The lens of history: Revisiting Donald Trump and... I'm typing this... Milli Vanilli

 It's time.  When I started The Unmutual Political Blog, it was to call out my fellow political scientists during the 2016 Republican primaries for their failure to understand that Donald Trump really did have a chance.  My colleagues simply didn't have a proper framework to understand what was happening.  I argued that their models were junk, and that they needed to understand the real precedent:  Jimmy Carter.  I already did my Trump vs. Carter Revisited series a while back on this blog.

Now, it is time to revisit another comparison I made back on The Unmutual.  This one, somewhat scarier.  And in fact, I am distressed that some of the knowledge even exists in my brain.  Currently, I am quite successful in tuning out any pop culture.  I know absolutely squat about pop music right now, and for the last several decades.  Nothin'.  Bupkis.  I occasionally hear snippets, and of course, I do the old-guy thing and comment about how it is terrible.  What I'm not going to do, though, is tell you about how great the music was in my day, because mostly, the music sucked then too.  OK, my generation had grunge, and some weird, "alternative rock" that somehow got popular even though it was weird as hell.  Somehow, Jane's Addiction and Primus and other weird bands got popular for brief periods of time, leaving us weirdos to ask, "what are you doing listening to our music?!"  However, the 1980s and 1990s had some shit music.

There were these annoying children who played concerts in malls, and... oy.  It mostly just sucked.

Me?  Well, mostly I was listening to old blues, classic rock, and trying to play guitar like Stephen Stills.  Yeah, sure, Hendrix, and all that, but seriously, have you ever actually listened to Stephen Stills?  My first guitar hero.

But 'round about 1990, there was this marketing scheme called "Milli Vanilli."  Marketing genius.  You thought I was going to say something snarky, didn't you?  Marketing genius.  Some marketing whiz figured out that if you put a couple models' faces on some crappy, simplistic 4/4 time and trite lyrics, idiots will give you their money!  All you have to do is get the models to lip-sync, and trust that the idiots are too stupid to figure out that the models are lip-syncing.  Make a couple of silly, 3-minute movie/advertisements, and Bob's your uncle.  That's the way you do it, get your money for nothin', and your chicks for free!  That ain't workin'... (sorry, I guess the 80s did have some good music, keeping in mind that Dire Straits put out their first album in '78).

Anyway, I do love a good scam, in a scholarly sort of way.  My advice to you, as always, remains a well-diversified portfolio.  These things are interesting to study as intellectual curiosities.  It's like the plot of a novel.  Enjoy from a distance.  Just don't try it.  Or if you do, don't blame me if it all goes pear-shaped.  Remember:  well-diversified portfolio.  That's my advice.

For a time, though, the "Milli Vanilli" scheme brought in buckets o' cash.  And then, as was inevitable, the whole lip-syncing thing was revealed.

But not until after those little twerps won a Grammy.  Seriously.  They won an actual Grammy.

You know, I like to bash the Grammys.  I do it rather frequently.  Why?  Lots of reasons, but a pretty good one is the fact that the idiots behind that shit actually gave a Grammy to lip-syncing models.

How did people like me respond?  Well, at the time, I was a classic rock & blues fan.  I looked at the entirety of pop music and called it a fucking joke.  Before the lip-syncing thing was revealed, I thought "Milli Vanilli" was insufferable.

Of course, that's because I couldn't appreciate the money-making genius of the scheme, as I can now.  Silly me, in my youth, all I could do was hear how shitty they sounded, even though someone else was doing the singing, which kind of begs the question of "why bother with the whole lip-syncing thing anyway?"

So when the scheme was revealed, I thought it was fucking hilarious.  I laughed at the idiots who spent their money on those records.  Now, have I ever bought an album that I'd be embarrassed to admit?  Sure.  But anything like that?  Fuck no.  The on-line guitar world is currently suffering through a "fake guitarist" thing where people put up videos of themselves playing, sped up to make you think they're better than they are, but that's mostly a metal thing, for kids who spend their lives in their bedrooms.  Which... I suppose is kind of the world, now, but the point is that's not really the jazz world, or the bluegrass world, or anything like that.  If you need to do it live, with an audience up close... not so much.

