Why Is David Brooks Wrong About Why People Admire Donald Trump?

Brooks On Why People Admire Trump

David Brooks, a pundit who also writes for the New York Times, who is a former conservative who later in his career transitioned to being a moderate, has a new article today in the Atlantic magazine, entitled "Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?" that is also an engagement with the life work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed in May at the age of 94.

MacIntyre argued that from at least the time of the classical period, communities ("a dense network of faily, tribe, city, and nation") created duties and expectations about how to live your life and act morally according to your social role ("soldier, farmers, merchants" and mothers), which people generally accepted and made it their life's work to live up to as well as you could. Judaism, Christianity and Islam tweaked these duties and expectations to give greater weight to compassion and humility, but through the Middle Ages maintained the same social structure in which morality and your duties in life were societally imposed. The wars of religion at the end of the Middle Ages convinced people that maybe religion was not the best thing to organize societies upon and in reaction to that came the Enlightenment period of the 18th century centered upon reason and science, and relegated morality to a matter of individual choice.

MacIntyre argued that this produced a decline in shared morality, although Brooks himself would put this moment in the mid-1960s. The narrative continues with Nietzsche famously saying that "God is dead" because we'd killed him and made ourselves our own gods. In this narrative, Hilter, Lenin, and Mao fill that moral vacuum with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, "and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

At this point it becomes less clear whether it is MacIntyre or Brooks talking. But the two solutions to a moral vacuum that Brooks presents are coercion or manipulation. Either coerce others to believe what you believe, e.g., with corporate DEI, or manipulate people with the kind of lies and sleaze that Trump and Fox News are known for utilizing. The battle of these methods in the 1980s and 1990s "looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared to today", Brooks argues, because in the last thirty years people have sought righteousness instead through their political identities and politics permeates everything.

Without a firm universal ground in "the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness", "People are rendered anxious and fragile" and without a moral foundation, they "fall apart when setbacks come."

He sees Trump as a man "who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality", doesn't care about weakening "our shared moral norms" with his example, speaks a language of preference "I want" and a language of power "I have the leverage", and a language of self, of gains of acquisition, of benefitting himself, instead.

Brooks argues, within the framework of MacIntyre's philosophy that Trump is "just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create." He also argues (inaccurately, in my view) that if Trump was on their team, most Democrats would like him too, and that you're lying to yourself if you deny it.

Brooks argues that pluralism is the answer to to resolving the tension created by incommensurate values, but that we need to recalibrate it to make people "more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community" and to provide rigorous moral education to the next generation (which sounds a lot like the coercion he condemned earlier in his argument).

Why Is Brooks Wrong?

I don't think this rings true, and find better answers in psychology and economics than in philosophy, which I've always considered something of a dead end and historical curiosity that recalls long since superseded proto-science, than something of real value today as anything more than intellectual history.

In my view, Trump, a psychopath rich in "dark triad" traits, is an archetypical figure familiar to observers of politics and public affairs and history since classical times, if not earlier, who is a constant threat to every organization from families to empires. There is nothing novel or surprising about him, himself. 

Demagogues were something that the Founders of the United States, at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, worried about. Democracy and the Bill of Rights were their answer to the narcissistic mad kings and equally dark leaders of established religions with whom they were very familiar, both from the 18th century world and from the history that they knew from the classical era through the Middle Ages. The Founders were familiar with Roman Emperor Nero. Machiavelli in "The Prince" wrote about how dark triad tactics might be advisable to a leader seeking to gain power for his people. They were intimately familiar with the tyrants of British history, right up through King George. The believed that people whose rights were guarded by law would not vote for such scoundrels. Lest we forget, George R. R. Martin, in his Game of Thrones series, a fantasy series that draws heavily on the War of the Roses, history that was much more fresh in the minds of the Founders, reminds us of what that was like and why it is best avoided.

It wasn't a bad plan. 

The Constitution adopted in 1789 lasted without an insurmountable constitutional crisis for 72 years, when Civil War broke out. After the crisis over slavery that manifested in the Civil War was overcome in 4 years of brutal deadly fighting (that still leave the nation deeply divided) was over, followed a 12 year Reconstruction period, and in turn followed by 77 years or so of de jure segregation but a fragile peace. We then went on to have another 70 years or so of the constitution working more or less as intended. 

We are in the midst of another constitutional crisis now, which their plan may or may not be good enough to overcome. 

The United States of America, including its 13 years before the current constitution was adopted, is 249 years old, making it the oldest fully non-hereditary democratic governmental regimes still in existence on the scale of a large nation. But the Founders, as one of the first countries to have a full fledged democratic Republic at a large national scale, lacked the historical experience or foresight to plan for every potential eventuality and their plan is now clearly not the optimal design, although it may be that our Republic's woes are such that no formal constitution would have been sufficient to prevent them.

The times and places in history where tyrants arose also doesn't match up. MacIntyre's framework suggests that we should have seen a breakdown in a sense of duty and morality in the Enlightenment. But we didn't see this happen across the board. Yes, the moral divide in the U.S. may be traceable to the moral fight over slavery that emerged in the Enlightenment. But, this was not a general, individualized loss of community norms, it was a divide that arose between two coherent and vital cultures, that of the slaveholding South on one side, and of the abolitionist North on the other, sustained, as much as anything, by the perceived economic needs of each region, with clergy serving of cheerleaders of each side and framing these economic imperatives with moral justifications.

Why did we get Hitler in Weimar Germany, and Lenin in Russia, while France, England, and the United States were not similarly afflicted?

Hitler is the clearest example. Germany's defeat in World War I, the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and economic collapse, radicalized many Germans, making them crave an authoritarian strong man to save them, and causing them to abandon the luxuries of caring for their fellow man whom they saw as their competitors, or as a drag on their society's ability to overcome the malaise that they faced.

Similar economic forces drive American politics today. After a couple of decades of remarkable shared prosperity, economic growth, which make the liberalism and the care for their fellow man of the Civil Rights movement possible, ceased to be shared starting sometime around the early 1970s. Since then, mostly educated, urban elites have captured almost all of the economy's economic growth for a half century, while less educated folk in rural areas and small towns have seen their economic prospects stagnate. The Civil Rights movement improved the economic lot of non-whites and women. New immigration laws welcomed foreigners. Free trade allowed manufacturing to be offshored to markets with lower wages, fewer labor protections, and weaker environmental laws. The U.S. de-industrialized and the Rust Belt came into being. Free trade rules, environmental rules, protections for unions, automation, birth control and abortion have, in their view, destroyed an economy fueled by domestic manufacturing and fossil fuels, in which men received good pay that made them heads of their families.

