohol abuse aggravates liver damage—the specialists at Harris Health decided not to treat his hep C, out of concern that mixing antiviral medications with his epilepsy drugs would worsen the damage. They monitored his health consistently for years.

On June 9, 2014, Oregón went to his night shift at the gas station feeling a little tired. A few hours in, he experienced a wave of nausea, suddenly vomited a large quantity of blood, and passed out. An ambulance brought him to Ben Taub, where doctors admitted him to the I.C.U. Oregón’s liver disease, they discovered, was progressing much faster than expected. He would need new medications and, eventually, a transplant. The liver specialist, aware that Harris Health could not cover the procedure, referred Oregón to a hospital social worker, who recommended that he enroll in Social Security Disability Insurance, a program for workers who have reliably paid Social Security taxes but become disabled before they reach retirement age. S.S.D.I. would give Oregón enough money for rent and food, and it would also help him recoup some of his mounting health-care costs. More important, it would change his Medicaid status: in Texas, if you’re disabled, you can qualify for the program as long as you have less than two thousand dollars in assets and earn less than seven hundred and thirty-three dollars per month. Oregón seemed to fit the state’s narrow standards.

After he was discharged from the hospital, Oregón went to the disability office, filed the appropriate paperwork, and, in September of 2014, acquired his Medicaid card. Two months later, however, he received notice that his health-care benefits had been terminated. S.S.D.I. payments are calculated according to a person’s average lifetime earnings before he became disabled. When Oregón’s started coming in, they amounted to nine hundred and twelve dollars per month, which put him over the Texas income threshold. The fact that he had paid into Social Security, in other words, made him ineligible for social health care.

Had Oregón lived in any other state, this would not have happened. In a Medicaid-expansion state, such as West Virginia, Oregón would have had no trouble maintaining his coverage. And even in other states that didn’t adopt the expansion, like North Carolina and Missouri, patients like Oregón still have hope of a transplant in a life-or-death situation. That’s because these states allow for a “medically needy” pathway, or a “spend-down” program, whereby patients can meet the Medicaid limit by deducting certain items, including unpaid medical bills, from their income. Texas has such a plan for children and pregnant women, but not for the disabled. When I told this to a social worker at a liver-transplant center in Missouri, she sighed over the phone. “Texas sounds tough,” she said.

For nearly the next two years, Oregón received frequent checkups from his physicians at Harris Health, and Emma took on extra work, including night shifts at a local sports bar. One avenue remained open to them. Disabled Texans who can’t get on Medicaid and can’t afford insurance may apply early for Medicare, the federal health-care program that usually applies to Americans older than sixty-five. But even those who have paid enough into the system, as Oregón had—his paychecks were small but consistent—must wait twenty-four months before coverage starts. This is in addition to the five-month waiting period for S.S.D.I. benefits. In the debate over the Affordable Care Act, Congress considered shortening the twenty-four months to six. But when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the change would add eighty billion dollars to the A.C.A.’s cost, legislators dropped the issue, hoping that an across-the-board Medicaid expansion would help cover most of the patients left in the gap. It certainly would have covered Oregón. Instead, he would have to wait until January of 2017 to be approved for Medicare—many months after he needed a new liver.

Before my first float—the overnight shift in which a fresh doctor takes over the care of a particular specialty’s patients—the chief resident gave me some advice. “Never go down alone,” she said. Since calling for help during this shift usually involves waking up a supervising doctor, the natural instinct is to do so only when a catastrophe is imminent. That first night, I was caring for a woman with congestive heart failure. As she relayed her history to me, she had to stop often to cough. I told myself that the cough wouldn’t worsen, but soon she was fighting for breath, sitting up in her hospital bed and gripping the guardrails. I knew I had let things go too far, so I called a resident. He took one look at the chest X-ray I had ordered and made a diagnosis: the woman had fluid in her lungs. She required a diuretic, which we quickly ordered. I apologized to him for not having recognized obvious pulmonary edema myself, and for calling him so late. “Why else would I be here?” he said. In a matter of minutes, the patient started breathing much better.

After Oregón was transferred to the step-down unit, we updated his mother on his worsening condition every day. We told her how the fluid around his lungs had started to suffocate him, how his liver could no longer stop him from bleeding into his skin, and how his kidneys had started to fail, all in the less than forty-eight hours since he had left the I.C.U. We considered new funding possibilities and ran into dead ends. Would the Social Security office lower Oregón’s disability check to seven hundred and thirty-three dollars a month so that he could requalify for Medicaid? No, administratively this wasn’t possible. Would the nearest transplant center consider performing the procedure as charity? This also wasn’t an option. Although Oregón was deemed a good candidate, there was no financing for his post-operative care, which included expensive immunosuppressive drugs. Even purchasing health-care insurance outright wasn’t feasible. The open-enrollment period for Obamacare had passed, and private insurers told Emma that her son’s illness did not meet their criteria for a life-changing event.

Ultimately, it seemed that the only way not to go down alone was to alert someone with power and influence. On April 26th, with Oregón still deteriorating, the medical team at Ben Taub called the office of John Culberson, the representative for Oregón’s congressional district, in Houston. Culberson, a Republican, opposed both the passage of Obamacare and the Medicaid expansion. But Oregón was a constituent, so two of Culberson’s staffers immediately began asking officials around the state who might be able to fund a transplant evaluation. Two days later, Emilie Becker, the medical director on call for the Texas Medicaid program, phoned me directly to say that several administrators at her office were working on the case, too. They needed one more piece of documentation, though—Oregón’s latest bank statement. Could we expedite things by faxing it over?

Oregón was by this point in no condition to manage the request on his own; his head was pulsing with pain and his kidneys were in total failure. His mother found the bank statement and gave it to the medical team. Three entries appeared in Oregón’s transaction history: a deposit of nine hundred and eighteen dollars from the Social Security Administration, a cash withdrawal the next day in the amount of nine hundred dollars, and another deposit of nine hundred and eighteen dollars twenty-nine days later. With the fax on its way, I relayed to the team my fear that, because the monthly Social Security check exceeded the stated limit for childless adults with a disability, our efforts would amount to nothing. One of the social workers was so confident of this that she wrote as much in a note, appending it to Oregón’s chart: “He will be denied this benefit.” Later the same afternoon, however, I received a call from the Medicaid office. Oregón had been approved.

