So I am interested what this communities' opinion of the other potential Future US Presidents. Anyone?

Did anyone see Last Week Tonight's take on Trump? Really interesting (& entertaining)

I found it somewhat entertaining, but the on the 'interesting' side of things, the fact that such a personal attack that had almost nothing to do with actual policies is being crowed about to such an extent, by people I would otherwise generally agree with the political opinions of, was significantly higher than yet another rather staid hit-piece based on personality rather than politics. I can't stand them when they're done to people whose policies I agree with, why should I suddenly agree with the practice just because it's being done to someone who I don't agree with?

Um... too many qualifiers there mouse... Fancy reframing all that in an understandable manner for me?

I dislike Trump's policies, and agree with the general thrust of the Last Week Tonight segment (that electing Trump is a bad idea).
However, I dislike the fact that the segment excessively focused on attacking Trump personally, or for things entirely unrelated to politics, rather than actually arguing against his policies, significantly more.
I find the fact that so many of the people I'd normally agree with in terms of political opinion seem to appreciate such personal attacks rather disconcerting and disappointing. Especially when so many of them complain when figures they like or respect are subject to the same.

Political decisions should be made based on policy (and how likely you think such policy will be enacted) rather than follow-the-mob personality cults.

That is true to a point, but not only does the US President assist in policy making but is also the party face for the nation. This is the person who meets with foreign dignitaries and sets the tone at the top for the whole country.

I agree that policy is more important, but personality can't be bankrupt, not anymore.

You would have a tough time pointing to any meaningful statement that Obama ever made about policy in 2008. Admittedly, I am always going to be suspicious of a politician with his own totemic symbol. That being said, in the American system, a President can push one or really at most two policy positions enough to even make Congress discuss them. The main power that US Presidents have is appointing the third tier assistant undersecretaries who actually run the bureaucracy far from the klieg lights of public supervision, and no candidate would ever discuss things of that nature with anyone for fear of discovering the cure for insomnia.

As for America's place in the world stuff, I once happened upon an interview with Jacques Chirac discussing America's uncouth, reckless "cowboy" President. He was commenting on Jimmy Carter's "hardline" stance against the Soviet Union that was endangering detentes. Reading it in the late 1990s, I had trouble not laughing out loud. I had not at the time realized the degree to which Chirac had been around forever.

Moving from mailise to hardline cowboy in a very short spate. The man was under-rated ;-)

The article was published in early 1980 in a European news magazine as France was refusing to join the American boycott of the Moscow Olympics.

It is interesting that Mr Drumpf focuses so much on the supposed damage that immigration does to the US. If elected, he'll be the trigger for the biggest immigration wave in US history - outwards! Many decent, intelligent and world-minded US citizens will emigrate to Europe, Australasia etc and will take their skills with them.

Watching these primaries, with the exception of Bernie, is like watching a car accident in slow motion. You're appalled but you cant tear your attention away.

If one believed any of the threats to emigrate, that would be the best argument to vote for Trump. Should you personally wish to emigrate, you will find that any country that you would consider has far tighter immigration policies than Trump has proposed. Bernie's beloved Denmark for example makes Trump look like a bleeding heart.

I say this as an economist that I find it astoundingly bizarre that the Bank of England has always admitted that immigration into the UK has had measurable effects in suppressing wage growth for low skilled workers and yet the idea that much larger levels of immigration by less skilled workers somehow cannot be admitted to have the same effect in the US. Building even a fairly simple theoretical model with reasonable assumptions, I have trouble seeing how one would avoid getting results that drive down wages for lower skilled workers and drive up the living standards of higher skilled workers. Of course, yuppies and plutocrats favor open borders. Bernie used to point this out fairly often 10-20 years ago.

One of the great puzzles of American Social Science is that economic progress for African-Americans came to an almost screeching halt in 1965. Presuming that dismantling of Jim Crow discrimination initiated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the political reforms resulting from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 must have had some positive effect relative to what came before, how did a secular trend of narrowing differences stop and in some cases reverse? While most arguments focus on Moynihan Report style cultural shifts or blame the welfare state or rather oddly assert increased racial discrimination relative to, you know, ACTUAL segregation (William Julius Wilson is interesting but does not seem well supported by reality to me), the mid-1960s is also when US immigration laws were massively liberalized and mass migration clearly began again for the first time since the 1920s. The absence of serious academic interest in quantifying the distributional effects is rather embarrassing. It is kind of like the young guy in the Business School at my University who just posted the first working paper that systematically tracked financial advisors disciplined for ethics violations. The data he used has been publicly available for decades. I used it myself multiple times in the early 2000s as a consumer. But obviously, Business School people are the ones with matching skills, knowledge and publishing opportunities, and such issues are just ideologically outside of their interests.