Half a century later, counties that vote blue have more than double the per capita GDP of those that vote red. Red America has captured almost none of the economic growth of the last half century, while Blue America is more prosperous than almost any other place on Earth. Prosperous Blue America extended its inclusive shared affluence mindset to allow the LGBT community to live publicly and in dignity, and to make it safe to be openly secular. 

Straight white Christian men in Red America without much education have seen every other demographic but them improve their lot in the last fifty years, while they have seen almost no improvement in their real wages, increased unemployment, and an inability to maintain stable and solid marriages and families. In relative terms, they seem themselves, and the rural and small town communities that they live in, as the losers, and see the economy as a zero sum game in which non-whites, foreigners, and women have taken what was theirs, and in which atheists and gays have ripped apart the moral framework that held their parents and grandparents families together. They want to throw out everything that they see as having driven their half century of eroded status with no end in sight, and return to the days when their relative status was vastly greater, no matter how unfair that may seem to everyone else. 

They are so frustrated over this sustained defeat that they are willing to turn to an indiscriminate authoritarian who breaks the rules that they see as having held them back, and are even willing to resort to violence, to get it. Their concerns about good character and process values and fair play have dissolved in the face of falling life expectancies, deaths of despair, regular unemployment, disability from the manual work that they are qualified to do with the economy doesn't need anymore to same extent, and their inability to hold onto wives and children that really arises not from an immoral society but from their own failures of economic providers. Faced with their conditions, they want to burn the system down and start over from new foundations that elevate their relative socio-economic standing.

Not everyone who votes for Trump has experienced this, and not everyone in red counties and red states has supported him. Some have supported Republicans simply out of thoughtless, long ingrained habit, or because they think that they are among the rich who will benefit from tax cuts. But peer pressure from enough people who matter in their little small town and rural communities, and in the working class underworld of Blue America, have made their political views (stripped of any reasoning behind them) normative in their communities, won over their wives, and caused religious congregation to which these men have been drawn because they are saying what these men want to hear to thrive and reinforce these men's views.

What we see today is more a product of capitalism, appropriately regulated but with only modest redistribution, doing what it does naturally: increasing GDP as fast as it can, while leaving the productive better off than the less productive who are worse off. But capitalism has done its thing to an extent greater than the political system is willing to bear, bringing us to a breaking point. 

It's worse in the U.S. because we have done less to cushion the blow for those who are less productive either by finding them places in the new economy or redistributing wealth and creating a stronger social safety net (in part, because racism has left the U.S. with a weaker sense of solidarity). But the same pressures are present in Europe, with somewhat different targets to fit local changes over the last half century, and are strongest in the places that are economically struggling.

Democrats Are Predominantly More Correct Than Republicans

The main sin that the Democrats have committed is not taking seriously enough the grievances of the working class, especially working class white Christian men, who have not shared in the improvement in relative or absolute prosperity that much of the rest of the nation has enjoyed, and who are lashing out at people they see as competitors or as people undermining morality, when neither of these things is the real problem. 

Despite adopting many policies that substantively benefit Red America more than their own base, they didn't go quite far enough, and left this constituency economically struggling, and equally importantly, feeling like they didn't matter and were neglected.

Progressives gets this and have tried to secure radical economic reforms to address this problem, so they don't have to resort to the injustices towards innocents that Trump has inflamed his supporters to think they want. But progressives do not make up a majority of the American public, and the bigger tent necessary to secure the majorities needed to reach a position of power where change can be enacted, and a constitutional framework and political system that tends to create gridlock and too strongly defends the status quo, has thwarted their efforts to secure more than incremental change, which has not been enough. Sometimes the frustration of progressives over their insufficient clout and numbers to achieve the full measure of their goals in a system that already makes it too hard to do so, when they rightfully believe that their proposals are urgently needed to keep far right tendencies at bay and secure economic justice, even boil over into claims that Democrats are no different than Republicans, since both are controlled by big business, despite the fact that this just undermines their own cause.

Contrary to Brooks' assertion, Democrats wouldn't fall for a Trump. They aren't desperate in the way that the MAGA Republican base is, and so they are happy to purge people like him from their ranks when they are caught. The Democratic Party isn't full of criminals, and is much less corrupt than the Republican Party which has had vastly more criminals and is now openly corrupt. 

Democrats and progressives are right that a manufacturing based fossil fuel economy isn't coming back, and that even if manufacturing did come back that 21st century manufacturing is so automated and skill intensive for most jobs, and so unproductive and low paying for others, that it wouldn't restore the economy and related societal consequences that flowed from it anyway.

Democrats are right that the rich aren't taxed enough, although they are mistaken that unions are a leading cause of the shared prosperity benefits that came from a tight labor market, rather than a symptom of that tight labor market that more efficiently utilized economic power that workers already had.

The Democratic effort to create working class clean economy jobs was the right idea, but was too little, too late.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that putting the Ten Commandments in schools, embracing religion, restricting abortion and birth control, making it legally harder to divorce, and squashing gay rights and transgender rights will restore morality and strengthen working class families.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that economics is a zero sum game, in which gains for non-whites, women, educated people, and immigrants, and imports leave white native born men without higher education, their communities, and the U.S. economy, generally, worse off.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that taxes and government spending are bad for the economy or bad for them. They are particularly wrong in thinking that reducing social safety net spending which disproportionately benefits them, will leave them better off, or that tax cuts for the wealthy, big businesses, and people with high incomes weaken the economy or leave them worse off. They have also forgotten (or never knew) that the era they seek to return to "when America was great" was characterized by high taxes and lots of government spending (as well as a very militant union movement).

Republicans are wrong in thinking that they don't benefit from the world order that foreign aid spending and our historical military alliances supported, and are a waste of money, and in thinking about military strength purely in terms of U.S. military might standing alone when wars are almost always won by the side with the most allies and "soft power."

But It Takes More Than Facts And Logic To Change Minds

Of course, as we've learned very painfully, mere facts and logic are enough enough to change political views, and in particular, are not enough to change the political views of a base that holds those views precisely because it has not prospered in an economy based upon knowledge and intellectual ability, and has had wealthy, amoral elites manipulate the information that has been imparted to them.

People's political identities are fundamentally social and are deeply shaped by economics and the information, however untrue it may be, that they have chosen to listen to when forming their world views (something that is itself influenced by their economic circumstances, as well as their ancestral culture).

