FLASHBACK: Peter Turchin: Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Society Frays. “Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse. . . . We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.”

That’s funny, I’m reading his War And Peace And War: The Rise And Fall Of Empires right now.

Related: How To Make The U.S. Collapse-Proof. Problem: Insufficient opportunities for graft.

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT URGED THE REST OF US TO HEED THE WARNINGS FROM THE ARAB STREET: Turkey turns the tables on the U.S., warning citizens anti-Trump protests could make travel to America dangerous.

Shouldn’t provincial reactionary leftists tone down their violence, pay attention to the warnings of a diverse multicultural world, and follow the advice of our current president, who has called for what the New York Times described as “a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics”?

Related flashback: Nobody tell Vanity Fair that “The Ugly American” was actually the good guy in the novel.

CLIVE CROOK: Revenge Of The Deplorables. “If you can’t manage genuine respect for the people whose votes you want, at least try to fake it. However, forgive me if I go further. It really ought to be possible to manage some actual respect. The complaints that Trump is addressing deserve better than to be recast in caricature then dismissed with contempt. . . . Elite opinion admits of only one answer: People are more stupid and bigoted than we ever imagined. Without denying that there’s plenty of stupidity and bigotry to go around, I think it’s more a matter of elite incompetence. Elite opinion heard the rebels’ complaints, but instead of acknowledging what was valid, it rejected the grievances in every particular and dismissed the complainers as fools or worse. The elites weren’t deaf. They were dumb.”

STEPHEN L. CARTER: Trump and the Fall of Liberalism. “Too many of my progressive friends seem to have forgotten how to make actual arguments, and have become expert instead at condemnation, derision and mockery. On issue after issue, they’re very good at explaining why no one could oppose their policy positions except for the basest of motives. As to those positions themselves, they are too often announced with a zealous solemnity suggesting that their views are Holy Writ — and those who disagree are cast into the outer political darkness. In short, the left has lately been dripping with hubris, which in classic literature always portends a fall.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1284: Podesta Friend At DOJ Led Cover-Up Of IRS Scandal.

QUESTION ASKED: Will Trump’s Populist Policies Actually Make America Great?

ONE LARGELY UNHERALDED BENEFIT OF THIS ELECTION: A big blow to dynastic politics. Jeb Bush, who should have followed my advice, never got off the ground. Hillary, despite the best efforts of the DNC and the media-industrial complex to drag her across the finish line, got soundly thrashed.

That’s good. A year or two ago, some of my foreign friends were mocking the U.S. for being on the way to having yet another Clinton or Bush in the White House. And it does look kind of bad when two families swap back and forth.

But that didn’t happen. Oh, they’re grooming Chelsea for Congress — how can you run an influence-peddling operation with no influence to peddle — but that’s a far cry from putting Hillary in the White House.

Political dynasties don’t have much to recommend them, and I don’t want to see any more of that here in the United States. For the moment, at least, we’ve dodged a bullet.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: How young California Bay Area residents responded to Imperial Japan during WWII, versus how the Bay Area responded to a man with (R) after his name winning the 2016 presidential election.

Or to put it another way:

CHANGE: Crime highest in 16 years, Obama legacy. “The personal crime rate throughout America has hit a 16-year high, with nearly 30 percent of all households report being ‘victimized,’ according to a new survey.”

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WHAT IF WE HAD A CULTURE WAR AND THE OTHER SIDE FINALLY SHOWED UP? Wanda Sykes gets booed off the stage for dissing Trump at a benefit in Boston.

NEO-NEOCON ON THE OLD SWITCHEROO: “I know that this is the traditional honeymoon period for a president-elect. But whatever honeymoon aspects this has—and it most definitely has some—are further enhanced by the fact that this was a honeymoon that was unexpected and unplanned by most people. It’s as though we expected to spend some time in the hospital having a colonoscopy, and after doing all the nasty prep and getting to the point of lying in the hospital room with the IV about to be inserted, instead a brass band comes into the room and the drum majorette announces that we need to get up, because instead we’ve won a free trip to a luxury resort in Hawaii. Now, that resort might be a bit tawdry. It may not be the exactly perfect hotel we would have chosen it we’d had our druthers. But hey, it’s a whole lot better than that colonoscopy.”