As we hurried to transfer Oregón to a transplant center, a staffer at Culberson’s office called for an update. I thanked her for her help. “Of course,” she said. “This was someone’s life at stake.” Although she and her colleagues had not dealt with a situation like this before, staffers for two other U.S. representatives in the Houston area recalled instances in which only congressional advocacy had helped a critically ill patient obtain coverage. I spoke with financial counsellors at several liver-transplant centers around Texas, who estimated that, in a given three-month period, between one and nine patients are disqualified from Medicaid because their disability payments are too high. Nobody could say what becomes of these patients—whether they somehow purchase insurance or move to states with less stringent Medicaid rules, or whether they simply die from lack of a transplant. “I’m sure that happens,” Representative Gene Green, of Texas’s Twenty-Ninth Congressional District, which serves eastern Houston, told me. When I called Becker to thank her, too, I couldn’t help but ask how, in the end, Oregón had qualified. She didn’t have an answer. “It seems like you got the right people involved,” she said.

On Friday, April 29th, Oregón was transferred to Baylor St. Luke’s Hospital, where he was evaluated by the transplant team. Shortly afterward, his blood pressure dropped dangerously low. He was intubated and placed on a ventilator, and his physicians also began dialysis, to take the strain off his kidneys, and set up a constant stream of intravenous medications. Very quickly, the documentation of Oregón’s treatment, prepared for billing purposes, took on an ominous tone: “This patient has a high probability of sudden, clinically significant deterioration, which requires the highest level of physician preparedness to intervene urgently.” Nevertheless, the team at Baylor St. Luke’s was able to get him stabilized. They decided that it was time to place him on the transplant list. According to the liver specialist, he would likely receive a good rank; livers are meted out according to necessity, and his condition was dire.

That same day, however, the nurses noticed that something wasn’t right. When they inserted a needle into Oregón’s arm to draw blood, a procedure that, even in a heavily sedated patient, would cause a flinch, he didn’t move. Even more concerning, when the doctors moved Oregón’s breathing tube around to test whether it would still provoke a natural coughing response, he only lay there—no cough, no fidgeting, nothing. A CAT scan confirmed the worst: bleeding in the brain. Surgery was not an option, since the bleeding was too widespread. The doctors waited five days to see whether Oregón would regain basic brain function, performing the same reflex checks over and over. Once it became clear that he would never recover, Oregón was taken off the transplant list. On May 10th, a month to the day after he came to the E.R. at Ben Taub, his mother asked the medical team to remove her son from life support.

Oregón’s wake was held two days later, at Santana Funeral Directors, a squat red brick building on the service entrance to one of Houston’s busiest freeways. I arrived late in the afternoon, after finishing my rounds at the hospital. Emma greeted me at the entrance and walked me to her son’s casket. “Look at him,” she said, pointing out how the yellow in Oregón’s skin had darkened into a dusky brown. “We didn’t have to use much makeup.”

I expressed my condolences as best I could. I said that Oregón wasn’t suffering anymore. I said that she had inspired my colleagues with her devotion to her son. I asked whether it would be O.K. for me to write about what she had been through. “Please do,” she said. Throughout Oregón’s stay in the I.C.U.s at Ben Taub and Baylor St. Luke’s, Emma had slept beside him, on a love seat, and rubbed his swollen feet after the doctors and nurses left the room. Before that, when he grew ill, she had stayed home with him, even though she couldn’t afford it, to care for him and make sure that he didn’t fall. Now, at the wake, she remained by his side again.

When I had finished talking, Emma asked me to pass along a message to the team—not just the doctors but also the social workers, the administrators, and a congressional staffer who had visited with her and her son. It was something that Oregón had told her toward the end, when it looked as though he might indeed receive a transplant. “I feel so important,” he had said. “Everyone treats me like I’m rich.”

Ricardo Nuila is an attending physician at Baylor College of Medicine and a professor of medical humanities at the University of Houston Honors College.

THE MIDDLE OF THINGS: ADVICE FOR YOUNG WRITERS

ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAN MURADOV
By Andrew Solomon, MARCH 11, 2015

The following is adapted from a speech the author gave at the Whiting Writers’ Awards on March 5th.

When I had just finished my schooling and was looking for a job, a friend put me in touch with an absurdly well-connected British biographer who, she assured me, would help me find the professional position of my dreams. I wrote and asked him whether we might meet, explaining that I would appreciate his advice on securing literary work and enclosing some of my early efforts. He duly invited me for tea. The advice I had in mind sounded like this: “You must call so-and-so at this number and say I suggested it and he will publish you and give you loads of money.” After giving me a cup of weak tea—no sandwiches, no pastry, not even sugar or milk—he said, “I have only one piece of advice for you. Have a vision and cleave to it.” We then discussed the weather for twenty minutes.

While I, unlike that biographer, am an artesian font of utilitarian suggestions, I can now see that being asked to comment on young brilliance is an explicit invitation to pomposity. I have done my best to R.S.V.P. in the negative. The proximate, tacit call to romanticism is harder for me to resist. While all old people have been young, no young people have been old, and this troubling fact engenders the frustration of all parents and elders, which is that while you can describe your experience you cannot confer it. It’s tempting, nonetheless, to pose as an expert—and in another way it’s tempting to say, ‘I know nothing that you don’t already know.’ Neither of those postures is right. Every stage of life longs for others. When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young. We have equal things to teach each other. Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls—and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that—the clearer people’s inherent dignity becomes. So I would like to be young again—for the obvious dermatological advantages, and because I would like to recapture who I was before the clutter of experience made me a bit more sagacious and exhausted. What I’d really like, in fact, is to be young and middle-aged, and perhaps even very old, all at the same time—and to be dark- and fair-skinned, deaf and hearing, gay and straight, male and female. I can’t do that in life, but I can do it in writing, and so can you. Never forget that the truest luxury is imagination, and that being a writer gives you the leeway to exploit all of the imagination’s curious intricacies, to be what you were, what you are, what you will be, and what everyone else is or was or will be, too.