You have to quash fountains of disinformation and fact resistance that have been gradually taking hold for decades. You have to either get people to admit that they have been conned, or find a way for people to change their political views that allows them to deny that this has happened. You have to make their views uncomfortable for them to hold in their own personal lives, but must do so in circumstances where converting from them is less painful than retreating into their denial with likeminded victims of the con. You have to be able to show them in terms that they understand and believe that your proposals are better than MAGA's and to back that up with an ability to produce tangible results for them. You have to address their needs and hardships, and not merely show that the other side is worse.

Those are tall orders, and it isn't clear that Democrats are up to the challenge. 

Democrats best hope is really that the Republicans, at a time when they are undeniably in complete control, are making the lives of the MAGA base tangibly worse, or convince the MAGA base that this is imminently about to happen, and to undermine any hope that they have that burning everything down will lead to a future that leaves them better off in relative terms, if not in absolute terms. Trump and his allies, as they attempt to govern in a purely ideological manner, are their own worst enemies here.

The GOP's hold on Congress is tenuous. In 2026, flipping 4 seats out of a 53 GOP seats would flip the Senate, and flipping 3 seats out of 220 GOP seats in the House (and reclaiming three currently vacant democratic seats in vacancy elections) would flip the House. Trump is the least popular President since Trump, and many of his particular policies, including his recently passed budget, are wildly unpopular with voters. The public is no fan of Congress and a lot of Republicans in Congress have voted for measures that are unpopular with the people who elected them (even though the final budget bill retreated from many of Trump's demands) and will actively hurt the people who elected them. Some of the gerrymandering that influenced the results of the 2024 election will also be remedied in 2026. Elon Musk's proposal to create a new "American Party", even if it wasn't terribly successful, would split the conservative vote in a way that could benefit Democrats immensely. The U.S. Supreme Court has also never had less popular support in the history of modern polling, and conservative voters no longer need to support Trump and the GOP to keep in that way (or to have their tax cuts for corporations and the rich made permanent).

It is unlikely that Republicans will hold both Houses of Congress in the 2026 election. They will probably lose control of the House and at least lose ground in the Senate, barring a major escalation in the steps that Trump has tried to take to erode democracy in the last sixteen months, with lukewarm but significant support from the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority which has significantly impaired the ability of other federal courts to restrain Trump.

Time will tell how it turns out in the midst of the constant political chaos and societal unrest that Trump have actively stoked.

Left leaning forces don't have to keep MAGA's dictatorial power grab at bay forever. The MAGA base is in demographic decline. The Democratic base is growing. If the left can endure this crisis and thwart full on totalitarianism until Trump is dead and his MAGA agenda has been discredited by its own failures severely enough, for enough years, the crisis will be overcome and the Republic can be saved. It may be bruised, battered, and irrevocably harmed in many ways, but it would not be beyond all saving. 

But history is also not without precedents, like Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, where progress is dramatically reversed when totalitarians succeed, and this backward state continues for forty years or more with minimal progress. And, unlike the case of people subject to the Axis regimes in World War II, no other country or alliance will be coming to rescue us, because we are too big and too militarily mighty. Another civil war might save us if that happens, but that would be a horrible price to pay.

Ghibli v. Disney Villains

In a nutshell, this video makes the case that Disney villains are inherently evil and must be defeated and punished, while Ghibli villains are redeemable and have understandable motives but have suffered and are misunderstood. To a lesser extent DC Comics follows the Disney model and Marvel Comics follows the Ghibli model. The video argues that Ghibli villains are more realistic and creatively interesting, but acknowledges that Disney villains are cathartic, efficient, and satisfying. The video attributes the difference to a Judeo-Christian American culture compared to Japanese values rooted in Shinto religious roots (although much of that is really Confucian).

Honestly, I disagree that Ghibli villains are "more realistic".  Ghibli style villains may be more common, but Disney style villains are out there too. We call them "psychopaths" and some key distinctions in criminal law, like the distinction between 1st degree murder and 2nd degree murder, are attempts to distinguish irredeemable psychopaths from misguided or impulsive or environmentally pressured individuals who are capable of being reformed.

Middle Class Crime

Middle Class Prison Inmates Are Rare

There is a lot of data on the characteristics of offenders and nature of the offenses committed overall, and there is significant data on sentencing for felonies (sentencing data for misdemeanors and ordinance violations is much harder to come by).

One of the things that we know from that data is that having any college education, even attending a single semester at community college and then dropping out, profoundly reduces you odds of being a prison inmate relative to have no college education at all. Your odds of being a prison inmate are 40-fold or more lower.

Clearly, this is mostly a sorting effect. 

Your likelihood of being a prison inmate is highest if you don't graduate from high school and also don't earn a GED. 

The next highest likelihood of being a prison inmate is earning a GED (even though it takes a higher IQ to do so than it does to graduate from high school in the ordinary course), rather than graduating from high school and then not receiving any further higher education. This reflects the fact that people, especially men, drop out of high school not just because they are low in IQ and not succeeding in school for that reason. They also drop out because they have trouble behaving appropriately in a high school setting, which is highly connected to their likelihood of committing crimes and going to prison.

Graduating from high school in the ordinary course rather than earning a GED, and then not receiving any further higher education is the next highest likelihood of being a prison inmate, and is still quite high.

But, some college or more dramatically reduces your likelihood of being a prison inmate, and the number of prison inmates who are in that category is so small that the statistics often aren't broken down further into people who have only some college, people who have associate's degrees, people who have four year degrees, and people who have graduate or professional degrees beyond a four year undergraduate degree.

By comparison, in the general population:

In 2022, the highest level of education of the population age 25 and older in the United States ranged from less than high school to advanced degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree.

9% had less than a high school diploma or equivalent.

28% had high school as their highest level of school completed.

15% had completed some college but not a degree.

10% had an associate degree as their highest level of school completed.

23% had a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree.

14% had completed advanced education such as a master’s degree, professional degree or doctorate. . . . 

In 2022, 30.1% of men age 25 and older had completed a high school diploma or GED as their highest level of educational attainment, compared with 27.0% of women age 25 and older.

In 2022, 39.0% of women age 25 and older, and 36.2% of men in the same age range, had completed a bachelor’s degree or more as their highest level of educational attainment. 

About 16% of adults have passed a GED exam. About half of people who pass the GED exam go on to have at least some college. So, about 8% of adults have a GED as their highest educational credential (roughly the same as the percentage of high school dropouts who haven't passed a GED exam). 

