Chris Christie to Vivek Ramaswamy:
"This is the fourth debate in which you would have been voted in the first twenty minutes the most obnoxious blowhard in America."
What would the Cree or Khoisan people do?
Scene from last night's GOP "debate."
I didn't see this debate live. I taped it to watch this morning. I had dinner with high school classmates, one of whom became a well-respected anthropologist, a scholar of hunter-gatherer foraging societies. By odd coincidence, while the debate exchange was happening live, my classmate was answering my question about how small groups -- the Cree people in the Canadian arctic, the Khoisan people in the Kalahari desert in southwest Africa -- dealt with jerks in their midst.
My actual question was: "What would happen to a Trump-type person in those traditional societies?"
His response was that those cultures valued and rewarded sharing. Hunting for game was a group activity. They are rather egalitarian. Hunters divided the meat from successful hunts among the community somewhat equally. They discouraged bragging or credit-taking. I asked what would happen if someone thought to say things like, "I alone can save you," and made vainglorious attempts to seize leadership.
My classmate said people would harass and condemn him. They would mock him. They would put ants in his bed. They would make him miserable. And if that didn't work, the miscreant could be banished from the group. One cannot survive on one's own and he would die. Or maybe the village would wake up to find that the man had been stabbed to death from multiple spear wounds in the middle of the night.
Last night's debate was probably pointless as far as changing the arc of the 2024 GOP election nomination fight. DeSantis's decline is probably intact. Haley looked good, as she always has, but there was no knock-out incident that clears the field for her. Chris Christie continued with his message that the real election is not between the four of these people on stage but against the frontrunner, Trump. He called Trump
a dictator, a bully, who has taken shots at everybody, whether they have given him great service or not over time, who dares to disagree with him. . . . He is unfit. This is a guy who just said he wants to use the Department of Justice to go after his enemies when he gets in there. The fact of the matter is there is no bigger issue in this race, Megan, than Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy remains a caricature of Trump, as scorched-earth as Trump, talking in a version of Trump's ALL CAP rants. Ramaswamy called Nikki Haley a "fascist" multiple times. He called her corrupt and held up this sign.
I noticed that the audience was mostly silent when Christie criticized Trump. The mechanisms of social control that work against Ramaswamy don't work against Trump. Trump is a wartime-leader. In wartime against an internal enemy as Trump describes it -- communistic Democrats, their turncoat RINO allies, the fake news, and career employees in the federal government -- intemperance and a selfish drive to victory is acceptable. Trump's voters bonded to him and like him as he is.
The USA is a society, not a community. Self-interested economic behavior is supposed to be transformed into a social good by an invisible hand. The founders thought that the same would happen in government with a federal constitution dividing power among separate branches. Ambition would check ambition.
Voters developed a taste for angry intemperance in a politician-showman. Ramaswamy sees which way the wind is blowing. Those voters have Trump for now, but Ramaswamy is waiting his turn. Trump openly defies the mechanisms of social control, and about half of Americans either don't care or they like it. What works in bands of hunter-gatherers is not working in America.
[Note: For daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. The blog is free and always will be.]
12 comments:
Does Ramascum attack anyone else the way that he attacks Nikki Haley? Like his dumpster fire hero, VR has no shame and no class. But he appears to be broadcasting his misogyny. It is ok to challenge a female candidate, but there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Haley is right, VR is scum.
I just noticed that VR already has been called Ramascummy publicly. I'm glad that others are on the same page.
“Voters developed a taste for angry intemperance in a politician-showman. Ramaswamy sees which way the wind is blowing. Those voters have Trump for now, but Ramaswamy is waiting his turn.”
Trump’s white nationalist base isn’t likely to go for a dark-skinned Hindu, no matter how whacko. The candidates on stage yesterday are competing for second place against a monstrosity that only Chris Christie wasn’t too timid to mention. Maybe they’re hoping Trump will just go away. Frank Bruni described it well this morning in the NYT: “Their approach occupies the region of the Venn diagram where moral surrender and magical thinking overlap.”
