From a really thoughtful assessment by Andrew Gelman and Julia Azari of lessons from the 2016 election:

In 2016, Trump was opposed vigorously as dangerous, incompetent, xenophobic, tyrannical, and unhinged, by almost everybody in elite circles: most of his Republican primary opponents at one time or another, a large number of conservative intellectuals, former Republican candidates Romney and McCain, the various Bushes, the media, almost all newspaper editorialists including those that were reliable Republican supporters, all Democrats, about 10 Republican senators, and even some pundits on Fox News. Further, Trump’s breaking of all the standard niceties of politics was there for all to see for themselves. But half the voters said, we go with this guy anyway. “The falcon no longer hears the falconer,” as W. B. Yeats put it.

To put it another way, the elites in the Republican party had a coordination problem, which allowed one of the most disliked choices to win the nomination in a multi-candidate primary campaign. At this point, one might well ask whether elites are now following public opinion: are elected officials who would like to challenge Trump afraid to alienate their voters? These sorts of questions demonstrate the connections between public opinion and legislative politics: Congressional Republicans are reliant on Trump’s support within their party but fearful of his unpopularity among Democrats and independence; meanwhile, Trump relies on the forbearance of a Republican-led Congress to avoid being engulfed by investigations of scandals.

Their Lesson 13 is also interesting:

13. There is an Authoritarian Dimension of Politics

Political scientists used to worry about authoritarianism within the electorate. Mainstream politicians, ranging from Republicans on the far right to lefties such as Sanders, tend not to go there. Trump did. In doing so he broke the rules of politics with extreme comments about his opponents, etc., that are hard to forget. But a significant segment of the electorate, maybe 20%, have always been waiting for its authoritarian champion on what we now call the alt-right dimension. There had not been one in the modern era. Trump’s absolute dominance of the political news for over a year signifies this uniqueness. There had been others with this sort of appeal, notably Joe McCarthy or George Wallace, but they never came close to becoming our national leader.

I agree with Dave Pell’s assessment:

“Before anyone gets too excited, I think it’s worth keeping this particularly unusual race in perspective. Roy Moore; an ill-informed, racist, misogynist, anti-gay, child molesting criminal who was shunned by many in his own party lost an election — and that was still considered an upset.”

Yep.

Interesting post by Elizabeth Drew, who IMHO has been a shrewd observer of US politics over many decades. She outlines the two current theories circulating in Washington about Trump’s mental state thus:

The most widely accepted view is that he suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder, which is far more serious than simply being a narcissist. According to the Mayo Clinic, such a disorder “is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others.” Moreover, “behind this mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”

This definition is all too reflective of traits that Trump regularly exhibits. Another view held by a number of medical professionals, based on how Trump spoke in interviews in the late 1980s and how he speaks now – with a far more limited vocabulary and much less fluency – is that the president is suffering from the onset of dementia. According to the highly respected medical reference UpToDate, a subscription-financed service used by professionals, the symptoms of dementia include agitation, aggression, delusions, hallucinations, apathy, and disinhibition.

So, which is it? Or maybe it’s both. But the worst delusion of all is the one shared by all of us liberals — namely that even if it becomes clear that the President is off his rocker or incapable, the Republicans will do nothing about it. And then there’s the terrible thought that if they did do something about it then the world will be stuck with Mike Pence.

Interesting essay by Thomas Meaney on the writings of Francis Fukuyama and John Dunn. The bit that caught my eye (given that I’ve been going on for ages about Chinese astuteness in managing the Internet) is:

If the Chinese example poses a challenge to Western politicians and political theorists, the reason is not because it offers states around the world an attractive authoritarian alternative to liberal democracy—at least not yet—nor because it has, more impressively, done more for its people in the past thirty years, in relative terms, than any Western government has done for its own. More simply, it is because China shows that in the twenty-first century a functioning state can rule over and claim the allegiance of more than a billion people without any pretense of liberal-democratic governance. Among some Anglo-American observers today, one detects the sort of admiration for China that in the nineteenth century was directed toward the bureaucratic efficiency of the Prussian state. It seems at least possible that in the near future the world will have something concrete to learn about the possibilities of the modern state from the Chinese experience. Already, China presents us with the unsettling fact that democratic rule does not automatically entail favorable economic or political outcomes—a lesson we apparently still haven’t learned from the last century. The point is not that China has become a model for governance, but that the pretense of any model, including a Western one, being stable and exportable is getting harder to uphold. Under democracy, we may be fortunate enough to experience good government, but good government is far from something that democracy guarantees—in theory, much less in practice.

Now that it’s becoming clear to the Brexiteers that unless they come up with a solution to the Irish border question then everything could fall apart when the UK next meets the EU in December. Fintan O’Toole neatly decodes the xenophobic rants now emerging from the UK tabloids:

The “political process” is the Brexit negotiations, in which Britain was supposed to table “specific solutions” on Ireland by October. That deadline had to be extended to mid-December. Yet here, a month before a decision has to be made, we have the most senior British officials stating openly that they still don’t understand the problem, let alone envisage a concrete solution.

So what is the Irish government supposed to do? What happens with the border is a vital national interest. Ireland is desperate to hear what Britain has in mind. Instead, it has been told not to worry its pretty little head about it, but trust in the reassurances of its betters. It is being placed in the position of a 1950s wife, whose husband is betting the house on a horse race while he tells her, with increasingly irritation, to stop worrying because the nag is sure to romp home.

Behind this reckless arrogance, there is an assumption that Ireland is an eccentric little offshoot of Britain that must shut its gob and stop asking awkward questions. It is, in fact, a sovereign country with the full backing of 26 other EU member states – and how strange it is that we have reached a point where this comes as an unpleasant surprise to so many people in London.

Sombre column in Spiegel Online occasioned by the political infighting in Berlin:

The idea that democracy was somehow the endpoint of development was megalomaniac. As long as there is something to redistribute, every system has it easy. But in the past 11 years, freedom around the world has receded. Of 195 states only 87 are still free, 59 are partially free and 49 are not free at all according to the NGO Freedom House. Turkey and Russia have turned their backs on the group of democracies while Poland and Hungary look to be not far behind. Meanwhile, the United States is foundering. One would hope that should be enough to focus minds in Berlin. There is, after all, a lot at stake.

There is. The thing that struck me about the column, though, was the reference to our complacency about the inevitability of liberal democracy. I love Francis Fukuyama’s two books about political order (‘origins’ and ‘decay’), but the first volume, in particular, is a bit like Darwin’s Origin of Species — with liberal democracy coming to serve as the political version of Homo Sapiens. (That’s what “getting to Denmark” was all about.)

The problem is that evolution is an ongoing process. Even Homo Sapiens continues to evolve, but at a relatively leisurely pace. Political evolution, on the other hand, runs at a much faster pace. Liberal democracy might, in the longer view of history, just turn out to be a blip.