populism

I guess squirrels are squirrels to me.  I guess neither of the dogs get that feeling of the civilized and wild worlds meeting, like Almighty God touching the finger of that poor schlep Adam (He had one job (this seems to be a current meme), but you know, a pretty girl offers you a bite, I'm sure we all would have done the same), when a squirrel eases a peanut from between their fingers.  Maybe it is just me. 

But why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  Why not just the tree of God doesn't want you to eat from.  I don't know that Adam ever did anything with that knowledge, just shuffled off meekly under the thunderous wrath of that Angry God.  By the end of the first couple pages of the bible we are through with him and Eve and those odd sons of theirs, and we are about to embark on Noah, a more interesting story, but that is some Angry God isn't it?


A stupid idea huh?  Well you know sometimes when you put out five pages a week you have to throw in some stuff.  But if The Institute is not a place ro defend a stupid idea then where is such a place?  All the candidates standing in front of you ready for the debate look pretty different, but if you compare them to Trump, how they are like him and different from him, they look a lot more similar.  If a democrat wins it's almost a sure thing that the dems will take the senate also.  But while, the reps are suck up toadies to their prez, the democrats will not be that way (Obama barely got Obamacare through is democratic house and senate).  The new dem president will have to get his bills through both houses so Bernie's bills will end up more moderate and Old Joe's more progressive, so what actually happens will be more similar across the candidates.  So I posit that it doesn't make that much difference who the candidate is, and that this avoids a fractious fight.

But to be honest I am not sure how awful a fractious fight in the primaries is.  This would call for a survey of previous elections which I don't have time for this morning.


I think what Obama, Bernie, and Trump have in common is populism.  Populism is a bit hard to define, I'm going to suggest the wiki page, though I haven't read it because I trust wiki.  I think populism can be loosely defined as throwing the bums out.  One thing I was not crazy about during the Obama campaign was how change was stressed without spelling out so much what kind of change.  I saw him as more leftist than he was and I think a lot of other people saw in him things that they wanted.  Bernie's populism is stronger, he tends to rail about evil forces.  And Trump's populism is total.  It is an odd fact that it is all defined by one man and what he may have said on a particular day, but the slathering mob is convinced that he is on their side and an attack on him is an attack on them.  I don't know why they are attracted to this repellent character of the sort, that if he showed up at their daughter's wedding he would be tossed out way before the cutting of the cake.  But there it is.