Both high school dropouts and people who have a GED exam as their highest educational credential are disproportionately men. In the case of the GED, this is, in part, because a large share of GED exams are taken high school dropouts who are in prison, and prison inmates are disproportionately men.

So, about 36% of men have at least a four year degree, 24% of men have some college but no degree or an associate's degree, about 20% of men graduated from high school in the ordinary course, 10% have a GED rather than a high school diploma and no college, and about 10% of men are high school dropouts who have not earned a GED.

The roughly 60% of men with at least some college have a dramatically reduced likelihood of going to prison. The 20% of men who are high school dropouts or only have a GED have a highly elevated likelihood of going to prison, and the 20% of men who graduate from high school but have no further high education have an intermediate likelihood of going to prison. On average, these men are in the bottom quarter of high school graduates academically (although a variety of other factors influence a decision not to pursue any higher education after graduating from high school).

One expects that among the 20% of men who graduate from high school but have no further education, men who are at the top of that group academically and behaviorally but didn't go to college because they had decent job prospects or went into the military or couldn't afford to go to college, probably have a likelihood of going to prison similar to that of people who drop out of college soon after starting college. But men who are the the bottom of that group academically and behaviorally probably have a likelihood of going to prison similar to but somewhat lower men who drop out of high school and then earn a GED but don't pursue further education. They are able to behave marginally well enough to meet the minimum requirements to graduate, and are not totally stupid.

So, the likelihood of going to prison is probably most elevated among men in the bottom 30% to 1/3rd of success in the formal education system, and are profoundly reduced among men who are more successful in the formal education system.

Operationally, however, since there is almost no data sorting high achieving and well-behaved high school graduates with no college, from low achieving and poorly behaved high school graduates with no college, we can define "middle class" inmates as inmates who have some college or more.

Questions That Are Hard To Answer

1. Some of the reason that middle class inmates are so rare is that middle class criminal defendants tend to have only minimal prior criminal records and are seen as having good prospects of rehabilitation. They also tend to have been legal representation in the court system, make good choices about when to accept plea bargains, take actions that judges view as mitigating circumstances, and behave in the way that sentencing judges want them to in the court process, relative to non-middle class criminal defendants. 

So, a middle class criminal defendant who commits the same crime as a non-middle class criminal defendant is more likely to receive probation, a fine, community service, time in a half-way house, or a jail sentence, than an ordinary prison sentence, especially for less severe crimes. Likewise, even if they receive a prison sentence, it is likely to be shorter than the sentence that a typical non-middle class criminal defendant would receive for the same crime.

2. Middle class criminal defendants probably tend to commit less serious crimes, when they are convicted of crimes. They tend not to commit "blue collar" property crimes that can send you to prison like car theft, burglary, or grand larceny of tangible personal property (as opposed to fraud or theft of intangible assets). They also probably tend to commit the same sorts of crimes that are disproportionately committed by women.

3. I suspect that middle class criminal defendant who actually go to prison have mostly either committed high dollar/drug volume non-violent crimes like fraud or drug dealing, or have committed serious violent crimes for which a prison sentence is really the only plausible sentence. But, I don't know that for a fact and I haven't seen good data on that point.

4. I don't know and would be interested to know how educational attainment beyond high school influences one's likelihood of being a prison inmate. I would suspect that the risk is reduced with greater educational attainment, but the data isn't there to show how significantly protective education beyond "some college" is in terms of likelihood of being a prison inmate.

4. The trio of serious substance abuse issues, serious mental health issues, and traumatic brain injury are pervasive in a huge share of all prison inmates. Middle class prison inmates are probably no exception. Indeed, these issues probably make up a bigger share of middle class prison inmates, since economic pressures on these inmates are usually more mild.

But notably, the protective effect of even some college is huge, despite the fact that the rates of serious substance abuse and serious mental health problems is very significant even among college educated people. Most likely, people with at least some college (overall, not just prison inmates) both have mental health and substance abuse problems that are sufficiently moderate that they can function well enough to finish high school and spend some time in college, and they are better at coming up with mental health treatment, substance abuse rehabilitation, and self-help programs to manage to live an at least moderately normal life despite these challenges, while the most severely impaired people have behavioral problems early enough that they can't finish high school and some college, and/or they can't figure out a self-help regime or access the mental health care system resources that they need.

Also, some mental health and substance abuse problems have a relatively late onset. 

Susceptibility to substance abuse has a very strong genetic component. But people who grew up in strict families, or avoided substances after seeing how it affected other family members, may not have had access to substances that they can abuse, or strictly avoided substances that they can abuse, until they are in or have graduated from college.

Most mental health conditions are genetic or congenital. And, most of them, like ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, psychopathy, anxiety disorders, and OCD typically manifest before you finish high school, so people with particularly severe cases of these conditions that aren't treated adequately either don't graduate from high school for behavioral reasons or just barely scrape by at that time. Most of them, except clinical levels of autism spectrum disorder and psychopathy are quite common. Substance abuse, ADHD (as a result of high levels of impulsivity and impairments to working and being a student at regular jobs), and psychopathy seem to have the strongest association with criminal conduct that can send you to prison. Other mental health conditions, while also common, seem much less likely to be associated with criminal activity.

But psychosis (i.e. manic-depression and schizophrenia) tends to manifest in late adolescence or in one's 20s as your neural connections thin out in the brain transition from childhood to adulthood. It tends to emerge a little later in men than in women because their brains mature a little bit later than women. Psychosis is rare but devastating in its effect on your ability to function. Psychoses are also among the most heavily genetic mental health conditions.  Even if early mild symptoms of psychosis manifest in late high school or college, these way be manageable until a few years later. (As an aside, one thing that is almost a litmus test for schizophrenia is heavy nicotine use, which despite its other harmful health effects, provides some limited relief from schizophrenia symptoms. A very large percentage of schizophrenics who have access to nicotine, legally or illicitly, use it.) 

M.S. typically manifests at ages similar to psychosis but has a viral cause, and its neurodegenerative symptoms can mirror major mental health issues and gets worse over time since it is degenerative. Further, traumatic brain injury, major depression (apart from manic depression) and PTSD are predominantly not genetic or congenital and can manifest at any age. Finally, some forms of dementia, whose symptoms are often only unmistakable in late life, and stokes (including TIAs) can also give rise to symptoms similar to major mental health issues.

These mental and cognitive health conditions that manifest after one typically starts college probably disproportionately impact middle class inmates, since these impairments do not interfere with behavior until these key educational landmarks are reached. 

Observations

* While the modern era in many countries is quite technologically advanced, we still lag in adopting new technologies that make sense. Many good, economically sensible ideas that would work are never adopted in almost every industry and walk of life.