I want to take a moment to talk about the middle of things. The middle of things is less exciting than the beginning and less dramatic than the end. Middles can seem humdrum. Say that your current relationship to writing has been like falling in love: we exalt falling in love as the finest of all possible experiences. But the reason people marry and stay married is that the middle, when it can be made to work, far outclasses the beginning. Ask people who have been happily married for a decade or two whether they would like to start all over again, and you’ll find that they mostly wouldn’t, even if some are tempted by the occasional dalliance. It gets to be that way with your writing, too, as you get an ever-clearer sense of what interests you, what you can do, what you’d like to be able to do. Your mature work is the outcome of your early work: that there can be no meaningful middle without a meaningful beginning. But the middle is as joyous as enduring love.

In thinking about this address, I returned to Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” the ultimate expression of intergenerational literary wisdom. If you’ve never read these letters, then do. They are worth reading while you are young so that you can imagine yourself as the recipient of this brilliance; they are worth reading when you are old as a measure of what your own acumen ought to approach. One of Rilke’s injunctions is easy to follow: “Read as little as possible of literary criticism.” I’m going to pass that one along unmediated. But others warrant a closer reading. The most famous passage is this:
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, or books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
The insight is tremendous, but he has it backwards. Belief in answers can get you through your early days, while the belief in questions, which is so much less tangible, takes a long time to arrive at. To know more is simply a matter of industry; to accept what you will never know is trickier. The belief that questions are precious whether or not they have answers is the hallmark of a mature writer, not the naïve blessing of a beginner.

Of writing itself, Rilke wrote: “Depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and beliefs in some kind of beauty—depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity; and use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.” All writers know this problem. A poor workman blames his tools, and we have only two: language and experience. Neither one is so poor as to hamper our ability to do what we dream of. The use of language gets taught at M.F.A. programs nationwide. The use of experience is far more elusive, a long-term game not easily won. Experience poses the questions we are asked to live, and our writing is the mere shadow of an answer.

Rilke adds, “Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” That’s not far off base, but, of course, the writer’s job is to say those things that appear unsayable, to cloak with language those volatile experiences that seem barely able to endure it.

Rilke has written, “Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, ‘I must,’ then build your life upon it.” That rhetoric of urgency is the credo of most writers: we may be on this path for profit, for fame, for catharsis—but, more fundamentally, we are there because it seems the only possibility.

Rilke goes on, “It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” The Romantic sublime entails the exchange of easier for more difficult pleasures. This is an attractive bargain only when more difficult pleasures are more propitious than less difficult ones. What Rilke is suggesting is not simply that we give up easier pleasures because the best things in life happen to be difficult, but rather that the difficulty itself is what makes those efforts so rewarding—that we need not merely endure difficulty to get to a goal, but must understand difficulty as part of the goal. That sounds masochistic, but it is masochistic only insofar as the act of writing is masochistic: insofar as the burdensome activity of marrying words to experience is a source of pain as well as pleasure.
To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them.
This is what I will say to you most urgently: there are many obvious differences between middle age and youth, between having lived more and done more and being newly energized and fresh to the race. But the greatest difference is patience. Youth is notoriously impatient, even though there is no need for impatience early on, when people have the time to be patient. In middle age, the wisdom of patience seems more straightforward, but there aren’t so many days left. But Rilke is correct that we must all write as though eternity lay before us. Enjoy the flexibility that span of eternity offers. The discourse between the young and the nostalgic retains some of its inherent poetry in the form of a longing intimacy. The freshness of younger people awakens memories in older ones—because though you, young writers, are yourselves at the brink of your own future, you evoke the past for those who came before you.

Some of Rilke’s advice seems obscure today, while some of it has been followed so often and so deeply that it sounds banal. But some of it is prescient. Today, we have no choice but to live the questions, because the prospective answers have burgeoned. We no longer expect much sense of the world. Deferring to that incoherence can feel dizzying, and there is an urge to simplify, but simplicity is often a mistake: not pure but reductive. Your work is not opposed to your life; you do not have to choose between them. It is only by living in the world that you acquire the ability to represent it. I am addicted to artists’ residencies, to sequestering myself to concentrate, to the vision that comes in silence, to Rilke’s vaunted solitude—but not to the exclusion of the engagement that gives you things to say. Try not to let your words outstrip your experience.

Never suppose that the humorous is the enemy of the serious. Middles can get ponderous, weighted down with their own importance. Lightness is a gift of the beginning—try to keep it with you for the whole stretch. Much press redounds to hate speech, which can instigate destruction. But even hate speech brings its point of view up from the darkness. To hate hatred is too abstract for men and women; that is the job of the angels. To hate the language of hatred is well within our powers. Learn that selective vitriol.

We are flooded with new technologies of representation and communication. There will be unforeseeable innovations in the course of your lifetimes, as surprising to you as online culture remains for many people my age. When I was a kid, I assumed that there would be colonies on the moon by now, but if you had told me that I could carry a small object in my pocket that would allow me to speak with and see anyone in the world, that could give me directions to anyplace I wanted to go, that would contain my favorite music, and that could allow me to access information on any topic, not to mention most of world literature, I’d have laughed at the absurd notion. As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent. Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.

I used to say that my books were my children, but now that I have actual children I’ve found that books are by comparison rather pliable and accommodating, if somewhat less affectionate. I can speak to you lightly about time, about getting to be middle-aged, about having a vision and cleaving to it. But in some ways I failed to have such a vision. I grew up in a time when my current life was unimaginable, in a time before gay marriage, a time before people like me could have children, and my ignorance of what was to come engendered a paralytic sadness that has turned out to be irrelevant. I don’t know what you may presume impossible, but I can say that some of it will turn out otherwise. Equally, I can say that forms of justice that seem unshakably strong will fall apart while you aren’t looking. Since I was your age, women’s reproductive rights have eroded steadily, anti-immigrant resentments have surged, and incidents of appalling racism have gripped the national conscience even since we reëlected our first African-American President. I wish I could tell you which issues will move forward surprisingly fast and which will slip unaccountably backward. There will be surprises in store on both fronts. All I know for sure is that those twenty-six shapes are what we have to defend our liberty and sustain our hope.

To Trump, Even Losing Is Winning


By NEAL GABLER - AUG. 19, 2016

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. — People run for the presidency for all sorts of reasons. But Donald J. Trump may be the first to run because he sees a presidential campaign as the best way to attract attention to himself. There seems to be no other driving passion in him, certainly not the passion to govern.

