The app for independent voices
A gentle suggestion on how in social science we describe current US policies
We fail as scholars and thinkers in social science when we let personal antipathy and prejudice overly influence our analysis. This is because personality quirks can be uncorrelated with the quality of policymaking. Not being able to get past the former can then draw observers to wrong conclusions on the latter.
At the same time, however, we cannot rule out that individual traits in leaders are, in actuality, causal for the nature and direction of their policies.
The current US President might be unhinged, according to the behaviour described in this NYT article and elsewhere.
"Trump’s sense of himself as the center of the universe was made all too clear with his attack on Mr. Reiner. The killings of the famed director and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had nothing to do with politics, according to authorities. But Mr. Trump decided to make it about himself with a bizarre social media post suggesting that their deaths were “reportedly due to the anger” at Mr. Reiner, an outspoken liberal, for “his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
It is not for the rest of us to pronounce on where America has decided it needs to go. But if the President is unhinged, then I think at the minimum, as social scientists, we should all agree to stop saying "Trump's policies on..."(tariffs, immigration, trade, China or anywhere else in East Asia, taxes, inflation, Russia, education, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, foreign engagement, industrial policy, peace, ...) if our goal is to present thereafter a serious analysis of those policies. Otherwise, we reveal the intellectual poverty of our field, that we can draw reasoned conclusions even from a source that is mentally unstable, or that our field is so bankrupt of logical foundation that even total randomness can produce sensible, strategic results.
There might be objection, "but he is elected President, and so what he says goes". We accept this reasoning because we believe that a legitimate process endows authority. But then so too believed those in historical times who continued to support a Mad King by virtue of the process of royal bloodline succession. In both cases, someone needs to call stop.
