Given the way he came to the Presidency, as an insurgent candidate with, at best, the tolerance of the Republican Party and its Congressional majorities, rather than with their blessings, Trump could have gone either way in choosing his Cabinet. He could have picked people just as much on the fringes of the party as he is, filled with the wacky ideas that inspired his supporters, even if those ideas hardly constituted an ideology in the sense of a coherent set of ideas that Trump felt obliged to carry out as best he could when he won the unlikely victory and became President. Or else he could choose a cabinet drawn from the permanent Establishment so as to carry out a traditional Republican, which means Conservative, political program, which is what Eisenhower did and what Reagan did, Reagan able after picking his Cabinet to sit back or clear brush at his ranch. If Trump had decided mostly on the latter course, that would be much to the relief of onlookers like myself who prefer competence above everything else and think that the Republic is therefore likely to muddle through, especially because the Conservative economic program, I believe, is so mistaken that it might drive us into a recession but likely not worse, and that the foreign policy program would probably not be much more belligerent than what it would have been with Hillary, although one can never count on foreign policy principles not going off the deep end, which is what happened when the George W. Bush people, who had seemed quintessentially Establishment, took power and get us entangled in a way it would take eight years of a successor to Bush to get us out from under.
Read MoreThere was a newspaper report of an armed gunman who said, when told by his victim that it was a policeman that he was holding up, “You know, now I have to kill you.” That is the stuff of gangster melodrama, and may even be true. The exchange reminded me of "The Asphalt Jungle" which was a remarkable movie because, among other things, it violated the movie convention whereby people who have others at gunpoint keep talking until the person with the gun pulled on him finds a way out of the situation. Rather, Louis Calhern just starts to sweat and lose his game face as he realizes that his erstwhile comrades in crime are going to kill him. However much they talk, the gangsters in "The Asphalt Jungle" don’t talk about what they are doing while they do it.
Why does the movie convention violated by "The Asphalt Jungle" make sense? Why do characters say what they are going to do rather than just do it? That is the same thing as asking why such dialogue occurs in real life, because the movie convention is simply exploiting and adopting a usage of everyday life, in that dramatic tension arises from whether an assailant will speak or not. So why did the gunman in the newspaper report act the way he did? (Here, I am engaged in applying Georg Simmel’s dictum, which is contrary to the accepted wisdom, that the sociologist can analyze fictional as well as real situations because both make use of the formal properties of social life.)
Read MoreLet us posit the following characteristics of the incoming President. He is mean spirited; he doesn’t know very much about any of the issues he will have to address; his own words and actions will be uncoordinated and arbitrary, subject only to his own whimsy; he will only reluctantly listen to his advisors but will, hopefully, accede to their greater knowledge and judgment. How will his administration, his political allies and adversaries, both foreign and domestic, cope with these facts, given that they want the administration to act rationally if for no other reason than it will serve their interests for it to do so? What are the compensating mechanisms which will settle in so the Trump Administration is not as out of whack as it might be?
Read MoreThe press, and especially the cable channels, are feeling guilty for having given Trump so much space and air time at the beginning of his campaign so he could make a fool of himself before he burnt out as a Presidential candidate, never to be more than a sidebar, sort of like Herman Cain. Now, to compensate, they find everything he says the result of ignorance and bad judgment. And that is true of much of what he says, but much of it, so far, is on the mark. Save your ammunition until he does or says something really bad.
Read More