He isn’t an ideologue like Ted Cruz, an opportunist like Marco Rubio, a movement builder like Bernie Sanders, a political legatee like Jeb Bush or a policy wonk like Hillary Clinton. For all of them — for any serious candidate — attention is a byproduct of a campaign, not its engine. For Mr. Trump, attention is the whole shebang.

That may be the lesson of his campaign “shake up” earlier this week. The shift is from politics to grabbing attention, and, quite possibly, from winning the election to winning the defeat, which is how he has spent practically his entire career.

Mr. Trump, the real estate magnate, is, after all, the master of taking a property, squeezing out the profit and leaving it for dead, then miraculously turning the loss to his advantage. A failing building or a failing Republican Party: To Mr. Trump, it may be the same thing.

Attention has always been the foundation of Mr. Trump’s modus operandi. Basically, he sells his name: Trump steaks, Trump water, Trump University. You have to hand it to him, though. He discovered that, in a celebrity society like ours, where so many people are competing for attention, running for president puts you a leg up even on the Kardashians.

The demotion of Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and the elevation of his second, Paul Manafort, was supposed to be a political decision. Mr. Manafort was acclaimed as a veteran strategist, a pro, who could facilitate Mr. Trump’s so-called pivot from primary firebrand to general election Solon and make him palatable to mainstream America. Not incidentally, Mr. Manafort would also professionalize the campaign, coordinate with the Republican National Committee, set up a field operation and devise a ground game.

That’s politics. What Mr. Manafort may not have realized, however, is that Mr. Trump’s was never a political campaign, either in the sense that it was operating under traditional political rules or in the sense that winning the election was its real objective.

Mr. Trump is no fool. He couldn’t possibly have thought that insulting the Khans, who had lost a son in combat, or dithering over whether to support the speaker of the House, Paul D. Ryan, or disingenuously hinting that the only way to stop Hillary Clinton was to shoot her, would have boosted his prospects for winning. They only boosted the attention paid to him.

Now, with Stephen K. Bannon, the Breitbart News chairman, and the pollster Kellyanne Conway taking over the campaign, the prevailing analysis is that those choices were a strategic decision: an attempt to improve messaging, to find operatives who could work with Mr. Trump rather than change him and to rally his base on his terms.

Of course, since the candidate hadn’t been doing anything other than on his own terms, the decision wasn’t a political one any more than Mr. Trump’s is a political campaign. It was a decision designed to make sure he continues to be an attentionmonger rather than another pol. Mr. Bannon, a provocateur at Breitbart, has never run a campaign, but he knows a lot about how to get media attention.

Nevertheless, that attention, as we are seeing, won’t necessarily help Mr. Trump win the election, which isn’t to say that there might not be a method to his narcissism. Winning means different things to different candidates. It doesn’t always mean winning the vote.

Mike Huckabee used the attention he got in his losing campaign to land a gig on the Fox News Channel. Sarah Palin used hers to get a reality show and enormous speaking fees. Ben Carson used his to sell books. Losers at the ballot box, they were all winners in a manner of speaking.

Television shows, books and speeches would be small potatoes for Mr. Trump, whose dictum, according to his daughter Ivanka, is, “If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.” And that is where attention meets victory.

If you think of his campaign as a real-estate negotiation, the man who coined the term “art of the deal” has taken a huge edifice, plastered his name all over it without investing much in it, and is very likely to abandon it as a troubled asset once the election is over and its value is diminished, leaving others holding the bag, just as he reportedly did during his serial bankruptcies. Only, in this case, the edifice is the Republican Party. It is Mr. Trump’s biggest deal ever.

And Mr. Trump leaves not only with 18 months of headlines and cheering crowds, but with an even bigger brand. Sarah Ellison of Vanity Fair and Brian Stelter of CNN have speculated that Mr. Trump may want to use his new notoriety to build a media empire. His alliance with Mr. Bannon may help him do that. So may his reported linkup with Roger Ailes for campaign advice.

One can well imagine a postelection Citizen Trump crowing that while Hillary Clinton is saddled with four years of headaches and a measly $400,000 salary, he is using the attention he got to make billions more as a media mogul.

Now who’s the loser?

---

What is the meaning of a quote "In a world full of Kardashians be a Diana"?

It means that, In a world, where you are famous for being famous, be famous like Princess Diana and not just famous like Kim Kardashian. Princess Diana was famous for being the wife of Prince Charles, the ruling prince of the UK. She was famous because of her title, but she used her title more positively by being in the media for the right reasons such as supporting charities and helping the poor, even after having a very dubiously infamous personal life full of separation from her royal husband and having multiple affairs. Even after her death more than a decade ago, she is remembered as a caring and helping royal. On the other side, Kim Kardashian is famous for being a bimbo porn star married to an egoistical rapper and currently known for giving birth to a Compass direction.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

THE CRACKED INTEGRITY OF DONALD TRUMP

The problem isn’t just that Trump doesn’t want to imitate a candidate with a semblance of rational bearing; it’s that he’s not believable when he does. PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC THAYER / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX
By David Remnick, AUGUST 17, 2016

You have to say this for the crooked demagogues and reactionary populists of the American past: they may have stirred the bitter soup of nativist resentment with as much zeal as Donald J. Trump, but their family counselors did not take time out from politics to cruise the Aegean on a plutocrat’s yacht; their rhetorical counselors did not attempt, for decades, to instill fear in their employees through the most squalid sort of sexual terror; and their political counselors never worked in the interest of Slavic autocrats. Oh, Father Coughlin, we hardly knew ye!

Day by day, news bulletin by news bulletin, the Trump campaign spirals to new depths of strategic confusion and moral chaos. On the escalators at Trump Tower, the direction is always down, down, down.

At the center of the campaign is Trump himself, and, summoning the spirit of Sinatra’s most irritating song, he has made it clear that he will win or lose by doing it his way, by refusing to “pivot” or blandify his message and language. There is a kind of cracked integrity in this. No matter what the polls and cable gasbags say, he is going to be himself. “I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change,” he told a local-television interviewer, in Wisconsin. “I mean, you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people.”