And I have had little difficulty ignoring the collection of liars and lunatics that compete to mis-govern us.

I'd just like to point out that Trump's central idea is not new immgration policies, it's just enforcement of existing policy, instead of allowing illegal immigrants to come in and stay illegally. That said, I agree with basically everything you said Gopher, with the exception that I think the welfare state and affirmative action are the chief cause of African American's plight, since they removed a lot of incentives for African Americans to work hard.
And there won't be a mass emigration wave, this all "I'm leaving if Trump gets elected" are just edgy teenagers posting on Facebook for fun and possibly for social acceptance.

Upon what do you base your theory? What would be an appropriate way to test it in data?

It is worth remembering that urban crime really began spiraling upward in the mid-1960s as well. Rising urban disorder at a time when a disproportionate percentage of Blacks lived in urban centers certainly had big measurable effects on household wealth, even if solely through the ownership of real estate. To say nothing about health and general well being. (A randomly selected Black person in America today is 6 times as likely to be murdered as a randomly selected white person for instance, even after 20+ years of falling crime rates) Future Senator Moynihan writing in the mid-1960s mentioned some specific spikes in specific cities in specific categories of crime and a rapidly rising incidence of Black criminality relative to white criminality and worries that the trend might continue, which it did. These trends clearly began before the Great Society Welfare State really got up and going. Moynihan linked it to family breakdown, which again clearly began before the Great Society programs or Affirmative Action were a reality.

Detroit is always the starkest and most interesting case to examine.

There is basically no real way of "testing" any theory, since none of us can make policies just to see what happens. There are certainly multiple reasons for this, but I think that the rise in urban crime was both because of the general 60s counterculture movement and specifically the black civil rights movement, but black crime would have fallen back to normal levels like white crime had affirmative action and the like not been implemented, which specifically removed incentives for many minorities to work harder, and thus sort of made permanent the spike in black crime by adding the much more lasting socioeconomic factor in crime. And real life is not science, people are complicated and everyone is different, so there are many correct explanations for the same phenomenon.

I don't actually study any social sciences, just frequently look up stuff on wikipedia and think about news, so please excuse my atrociously unprofessional way of phrasing this.

I was not being aggressive or accusatory. Theories can be tested in absence of controlled experiments. We have theories about astrophysics in the absence of ever having created or destroyed a star.

Perhaps this is too "teacher-y" of me but I offer you this little framework that I find useful. It is called "a ladder of abstraction". At the top, we begin at the level of theory with a "concept" related to another "concept" by a "proposition". This is often an exercise in rationalist logic; in my field, it might literally be a mathematical proof. "The welfare state reforms and the transition from civil rights to the positive discrimination of affirmative action have hurt Black people by reducing the strong connection between work and material reward." At the bottom, we are more in the realm of empirical evidence. At this level, we construct "hypotheses" that relate one "variable" to another "variable". Ideally, we would need some data that we believe serves as a reasonable measure of the expanding welfare state and the rise of positive discrimination. There is lots of other stuff that makes the process more complicated for "professionals" (and we don't have a great record of getting those things right), but what I have described is still a useful way of thinking about things even in a casual sense.

That being said these issues are complicated. The answer could well be all of the answers. Many years ago, I read a paper by a guy who tried to estimate the impact of the Detroit riots on Black people in Detroit. If you are unaware, the Black homeownership rate in Detroit in 1966 was basically higher than the white home ownership rate just about anywhere else. The difference in median household incomes in Detroit between the races was 6%. That is incredibly low when compared to other US cities at the time and may well be astounding across US cities today. The guy's method was that he looked at real estate values through time in cities that experienced riots and those that did not. He then used calculated effects across other variables to generate predictions of what the impact of removing a given riot might have reasonably been. His conclusion was that Black households lost over 5 Billion dollars through lost home equity he believed to be linked to the riots. I forget what his stop date was but I think that it was in the early 1990s. That is a huge loss spread over a few hundred thousand people (certainly college tuition for a lot of middle class Black kids in the 1970s and 1980s). To admit possible biases, when I was in middle school one of the most high profile crimes in the country happened across the street from my aunt's neighborhood, which was one high school over. I watched a stable middle class area turn into a ghetto with startling speed. My parent's house lost half of its appraised value over 18 months after several shocking crimes; I checked recently on the tax collector's website and the house only returned to the nominal price my parents paid in 1980 last year, which admittedly means significant appreciation for the subsequent owners. Negative home equity is a significant driver of a great many of the negative trends in cities. I know that there is research that looked at fires in California through insurance reports and found an almost three fold increase in incidence for the most severe category of building fires through the real estate down cycle from 1989 and 1994. The author explicitly claimed moral hazard. Being a cynic, I think arson, but motive and mechanism do not matter that much in this case. I went to college in Harlem and made occasional trips to the South Bronx....the frequency of buildings gutted by fire and left unrepaired did not seem random.