Indeed it is. Yesterday, a few hours before Neo sent me a link to her new post, I was telling my wife that I left California in March firmly convinced that Hillary had the election in the bag, but Texas would be a bit behind the lines during the top-down culture war that was sure to come, along with Hillary packing the Supreme Court with far left socialists for a generation. Knowing those particular boulders have been dodged make the move now feel that much more fun. Going forward, lefties can and will continue to do considerable damage to the country (see also: the crazy propaganda the left disseminated during the Nixon administration), but at least the White House won’t be leading the charge for at least the next four years.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Oprah Under Fire for Being Optimistic About Trump.

UPDATE: “How easily the college-educated go barking mad.”

WAPO: HOW BADLY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY DOING? THIS BADLY: “That whistling sound you hear is the party Thelma-and-Louiseing.”

IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES, or as it’s been titled this week, “The Epic Trumpening Special Double Edition.”

SCOTT ADAMS: The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb.

This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future. Here’s the setup that triggered them.

1. They believe they are smart and well-informed.

2. Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or something similarly bad.

3. Half of the voters of the United States – including a lot of smart people – voted Trump into office anyway.

Those “facts” can’t be reconciled in the minds of the anti-Trumpers. Mentally, something has to give. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in.

There are two ways for an anti-Trumper to interpret that reality. One option is to accept that if half the public doesn’t see Trump as a dangerous monster, perhaps he isn’t. But that would conflict with a person’s self-image as being smart and well-informed in the first place. When you violate a person’s self-image, it triggers cognitive dissonance to explain-away the discrepancy.

So how do you explain-away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?

You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating – literally – that Trump supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)

In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact – as obvious as it would seem – is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world, they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or cognitive way, or both.

Pretty much.

UPDATE:

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROM: FOR COMPARISON’S SAKE, this is me on Nov. 13, 2008 after Obama won.

DAN MARKEL UPDATE: The Dan Markel Murder Case: Who Is (Or Was) Paying The Killers’ Attorneys’ Fees?

TO BE FAIR, THEY DEMAND TOLERANCE, THEY DON’T OFFER IT: Editorial: ‘Cowering Oregon Law Faculty Need To Learn What Decency, Tolerance And Diversity Really Look Like.’

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR:

As much as Simon was devoted to the romance and art of journalism and, more important, to nonfiction, even he had to concede that fiction film and TV were the primary communication media of his era. “To get a best-selling novel on the New York Times Best Sellers list, you need to sell a hundred thousand copies. A poorly watched HBO show is going to draw three or four million a week. That’s ten times as many people acquiring your narrative.” And that mattered because, to Simon and his partner, Ed Burns, The Wire was explicitly a piece of social activism. Among its targets, large and small, were the War on Drugs, the educational policy No Child Left Behind, and the outsize influence of money in America’s political system, of statistics in its police departments, and of Pulitzer Prizes at its newspapers. The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that Burns and Simon had begun to see as fundamentally doomed. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefty, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.)

—From author Brett Martin’s profile of David Simon, the showrunner of HBO’s The Wire, in Martin’s 2012 book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

Chaser:

—Simon yesterday.

As Andrew Klavan has written, “here’s what bugs me. The Wire (which is, to some extent, based on the year Simon spent with the Baltimore Homicide Squad while researching Homicide) takes place in a city without conservatives, even without Republicans. There has not been a Republican mayor of Baltimore since 1967. And much of the show’s genius lies in its depiction of the brutalized life of black people in the city’s ghetto. So we have a writer who has seen for himself, and who has shown us, the effects of Democrat governance on a city, the dehumanization of the poor that is the direct result of leftism and the corruption that inevitably springs from it. And yet Simon blames conservatives!”

And if your goal really is to take down “a capitalist system” you’ve “begun to see as fundamentally doomed,” and replace it with a form of nationalized socialism, you’re really not in much of a position to (a) shout about the horrors of national socialism, or (b) compare small government Republicans to any form of it. Besides, isn’t the entire nation socialist now? Newsweek wouldn’t lie to me, would it?

WELL, YES: Trump will have vast powers. He can thank Democrats for them. Liberals liked executive authority as long as Obama wielded it. Now they’ve set a precedent. Then there’s Harry Reid’s nuking of the filibuster.

Related:

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YES, HILLARY’S BIG PROBLEM WAS THAT SHE DIDN’T GO FAR ENOUGH LEFT: Seething liberals vow revolution in Democratic Party.