The people closest to Trump are his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner. Like the children of populist reactionaries the world over, they spent last week vacationing aboard David Geffen’s two-hundred-million-dollar collapsible dinghy, the Rising Sun, along with Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Wendi Deng. They Jet Skied and toured the old town of Dubrovnik. It is clear—both from legal documents and from Lizzie Widdicombe’s reporting—that Ivanka Trump and Kushner have occasionally been alarmed by the candidate’s public statements (particularly on Mexican “rapists”), but they are, despite their gestures toward feminism and social liberalism, completely committed to Trump and Trumpism. As their friend Reed Cordish put it, “They’re believers. They are all in. They have been all in from the get-go, without hesitation.”

With the polls suggesting a potential electoral wipeout in November, Kushner returned from Croatia and took part in meetings this past weekend that kicked Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, either upstairs or to the side of the road, depending on your reading of the spin. This announcement came shortly after the Associated Press broke the story that Manafort “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.” Under federal law, it is a felony if American lobbyists fail to report their ties to foreign political parties or leaders.

This story was just a new piece in a bewildering puzzle concerning the Trump campaign’s ties to, and the candidate’s own views on, the Putin regime. In an interview I conducted yesterday for “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s closest adviser on foreign policy and national security, made it clear that the Russian issue would remain a focus of the Clinton campaign. Sullivan pointed to Trump’s statements excusing Putin’s anti-democratic behavior, his questioning of nato’s commitments in Europe, and his proposal that he might lift sanctions on Russia. “Those are just some of the examples of where the Trump campaign and Trump himself have gone out and basically adopted not just the position but the logic and the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin,” he said.

Sullivan added that the release of Clinton’s e-mails, almost certainly engineered by Russian intelligence, might only be a first step. “Given Russia’s track record and Putin’s track record, it would be folly to assume that there isn’t more that they would try to do to disrupt the election, more e-mails that they would put out,” Sullivan said. “We have to proceed on the assumption that that is going to happen.”

With Manafort’s demotion, the Trump campaign will now be led byStephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and frequent Trump surrogate on CNN. It does not require a liberal spirit to define the nature of Breitbart. William Kristol, a leading neo-conservative political operative and editor, calls the Breitbart operation “Right-Wing, Intolerant, Mean-Spirited News.” (Kristol ought to know. Breitbart rewarded his opposition to Trump by running a story about him headlined “Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”) Bannon, who is every bit as pugnacious as the now-sidelined Corey Lewandowski, will hardly attempt to tame Trump or normalize him. He will be part of the effort to let Trump be Trump.

As if that were not enough to promise an even uglier autumn, we’ve now learned that Roger Ailes, late of Fox News, is advising Trump before the opening Presidential debate, scheduled for September 26th at Hofstra University, on Long Island. That relationship is long-standing and close. Trump advised Ailes on how to “handle” myriad accusations of sexual harassment when he was running Fox News; despite this counsel, Ailes was sent from the building (though he was clutching a forty-million-dollar severance). Ailes is a deeply experienced political operative, having advised Ronald Reagan on how to handle the “age issue” before a critical debate with Walter Mondale, and George H. W. Bush on how to employ the shiv of racial fear to defeat Michael Dukakis. Ailes and Trump have not always had a smooth relationship—they quarrelled publicly after Trump’s clash with Megyn Kelly during a debate last year—but they are in sync in their xenophobic ideology and their disregard for the rights of women.

No matter how aggressive or skilled the new members of the Trump campaign team may be, their task, their set of problems, appears vast. If Trump is left to his own devices, if he does not get a decisive boost from another cache of e-mails pried loose by Russian hackers, if reporters fail to discover a level of sleaze at the Clintons’ foundation that is truly ruinous and dispositive, their route to winning the Electoral College will be trying at best.

The problem isn’t just that Trump doesn’t want to imitate a candidate with a semblance of rational bearing; it’s that he’s not believable when he does. His hallucinatory improvisations, his fact-lite flights of insult, conspiracy theory, and rage are him, the essence of Trump. His supporters sense that, and they credit it as a form of integrity and genuineness. When Trump is compelled to revert to a prepared text and the teleprompter, his discomfort is as evident as the fear of any hostage forced to read a statement of guilt into a video camera. Trump knows that his listeners know that this performance is not him at all, that he is making a gesture to campaign strictures for which he has nothing but impatience and contempt. In the end, not even those who admire and support Donald Trump most fervently will likely save Donald Trump from Donald Trump.

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.

Saturday, August 13, 2016

WHAT WE LEARNED ABOUT TRUMP’S SUPPORTERS THIS WEEK

A Donald Trump supporter at rally in Denver, Colorado, in late July. New research suggests that the Trump voter is driven not by simple economic self-interest but by something deeper and more psychological. PHOTOGRAPH BY RJ SANGOSTI / THE DENVER POST / GETTY
By Ryan Lizza, AUGUST 13, 2016

Donald Trump loses the Presidential election, this week may be remembered as the point in the campaign when his defeat became obvious and inevitable. The number of controversies, reckless statements, and outright lies from Trump this week was dizzying. He toyed with the idea of political assassination, declaring that “Second Amendment people” could do something about Hillary Clinton or her judicial nominees if she were elected. He called Barack Obama “the founder” of isis. Trump kept the fact-checkers, the hardest-working journalists of 2016, busy. The Associated Press reported that Trump confused an expensive babysitting program for the children of guests at his exclusive hotels with a nonexistent company child-care program for workers. The Washington Post noted that a story, confirmed as true by the Trump campaign, about Trump ferrying stranded soldiers with his private plane in 1991, was untrue. And Trump once again refused to release his tax returns, a break with a tradition that goes back to the nineteen-seventies.

Despite the justifiable panic among Republicans who believe Trump’s post-Convention crater may swallow other G.O.P. candidates, Trump showed no interest in building a conventional political campaign. In an interview with CNBC, he bragged that he has spent “zero” dollars on television ads (he has actually spent some money). In an interview on Fox News, he noted, “I don’t know that we need to get out the vote.” This is the Trump we have come to know: flaunting every obvious weakness as a tremendous strength.