* In policy determined by politics, while there is not one correct answer, there are many incorrect answers that are objectively, or at least, intersubjectively, clearly wrong. 

* Many popular beliefs about policy and science and medicine and technology are profoundly wrong.

* While the term is become somewhat hackneyed, "opinion leaders" do greatly influence what the general public thinks is good policy. It is not just a one way street with the views of the masses (who often don't have any meaningful views on something) driving the decisions of politicians. Politicians and judges shape what the public considers right and wrong at least as much as they respond to public opinion.

* Uninformed and misinformed voting can increase public confidence in the system, but it doesn't lead to better choices. But, people who have no vote, systemically get shafted by the decisions that are made by politicians, while the desires of people who vote reliably are far more likely to come out on top when decisions are made.

* It is very common for people, both ordinary people and more sophisticated people, to be aware of a problem but to be greatly mistaken about the cause of that problem. Conventional wisdom about what causes things to happen is often wrong.

* Smart people make different kinds of mistakes than stupid people.

* Only a modest minority of people will change their beliefs when presented with facts and evidence that are contrary to their beliefs. Changing people's views is to a great extent a social process and a function of experience.

* People who are knowledgable about something greatly underestimate how little everyone else knows about what they know.

* People tend to underestimate the capacity of technology to improve and to cause social change, and tend to overestimate the capacity of societies to change non-technologically.

* If people seem to be acting in an economically irrational manner, this usually means that the people observing them don't understand their situation in important respects.

* If you see businesses acting in what seems to be an odd or inefficient way, it is most often some strategy to engage in price discrimination.

* Every law and regulation exists for a reason and you should understand why it was put in place and what effect it had (which may have worked in an unintended way) before committing to changing it. But many laws and regulations nonetheless no longer make sense, especially in a rapidly changing world.

* The folkways and norms of a culture in a particular region often persist long after they have become dysfunctional for current conditions.

* Religion thrives when it protects threatened cultures, it withers when the culture of which it is apart is dominant and secure.

* Most people are more rigid about adopting new languages or language innovations, new religious beliefs, new cultural norms, and new political views once they are past a formative period which is often in their 20s or younger.

* Our society is neither ruled by an elite cabal of a few dozen or hundreds of billionaires and elite politicians, nor by widespread grass roots democratic decision making. Most real decision making is made by perhaps several of thousand to several million people, although some important decisions (especially economic decisions) are more decentralized.

* It is harder to figure out viable paths to improve the status quo than it is to know what a better world would look like.

* Many intelligent people who accurately state the facts and the problems propose bad solutions based upon that knowledge.

* One of the important functions of politics is to prioritize problems vis-a-vis each other. It isn't uncommon for problems that are known to exist and have clear solutions to go unsolved because they aren't ultimately very important to solve yet.

* Demagogues are incredibly harmful to society and hard to regulate.

* Our political system and business firms do a poor job of screening out psychopaths and demagogues from positions of power.

* The most important factor that distinguishes the economic success of capitalism v. communism, and the private sector v. the public sector, is that the capitalist private sector shuts down failing firms and activities more quickly.

* Political power is more concentrated than economic power.

* Small organizations can change themselves more rapidly than big ones, and big organizations broken up into many small ones can change all of them more rapidly than the one big organization can, most of the time.

Crime Reduction Research

An interesting analysis takes on the question of how to reduce crime.

It starts by establishing that crime is bad, not just due to direct harm, but due to indirect harms like changing how people behave to avoid it. I won't belabor that point.

It then lays out some key facts:

The distribution of criminal behaviour is highly skewed, with a very small proportion of the population accounting for a significant share of total crime. Incapacitation of this group through imprisonment results in a significant reduction in societal exposure to criminal activity.

(i) A study of the Swedish population born between 1958 and 1980 found that 3.9% of the cohort was convicted of a violent crime. A group of persistent offenders accounting for 1% of the total population accounted for 63.2% of all convictions. These offenders were relatively likely to commit offences early, use drugs, and display personality disorders.

(ii) A paper comparing convictions from a UK longitudinal study and a US dataset of self-reported delinquency found that in both cases, criminal behaviour was well described by a power law.

(iii) Some 70% of custodial sentences in England and Wales are handed out to offenders with at least seven previous convictions or cautions; 50% to those with at least 15.

(iv) Roughly 73% of 2016 US federal offenders had previous convictions. Among this group, the average number of convictions was ~6. Around 39.5% of these offenders had prior violent offences.

Offenders often possess characteristics which require greater support both in prison and in general society, and which may make standard models of rational choice a poor fit for their decision-making processes.

[Multiple studies show that people convicted of crimes have "high discount rates" which is to say that they disproportionately care about the short term and short change the long consequences.] . . . .

(iv) Some 53,109 adults in British prisons were being treated for alcohol or drug abuse issues in 2017-18, out of a total prison population of around 82,000.

(vi) The National Institute on Drug Abuse states that ”85% of the [US] prison population has an active substance use disorder or were incarcerated for a crime involving drugs or drug use”

(vi) The UK does not have up-to-date figures on mental health in prisons, but the Institute of Psychiatry estimated over half of prisoners have common mental disorders - PTSD, anxiety, or depression - while another 15% have specialist mental health needs, and 2% acute and serious problems.

(vii) The APA estimates that “at least half of prisoners have some mental health concerns”, and 10-25% of US prisoners serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

The deterrence effect of jail time appears to be relatively weak, in part due to these commonalities. . . . 

(ii) . . .  the majority of any deterrent effect results from the initial period of punishment.

(iii) . . . when . . . the economic return to non-criminal activity . . . is low value the return to crime may be disproportionately high.

(iv) . . . it is not clear whether classical rational behaviour is a good approximation to the behaviour of individuals suffering from mental illness or substance abuse issues.

(v) These suspicions are born out by David Roodman’s excellent analysis of deterrence, which notes that punishments designed under the presumption that increases in the certainty of punishment better dissuades criminal behaviour than the threat of greater sanction did not produce the desired effects.

(vi) Roodman also notes that US studies on increased severity have shown little in the way of strong deterrence effects.

(vii) The existence of significant procedural delays in trials and sentencing may exacerbate this, pushing the eventual punishment further into the discounting window.

Conversely, the deterrence effect of visible policing is relatively high

(i) A study using variation caused by the terror alert level set by the Department of Homeland Security found that crime levels decrease significantly when police presence is increased.