Trump has become the GOP’s moral compass and he’s campaigning on a platform of retribution. Every organization needs a slogan. Theirs should be, “I’m gonna git you, sucka!”
Anon@8:48. It seems to me that,Ramaswampy has a couple od screws loose. He is,apparently at least somewhat aware that his attack dog style is going nowhere, yet he keeps doubling down on the misogynistic attacks, as though he thinks being worse than Former Guy will win him adherents.
Also yesterday in media land, Taylor Swift was named "Person of the Year" by TIME magazine. This is quite an honor for your BFF 🙂
Serious, if uninformed, question: how do we know that hunter-gatherer groups discouraged bragging and credit-taking?
It does make sense that agriculture and settlements made religious and other ceremonial or blowhard positions possible.
“ What works in bands of hunter-gatherers is not working in America.”
And what worked in the late 1700s, when communication happened via hand-printed pamphlets and in-person speeches, is not working that well in the era of algorithmically-driven social media.
To answer LF's question:
My classmate got his Ph.D. from Cornell, did two years of post-doc work then spent a full year living in northern Canada among a village of Cree. He hunted with them, ate with them, lived with them, observed them. He said the second stomach of harvested caribou contained half digested food which made a delicious carbohydrate meal.
I guess the straightforward answer is that he saw and recorded how they handled leadership. That's how he knows -- or at least thinks he knows. He has a lot of respect for hunter-gatherer people which comes out in conversation. I don't think he felt a need to idealize them or make up a noble-savage narrative to meet some purpose. He is an ethnographer. He taught at two very prestigious Tier One research universities. Maybe he will do a guest post and report further on his methodology.
He is particularly interested in foraging strategy. I don't care much about that but I am interested in leadership strategy, so that's what I write about. I don't have a Ph.D. in the ethnography of voters, but I have tried to pay attention. I suppose, on reflection, that my most serious practical ethnographic work was observing upper middle class investors in the United States. They don't eat partially digested contents of the second stomach of caribou. I have never seen it on a menu of a restaurant. I do observe that they feel the pain of loss at 5 times the intensity that they enjoy gains in the same account at the same moment.
Peter Sage
Tribal societies such as the Klamath Tribes here in the local region operate according to much of the same sharing ethic now as Peter describes relative to the groups he discussed. Of course, it's complicated, as when some tribes work to undermine another tribe's plans for a casino in Medford. What needs no explaining is that white culture in America rewards individual achievement. It's hard to dovetail the two ethics in a way that accommodates the needs of someone brought up in one culture when that person needs to succeed in the other culture; this is one reason DEI is important if we want American society to work with common purpose. Ultimately, the issue always is survival for our nation as well as for us as individuals. DEI forces us in one group to account for the points of view of those in the other group.
Apropos of December 7th and sharing: The late Ralph Hibbs, M.D., of Medford, was an Army physician in the Philippines when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He survived the Bataan death march and imprisonment in a prison camp in the Philippines; the camp and he were liberated in 1945. The prisoners lived on the edge of starvation at best. After Dr. Hibbs read James Clavell's novel "King Rat," he said, "King Rat wouldn't have lasted 15 minutes where I was." King Rat didn't share. Dr. Hibbs wrote a book about his time in the Philippines, "Tell MacArthur to Wait." He often added this when he signed his book: "I hope you have a happy life."
Fine, thanks. Uncomprehending as much as uninformed! I thought that was interpretation of the long past, not present-day observation. I didn’t even know hunter-gatherers still existed as such. Fascinating work.
On the humorous side, anyone else recall The Far Side comic with indigenes resembling the Yanomami sounding the village alarm and hiding their gadgets and appliances amid the cry, “Anthropologists! Anthropologists!”?
LD -
I don't remember that one, but I do remember the one with spears sticking out of the ground near a cave while antelope grazed in the distance, and the caveman saying to his mate: "This telecommuting isn't all it's cracked up to be."
Post a Comment