Unlike in the Republican primaries, when Trump’s serial untruths and shocking statements had little effect on his political standing, the damage in the general election has been swift and severe. As of Friday morning, Hillary Clinton led Trump in the last twenty-one nationals polls. New surveys in the most competitive swing states raise the possibility of a Clinton landslide. Important subgroups are repulsed by Trump. In one new poll, eighty-two per cent of Hispanics have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Number-crunchers at the Times and FiveThirtyEight put Clinton’s chances of victory at close to ninety per cent.

But even if Trump loses, Trumpism won’t necessarily lose, too. Trump makes so much news in a single week that it’s sometimes hard to know how to process it all. The last few days did offer some clarity, however, in an ongoing debate about the nature of Trump’s supporters, who make up an enormous chunk of the electorate and will have influence over American politics for years to come.

To simplify somewhat, analysts have been divided into two camps when it comes to what’s driving support for Trump. One group places a great deal of emphasis on economics as the crucial factor, while another group places more weight on racism and bigotry as the key explanation. The two are, of course, intertwined: a Trump voter who is struggling economically might like Trump’s views on trade deals and his attacks on non-whites.

This week, Trump offered up evidence for both theories. In his economic speech on Monday, and in a later interview, he outlined several policies that the econocentric analysts often point to as evidence of his appeal to the working class: protectionism, restrictionist immigration policies, a commitment not to change Social Security and Medicare benefits, huge spending on infrastructure, and a willingness to borrow more for some spending programs, rather than a guarantee to pay down the debt.

The most noteworthy aspect of Trump’s economic speech may have been that he adopted many of the tax ideas of congressional Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce wing of the G.O.P. and that he actually had surprisingly little new to say to struggling wage earners. For example, his child-care proposal is in the form of a tax deduction, which benefits well-off taxpayers, not those who need the most help paying for their kids. Still, Trump has broken enough with the Paul Ryan wing of the G.O.P. to suggest that his appeal might have something to do with his economic policies, as muddled as they may be.

In addition, Trump returned this week to the issue that first endeared him to many Republicans: he attacked Obama as somehow foreign and anti-American. Recall that Trump, a notorious conspiracy theorist, was the most prominent proponent of the idea that Obama was born in Kenya or somewhere other than the United States. Trump led the effort to delegitimize the first black President as a Muslim or a Kenyan. Trump’s birtherism and then his embrace by a loud neo-white-supremacist movement led many to argue that his appeal was not much more complicated than old-fashioned racism.

On Friday, a researcher with Gallup brought some much-needed data and clarity to this debate. Jonathan Rothwell, an economist who drew on eighty-seven thousand interviews in the organization’s polling database, expected to find that Trump’s strongest base of support existed in areas of America adversely affected by international free-trade agreements and lax immigration policy. He made a surprising discovery.

“The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support,” he writes. “His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support.” Rothwell adds that his results do not present a clear picture of the connection between social and economic hardship and support for Trump. The standard economic measures of income and employment status show that, if anything, more affluent Americans tend to favor Trump, even among white non-Hispanics. Surprisingly, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.

Rothwell’s finding is similar to what researchers who have studied the Tea Party movement since 2010 have found. For example, Theda Skocpol’s careful work on the Tea Party showed that it was a movement of middle-class Americans, many of whom experienced a shock to their net worth after the 2008 financial crash when the value of their retirement accounts and homes plummeted.

So if Trump supporters are not necessarily the dislocated factory workers of media lore, what is driving them? Rothwell has two explanations, each of which gives both of the sides in the long-running debate over Trumpism some evidence to support their view.

First, he finds that “more subtle measures” of “longevity and intergenerational mobility” are key to understanding Trump. In other words, Trump voters aren’t living as long as they should be, and they seem to have serious concerns about whether their children will be as prosperous as their own generation is. “Make America Great Again” is not a bad slogan for the people in this situation.

But Rothwell also found a second factor that correlates highly with Trump support:
This analysis provides clear evidence that those who view Trump favorably are disproportionately living in racially and culturally isolated zip codes and commuting zones. Holding other factors constant, support for Trump is highly elevated in areas with few college graduates, far from the Mexican border, and in neighborhoods that stand out within the commuting zone for being white, segregated enclaves, with little exposure to blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.
In other words, race is important. Rothwell, discussing what is known to social scientists as “contact theory,” essentially argues that living in overwhelmingly white enclaves increases one’s chances of being a racist, as “Limited interactions with racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and college graduates may contribute to prejudicial stereotypes, political and cultural misunderstandings, and a general fear of rejection and not belonging.”

If Rothwell is correct, his research complicates our understanding of why voters support the most extreme aspects of Trump’s nationalist policies. It means that simply improving economic conditions isn’t enough. The Trump voter, according to this research, is driven not by simple economic self-interest but by something deeper and more psychological. Rothwell’s view is much more in line with the argument that Trump voters are whites who feel that their privileged place in America is threatened by forces they don’t really understand. If this is true, they can’t simply be won over by getting median wages raised or by bringing the local factory back from Mexico.

This week, Trump’s immaturity and recklessness made it more likely that he will be defeated in November. But his supporters will remain, and, going forward, it will take a more sophisticated and nuanced Republican leadership to figure out an agenda that speaks to their legitimate demands without exploiting their worst fears.

Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.

A massive new study debunks a widespread theory for Donald Trump’s success


By Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo August 12

Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump. It seems to make sense. Trump's most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalized world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labor has shifted overseas. Trump has promised to curtail trade and other perceived threats to American workers, including immigrants.

Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump's appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.

According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.

Yet while Trump's supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead.

The Gallup analysis is the most comprehensive statistical profile of Trump's supporters so far. Jonathan Rothwell, the economist at Gallup who conducted the analysis, sorted the respondents by their Zip code and then compared those findings with a host of other data from a variety of sources. After statistically controlling factors such as education, age and gender, Rothwell was able to determine which traits distinguished those who favored Trump from those who did not, even among people who appeared to be similar in other respects.

Rothwell conducted this kind of analysis not only among the broad group of Americans polled by Gallup. He was also able to focus specifically on white respondents, and even just on white Republicans. In general, his results were the same regardless of the group analyzed.

Rothwell's research includes far more data than past statistical studies of Trump. It also provides a detailed view not only of the people who support him but also of the places where they live. Academics and other analysts will continue to study the Trump phenomenon in months and years to come, and may, of course, reach different explanations.

