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One of the things that alienates educated Westerners from Trump is the way that he talks. He hardly ever talks in abstract terms. He doesn't qualify or hedge; everything is direct and concrete. Rather than say that he was on one of the later episodes of Oprah's show when they were coming to an end, he will say he was on the last episode. He won't just say that one of Lincoln's sons died, but instead he will name that son Tad. He's always including specific details that he misremembers or aren't all that important. He can't just say that people like Liz Cheney send people into warzones but will never face any real danger themselves, but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing [EDITED] her being pushed onto the frontlines to face death against an overwhelming force. One of the worst parts of his interview with Rogan was when he forgot the name of a boxer in his story. Usually, he would just throw in some name that sounded about right and run with it. However, this time, he didn't, and he tried to talk about "the guy" and the whole story fell to pieces in a mess of vague referents.
I think this is why Trump actually has a lot of cross-cultural appeal, because it's the educated Westerners who are strange. Most people aren't very good at thinking and talking in lawyerly abstractions, studiously avoiding any implication that might not hold up in court. For most of human history, people have used stories about specific people, in specific places, and about specific events to communicate general ideas about society, politics, morality, and even science. Most people aren't good at remembering abstract statements about general categories. However, give them a story fleshed out with questionable details, and they'll remember the gist even after they've forgotten most everything else. Educated Westerners are very good at communicating in abstractions, and they expect their audience to infer details from context. For many people, this kind of speaking might as well be in some kind of secret code language.
One of the most charismatic storytellers I know is an old Christian missionary women who would abhor the thought of voting for Trump, but she is very much like him in personality. She has made her entire life out of convincing people to fund her charitable missionary work. She has an incredible capacity to reach across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries and communicate with so many different types of people, and she talks just like Trump. Her stories are all too good to be true, and that's because they're not, at least not literally. She didn't really escape from a country descending into civil war on the very last flight out of the airport. The miracles and coincidences in her stories were not really quite so serendipitous or unexpected as she makes them sound. She always embellishes with details that are often lazily misremembered or merged from other events. I don't think for a moment she is trying to be manipulative or deceitful, because she implicitly expects her audience to extract the general meaning from the particulars. The specific names, times, and places are used as placeholders, either approximately true or for illustrative purposes. She does not seem to know how to communicate in any other way.
What's interesting about Trump is that he can't turn this off either. He can't code switch between the two different ways of communicating, and it continually suprises him when he is misinterpreted. This is, I think, one of the reasons he comes across as stupid to educated Westerners, because to them this kind of communication is associated with stupid people. And they're not wrong--this is how stupid people communicate abstract ideas. However, not everyone who commicates like this is stupid, and perhaps most people in the world prefer this way.
I think honestly it’s one of the things I like about the modern era that’s most bizarre about the current crop of elite. Not only do these guys speak an odd dialect of lawyer, but they’re fantastically uneducated about how anything is actually done or made. And it is off putting to average people because they don’t hide behind statistics and spreadsheets. They do things, make things, and watch or play games.
It’s like if I had a bookie describe the last game of the World Series, and then a plumber from Brooklyn. They’d both be describing the same events but only one guy would have described a baseball game. The other guy is describing a graph describing the baseball game. And I think that’s actually why the elites running the systems cannot fix things. The old deep knowledge of the processes their graphs and lawyered language describe is gone. They’ve never done any of that kind of work, nor, increasingly do they even know anyone who does that work. Without knowing how the game of baseball actually is played, without knowing what is going on on the field, moneyball simply doesn’t work.
And I think this is what people are reacting to. Trump at least comes across as the guy who actually understands baseball instead of baseball statistics. They have plenty of real life experience of working with idiots who only see the world through screens. Those people might be educated, as in having attended a lot of very expensive colleges and having a couple of $100K sheepskins on the wall. But talk to anyone in the trenches of any operation and it’s pretty universal that the spreadsheet jockeys often make arbitrary decisions that make their job harder to impossible. The general problem for a lot of ground level managers is to make it look like they’re following the new, stupid procedures dictated by a spreadsheet jockey, while still getting productive work actually done. They’re used to idiots who talk like Harris, and they know her practical knowledge of the stuff she has policies for is precisely as bad as the local regional manager o& their corporate masters— she looks at graphs and knows the graphs go up if you do a thing.
I’m not sure that it’s a communication problem at all. The problem for the elites is that the culturally coded language they use bespeaks of their ignorance. Nobody takes them seriously because not only do they mistake their maps as territory, but it’s often the case that the6 have no idea there’s a real territory out there being impacted. We can just make fossil fuels a thing of the past, without using nuclear. Just look at my graph.
Fix what? Elites developed the policy that solved the 2008 mortgage crisis as the rest of the world struggled. The zero-interest rate policy and QE has since been copied by other central banks. It was not elites who were buying those mc mansions with 0-money down. Same for Covid vaccines.
Elon Musk is technically is an elite and has contributed greatly to society. Society is not going to solve difficult problems like space travel using only ordinary people. Difficult coordination problems require elites. Sometimes the public isn't always owed an explanation or it would be against the interests of national security, like the Manhattan Project.
Dollars to donuts Elon had a summer job shovelling shit or picking apples at some point -- Kamala seems to be kind of an early adopter on this sort of thing being Just Not Done for aspiring white-collar climbers, to the point where not only does she need to make up a story about working at McDonalds, McDonalds is the shittiest job she can even think of to lie about.
Trump probably never had to literally lay bricks or whatever, but based on how much he seems to enjoy hanging around with garbagemen and workers at his hotels, it's a good bet that he's done quite a bit of shit-shooting with the pointy end of his construction crews as well.
I’m still not convinced that she lied about working at McDonald’s. I think it more likely that she lied on her resume about not working at McDonald’s. Of course, that shows not just ignorance, but shame at being associated with the working classes.
Not listing a job on your resume is not “lying”. It’s totally normal and acceptable to omit meanial labor jobs when applying for professional jobs.
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It's trivially easy to prove, you can see all of your work history on ssa.gov.
So either she doesn't want to engage, no one on her staff has realized this paper trail exists, or she really didn't work there. Or she worked under the table.
I had two jobs in the 90s that I got W-2s for and paid taxes on that don’t show up on my SSA work history. I’m currently in the process of trying to prove I worked these jobs for the SS benefits when all the paperwork has long since been shredded. Totally plausible to me that she worked there and can’t prove it.
Small businesses? Totally possible that they pocketed the deducted payroll tax and never reported to SSA. Many such cases.
Yep. This is possible.
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There's a theory that she did it in Montreal, right? Doubt you'd find that on ssa.gov (or want to publicize it).
She specifically claimed that it was a particular McDonalds in the Bay area, didn't she?
Yes but at the same time if she did work at a McDonalds in Montreal shifting the local to the states seems like a natural "bending of the truth" given how her campaign has been trying hard to downplay her family's ties to Trudeau and the wider Canadian left.
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yes, you're right.
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