I’m a great admirer of Adolph Reed. And I generally agree with him. Unlike most of the people I read on the left, I don’t read him contingently. What I mean by that is that he is roughly as “liberal” as I am. People like Paul Krugman are allies because our country is so out of whack. But if the country does take a solid turn to the left, I will be more and more at odds with Krugman in a way that I won’t be with Reed. So I was pleased to see him write, Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It’s Important. He means, of course, Hillary Clinton.

Now, I actually don’t have much bad to say about Clinton in the same way that I don’t have much bad to say about Obama. Neither people are truly in my political camp. But they are both like Krugman: in the modern American context, they are allies. Also, in Clinton’s case, I think most of this narrative about her not being honest is due to the right-wing campaign against the Clintons in the 1990s. I don’t find her any more corrupt than any other politician of her stature.

Adolph Reed on 1930s Germany

But there was one thing in Adolph Reed’s article that really struck me. He was talking about how the Communists refused to support the Social Democrats in Germany in the early 1930s. And their leader, Ernst Thällman, famously said, “After Hitler, our turn.” Reed wrote, “His point was that a Nazi victory would expose them as fraudulent with no program for the working class.” Of course, that didn’t happen. Thällman underestimated the ruthlessness of Hitler and the Nazis. Reed goes on to discuss this. You should read his whole article, it is typically brilliant.

I’d like to talk about this in the context of our political system. I am one of those people who thinks that our democracy is stronger than Donald Trump. But I hear a lot of “Bernie or Bust” types claiming that Trump would be such a horrible president that he would only serve one term — if that. And then we would have a wonderful future where everyone is fairies and elves and you can have all the cotton candy you like. This is a total misreading of how politics works in the United States.

How a Trump Presidency Will Go

I think if Trump were elected, it would be Ronald Reagan 2.0. At first, the economy would tank. People would flip out. But then, they’d notice that Trump hadn’t actually started World War III. And the economy would recover. By 2020, Trump would win re-election easily. And by the time he left office in 2024, the country would be in ruin. But by then, the laws of the country would be much worse.

The lower classes would pay a far higher percentage of the taxes than they now do. There would be virtually nothing left of the social safety net. And the federal courts — most especially the Supreme Court — would be so conservatives — that it would be almost impossible to fix the country if a liberal Democrat were elected president with a Democratic House and 70 members of the Senate.

This Is Important

People who believe this “Trump will be such a catastrophe that everyone will see it” nonsense don’t understand how things work in this country. There ain’t gonna be a revolution. The same rich people who are in charge now will be in charge then, but the rest of us will be poorer with far less power to do anything about it. And that’s the best we can hope for. With all the voter disenfranchisement that the Republicans will enact, it could be many election cycles before anyone anywhere near liberal is in the White House.

Adolph Reed is right: this is important. Super important.

I’ve known a lot of people from a broad array of backgrounds. They range from people living on the street to people with millions of dollars. (I’ve had no experience with the super rich.) And something I hear a lot from the people who have done fairly well economically is that they succeeded, so anyone could do it. Note: I am not just talking about the millionaires. I hear this kind of comment from people just scraping by in the lower middle class. Anyone who has overcome adversity can make the same claim. But this is a demonstration of something very dangerous: the skewed sample fallacy.

Let me make it personal for a moment. Although I had the great advantage of having parents who were interested in the life of the mind, I also suffered badly from dyslexia. As a result, I had a very hard time learning to read and write. And this was at a time when people didn’t think much about dyslexia. Normally, I would have just been written off as simply stupid, if it hadn’t been for my prodigious gift for math. So it would be easy for me to dismiss the failures as others, “I could barely read into my teens yet I became a writer!” Blah, blah, blah! Shut that man up!

Sample Size: One

This is what I mean by the skewed sample fallacy. And in this case, the sample size is one: me (or you). In my case, my lack of literary skills eventually made me embarrassed. And this led to my becoming fascinated with the language. But that was just me. I think a more natural response is to avoid it. And if not that, embracing it wouldn’t assure success. (Note: I’m only a good writer relative to my environment; every day I learn something that makes me embarrassed about something I wrote yesterday.)

On a personal level, the skewed sample fallacy is fine. It’s great that people feel good about themselves. It’s on the social level that it is pernicious. This is because it is society’s winners who set the rules. And every one of them thinks that their wealth and power are due to their own wonderfulness. As the football coach Barry Switzer said, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”

But even if they were born with every disadvantage and managed to make it to the top of our economic pecking order, nothing changes. In fact, I generally find such people the biggest abusers of the skewed sample fallacy. They do, at least, have strong evidence that bad circumstances can be overcome.

Social Policy Based on Skewed Sample Fallacy

Everywhere I look in society, I see evidence that our social policies are based on millions of individuals’ one little skewed sample fallacy. Look at Bill Gates. To him, all poor children need are good schools. After all, some desperately poor children have been put into special educational programs and become great successes. But is that how we are to set policy?

Certainly many conservatives think this very thing. After the 2012 election, Avik Roy made the ridiculous argument that we liberals had equality of opportunity all wrong. Basically, he claimed, equality of opportunity means not having any laws against the poor. So as long as there is no law stopping a malnourished child who misses the first five years of school is legally allowed, they still have an equal opportunity to make good as Donald Trump’s kids.

What I’d like to see is society’s “winners” understand that they don’t define the world. Policy based on their own experiences is rarely good policy. They usually have advantages that they don’t see. And so they need to see that just because they rose and others did not is not an indication that they are better and others are worse. And I make that plea first and most forcefully to myself.