This research leaves some mysteries unsolved. Something is afflicting the places where Trump's supporters live, but Trump's supporters do not exhibit more severe economic distress than do those who view him unfavorably. Perhaps, Rothwell suggests, Trump's supporters are concerned less about themselves than about how the community's children are faring. Whatever it is, competition from migrant labor or the decline of factory work appear to be inadequate explanations.

Trump is giving his supporters a misleading account of their ills, Rothwell said. "He says they are suffering because of globalization," Rothwell said. "He says they’re suffering because of immigration and a diversifying country, but I can’t find any evidence of that."

Trump's support does come from a place of adversity, though, and Rothwell said Trump's prescriptions — tariffs on imported goods, restrictions on immigration and mass deportation — seem disconnected from his voters' real problems.

"I don’t see how any of those things would help with their health problems, with the lack of intergenerational mobility," Rothwell said.

Five findings in particular from Rothwell's work are noteworthy: those related to economic factors such as income, manufacturing and opportunity, as well as his conclusions about health and racial diversity.

Income

From polls, it is clear that Trump's supporters tend to be blue-collar men with lower levels of education. Yet important questions remain. For instance, do these people support Trump because they are on the margins of the economy or for other reasons?

To answer these questions, Rothwell gathered data, mostly from Gallup's regular telephone interviews. In those interviews, pollsters asked how favorably respondents viewed the presidential candidates and collected a variety of other information, including where respondents lived, their race and ethnicity, their religion, their education, their employment and their income. Rothwell also compiled information about the communities where people lived — how healthy the residents were, the local effects of trade, and the level of economic opportunity. He compared all these factors to determine which were closely associated with Trump's supporters.

Among people who had similar educations, lived in similar places, belonged to the same religion and so on, those with greater incomes were modestly more likely to favor Trump. They were just as likely to be either working or looking for work as others.

In one respect, that conclusion was expected. White households tend be more affluent than other households, and Trump's supporters are overwhelmingly white. The same is true of Republicans in general. Yet when Rothwell focused only on white Republicans, he also found that demographically similar respondents who were more affluent viewed Trump more favorably.

These results suggest that personal finances cannot alone account for Trump's appeal. His popularity with less-educated men is probably due to some other trait that these supporters share.

Trade

Several recent analyses have attributed Trump's success to the disappearance of the factory worker, and to competition with imported goods — especially from China. An essay in the Atlantic in May attributed Trump's success to the gradual decline of employment in the manufacturing sector because of technology and globalization.

"Manufacturing provided steady work for unionized workers without a four-year diploma," Derek Thompson wrote. "When it collapsed, so did unions and the fortunes of non-college men."

On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal report was published online with the headline "How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump." The authors concluded that Trump had won the Republican primary in 89 of the 100 counties most negatively affected by competition from China, measured according to an index developed by a group of academic economists.

Trump's supporters do live and work in economies reliant on manufacturing that have been exposed to intense competition from China. They themselves believe their personal finances have been negatively affected by trade: A poll by the Pew Research Center during the primary found that 60 percent of Trump's supporters said trade had hurt their family's finances, compared with 42 percent of Ohio Gov. John Kasich's supporters and 36 percent of those supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

Yet the Gallup analysis shows that Americans who live in places where employment in manufacturing has declined since 1990 are not more favorable to Trump. Rothwell did not find a relationship when he focused only on white respondents, either, or even specifically on white Republicans.

Trump's supporters have many other traits in common with the factory workers whose economic prospects have been negatively affected by automation and global trade. They tend to be less educated men who hold blue-collar occupations.

Yet those two broad trends in factory work do not account for Trump's appeal, Rothwell's analysis suggests. In fact, among those who share other traits, those who live in districts with more manufacturing are less favorably disposed toward Trump.

Rothwell even found that evidence that people in places affected by Chinese competition viewed Trump more unfavorably. Rothwell, however, was less confident in this finding because of statistical uncertainty.

Rothwell said the results make sense, even though he was surprised by them initially.

Trump's supporters are blue-collar, and many people working in those occupations have jobs in construction, repair or transportation — all of which are protected from Chinese competition. Chinese workers might be assembling semiconductors, but they are not adjusting the thermostat or changing the oil.

Republicans who belong to unions outside of the public sector are not more likely to favor Trump than those who are not in a union, but self-employed Republicans view the candidate more favorably, after adjusting for other factors.

Opportunity

Trump supporters might not be experiencing acute economic distress, but they are living in places that lack economic opportunity for the next generation.

Rothwell used data from Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, who studied how children born in the 1980s moved up or down the economic ladder depending on where they grew up. Children raised in places with high economic mobility, such as Boston or Pittsburgh, often surpassed their parents in socioeconomic status. Children raised in places with low economic mobility, such as Raleigh, N.C., and Indianapolis, struggled just to do as well as their parents in adulthood.

Trump was especially popular in these parts of the country.

Why does Trump’s message resonate the most in these low-mobility areas? The data do not provide a clear answer. It is possible that Trump's supporters, while still better off than many of their neighbors, are worse off than they might have been in the past. Rothwell examined their incomes, but he did not have data on how those incomes had changed over time.

Polling conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News earlier this year, for example, also found no connection between current income and support for Trump. Respondents were also asked, however, whether they felt they were struggling to maintain their standard of living or whether they felt comfortable in their situation and that they were moving up. Those who said they felt they were struggling were more likely to support Trump.

[Economic and racial anxiety: Two separate forces driving support for Donald Trump]

Rothwell also suggested the reason might have something to do with parents and children. Trump voters tend to be older, blue-collar workers, and recent generations have had more difficulty getting well-paying jobs that didn’t require much education. Those opportunities have largely dried up. And now, Trump supporters tend to live in places where the world has gotten visibly tougher for the kids on the block. It's easier to agree with Trump's narrative about American decline when you have seen your own child fall down the economic ladder.

This may help explain one puzzle that has stumped election observers so far. Trump has found success playing up economic grievances, stoking anxieties about immigrants, and complaining about Chinese competition. How is it then, that so many of his supporters seem to be economically secure? It could be that Trump supporters aren't worried for themselves, but for their children.