(ii) An Argentine study using variation in policing following terror attacks found a strong deterrent effect of observable police in the immediate vicinity.

(iii) Evidence from the United Kingdom shows that victim-reported crime drops with higher numbers of police, while police recorded crime may increase - indicating a deterrent effect alongside improved reporting.

(iv) Variation in police spending in sync with electoral cycles shows that increases in police force numbers have a strong effect on violent crime.

(v) A review of the literature on hotspot policing found that focusing police attention on high crime areas caused an appreciable decrease in crime, with some evidence that high visibility patrols were more effective than normal patterns of behaviour.

Local interventions can also reduce crime by altering the physical environment

. . .  

(ii) An analysis of the impact of street lighting on crime in the UK found that targeted interventions tended to reduce crime, and also made residents less fearful, potentially reducing costly behavioural alteration. . . . A broader review backs this conclusion, finding that street lighting significantly reduces crime.

(iv) A 2009 review of the literature on the installation of CCTV cameras found that it resulted in a small but significant decrease in criminal activity, particularly in car parks. . . . A similar review conducted in 2019 replicated these findings, with the additional note that active monitoring resulted in a larger reduction than passive systems. . . . One study suggests that the bulk of the benefit is deterrence of automobile theft.

The incapacitation effect of imprisonment is relatively strong

(i) Almost by definition, an individual in prison is highly unlikely to commit a crime against a member of the general public.

(ii) Set against this, they are also more likely to commit crimes within prison. Greater monitoring of behaviour must be set against the lack of possibility for effective further punishment (longer sentences may not act as sufficient deterrent), and an environment which is likely to be criminogenic (see below).

(iii) The cost of crime within prison is likely to be lower to society than the cost of crime without; it is not committed against random members of the population, results in less defensive expenditure or avoidance behaviour, and is focused on a smaller group of individuals in an environment designed to reduce criminal activity.

(iv) Roodman’s review of incarceration notes that multiple studies find strong evidence that incapacitation works to prevent crime. This should be expected.

Certain currently common forms of sentencing are likely to increase reoffending

(i) Turning again to Roodman’s review, there is a fairly solid bed of evidence that US prisons are criminogenic. This is not sufficient to outweigh the benefits of incapacitating serious offenders, but is cause for reappraisal for marginal offenders.

(ii) Harsher prison conditions are associated with greater recidivism. This is unsurprising, as brutalising conditions are unlikely to provide effective conditions for self-improvement. . . . A study of Italian jails shows that worse prison conditions does not reduce future criminal activity, instead driving increases in future criminal behaviour. . . . A study of US jails produced a similar conclusion, with a suggestion that harsher conditions increased crime post-release. . . .

(v) A UK Ministry of Justice report concluded that short-duration sentences if anything increased reoffending relative to court orders.

(vi) Norwegian prisons consistently display low rates of recidivism, and are marked by their civilised treatment of prisoners.

The analysis has conclusions, but I'll draw them myself from this data.

1. Identify the individuals at highest risk of committing serious or repeat crimes and support them so they they don't. This is a fairly modest share of the total population: mostly males who are high school dropouts, have substance abuse problems, have criminal records or juvenile justice records, have particular mental health disorders that put them at high risk, and have with poor non-criminal economic prospects. Substance abuse is generally higher risk than mental health disorders generally (although psychopathy manifests young and is a very high risk factor). 

Gang membership, while hard to establish legally in a civil liberties respecting manner, is also an extremely high risk factor. As of 2017:

According to the DOC, there are now more than 8,000 gang-affiliated inmates and parolees in Colorado divided between at least 135 gangs. That means that roughly one out of every four people in the state prison system is labeled as being in a gang. And there are now more gang members in prison than there are total DOC employees.

Incidentally, killing or incarcerating gang kingpins is absolutely the worst thing you can do if organized crime is a serious problem. (See also here).

As I've previously noted at this blog: "Just as crime gravitates to certain neighborhoods, it also clusters in families: According to one criminologist’s analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 5 percent of families account for more than 50 percent of all arrests."

Less than a quarter of Colorado prison inmates graduated from high school in the ordinary course (as opposed to getting a GED) (compared to about 85%+ of the general population), and just 1% have earned any college degree (compared to about 43% of the general population). Substance abuse is a problem for 79% of inmates. Just 6% of Colorado inmates both have a high school diploma (as opposed to a GED) and don't have a moderate to severe substance abuse problem, and some of the inmates in that 6% have moderate to severe mental health problems.

"As of 2010, 3 percent of the total US population and 15 percent of the African-American male population have served time in prison. People with felony convictions more broadly account for 8 percent of the overall population and 33 percent of the African-American male population." (From Science Daily. The paper is: Sarah K. S. Shannon, Christopher Uggen, Jason Schnittker, Melissa Thompson, Sara Wakefield, Michael Massoglia. "The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010." Demography (2017). DOI: 10.1007/s13524-017-0611-1).

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is extremely common in the most difficult inmates. 96% of inmates in a high risk unit of the Denver jail have a history of traumatic brain injury. By comparison, 67%-80% of all jail and prison inmates, nationally, have a history of traumatic brain injury, and 6%-8.5% of the general population has suffered from a traumatic brain injury. In the Denver high risk jail unit, 100% had a prior criminal history, more than 90% had a history of mental illness and more than 90% had a history of substance abuse. More than 77% of the inmates in the high risk unit had all four risk factors. A study reviewing TBI incidence in Australian prisons from 2006 found an 82% TBI incidence rate. Another county jail study from 2003 found an 87% lifetime incidence of TBI. A 1995 study examined the way the substance abuse can exacerbate TBI issues.

2. Incarcerate offenders with high recidivism risk until they no longer have a high recidivism risk. A small percentage of people are convicted of crimes and a small percentage of people who are convicted of crimes commit most of those crimes. Detain the worst and try to avoid criminalizing low risk offenders further with the criminalizing effects of poorly managed prisons.

3. Take the effort to make prison conditions less brutal both to reduce recidivism and to reduce crime within prisons.

4. Longer sentences don't discourage people not currently in prison from committing crimes, and even certainty in sentencing doesn't do that, because criminals don't care about the long run and aren't rational actors.

5. Visible police presence in crime hotspots can work.

6. Good street lighting reduces crime.

7. Actively monitored CCTV in parking lots reduces car theft.

The analysis fails to note, but it is nonetheless true, that strict gun control over large geographic areas is very effective at reducing homicide, suicide, and accidental deaths from firearms.