Use Google Maps some time to look at the neighborhoods around downtown Detroit with the satellite images and note the empty space that clearly used to be filled with houses. For anyone who read idiotic stories in East Coast newspapers and magazines claiming that Detroit was too big and represented a collapse of "sprawl", I will point out that Detroit is almost the exact same size as Portland, Oregon in terms of physical footprint and is actually denser in terms of population per square mile even after 60 years of population decline. Detroit also currently has a population density around 70% of Minneapolis. Detroit at its peak had a density double Minneapolis's current density and 60% higher than Minneapolis's peak density.

William Julius Wilson claims that manufacturing jobs left cities for suburbs and Black people were somehow uniquely unable to follow the jobs out to the suburbs. I don't have figures on car ownership, but with high Black homeownership and being in a city culturally in love with automobiles, I have to think that mobility for Blacks in Detroit would have to have been well above average. Even if redlining or collapsed home equity prevented Blacks from moving from Wayne County to Macomb or Oakland Counties, they still owned cars and could have commuted as white people in the suburbs generally did. At the very least, Black poverty from a Wilson-esque cause would seem likely to be much less in Detroit than other peer cities. That is not my impression. Also worth noting is that today most people who live in Detroit and are employed work outside of the city while most jobs located in Detroit are held by people who live outside of the city. Both of these majorities are large majorities.

Holy shit that wall of text, I thought the messages I wrote discussing long term strategy with allies were the longest texts on this website, you just proved me wrong by miles...

Well, what you said was certainly true, de-industrialization and crime certainly played major parts in the current situation of African Americans, but if blacks were equal to others de-industrialization and crime should affect black and white equally. Obviously they didn't, so there requires another reason why this all specifically targets and sets apart blacks from everyone else. Affirmative action is the one major thing that sets them apart. It could just be a random series of accidents which happened to target black that self-perpetuates, since correlation doesn't imply causation, but I think that much more likely is that there were systematic causes that started really targeting blacks in the 60s-70s era. Crime and loss of employment were just the ways in which the cycle of destitution systematized by Affirmative action self-perpetuates. I doubt if removing affirmative action is enough to save blacks, since existing crime and such would just directly lead to more crime in the future.

On a side note, the 60s and 70s are a very interesting time in American politics. The base of the republican and Democrat party basically did a complete flip flop, in terms of presidential elections at least. I'm fairly certain it has to do with the civil rights movement, but I just can't pinpoint a systematic cause of why this happened.

In case you missed it, time to pay homage to Australian Youtuber Huw Parkinson with his Donald Trump vs Game of Thrones mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0tE6T-ecmg

Last year he did a great Seinfeld in Australian Parliament video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuDTMmxGStE

BTW, as an outsider to American politics (but an interest in it), I'm surprised that African Americans are voting for Hillary in flocks, yet based on democratic socialist policies they'd be theoretically be better off with Bernie. Or have I got that screwed up?

Maybe the reason Detroit's black population didn't follow the whites fleeing for guarded suburbs was not because they didn't have cars but that... ahem... they were not welcome?

"The base of the republican and Democrat party basically did a complete flip flop, in terms of presidential elections at least. I'm fairly certain it has to do with the civil rights movement, but I just can't pinpoint a systematic cause of why this happened."

I can think of one systematic cause that just happens to rhyme with 'base'!

