The Electoral Choice

Yesterday was a slow morning, so I turned on a television show called Squawk Box to accompany my breakfast. The show reports on money and markets, often intelligently. Rather than expose myself to more political spin, why not tune in to the views of people who manage money.

Such was my thought. 

As I was watching the show a serious money manager or market strategist appeared. He was going to explain his choice in the presidential election. Not entirely an undignified task.

But then, in the midst of what seemed to have been an endless disquisition about God-only-knows what, he asserted his basic principle. He did not care about what the candidates had done. He was tuning in to their language. He cared mostly about what they were saying. 

Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. So much so that I changed the channel. If that was his thought process I did not care to hear his conclusion. And, I did not even record his name. Some names are best left unsaid.

Obviously, we have reason to distrust what politicians say when they are scavenging for votes. Some politicians will say just about anything to persuade you to vote for them. Some will repudiate every position they took in the past in order to make you think that you can trust them with the future.

Then again, by a certain perverse logic, one might say that one of the presidential candidates has a record. He has been there and done that. The other candidate might choose to run on the record of the president she served, but, beyond that, her record of achievement is very thin indeed. 

So, we might say that we can judge our own experience of living under the presidency of one candidate versus our hopes, dreams, wishes and fantasies of living under the presidency of the other. The first is experience; the second is an idea.

It may be the case-- it is almost certainly the case-- that the Harris campaign does not want any of us to think of the record of the Trump administration. After all, the Biden presidency does not shine in comparison.

Were we to try a slightly different angle, we would point out that Kamala has no real executive experience. Trump has a great deal. Since Kamala has been shown to be an incompetent manager-- no one wants to work for her for very long-- she fails the experience test.

As we have often noted in these pages, Trump gave us the Abraham Accords. Biden gave us October 7-- at least indirectly. You might think that Trump has made some infelicitous remarks, and many of us would largely prefer that he show more discipline, but how many dead Ukrainians are you willing to accept as a counterweight.

Better yet, many serious commentators have taken to the media with the message that, speaking of the economy, we never had it so good. And yet, everyday Americans do not think so. However glowing the reports, they continue to believe that the economy sucks, and that they had it better under Trump.

Again, which is more important, their experience of the economy or the opinions of a band of experts.

Now, if you have waded into intellectual history you might recognize the argument here. In the mid-eighteenth century British philosopher David Hume laid the groundwork for British empirical philosophy by asking a simple question.

Writing in his book, A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume asked: which comes first experience or ideas?

It is a difficult question, and I am not going to solve it today. In particular, Hume was asking whether we learn ideas and then apply them to our experience or whether we have experiences and use them to formulate and to understand ideas.

In more specific terms, can you understand the idea of redness if you have never seen a red object? Simple and direct, as questions go. 

In more pedestrian terms, when a detective encounters a crime scene, does he begin by collecting evidence or does he begin by formulating a theory of the crime? Does he prejudge the outcome or does he begin with an open mind and wait until the evidence points toward one or another theory.

Some people are impervious to evidence. Their faith is such that they will never accept any facts that disprove or discredit their beliefs. They are, as the saying goes, prejudiced. They cling to their beliefs and only accept evidence that seems to prove them right.

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