Anyway, for those of us who have always rejected the entire concept of studio sheen, lowest common denominator dance pop garbage, the "Milli Vanilli" thing was just a moment of glorious schadenfreude.  We could turn to anyone around us, who had ever expressed even the slightest bit of fondness for that act-- and that was a lot of fuckin' people-- and laugh our proto-hipster asses off at them!

What happened next?  What happened next was that you couldn't find a Milli Vanilli fan anywhere.  No matter how hard you looked, you couldn't find one.  It was amazing.  Nobody anywhere had ever liked or bought a Milli Vanilli album.

And this brings me to Donald Trump, and some comments I made way back on The Unmutual Political Blog.  Would he become Milli Vanilli?  As Donald Trump leaves office this week, having been impeached for the second time after starting a riot/insurrection in an attempt to steal a second term, let's take a moment to think about the totality of his fraudulence.  I'm not going to bother with any kind of a recap here, but everything about the man is a lie, and a fraud.  Everything.  He has never said or done an honest thing in his life, and he is finally being forced out of office amid his most destructive lie yet-- the lie that the 2020 election was "rigged."

Some of us have always seen through his lies.  Some of us have always looked at him and wondered how anyone could fail to see the con.  And at the end, we come to an event which should lay bare exactly what he is.

Most ex-presidents see their public standing improve with time out of office.  George H.W. Bush lost his 1992 reelection campaign, but became an elder statesman by acting like an elder statesman.  Jimmy Carter, of course, is the quintessential example of leaving office amid disapproval, and then just doing good.  Was he a good president?  No.  He was a very bad president.  But he has been a great ex-president.  And even Richard Nixon managed to rehabilitate his image somewhat by not acting like the worst sub-human shitbag on the planet, after he left office.

The thing about Nixon, and... Milli Vanilli... is that after Watergate, we had a bit of a survey problem.  Gaps started to show up in surveys.  What proportion of the population voted for Nixon in 1972?  That was a landslide election.  Nixon mopped the floor with McGovern.  Pay attention, you fucking lefties!  Nixon won 49 states.  Nixon got 60% of the non-existent thing called "the popular vote," which is a thing which doesn't exist, but about which Democrats currently obsess and whine.  But which doest't exist.  49 states.  Those things exist.

But the thing is, after Watergate, finding people who wanted to say they voted for Nixon was a little harder.  Self-proclaimed Nixon supporters, post-'74, were somewhat less than 60%.  Why?  People didn't want to admit they'd been had.

Now to be fair, Richard Nixon was a complicated man, and no one understood him but his dog, Checkers.  He had a mixed political legacy.  He was not much of an ideologue, in the technical sense of the term.  He had few core principles that guided policy positions, which meant that he made a lot of deals with Congress.  A Democratic Congress.  Hence, liberals can look at his legacy and see a lot of leftward movement, continuing the enactment of core Great Society principles.  Not across the board, of course.  There were also his actions in Vietnam and Cambodia, and of course... Watergate.  A complicated man.  Checkered.  Understood only by Checkers.

Yet once his name became synonymous with the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, fewer people wanted to admit having voted for him.  Hence, the gap.  Not that store at the mall where teenie-bopper pseudo-musicians put on concerts in the 1980s, but the mathematical discrepancy between Nixon's vote share in 1972, and the proportions of the population that would admit to having voted for him later.

Earlier in the Trump presidency, back on The Unmutual Political Blog, I had pondered the Milli Vanilli effect, and Donald Trump.  He is going out in a blaze of ingloriousness, as is only appropriate for Donald Trump.  He saved his most vile actions for the end, for one last attempt at a power grab, no pussies being within reach, I guess.  If this doesn't reveal to you who and what he is... nothing will.

So what's going on with his approval rating?  Well, if you take a look at the RCP average, Trump's approval rating took a precipitous drop with his attempted incitement of an insurrection.  As it should.  Because holy fucking shit, the President of the United States incited a riot and insurrection in an attempt to overthrow democracy.  Holy fucking shit.  Except... that it's Donald Trump, so of course he'd try something like that, because he's a sociopathic wannabe-dictator who should have been thrown in Supermax years ago.  But holy fucking shit.  This is where we are as a country.