For example, “shall-issue concealed carry permitting laws were significantly associated with 6.5% higher total homicide rates, 8.6% higher firearm-related homicide rates, and 10.6% higher handgun-specific homicide rates compared with may-issue states.”

The analysis emphasizes the fact that violent crime causes more harm than non-violent crime. But, it misses some key points about prevention of crime, especially, but not only, non-violent crime:

1. Requiring a personal identification number (PIN) to use a credit card greatly reduces credit card fraud. See, e.g., this 2012 study (e.g. U.K. credit card fraud fell 63% when this was done).

2. Tracking technology is now cheap and used well, it can greatly reduce car and bicycle and laptop and phone theft, not just through deterrence and by recovering stolen items, but by catching thieves before they can reoffend.

3. Monitoring markets for stolen goods (including electronic markets) effectively is a good way to catch thieves and to make theft less cost effective.

4. Using forensic technology usually reserved for murders and serious assaults and rapes in burglary cases can greatly reduce burglaries because most burglaries are committed by repeat offenders so if you catch on burglar you prevent many offenses and recover a lot of stolen property.

5. Require small telecoms to adopt anti-spoofing calls used to make fraud calls.

6. Randomly including trackers in a modest percentage of delivered packages in problem areas, and using this information together with security camera data to catch porch pirates can reduce larceny.

7. More effectively blacklisting fraudsters can reduce fraud.

8. We could establish an agency that can identify patterns and networks of fraud activity in social media, and take effective action based upon it.

9. We should legalize one party consent to recording telephone communications to make it easier to catch offenders.

10. Legalizing vice (i.e. drugs, prostitution, and gambling) can greatly reduce crime by making organized crime that maintains black markets unprofitable, and by building trust between police enforcing crimes that have victims and citizens. For example, legalizing prostitution materially reduces sexual assault and drug crime rates.

Legalizing vice (e.g. federally legalizing marijuana) also reduces the amount of cash circulating which can drive robbery, burglary and theft.

11. Allowing adult entertainment businesses in a neighborhood reduces the incidence of rapes in that neighborhood.

11. After a fairly modest number of years after release from prison (about five) without committing a new offense, the risk of committing a new offense approaches barely below background levels.

12. Ignoring juvenile records deprives sentencing authorities of key information because the earlier and more severe your juvenile offenses are, the most likely you are to commit serious future offenses. Juvenile delinquency records are a major risk factor for adult crime. The notion that young offenses are most prone to rehabilitation is mostly false. People do age out of being high crime risks, but only in middle age.

13. The risk of substance abuse, and of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, is highly hereditary.

14. The risk of poor academic performance leading to behavioral problems in school are highly predictable from early childhood, as is a capacity to defer gratification which is a major risk factor for crime.

15. A large share of crimes are economically motivated, or are violent crimes that are incident to economically motivated crimes. Even quite modest non-criminal economic opportunities for people with criminal records and people at high risk for committing crimes can significantly disfavor crime.

16. Abating lead pollution prevented a lot of crime and should continue. More generally, a 2017 California study of the link between air pollution exposure and delinquency shows a statistically significant link between pollution exposure and delinquency. A related study shows the impacts on air pollution exposure on cognitive development.

Finally, a footnote on race, public safety, and crime:

rates of homicides, gun killings and illicit-drug fatalities [ed. combined] are highest in counties where nine in 10 residents are white and where President Trump won in the 2016 election.

Such counties are not limited to one geographical region. They include Boone County, W.V.; Washington County, Utah; Baxter County, Ark.; and Brown County, Ohio.

Correspondingly, the white Americans who are safest from such deaths are those who live in racially diverse areas such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where two-thirds of residents are nonwhite, where millions of immigrants live, and where voters favored Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nonwhites also are safer in these areas overall, though rates vary by location.  

White Americans are nearly eight times more likely to die from illicit-drug overdoses than murder, the CDC statistics show, a proportion that undoubtedly reflects the heroin and opiate epidemic. But according to FBI data for 2015, when whites are murdered anywhere in the country, the murderer is five times more likely to be white than nonwhite. (This ratio counts only murder cases in which information about the offender is known by law enforcement.)

Overall, white Americans who live in predominantly white and Trump-voting counties are 50% more likely to die from murder, gun violence and drug overdoses [ed. combined] than whites who live in the most diverse and Democratic-voting counties. The more white and Republican a county is, the greater the risk for white Americans.

and a footnote on immigration:

immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime 

Robert Adelman, et al., "Urban crime rates and the changing face of immigration: Evidence across four decades" 15(1) Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice (November 21, 2016).

Deporting immigrants who are arrested for crimes, surprisingly, has no discernible impact on the crime rate.

And, a footnote on religion and homicide and suicide:

The current study assessed the relationship between national religious affiliation and lethal violence by simultaneously examining homicide and suicide rates. The information on homicide and suicide rates for 124 countries came from the World Health Organization (WHO). Regression results suggested no significant difference in lethal violence between predominantly Catholic and Protestant countries, although Islamic countries revealed significantly lower homicide, suicide, and overall lethal violence rates than non-Islamic countries. Countries with a high level of religious heterogeneity are subject to an increased suicide rate.

Don Soo Chon, "National Religious Affiliation and Integrated Model of Homicide and Suicide" (2016).

Bullies

Almost every place has some kind of bullying. But this masks important differences that shed light on the societies in question.

In Japan and Korea, bullying is a pervasive and serious problem in schools and workplaces. But there bullying is characterized by bullies abusing power that comes with higher socio-economic status, that authorities overlook, in part for that reason, against victims with lower socio-economic status. In England, the same thing is true, or at least was true prior to very recent history, although perhaps not quite as intensely. Notably, all of these societies have a lot of school discipline dispensed by deputized students - typically a student council disciplinary committee in Japan and Korea, and historically, at least, prefects in British boarding schools.

The U.S. has bullies too, but the character of the bullies is different. The typical U.S. bully is socio-economically marginal and picks on victims who are in some way defenseless getting one up on them so that they aren't at the bottom of the social hierarchy entirely. Bullies in the U.S. in schools and workplaces are also much more likely to have biologically based mental illnesses and/or learning disabilities. While in Japan, Korea, and England bullying is an abuse of privilege, in U.S. primary and secondary schools, bullying is an act of losers. U.S. primary and secondary schools rarely vest disciplinary authority in students, with student councils being more social event organizing committees than bodies with any power.

This kind of crass bullying by losers is mostly absent in higher education in the U.S. (the losers don't go to college), where there is instead there is some "abuse of power" bullying although much more limited, mostly within fraternities and sororities, and by professors abusing students who are especially dependent upon them such as graduate students dependent upon their thesis advisors. 

