When I am debugging a program, especially when it’s someone else’s work and its substantial, I put a fair amount of time and effort into constructing a mental model of how the program works. It’s not exact, and quite often I’m looking for congruencies with models of how such tasks are accomplished in my experience.
Since this has met with a fair amount of success, I’ve tried to transfer the same approach to other situations, such as understanding how certain people’s brains work. In these situations, I’ve found it often helps to understand how each real person differs from a collection of iconic persons, to whom I’ve assigned certain attributes & values: an average value for truthfulness, a morality system that incorporates both traditional morality and a liking for prestige and prosperity, although for religious officials prosperity becomes less important, etc. All of this is idiosyncratic on my part; I have no idea how other people do these sorts of things.
The interesting part for me, though, came yesterday while reading Steve Benen’s latest conniption fit over President Trump:
Usually, when two politicians feud, at least one has the facts on their side. What’s amazing about the Trump-Sessions dispute is that they’re both wrong.
The president, for example, has repeatedly made it clear that he expected Sessions to be a partisan loyalist in the attorney general’s office, making Trump’s legal troubles go away whenever the president snapped his fingers. Indeed, he’s left little doubt that he believed it was Sessions’ job to interfere with the justice system on the president’s behalf.
In effect, Trump has spent years whining that Sessions wasn’t corrupt enough for his liking.
As Benen reminded me once again of the corruptive influences of President Trump, it finally became clear to me who President Trump most greatly resembles, if only in ambition:
The robber barons of the American 19th century.
Their overwhelming concerns were for personal prestige and wealth; they dedicated their lives to accumulating and building business empires. Conventional mores were for fools; laws were not boundaries for behavior, but obstacles to be neutralized in the pursuit of the envisioned empire. Such was Vanderbilt, JJ Hill, and those others.
This is a description of Trump right to the T.
And the robber barons didn’t come out of their era smelling of roses. Despite attempts to salvage reputations by descendants (think: Vanderbilt University), the robber barons are considered to have harmed society, even as they built and built. Carnegie may have built libraries, but coal miners died in his mines and in protests of his practices; the libraries were a late gesture of redemptive character. Other robber barons may not have done as much. They were cold, brutal men who cared for, at most, their own families. Perhaps this is overly generic; but it helps to keep in mind the general reputation of the robber barons.
And whether one such has any qualification for running a nation.