@Amby....Blacks on a personal level are by far the most conservative people in America. Married Black couples with children in the home are more supportive of the "Republican" position issue by issue than any other demographic bloc. Black politics are essentially fascistic and tribal far more than they are "Democratic". There is little ideological connection between what a Black person tells a pollster that they believe or desire and how they actually vote. Black urban politics especially are nasty and ugly in a way that is hard to describe. My great grandfather was a particularly notorious ethnic Catholic political boss in New Jersey for several decades. FDR agreed to announce his run for President in New Jersey after a meeting with him. So one, I know what tribal identity politics is about, and two, I am making my assessment "matter of fact"-ly rather than judgmentally. Hillary is bear hugging Obama and Bernie is criticizing Obama, so Bernie is toast. I mean Black people voted repeated by overwhelming majorities to keep electing George Wallace in Alabama well into the 1980s.

@Tallyrand....My point was precisely that Blacks did not need to move to Macomb County to follow jobs to Macomb County. Wilson's theory falls apart upon close examination for other cities as well, but his basic story was jobs moved and Black people could not follow them. A Black person with a car living in Detroit is just as able to drive to Macomb or Oakland County as a white suburbanite in Oakland County could drive into downtown Detroit, which they obviously did by the hundreds of thousands. Perhaps in New York or Philadelphia or Chicago one could point to large urban Black populations dependent upon public transit systems that were not suited to cover low density suburbs, but I am skeptical that that describes much of the Black population in Detroit circa 1970.

As to your second point, I will point out that Howard Baker, Winthrop Rockefeller, "Bo" Callaway, John Tower and even Spiro Agnew ran well to the left of their Democratic opponents on race and civil rights when they scored the break through elections for Republicans in the South. Race was an issue that kept a very conservative white electorate in a party that on the national level was no longer willing to tolerate them. LBJ's chief lieutenant John Connally, who was the idealogical middle of the Texas Democratic Party, became a Republican in the 1970s. The day that JFK was shot, the Houston Chronicle had been setting a front page story for the next day about polling showing JFK & LBJ running behind Goldwater statewide. The story obviously never ran, but a possible Conservative Republican challenge for Texas's electoral votes was thought to be the story of the day in 1963.

The dismantling of the seniority system in Congress, which had allowed long serving Southern Democrats to dominate the institutional levers of power through the combined results of the 1920 and 1930 elections, and the Baker vs. Carr Supreme Court ruling that forced political reform onto the South at the local level that may well have been more significant than the Voting Rights Act caused enormous political dislocations in the South. In my home state of Texas and in many Southern states, Democrats switched the major offices from two year terms to four year terms offset from Presidential elections because association with the national Democratic Party essentially doomed Democrats down ballot. Democrats held onto the legislature in Texas until 2002. They lost Georgia the same year. The idea of a Nixon Southern Strategy dog-whistling on race is largely overblown. I cannot speak to the deep dynamics outside of Texas, but in Texas, the Republican party grew up in the suburbs as Midwesterners migrated in. My understanding is that the dynamics in Georgia were similar. The Congressional district I grew up in was won by Papa Bush in 1966. A demographically similar district taking in the North Dallas suburbs went Republican in the same election. Add in a somewhat eccentric guy from the wilds of West Texas and that was the Republican Congressional delegation from Texas after the 1966 election.

As for the rest of the flip, Senator Thomas Eagleton (he of electro shock therapy) predicted that "amnesty, abortion and acid" would drive the ethnic Catholics base out of the Democratic party, which it largely did. The repudiation of Hubert Humphrey and the near purging of the Democratic Party in the decade after 1968 drove huge voting bloc over to the Republicans. Jerry Falwell, Richard John Neuhaus, Condi Rice and Jeane Kirkpatrick were all Democrats in good standing until the final death spasms of the Carter administration.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support

Thomas Frank is a reasonably well known left wing writer in America. The Guardian is THE left wing newspaper in the UK.

BTW, I work in Trade Theory as an economist and my PhD advisor helped negotiate NAFTA (working for the Mexicans).

So they can afford the wall then?

@gopher: That was an excellent article, one of the best I've ever seen after Donald Trump and in fact politics in general

*seen about

Is webDip down?

"Is webDip down?" It was but it is back up again.

@ingebot - agreed, a good read. Puts forward a similar argument re: trade/economy that won over working Americans to Reagan, or even here in Australia with conservative John Howard's "Battlers" although working class voting with the right.

When I listen to Trump speak its clear he's fumbled but yet strangely clear message is all about the narrative and making the connection with voters that has driven him this far. The question is how much further will it take him and - to paraphrase this thread - can anyone Stop the Trump?