Crass bullying is also largely absent from middle class workplaces in the U.S., although there is some "abuse of power" bullying by superiors over subordinates in the workplace, most typically characterized as sexual harassment. Still, the "me too" movement has produced swift and severe consequences for every C-suite executives in both big businesses and academia, for those caught doing so, and even the anomaly by U.S. standards, of abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic church has come to roost and to be addressed, although it is less clear that change has occurred in other, more fragmented religious institutions, non-Catholic private schools, and in various youth oriented groups.

The crass bullying by losers seeking to be not quite at the bottom seen in elementary schools and high schools in the U.S. does manifest, however, in other institutional settings, especially in the prisons often leading to prison gangs and prison rape, and in abusive hazing in the U.S. military, mostly in the enlisted ranks. This accompanies institutions like internal management of prisoners by prison "trustees" and by limited authoritative self-governance within military units by non-commissioned officers.

In contrast, in Scandinavia and much of Northern Europe, prisons are quite tame by comparison, practically free of prison gangs and bullying of one prisoner by another.

Extreme bullying appears to be pervasive in the Russian military and to a great extent in other military forces built on the Soviet model. It also appears to be not uncommon in other facets of society, like schools, workplaces, and prisons, although I don't know that society well enough to distinguish the extent to which it involves "abuse of power" bullying or crass bullying by losers. Perhaps both area present.

I have the same perception of Latin America, although "abuse of power" bullying seems to be a very real thing there, in addition to crass bullying by losers.

One of the things that is admirable about England and Japan is how remarkably good that people in these societies are at being self-organizing, which manifests particularly in wartime and in natural disasters. But the institutions of self-governance from a young age and internal hierarchy that make this possible also fosters abuse of power bullying.

In contrast, Americans are horrible at self-organizing, but also much more free of abuse of power bullying as a result.

Fear v. Greed

Both reasoning from behavioral-economic first principles, and my personal experience, people are at their most evil out of fear, not greed. Growth means there is less fear going around.

from Vitalik Buterin, reviewing Stubborn Attachments on Twitter (via Marginal Revolution).

Trump Has Opened The Flood Gates Of Evil

There have been times in history when both parties were comparably engaged in corruption and misconduct. This is not one of those times. Right now, evil and the Republican party have never been more closely aligned. (I'm not the only one who thinks so.)

Fanning Domestic Terrorism

The far right holds a near monopoly on political violence (see also here):

Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project says that “if you go back to the 1960s, you see all kinds of left-wing terrorism, but since then it’s been exceedingly rare.” She notes that eco- and animal-rights extremists caused extensive property damage in the 1990s, but didn’t target people.

In just 72 hours this week a Trump zealot sent 14 pipe bombs in the mail to the enemies Trump has identified again and again in campaign rallies. A Neo-Nazi Trump follower killed eleven people and injured six more (including four police officers) at a synagogue in Pittsburg in the worst incident of anti-semitic violence in U.S. history. And, a white supremacist killed two African-Americans in a Kroger in Kentucky after the shooter couldn't manage to get into a locked black church. Earlier this week another white supremacist plotting a school shooting in Kentucky was thwarted based upon a Facebook post driven tip. Earlier this month, white supremacist threats caused a black female legislator in Vermont to resign from office. An Uber driver in Colorado Springs threatened to kill a Muslim passenger.

The atmosphere of politically motivated right wing violence and threats of violence is palpable in the mid-term election season this year.

He blamed the media and political figures targeted by the bomber for the violence directed at them. Trump and other conservatives argued absurdly that it was a false flag conspiracy. Trump blamed the synagogue for the massacre it experienced and has absurdly suggested that anti-semitic violence is a self-inflicted false flag operation. 

He is a stochastic terrorist. His routine endorsements of political violence in his rallies have predictably produced a wave of hate crimes. There has, for example, been a surge in anti-semitic violence since Trump was elected (also anti-semitic online harassment). Trump's unprecedentedly extreme tirades against the media probably also contributed to a mass shooting at a newspaper. Emboldened by Trump, white supremacists and Nazis have come out of the closet.

His rhetoric was already stirring up and motivating three men to launch a bombing campaign against Somali refugees two years ago on the eve of his election in Kansas (they were caught before they could carry out their plan). Some of his other supporters on the eve of that election burned down a black church.

He called the rallying Nazi's in Charlotte "good people" with blame on both sides, when one of those Nazis murdered a counter-protestor and committed dozens of other felonies. He has called himself a "Nationalist", and called for banning protests and shutting down newspapers.

Misconduct and Corruption

The list of corrupt activities that Trump has engaged in is a long one, which the New York Times summarizes.

One after another senior Republican affiliated with Trump has pleaded guilty to serious crimes. He endorsed for U.S. Senate an old man who'd had such a penchant for pursuing jail bait girls in his younger days that he had been banned from a mall who is also known for defying the U.S. Supreme Court's authority. The line between the Republican party organization and Neo-Nazi street gangs has blurred.

Trump lies, constantly, about almost everything, in easily provable ways. Trump has confessed on audio tape to sexual assault and allegedly has committed multiple sexual assaults, was denied a casino license in Australia for possible mafia connections, has settled a high dollar fraud cause involving Trump University (and is the subject of multiple other fraud allegations), and has paid off at least one mistress with whom he had sex while married to his current wife (having cheated on his previous two wives as well).

Brett Kavanaugh, his latest U.S. Supreme Court appointee, who has also lied to Congress, both in previous hearings and in his most recent confirmation hearing in provable ways, and has committed multiple sexual assaults, and didn't manage to keep his cool and a judicial demeanor in his confirmation hearing.

Support For Bad Actors Abroad

Trump tried to point blame away from the Saudi Arabian regime for the torture-murder of a Washington Post journalist in their Turkish embassy, in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary. 

Trump is beholden financially to Saudi Arabia and Russia, both of whom have been treated well by his administration. His son in law is in close communication with the Crown Prince of the Kingdom. His son is also carrying water for them.

Aided And Abetted By Evangelicals

One has to go back to the antebellum and Jim Crow South to find a time period when a political faction was so indisputably evil.

Evangelical Christians, in contrast, have been evil since at least the Second Great Awakening that gave rise to their religious movement, and remain as committed to evil as they have almost always been, if not worse. Their most prominent leaders are constantly making the most deplorable pronouncements. Trump has stirred up pastors that support him to the point where they are urging people to assassinate liberal figures and develop a "more violent Christianity."