But... his approval rating isn't even at the lowest point.  39.7%.  It was lower at the end of 2017.  There are still a lot of people who want to go to that Milli Vanilli concert, insisting that there's no lip-syncing going on.

Look, Milli Vanilli always sucked.  And popular music will pretty much always suck.  Every once in a while, the fates will align, or mis-align and a talented artist will somehow gain fame and fortune.  But pop, almost by definition, must be the lowest common denominator, and that's-a-gonna suck because people lack the intelligence, sophistication or understanding of music to comprehend what makes, for example, A Love Supreme such a brilliant piece of art.

The question is how people respond when fraud is revealed.  A couple of years ago, I suggested the possibility of a Milli Vanilli effect for Trump, referencing Nixon and the eventual gap that would emerge between his actual 1972 vote share and survey responses of people admitting to voting for him.

Of course, the revelation of a fraud does not always lead to people coming to grips with the truth.

Consider an issue with which we now must grapple.  Vaccines.  There are a lot of anti-vaxxers in the world.  Unfortunately.  The MMR vaccine became "controversial" because of a lying sack of shit named Andrew Wakefield.  Wakefield was a liar and a fraud who faked some data on 12, yes, 12 cases in order to claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism.  Total, absolute bullshit, and it has been debunked time and again.  The journal that published his lies-- Lancet-- has since retracted the paper.  You can still download it, but you'll see the word, "RETRACTED," in big, bold, red letters, diagonally across every page.

But the debunking of Wakefield did nothing to convince the anti-vaxxers, except that the conspiracy is deeper than anyone ever thought!

And I wish I could say that this effect is limited to uneducated conspiracy theorists.  However, I'm gonna have to do this again.

Psychology.  Psychology does not need to be a bullshit discipline.  The application of the scientific method to the study of the human mind, in principle, is a thing that can be done rigorously.  In practice, though, it strongly tends to be a bullshit discipline.  More than most, it is subject to what we call, "the replication crisis."  Many of its most famous claims, and countless of its less famous claims, simply cannot be replicated, for a wide variety of reasons.

Here's the one that bothers me the most.  Philip Zimbardo.  The Stanford Prison Experiment.  This was fraud.  Absolute fraud.  Dude coached the participants in what to say.  Scripted.  The fraud goes beyond that, but this was revealed a few years ago.  Zimbardo is a liar and a fraud.

Psychology classes have been teaching Zimbardo as gospel truth for decades.  What do you do when it has been revealed as a fraud?  After all, it has never been replicated because it can't be replicated.  Rules on human subjects!

You know what professors of psychology are doing?  They're teaching Zimbardo anyway.  They're putting their fingers in their fucking ears and saying LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!!!!!

I get students on a regular basis, to whom I show the research debunking Zimbardo, who have taken classes in which Zimbardo is still taught, and they are fucking pissed.

At their psychology professors.  Justifiably so.

These people are the Milli Vanilli fans of academia.

Maybe that's not fair.  I believed Zimbardo, until the debunking.  I never liked Milli Vanilli, but I believed Zimbardo until the debunking.  The question is, what do you do after the debunking?  At least the Milli Vanilli fans had the decency to have some shame.  Psychology professors who are still teaching Zimbardo like the debunking never happened...

There are so many reasons I brush psychology aside, but this is a classic demonstration.

And if psychology professors can adhere to their Zimbardo cult, ignoring the fact that he has been debunked as a liar and a fraud...

Should we really expect the Trump cultists to turn on Trump now?

In retrospect, it is actually kind of amazing that Nixon's supporters turned on him.  And as for Milli Vanilli... well, whatever.

In James Madison's warnings about the dangers of democracy, he wrote about the need to protect against the "fickleness and passions" of a public that could easily be swayed hither and thither.  And yet the greatest danger seems to be the stalwart nature of support for the most shameless liar in American history.

I could really go for some of that fickleness about now.  It got Nixon off the stage.  Milli Vanilli too.  Stubbornness keeps Zimbardo's lies in the college classroom in a discipline that is so fraught that you should probably disregard most of what they say as a general rule, and stubbornness is keeping Trump's support higher than it should be, even after his lies incited riots and insurrection.

Gimme some fickleness.