Health

As The Post reported in March, the counties that supported Trump in the GOP primaries were the same counties in which middle-aged whites suffer from abnormally high death rates. Rothwell's report confirmed this connection and expanded on it.

[Death predicts whether people vote for Donald Trump]

Among Americans who were similar in terms of income, age, education and other factors, those who lived in places where people were less healthy had more favorable views of Trump. In these communities, whites are dying faster, there is more obesity, and people report more health problems. Again, this pattern held when Rothwell focused on white respondents only and on white Republicans specifically.

In other words, between two people who earn the same amount of money and have the same amount of schooling, the person who comes from a place with bad health is more likely to support Trump. It's hard to say what is causing this bad health, but at least some of this probably has roots in cultural practices — diet and exercise habits, patterns of drinking and smoking, and more.

It’s unclear what’s going on here, but it’s not a recent phenomenon.Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton recently documented startling increases in the middle-aged white death rate in the past decade, but Rothwell finds that people's support for Trump didn't seem to be affected by changes in the white death rate where they lived. The places where Trump is popular are places where people have been unhealthy for a long time.

Diversity

Although Trump voters tend to be the most skeptical about immigration, they are also the least likely to actually encounter an immigrant in their neighborhood.

Rothwell finds that people who live in places with many Hispanic residents or places close to the Mexican border, tend not to favor Trump — relative to otherwise similar Americans and to otherwise similar white Republicans.

Among those who are similar in terms of income, education and other factors, those who view Trump favorably are more likely to be found in white enclaves — racially isolated Zip codes where the amount of diversity is lower than in surrounding areas.

These places have not been effected much by immigration, and Rothwell believes that is no coincidence. He argues that when people have more personal experience of people from other countries, they develop friendlier attitudes toward immigrants.

Research from Pew suggests that there is a relationship between the character of people’s neighborhoods and their views on immigrants. A study from 2006 found that native-born Americans living in Zip codes with lots of immigrants tended to hold immigrants in higher esteem. For instance, they were about twice as likely to say that immigrants “strengthen the US with their hard work and talents.”

This was true, apparently, even after taking into account people’s backgrounds and their political leanings. “Analysis of the survey indicates that their more favorable views do not merely reflect their demographics or political composition, but suggests that exposure to and experience with immigrants results in a better impression of them,” Pew noted.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Why facts don’t matter to Trump’s supporters

Aug. 3, 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally at Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Fla. Evan Vucci/AP
By David Ignatius Opinion writer August 4

How did Donald Trump win the Republican nomination, despite clear evidence that he had misrepresented or falsified key issues throughout the campaign? Social scientists have some intriguing explanations for why people persist in misjudgments despite strong contrary evidence.

Trump is a vivid and, to his critics, a frightening present-day illustration of this perception problem. But it has been studied carefully by researchers for more than 30 years. Basically, the studies show that attempts to refute false information often backfire and lead people to hold on to their misperceptions even more strongly.

This literature about misperception was lucidly summarized by Christopher Graves, the global chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations, in a February 2015 article in the Harvard Business Review, months before Trump surfaced as a candidate. Graves is now writing a book about his research at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy.

Graves’s article examined the puzzle of why nearly one-third of U.S. parents believe that childhood vaccines cause autism, despite overwhelming medical evidence that there’s no such link. In such cases, he noted, “arguing the facts doesn’t help — in fact, it makes the situation worse.” The reason is that people tend to accept arguments that confirm their views and discount facts that challenge what they believe.

This “confirmation bias” was outlined in a 1979 article by psychologist Charles Lord, cited by Graves. Lord found that his test subjects, when asked questions about capital punishment, responded with answers shaped by their prior beliefs. “Instead of changing their minds, most will dig in their heels and cling even more firmly to their originally held views,” Graves explained in summarizing the study.

Trying to correct misperceptions can actually reinforce them, according to a 2006 paper by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, also cited by Graves. They documented what they called a “backfire effect” by showing the persistence of the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2005 and 2006, after the United States had publicly admitted that they didn’t exist. “The results show that direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual belief,” they wrote.

Next Graves examined how attempts to debunk myths can reinforce them, simply by repeating the untruth. He cited a 2005 study in the Journal of Consumer Research on “How Warnings about False Claims Become Recommendations.” It seems that people remember the assertion and forget whether it’s a lie. The authors wrote: “The more often older adults were told that a given claim was false, the more likely they were to accept it as true after several days have passed.”

When critics challenge false assertions — say, Trump’s claim that thousands of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001 — their refutations can threaten people, rather than convince them. Graves noted that if people feel attacked, they resist the facts all the more. He cited a study by Nyhan and Reifler that examined why people misperceived three demonstrable facts: that violence in Iraq declined after President George W. Bush’s troop surge; that jobs have increased during President Obama’s tenure; and that global temperatures are rising.

The study showed two interesting things: People are more likely to accept information if it’s presented unemotionally, in graphs; and they’re even more accepting if the factual presentation is accompanied by “affirmation” that asks respondents to recall an experience that made them feel good about themselves.

Bottom line: Vilifying Trump voters — or, alternatively, parents who don’t want to have their children vaccinated — won’t convince them they’re wrong. Probably it will have the opposite effect.

A Donald Trump supporter, left, plugs his ears while passing protesters waving signs and chanting against the Republican presidential nominee at a Trump rally in Denver. (Brennan Linsley/Associated Press)
The final point that emerged from Graves’s survey is that people will resist abandoning a false belief unless they have a compelling alternative explanation. That point was made in an article called “The Debunking Handbook,” by Australian researchers John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. They wrote: “Unless great care is taken, any effort to debunk misinformation can inadvertently reinforce the very myths one seeks to correct.”

Trump’s campaign pushes buttons that social scientists understand. When the GOP nominee paints a dark picture of a violent, frightening America, he triggers the “fight or flight” response that’s hardwired in our brains. For the body politic, it can produce a kind of panic attack.

Screaming back at Trump for these past 12 months may have been satisfying for his critics, but it hasn’t dented his support much. What seems to be hurting Trump in the polls now are self-destructive comments that trouble even his most passionate supporters. Attempts to aggressively “correct” his remaining fans may only deepen their attachment.

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