Recently I was reading that any decently behaved mathematical function, when studied in a finite region only, can be approximately decomposed into sine waves. This is called “Fourier analysis”, and the components can be called “modes” in certain contexts (I think). You get the original function by adding together the contributions of all the modes. If that is not interesting, I don’t know what is.
Again recently, I took part in the comments on the best comments on Victor Orbán and democracy at Astral Codex Ten, getting some valuable information about the workings of American democracy in the process (commenter gbear605 deserves special mention). While this does not suddenly make me an expert on American politics, I shall nevertheless, in an experimental spirit, attempt to decompose its current state, as I perceive it from afar, into Fourier modes as just described. What kind of model might we need to get a satisfying approximation?
As the first mode, I would propose “wokeness”, associated with the Democratic party. Once more, I am not well-informed about American politics; but as I understand it, proposals that the police should be abolished fall under this umbrella, or claims that the categories “woman” and “man” are merely culturally constructed. We don’t want to comtemplate here the scary possibility that “woke” official cognitive elites are drifting into insanity, so we may assume that there exists sophisticated theory behind improved categories such as “birthing person”, or “person who menstruates”. It is well-known, after all, that modern science can be highly counterintuitive. Still, the average person may well think that a drift into insanity it is. A rational voter may then reason along the lines of “thank you, that saves me time this year since I can skip examination of the parties’ proposals on tax policy etc; I know I vote Republican anyway [the other of the two leading parties], as surely the most important consideration must be keeping from power insane people who, by virtue of their insanity, would be prone to wreak on the country all sorts of unforeseeable havoc”. As a result, “wokeness” leads to a electoral advantage for the Republican party. In areas where Republicans are strong, they will win bigger; where they are weak they will lose less big; and in marginal areas they will tend to win. That’s the top mode of current American politics.
It explains the general Republican success in the elections of 2020. Except, of course, Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump for president. So we need an additional mode. Let us incorporate Paul Graham’s 2004 observation that presidential elections are usually won simply by the more charismatic candidate, with much of the political analysis afterwards amounting to no more than after-the-fact rationalisation. Such a phenomenon is characteristic of reporting from financial markets, after all, a parallel that Graham also notes. Someone feels like hitting with verve on the sell button; the price goes down; and the commentators now have to comb through the day’s news for reasons for the price movement.
His charisma theory works, Graham explains, because the parties both try to please voters on the issues, cancelling each other out in this respect, with charisma left as the one factor they can’t control (once the candidates are chosen). The top mode as stated here, by contrast, is based on Democrats scaring the voters, so Graham’s assumption apparently no longer holds. Why not? That would be a topic for another post. If it’s really true that it no longer holds. In any case, intuitively I would say the charisma mode is always important; and were we looking at presidential elections only, perhaps it should have been the top mode.
But wait. Was not Trump a very charismatic candidate? More charismatic than Biden? Instead of helping us out, the second mode’s contribution goes into the wrong direction! Apparently yet another mode is needed in order to obtain any sort of acceptable approximation.
The third mode, the most particular of the three to America and to the present moment in time, is Trump’s unique character. Now, this might look like no more than the after-the-fact introduction of an ad hoc mode in order to account for a recalcitrant empirical datum. Not very consistent with how I just dismissed after-the-fact rationalisations! Against that, though, I would contend that Trump’s character flaws are striking before-the-fact, and obvious to the majority of neutral observers. They make it feasible for him to lose elections despite a strong tailwind from the first two modes. Moreover, his conduct after his 2020 loss could be responsible for the Democratic victories in the Georgia Senate runoff elections, which defied the first mode. And this concludes our investigation into the dominant modes of current American politics. Note that I’m not saying that Trump voters have flawed characters, as they may have voted rationally according to (for example) the logic outlined above, where I introduced the first mode.