A couple of numbers from FiveThirtyEight‘s polling roundups:

56% of Americans polled disapprove of US president Joe Biden.

56.1% of Americans polled disapprove of former (and hoping to be future) US president Donald Trump.

Those two are their respective parties’ 2024 presidential nomination front-runners, and it’s not even close.

US vice-president Kamala Harris, who’s best positioned to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket if he drops out or dies in office, is just a wee bit less unpopular than those two with a disapproval rating of “only” 51.3%

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s running against Biden for the Democratic Party’s nomination, is less unpopular yet — but more so with Republicans (23% unfavorable) than with Democrats (41% unfavorable).

On the Republican side, second-placer (so far) Ron DeSantis bests Trump with an unfavorable percentage of “only” 48.6%. Former US vice-president Mike Pence is even less popular than Trump or Biden at 58.5%.

I’m not old enough to remember people actually wearing “I Like Ike” buttons, and I’m just old enough to have trouble remembering who it was — it may have been Dick Morris — who said in the early 2000s that if your unfavorable rating is above 35%, you shouldn’t bother running for president.

This year, the only “serious” “major party” candidates who seem to be getting under that wire are on the Republican side: Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (34.2%) and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (24.7%). And one suspects that if either gets any traction, those unfavorable ratings will spike upward.

Looking at Gallup statistics, I see that the average disapproval rating for elected presidents upon taking office from Eisenhower to Obama was 11.3%, and that average was dragged way upward by Bill Clinton (20%) and George W. Bush (25%).

Even the likely retrospectively most unpopular president overall of the Eisenhower-to-Obama era, Richard Nixon, entered office with a stunning disapproval rating of only 5%!

Something has changed in recent years, and that change manifests in two important ways.

First, politicians in general are obviously becoming a LOT less liked and trusted. I don’t think that’s because politicians are worse now than they were in, say, 1952. I think it’s because people are paying closer attention.

Second, these days, it’s hard to make a case that voters are voting for the politicians they like best for the nation’s higher office. Instead, they’re mostly voting against the politicians they hate the most, and for politicians they hate just a little bit less.

The predictable result is that these days, instead of running on their own policy proposals, presidential candidates run on claims about their opponents. Trump is an “insurrectionist.” Biden runs a “crime family.” Ignore my IDEAS, folks! Focus on how naive, stupid, or dastardly my OPPONENT is.

Which explains why, policy-wise, it’s hard to tell one president from the next without a scorecard.

I can’t help but think of this phenomenon as a huge neon sign reading “TERMINAL DECLINE” flashing brightly over any polity it shows up in.

That sign means it’s time to stop worrying about WHO’S next, and start thinking about WHAT COMES next.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The Wall Street Journal now realizes that income inequality can be a source of social problems.

No, its famously pro-proprietor commentators haven’t signed up for union cards.  Two different editorials in the August 28 opinion pages come not to praise labor organizing but to bury it, whether it’s South American schoolteachers whose policies “put unions above children” according to Mary Anastasia O’Grady in “Socialism Sinks Venezuela’s Schools,” or Sacramento screenwriters hitting up California for what an unsigned editorial dubs “Jobless Benefits for Susan Sarandon.”

What stands out is the unlikelihood of suddenly developing a tender concern for workers in fields without Sarandon-style stars to draw attention to their cause during the most contentious film industry strike in decades (followed closely by O’Grady decrying the use of schoolchildren as “a good prop for communists” while capitalists are equally happy to use a captive audience to prop up their own profits). Sarandon and actors struggling from a lack of comparable name recognition have more clout joining together. Meanwhile, loyal audiences perennially show up for Sarandon vehicles like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Thelma & Louise precisely because they get more than a movie ticket’s face value out of them.

More insidious is the Journal‘s implication that pro-strike partisans are only “now seeking to put their thumb on the bargaining scale” after the “level playing field for unions and management” put in place by the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.  In fact, as Murray Rothbard has observed, “it was the Taft-Hartley Act” itself that was responsible for “taming as well as privileging” unions and leading them “into the cozy junior partnership with Big Business and Big Government that we know so well today.”

The Journal views subsidies for strikers as inadvertently providing “even more incentive to use artificial intelligence to replace workers” than the course of technological progress resisted by flesh-and-blood thespians.  Yet it was cybernetician Stafford Beer, in the aftermath of his efforts to build a participatory computerized economy for leftist leader Salvador Allende in Chile, who foresaw moving past “the cultural myths that all technology is dehumanizing.”

Beer asked why “we shall prefer to sit a hundred pupils uncomfortably in front of a human teacher who hopes he understands relativity … than to give the individual pupil access to videotape recordings which he can replay to his hearts content, of Albert Einstein — who could be as lucid as the day.”

Half a century after Beer noted that “a computer can be interrogated, explored, used, continuously and in different ways by a few hundred pupils at once,” devices orders of magnitude more powerful are still being misused to “condition the pupil to give the right (in quotes) answers to a set of trivial questions.” O’Grady dictates that Southern-hemisphere socialists “track students” and “administer standardized tests.” Yet as Beer hoped, “the machine could be used as a real liberator” at a truly free, and thus fair, bargaining table.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “OPINION: The raw-dealed actor/teacher show” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina] September 5, 2023
2. “The Raw-Dealed Actor/Teacher Show” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, September 7, 2023
3. “The Raw-Dealed Actor/Teacher Show” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, September 8, 2023

For the second time in as many months, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 81, experienced an … episode … on August 30, suddenly freezing, going silent, and appearing to have broken contact with the external world while talking with reporters.

Dr. Brian Monahan, the US Capitol’s attending physician, declared McConnell “medically clear” the next day, noting that “occasional lightheadedness is not uncommon in concussion recovery.” McConnell sustained a concussion after falling in March.

But among the aging American political class, McConnell’s far from alone when it comes to recent public displays of something that most people think looks like senility. Two other names (not the only ones) that come to mind are US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), 90, and US president Joe Biden,  80.

All this has people talking about things like age limits, term limits, and “competency tests.” Which is fine, I guess, but it seems to me that we may be better off with wandering attention spans, sudden descents into sleep, etc., than we would be with these people still at the top of their games.

“In that moment of amnesiac innocence,” Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone writes of McConnell’s latest freeze-up, “you’d never be able to tell from looking at Mitch McConnell how many people he’s helped kill. …. All you’d see is a man. A cute, harmless, befuddled old man.”

How many people HAS McConnell helped kill? It’s hard to envision any answer which doesn’t include the word “million.”

As a member of the US Senate since 1984 and its GOP faction’s leader since 2006, he’s been one of the main political figures behind deadly US military interventions around the world. He’s openly backed, and whipped Republican support for, these wars of choice, and worked hard to defeat even half-hearted congressional attempts to rein them in.

In a world where justice meant anything, McConnell would probably be living out his golden years in a senior citizens’ complex back in Kentucky — specifically, FMC Lexington, a federal prison  for inmates requiring constant medical attention.

Barring that — or, better yet, eliminating his job entirely — perhaps we’re better of with him in Washington. If he retires, he’ll almost certainly be replaced by someone just as evil, but still possessed of relative youth and mental acuity.

Every time Mitch nods off or freezes up at a meeting, or misses a vote to get a hip replacement or botox injection, there’s at least a chance of innocent lives being spared.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY