No-One Doubts The Sincerity Of His Belief In The Pah-Wraiths

 Not gotten political around here for a while, lads.

The Wrong Side Of The Lee: The Politics Of Marvel's Loudest Voice

(Note: this is part of a larger piece I wrote in 2015. I’ve made a few tweaks this week to tighten the arguments, reference something I wasn’t previously aware of, and – obviously – reflect Lee’s death.)

I want to take this opportunity to discuss Lee's politics, and how they came to influence his writing. Some of what follows was gleaned from Lee's own Amazing Fantastic Incredible, but the main influence here is Sean Howes' The Untold Marvel Story, without which this essay wouldn't have been possible. I highly recommend Howes' book (Lee’s is interesting too, though the limitations of its usefulness in the pursuit of understanding who he truly was are presumably obvious).

Let's start at the beginning. Born the son of a Romanian immigrant and a native New Yorker, Lee's family struggled badly with money whilst he was growing up. It would be entirely too pat to suggest his parents' difficulty keeping him entertained on their budget (Lee talked about a gift of a pedal bike being life-changing, and said he has no idea how they found the money for it) is what led him to start dreaming up superheroes and alternative dimensions. That said, there is one aspect of his childhood worth lingering, and that's the story he told of leaving his local cinema each time he watched an Errol Flynn film and riding on his bike around the neighbourhood looking for women being harassed so that he could intercede.

As Lee admitted, it's fortunate for his own sake that he never actually came across a woman being harassed. Which is to say, of course, any woman he understood as being harassed. That's an important distinction to make, because this seemingly random slice of Lee’s childhood manages to summarise precisely what made Lee so inconstant a political actor. The central tension arises from two fundamental truths about the man. First, he abhorred bullies. Secondly, he wasn’t all that good at actually recognising bullies, or knowing what to do about it when he did.

(I hadn’t realised when I wrote this back in 2015 that Lee himself had been accused of sexually harassing women in his employ, but that fact adds another level of not just ugliness to this story, but irony too.)

That’s the diagnosis, then. What’s the pathology? Lee’s basic error, so far as I can tell, was a conviction that the US government was, broadly speaking, a force for good, or at least not so bad that its claim to be the country's ultimate moral authority (divine beings aside) could seriously be doubted. Sure, there were individual members of that government who could fail to live up to the responsibilities and duties their positions placed on them (Lee wrote one or two of them himself), but as an aggregate unit, Lee seemed willing to believe the government is always doing the absolute best it can. As Lee had Iron Man announce in 1966: ``No-one has the right to defy the wishes of his government! Not even Iron Man!''.

Say what you like about Lee – he walked the walk. Several of his fellows at the then-called Timely Comics were drafted during WWII, but Lee went in voluntarily. One can quibble over whether this decision was made out of a wish to serve America as a political structure or as a national ideal, but there’s little enough sense elsewhere in Lee’s life that he thought too much about that distinction in any case. If there is meaningfully different alternative explanation for Lee volunteering, it’s more likely to be his established hatred of bullies. Perhaps Lee simply wanted to help out his colleagues and fellow Jewish men who had been so ahead of the country’s mood in condemning (and provided four-colour shit-kickings of) Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether he signed up first and foremost to serve the United States, or to oppose Hitler. Either way, Hitler was most certainly the kind of man Lee liked to oppose. The label “bully” falls as short of adequately describing Hitler as does the phrase “leery of diversity”, but that isn’t to say it’s actually inaccurate. Describing fascism as bullying with a body-count isn’t terribly sophisticated, but there is certainly truth there. It genuinely isn’t difficult to imagine Lee enlisting because he wanted to play a role in Hitler’s downfall. To sum up his decision, as does Captain America in the MCU, by noting his dislike of bullies.

Which, obviously, is the right instinct. It’s quite clear that Lee wanted an end to overt bigotry. The problem is, it’s hard to find evidence that he ever thought very hard about how to do it, and whether that could be enough. Lee was vocal about how much he hated racists, for example, but had very little grasp of what racism actually was. Sure, he wrote several pieces for ''Stan's Soapbox'' about the transparent ridiculousness of racism (including the one currently blanketing Twitter like a carpet of faintly self-righteous snow). But he also responded to a letter criticising Marvel for a dearth of black characters and deriding Black Panther as a token by arguing it wouldn't look realistic if there was a sudden increase in the number of black people ``stampeding'' through their comics. As though realism was something Marvel had to take pains to maintain – at that point more of their heroes were reformed alien invaders than were people of colour – hell; that might still be true. Regardless, a rapid uptick in black representation would not somehow have broken any carefully maintained laws of plausibility.

 (Lee also wanted credit for the fact Man-Ape was black, which is probably even more clueless a defence of Marvel's commitment to diversity than bragging about creating a gay character named ``Pinky'' Pinkerton, which Lee also did. On the other hand, in the same response nodding to the Man-Ape, Lee mentioned Sam Wilson, the Falcon, despite the minor obstacle of Wilson not actually existing as a character at all. After writing his response, Lee and Gene Colan immediately huddled and created him, meaning that Lee both managed to give the original writer what he wanted, another heroic black character - and ultimately a Marvel mainstay - AND take the full credit. No-one ever looked at Stan Lee and asked whether he thought he needed a bit more chutzpah.)

What a sudden surge of African-American characters would have done would hurt sales, and as Howe puts it, ``[Lee would] happily preach tolerance, but he was not going to get caught taking an unpopular stance''. Which at that precise time, when Lee was responsible for the entirety of Marvel's comic output, was probably true. While Lee's approach and output during the late '60s put more than one nose out of joint (including the guy responsible for drawing Iron Man's nose, as it happens), his decision to take the path of least resistance at that point can at least be contextualised by the fact he was certainly aware that if Marvel collapsed, he would not be the only one hurt, nor the one hurt most. Just a few short years earlier, when Lee was busy helping to build the empire he would ultimately be responsible for, he was far more willing to take risks. Problem was, those risks were often in exactly the wrong direction.

Let’s talk about Iron Man, a character whose origin story focusses around his narrow escape from a clutch of sneering Asian Communists. Lee spent a lot of time coming up with sneering Asian Communists. One could easily infer from this that a) he hated Asians, b) he hated Communists, or c) both.

I don’t actually think this is the problem, however. I don’t think Lee was anti-Asian, or anti-Communist – at least in terms of coherently objecting to their politics. I think it’s simpler than that. Lee hated bullies, and thought that’s what the Communists were.

This lack of political nuance not only explains why so much of Lee's output involved Commie-smashing (seriously, Captain America: Commie Smasher was genuinely a Lee-written book title for a while), but how an apparent liberal - even a ``casual'' one, as Howe puts it - could decide the best way to run counter to the prevailing mood and generate an unexpected hit would be to create a superhero (Iron Man) whose alter ego specialised in creating weapons to fight the Communist overseas. We’ll come back to the Communists in good time, but for now, let’s marvel (hah!) at the sheer ludicrousness of imagining Iron Man could possibly represent some kind of deliberate inversion of the status quo. Somehow, amid the spiralling international tensions that would lead to the Vietnam War breaking out just a year later, Lee managed to come to the pig-headed conclusion that a hero designed to be “counter-cultural” would take the form of a man who made his fortune through getting commission on international murder sprees (or pretended this was the reason and figured people would buy it, which amounts to a similar failure to understand the contemporary political climate).

It is of course, beyond obvious that Tony Stark is not a hero from within the counter-culture, but one that stands opposed to it; a purely reactionary figure. Seeing the anti-war movement as the prevailing attitude of the time is, likewise, a fairly unambiguously reactionary position. But it isn’t the reactionary element of Lee’s take here that jumps out, so much as the incoherence. Lee was undoubtedly genuinely searching for another hit – genuinely thought it was smart to (claim to) swim about the current as a way of being daring and different. The fact he so completely to understand what that current actually was isn’t evidence of terrible politics, it’s evidence of a terrible grasp of politics. A fundamental inability to actually understand the complexities of the prevailing mood. Lee didn’t hate the zeitgeist. He just couldn’t recognise it unless it put a sheet over its head.

We see further evidence in his inconsistent attitude to protest movements, and in particular student protest movements. Lee wasn’t against student activism in and of itself. At one point he even replied to criticism of Marvel's poor treatment of hippies (which Lee was a part of, though how much his caricatures of the Beat generation were meant to be affectionate is an open question) by arguing he was actually very much in favour of activism on campuses. At least that way, he argued, they were engaging, making less likely that students would drop out.

Alas, his approval of passionate student engagement with the politics of the day only lasted as long as protesters acted in a way he approved of. Make your point, sure. Just don't yell, because yelling upsets people. It upsets the peace, and that might get you into trouble for which you can only blame yourself. It's this kind of cognitive dissonance - I agree you need something desperately and immediately, but please ask those nice government types politely for it - that meant Lee could simultaneously support the Civil Rights movement and write a comic about a hated minority that has an FBI agent secretly helping that minority, as oppose to plotting to assassinate Xavier if he ever became too effective. Lee might argue that there was no way in '63 he could have known how deep the FBI were into the government's attempt to stifle the move toward civil rights, but that hardly helps - he didn't know because he wasn't listening, and when he heard something by accident he demanded people quieten down.

An almost perfect synecdoche of Lee's approach can be found in his dialogue for Amazing Spiderman #68. Here Spidey encounters a group of students protesting their university's declsions ion how to use its land. At first Peter is sympathetic to their cause, but like Lee it doesn't take long at all for him to decide that whilst they might have a valid case, they're going about it in entirely the wrong way. ``Anyone can paint a sign, mister! That doesn't make you right!'', our hero yells at one point. The issue ends with the protesters framed for vandalism and arrested, with Spidey swinging away, amused that their entirely unfair and potentially calamitous brush with the law might give them time to calm down. This was in 1968, the year of the Columbia University protests.

Once again, we see evidence of Lee's beliefs regarding the basic decency and natural authority of, well, authority.  He will grant you the right to talk back to those in power, so long as you do it quietly, and accept it immediately if they rule against you.

The problem here will be familiar to many of you. Setting yourself up in opposition to those compelled to shout, just so they can be heard, is obviously going to mean taking stances against protesters and minorities - these being the people who have to yell themselves hoarse simply to be heard. Of course the quietest voices are those of the status quo. There's no need to shout your message when it can be heard everywhere at all times. When your position has become the heartbeat of your very country, there is no need to reach for the snare-drum and mark time for the march.

Demanding those without access to a microphone keep their demands sotto voce is no more than a plea to not have to hear them at all. It's a way for the poerfupp to salve their consciences, by ensuring every problem is either one they don't know about, or one they can feel justified in ignoring because of how "badly" those who notified them of the issue are behaving.

The reports of Lee getting frustrated over demands by Kirby and Ditko to receive their fair share of Marvel revenue is perhaps germane here - Lee knew he wasn't prepared to do what was necessary to secure them equitable deals (and in Lee's defence, it might have taken threatening to quit, with the risk that Martin Goodman would have called his bluff) so he became audibly frustrated with the fact they wouldn't quietly swallow their displeasure.

The common thread throughout all this is Lee’s desire for people to get along. If people couldn’t agree, they should just agree to disagree, and then forget the whole damn thing. The most generous interpretation of this impulse is that Lee genuinely believed the system was generally sound, and just needed people to behave a little better. The less generous view is that he just wanted everyone to quietly allow him to enjoy his wealth. Whichever it was (or what ratio existed between the two), Lee was fairly undiscerning in his curmudgeonly shushing. Lee didn’t want racists to be overtly racist, but he didn’t want students to be loudly political. He didn’t want fascism taking over Europe, but he didn’t want the Communists causing a fuss either.

I said we’d come back to the Communists. There’s absolutely no doubt that Lee liked to put the boot in where the Reds were concerned. And why wouldn’t he? The last time the US Armed Forces he onced signed up to had headed for war, it was to stop the nightmarish actions of Hitler's Nazi Party. Why should first Korea, and then Vietnam be any different? When you look at how the US government was portraying foreign Communists at the time, why wouldn't Lee see them - as Captain America himself puts it - the ``Nazis of the 1950s'' and beyond?

It’s instructive to consider what Lee’s experiences in the Army actually were. Lee spent his time there writing narrations to training films and designing posters warning GIs about the dangers of VD. Important to the war effort, no doubt, but by spending the war Stateside, Lee never got the chance to experience the realities of war or, more importantly for our purposes, the difference between the propaganda's presentation of the enemy and the enemy themselves. He never learned to doubt the official line, up to and including some pretty racist assumptions about Asian communists that led to some fairly disgraceful representations of them at Marvel. In fairness, Lee later admitted his mistake on this, but racist thinking was essential to his conceptionof the Communists, who were forever the sneaky foreigners being deservedly punched by square-jawed representations of American imperialism.

And yet there’s X-Men #14-16, the introduction of the Sentinel robots. Those three issues are simply packed with veiled references to people like Joe McCarthy, and groups like HUAC. Lee might have disliked the Communist abroad, but in his own country it was the witch-hunt for domestic Communists that seemingly put his back up.

One might cynically suggest here that Lee was, hardly uniquely, nervous about the McCarthy juggernaut treating middle-class white men (many of them writers, no less!) as though they were somehow equivalent to those sneaky foreigners. Honestly, though, I think Occam’s razor suggests Lee was just doing what he always did, and suggesting the best thing for everyone is if people could just calm down a bit. Lee’s criticisms of McCarthy were vastly more elliptical than those of the Communists of Indo-China, but they arose from the same impulse – what Ultron called, in easily the best moment of his eponymous MCU turn, “mistaking peace for quiet”.

Quiet was always the goal. Lee himself stated proudly that he tried to ensure the politics of his story-lines were vague enough to keep both left and right happy (though one imagines what he saw as ``the left'' was warped by his self-imposed deafness to certain positions, and clearly Lee had no problem grotesquely offending the foreign market). To return to Tony Stark, though, the limits of this approach are readily apparent. Refusing to either explicitly condemn or support the status quo is not to remain neutral, but to implicitly support the status quo. When a co-founder of the Libertarian Party can compliment Marvel for ``the fact that the heroes run to being such capitalists as arms manufacturers... while the villains are often Communists (and plainly labelled as such, in less than complimentary terms)'', you're no longer letting sections of the right see the patterns they approve of in the inkblots. You're using your fountain pen to write what they want you to write.

In fact, whilst we're dragging him over the coals for throwing red meat to the Libertarians, we should note that, were Lee truly as keen as he claimed to keep Marvel clear of the rocks and shoals of political commentary, it was an idiotic move to let Steve Ditko take control of Amazing Spider-Man to the point he was directing Lee (in the page margins; the two were no longer speaking) to have Spidey spout terms straight out of Ayn Rand's horrific philosophy. Ditko bit hard and deep into Objectivism, a political stance so objectionable it broke up at least one further collaboration - calling those who require assistance to survive ``parasites'' tends to have that effect. If Lee had any qualms about a superhero nominally dedicated to helping the less fortunate spit venom at those who failed to meet Rand's ugly (and profoundly hypocritical) standards of acceptability, however, I've seen no evidence of it. Again, this is not letting those who espouse harmful political philosophies think they see echoes of their position in the text. This is letting the text sound out those positions.

(This is an essay about Lee, not Ditko, but I couldn’t let this moment pass without pointing out the profound irony of Ditko insisting his co-creation of Spiderman justified him using the character as a Randian mouthpiece, given that Parker’s refusal to stop a criminal because there wasn’t anything in it for him proves to be the foundational mistake atop which his entire character is built. Spidey is an asshole about stopping a criminal, and a half hour later his beloved uncle is dead. No, libertarianism, fuck you.)

I realise much of the above comes across as quite critical of Lee, but the truth is the worst that can be said of his political philosophy is that he wanted to do good, to be a force for tolerance in the world, but simply wasn't sufficiently interested in politics to manage this consistently, or without actually working against it on multiple occasions. His chaotic, contradictory political stance is exactly the sort one expects from someone who doesn't really believe they have a political stance, or at least one who insists a person's writing can be apolitical. 

There's certainly some evidence that politics just isn't something Lee finds important, at least in comparison to whether or not he likes political figures personally. In Amazing Fantastic Incredible he spends as much time fondly reminiscing about meeting George W Bush as he does the Clintons, which both get approximately the same amount of space as Lee running into George Clooney (Lee's trip to the Carter Whitehouse gets more space, but only because the US Secret Service tried to shoot Green Goblin in the face for scaring Amy). That Clinton was far closer to the kind of politics Lee tended to subconsciously gravitate towards, and Bush very much wasn’t, doesn’t seem to have mattered in the slightest.

Lee isn't the only person who didn't take the chance to spit in Dubyah's face when given the opportunity, of course. Perhaps he decided the boost in visibility for his own brand of philanthropy was worth the implicit endorsement of a war criminal. More likely, Lee never conceived of that trade-off in the first place. Which makes things tricky. It's hard to choose the right path out of a dilemma when you don't recognise that dilemma to begin with.

I've spent plenty of time above talking about how Lee's frequent failure to take or even see the road less travelled led to some very problematic pronouncements and publications. But perhaps it has been no less often that Lee has somehow stumbled blindly onto precisely the correct path. The X-Men may only have been intended to criticise the most obvious forms of racism, but over the years the franchise has offered up no shortage of more cutting and more vital criticism, of a kind of genuine value to those looking to understand and combat systemic inequality (especially as the franchise is finally being wrested away from the stranglehold of cis-het white men). Lee might have created the Sentinels to claw at a potential personal threat, but the story he generated can be picked up and used by any number of people seeking to kick out against the spread of anti-left hysteria. And whilst Sam Wilson only existed at all so Lee could strengthen his case during a textbook example of whitesplaining, the Marvel Universe - first on paper and then on celluloid - has become a more inclusive and interesting place for his creation.

Stan Lee. He could have done so much more. Doesn't mean he didn't do plenty.

No, Virginia, Changes To Language AREN'T A Problem

Some stray thoughts prompted by people I work with arguing it's hard to learn new pronouns or avoid deadnaming those who have transitioned.

This argument always makes me think of my friend Cat. How she doesn't really like it when you call her Catherine. Because Catherine might be the name on her birth certificate, but she much prefers Cat. Cat is the name she chose for herself, like my friend Kat, and my friend Katy, and my friend Katie, and my friend Katey, and Katee Sackhoff, and Kitty Barne.

They all were born with a name that sounds the same, but that's not the name they'd like you to call them. Just like I want to be Ric, not Rik (though Rik Mayall did) or Dick (though Dick Van Dyke does) or Ricky (though Ricky Steamboat does) or Rich (though Rich Hall does) or Dicky (though Dicky Barrett does) or Richard (though Richard E Grant does).

And my question is this. If we get that Cat and Kat and Katy and Katie and Katey and Katee and Kitty don't want to be called Catherine/Katherine/Cathryn, and we get that Ric and Rik and Dick and Ricky and Rich and Dicky don't or didn't want to be called Richard, when why the HELL are so many people pretending new pronouns or the concept of deadnames are so unbearably confusing it would cause society to collapse into chaos if we agreed to abide by them?

When someone calls me Richard and I correct them, they say "sorry". They don't say "But Richard's your real name, isn't it?". They don't say "You just look more like a Richard to me." They just apologise and try to remember my preference.

Is it just MAYBE POSSIBLE that people's gender identity shouldn't be treated as less important than people wanting to be known by their nickname?

Geek Syndicate Review: Rebels (These Free And Independent States) #1

Brian Wood's back with another American history lesson. Features Alexander Hamilton for no real reason other than he's popular now. I wonder if he's ill, though; he's all pale and totally off-rhythm.

The Blue And The Orange

US Presidental Election 2016 Liveblog

05:37 OK, my friends. I realise that final result hasn't been called, but the news outlets have shifted into speculating about when President Trump will give his victory speech, and I have no interest in sticking around for that. My thanks to those of you who were brave enough to tune into what turned our to be the third live-blog in a row where I - and anyone who isn't a fan of bigotry - got their heads thoroughly handed to them.

Maybe we can still win this. But I'm a probabilist. I recognise the writing on the wall when I see it. I'm going to bed. Everyone be kind to each other. It's the only way that one day. one far off day - more far off than we could have imagined six years ago - that we will finally win.

05:35 (Just, like, 99% fucking appalling.)

05:34 Apparently this election cycle saw the first Lantina woman elected to the Senate. So it isn't all bad.

05:27 (We ALL have skin in the game one way or another, and fuck anyone who says we don't.)

05:26 Clinton wins Nevada. I can't see us winning, but we'll lose well. Small comfort, I know. And that's for a white cis-het man from another country. I can't imagine how horrible this is for people with skin directly in the game.

05:19 Wee bit of good news: Harry Reid's retirement hasn't cost the Democrats a seat.

05:16 Not a great time to be a fan of equality.

05:06 Still on the BBC and fuuuuuuuuuuuuck you for letting someone make a distinction between those who live in coastal states and "ordinary Americans".

05:00 You know, quite aside from anything else, I profoundly resent the fact that so many electorates this year have provided Nigel Farage with a throbbing erection. Or as he calls it, an Iron Eagle.

04:54 At this point we're somewhere between Trump being effectively unstoppable and him actually having taken the Oval. Which would be bad enough, but to make things worse, no-one with access to a microphone has any idea has it happened. It would be nice to think that out of this calamitous disaster, the Left could forge a new alliance, but I don't even see that happening. We're still too busy dealing with Leftists who manage somehow to still be racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or ableist.

We don't deserve to win. Our enemy, of course, deserves to win far, far, far less. But apparently that doesn't matter.

04:44 Bear this in mind.

04:38 BBC just said Clinton needs to win a range of races. Misheard that as "range of racists", and frankly, I think that makes more sense.

04:34 Of course, if Trump does win, there's going to be approximately two centuries of experts telling us how it means women can never be president. Or at least there would be, if global anarchy wasn't going to kick of by 2040.

04:32 That probably undersells how close things are. Clinton is behind by seven electoral votes with 425 declared.

04:30 Clinton beats Romney! Not the actual Republican candidate she's up against, but it's a start.

04:20 Keep the faith, my friends! Clinton is only 10 electoral votes from doing better than Mitt Romney!

04:14 Interesting in the abstract to watch someone simultaneously commend logical thinking and condemn those who aren't "plain spoken".

04:12 Someone genuinely just said on the BBC - and this time I've checked that I haven't just gotten too drunk to recognise letters - that Trump isn't far-right. WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE DEFINING AS FAR RIGHT?

04:03 Apparently I've been on ITV for ages. Only found out when Farage showed up and I grabbed for my remote.

04:00 Florida for Trump. Hooray for voter suppression, I guess.

03:56 Let's be clear. There's nothing at all wrong with asking how Melania Trump would handle the responsibility of being First Lady. But when your first comments are about her posing nude and her grasp of English, it's maybe possible that you're not actually part of the solution, grok?

03:47 Trump takes North Carolina, Clinton takes Virginia. Given tonight's results, I think that's a trade Clinton will take.

03:46 Idle thought: I spend a lot of time on my Decision Theory module talking about the difference between relative results and absolute results. Tonight is an absolute triumph for those who can't compare relative positions. "Emails." But calling Mexicans rapists." "Emails." "But insisting on banning Muslims from the country." "Emails". "But literally confessing to sexual assault. "EMAILS".

Again, there are genuine reasons to not be willing to vote for Clinton. But I think we all know those aren't the reasons that has Trump doing so well.

03:37 Hooray for Colorado.

03:36 That said, there's plenty of blame to go around. I have the upmost sympathy for those less privileged than me who felt incapable of voting for Clinton. They knew what they were risking with a Trump administration rather than a Clinton one, and they made that choice. It's not my place to criticise it.

03:34 Watching anti-Trump Republicans on Twitter agreeing this is Clinton's fault. Because Gods forbid they interrogate their own positions.

03:26 Ah. BBC (ITV: I suck) calls Virginia for Clinton. This is still a fight.

03:22 Kudos to the Beeb for choosing a picture of Trump to keep showing that looks like an alpha
orangutan being blown by a gamma orangutan. Small victories at this point.

03:18 We're now onto adultery being equivalent to racism. And yet someone tomorrow will tell me how liberal the BBC is (again: this was ITV).

03:13 That was a lot of capital letters, on reflection. Sorry. I'm a bit on edge.

03:09 HOLY SHIT a Trump shill just got to say on the BBC (edit: it was ITV, and I'm an idiot; still)  that HILLARY CLINTON is suspect for using a charitable foundation to enrich herself. A TRUMP SHILL. We need a new phrase; post-truth politics just doesn't cover it.

03:07 New Mexico called for Clinton. So that's nice. See below RE Brexit Fulcrum.

02:56 "I've been looking so long at these pictures of Trump,
           That I almost believe that's he's real.
           I've been living so long with these pictures of Trump,
           That I almost believe this is one deal he's certain to seal."

02:55 Back to ITV to avoid pictures of Trump.

02:51 It's interesting - or at least it would be interesting were I not gripped with existential terror - that Trump is doing better in blue states than any other Republican has done since the '80s.  I guess the hardliners were right - the best shot for the White House for a Republican is just to be the most obvious racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic (FUCK YOU BLOGSPOT FOR STILL SAYING THAT ISN'T A WORD) anti-intellectual monster possible. It's almost as though fascism needs to be fought rather than ignored...

02:40 The Trump spokesperson on the Beeb just threatened a third party breaking off from the Republican Party if Trump doesn't take the Oval and that's legitimately the best news I've heard since New Hampshire declaring for Clinton which I turned out to have been wrong about anyway.

02:31 Looks like we are rapidly arriving at the Brexit Fulcrum: can the urban areas that take longer to tally counteract the rural counties that have already declared for Trump. Obviously my choice of metaphor gives you some idea of my level of confidence.

02:21 Michigan turning red. That's terrifying.

02:15 And now she's saying southern NY state is in "agonising poverty" because of insufficient fracking. My thing is, if everyone is so keen on grabbing at someone who correctly diagnoses the problem but can't possibly provide a solution, why aren't Marxists the dominant political force?

02:13 A Trump spokesperson on the BBC right now explaining how Trump's big idea is to increase fossil fuel production. Fun times.

02:08 Back to BBC, assuming Farage has been put back in his swastika-shaped hole.

02:03 And New Hampshire too. That's an important result considering the earlier vacillating.

02:00 Illinois goes to Clinton. The exact opposite of a surprise, once more.

01:59 I don't want to depress people any more than they already are given how close things are, but even if Clinton wins tonight - and I still think she will - this strikes me as evidence that the White House will probably belong to the Republicans in four year, and will definitely be theirs in eight. The desire to punish the not-we is simply too strong.

01:47 But then ITV has a Trump supporter talking about how the GOP needs to bring in the liberally-minded. Which is depressing as all hell. And yes, I realise there is no shortage of liberals who are also racist to fuck, but that just makes it all worse.

01:45 No, BBC. Nigel Farage is an immediate red card.

01:42 Not going well for the Democrats attempt to take the Senate, and the Republicans keep the House, because why would we ever have anything nice?

01:37 Where is Times Square getting its data from?

01:33 (I may be drifting off the subject.)

01:32 YES YES YES. He also had a beard. But being less scrupulous than Hitler in maintaining your facial fuzz can hardly be considered a point in your favour.

01:31 I'm being unfair. I am totally open to input from fascist-friendly Christians sporting toothbrush mustaches. Because how could that possibly go wrong?

01:27 Apparently the problem here is that insufficient people have accepted Jesus. Good to know, BBC.

01:26 When I went - pre-interview - to discuss the job I'm currently doing with the man I am currently doing it for, he kept having to correct himself. He kept saying "You will have to - that is, the candidate will have to...". That's what the BBC commentators sound like every time they let slip the fact they don't think Trump has any real chance.

01:17 Texas isn't going to go blue, obviously. But still, that's pretty funny.

01:16 AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

01:13 Finally, South Carolina declares for Trump. So obviously, fuck South Carolina (standard caveats regarding non-Trump voters apply). As I said, though, the amount of time that took is instructive.

01:09 Data now showing Texas leaning Trump. In more surprising news, data also shows the Tower of Pisa is leaning towards the ground.

01:07 The projected results for the eastern states look like they've been determined by tossing a coin handed to an idiot by an obscure trickster god.

01:05 Durham County is going to get its voting extension. Unambiguously the right decision. I look forward to Republicans explaining why it represents the death of democracy.

01:03 OK. That didn't suck. Not seeing any surprises in the slew of new results, though.

00:58 Oh, that's a good question from Person McBBC. Why are Latinx voters so united against Trump when they have such diverse interests and priorities? Answer: because Trump is a racist toss-stain, and that takes priority.

00:57 Chat right now about the Hispanic turnout tipping the election. Please please PLEASE let that be true. I'll donate an organ for this to be true. Take a kidney. It's black and withered and stinks of Strongbow anyway, so...

00:51 Always a bleak kind of fun in watching Republicans trying to argue that somehow Trump doesn't represent his party, after he won the nomination and has already won almost 5% of the electoral votes of the entire damn country.

00:49 Plus the Guardian is now suggesting Clinton is in contention in South Carolina. That's approaching a Red Wedding level of betrayal.

00:47 For the Brexit-burned, it's worth pointing out that by this stage in the count (with due adjustments for the difference in kind) the BBC talking heads were much, much more cagey about Remain's chances than they are right now about Clinton.

00:45 New Hampshire now leaning Democrat.

00:39 Why not just interview Dracula and ask whether he thinks enough nubile virgins are being offered up to vampires?

00:38 Oh goody. An interview with a Trump supporter on the BBC. And guess what? He's furious that immigrants are getting all the money.

00:33 Quick congress update: Democrats ahead in both declared Senate and House races.

00:31 West Virginia called for Trump. Another unsurprising result - I've not forgotten how badly Obama bombed there back in 2008. Anyone else remember that Daily Show interview with a WV native? "I don't like that Hussein thing. I've had ENOUGH of Hussein!"

00:28 Shit, the TV only wants to talk about Florida too. Mainly they're saying Trump is in trouble down there, though, so it could be worse.

00:27 Not even the news can keep up with Florida at this point. I shall try to find something else to talk about accordingly.

00:24 BBC has seen sense and is using an actual upstanding map for the electoral college. As always, the Republicans win Blockbusters, but Clinton has the edge.

00:23 Florida once again leaning Trump. I hate you Florida.

00:20 And now Florida is leaning towards Clinton. This is, in case it wasn't already obvious, going to be a very long night.

00:17 Virginia leaning Democrat. That's good news for Silver and Wang's models, and for, you know, humanity.

00:16 Though that said, Dan has a good point in comments: South Carolina not calling for the Republicans already is unusual, from what I dimly recall.

00:14 Trump leading in Florida right now is not brilliant news. It's early days, obviously, but I'm more worried by Florida than I am reassured by Georgia.

00:11 ITV interviewing the Khans, and starting with Mrs Khan. Assuming she's happy to do so, that's fucking brilliant.

00:07 (All my apologies and sympathies and solidarity to those in Indiana and Kentucky who didn't vote for Trump. I've lived my entire life in safe seats for the less evil major party. I can't imagine how hideous it must be to lumbered with the electorate you all have to suffer.)

00:06 Actual results. Indiana and Kentucky go Trump, and Vermont Clinton. None of these are surprising given both historical context and statistical models. Even so, it's important to say: fuck you, Kentucky. Fuck you, Indiana. You voted for a fascist, and not even a smart one.

00:01 Haq just said "It helps to have Tim Kaine", which is surely the first time anyone has ever said that, ever, including at a Time Kaine-lookalike contest.

23:56 YES I USED THE WORD "BIGWIGS" IN A COMMENT ABOUT TRUMP WHERE IS MY COMEDY PRIZE?

23:55 Back on ITV for more chat about everyone hating Clinton. Apparently the Obama's campaigning for her is evidence of her weakness, as oppose to the Bush's not campaigning for Trump being evidence that he's utterly unacceptable even to his own party's bigwigs.

23:49 Fucking hell. I hope my earlier joke has only been rendered in horrible taste, and not actively prophetic. I hope everyone injured makes a full recovery.

23:45 Talking head (keep missing the names) on BBC1 talking about the college-educated/non college-educated split in Wisconsin being the greatest recorded (in modern times? Not sure). Never found a way to comment on that kind of thing without sounding like an unbearable elite with rooms in the the most gleaming of ivory towers, but I thought I'd pass it on.

23:40 How do you talk about people voting for Trump because they're sick of rich people playing to different rules and not address the paradox?

23:38 Almost forty minutes into the election coverage before Benghazi got its first name-check. You can tell I live outside the US.

23:37 There are plenty of reasons to be massively anti-Clinton on purely policy ground, obviously. But that's clearly not what's going on in general.

23:36 Good to see someone blame anti-Clinton animus on sexism.

23:31 Reports of people being turned away from the polls in Florida illegally. Not to worry, though. Florida's not a big college town.

23:29 The BBC virtual map is desperately unimpressive. Just put a map up, for God's sake. You don't need a guy looking like he's standing on the damn thing.

23:24 Indiana too, though again this is in the "unsurprising category". First talking head on BBC1 taking time out to tell us that the Trump voters she's met have been intelligent and thoughtful people who don't like what he says on immigrants, but are desperate enough to roll the dice on him. Not mentioned: they're not the people who'll be screwed over if the dice come up snake eyes.

23:22 I'm not saying New Hampshire going for Trump is astonishing. But I am saying that if it does call for Trump, there are a number of other battleground states that are very likely to be Trump's too.

23:20 Early results looking good for Trump in Kentucky and New Hampshire.  The first was entirely predictable. The second, not so much.

23:15 Flicking over to BBC1 whilst ITV are on a break, and "Election Night In America" turns out to be an episode of Room 101. Which is either a catastrophic scheduling fuck-up or the most profound comment on the American election Auntie Beeb has managed yet.

23:14 (American money, I mean. Not our British money that doesn't have value any more.)

23:13 Not sure Trump has the semiotic depth to possess themes, but otherwise Haq is right on the money here.

23:12 Oh, how nice. An actual American gets to comment (YES I AM AWARE OF THE IRONY) and they immediately nail Trump for being a filthy racist.

23:11 Wow. Apparently the issue is Trump's threat to the current political system. Not, for instance, to people who aren't white.

23:10 Still on ITV. Amazing to hear so many talking heads talk about this being an abnormal election and yet none of them are willing to admit that's because Trump is a fascist.

23:05 ITV are reporting a higher than expected minority turnout. One wonders who was expecting fewer non-white people to show up to tell Trump to go screw himself.

23:04 Excellent. UK terrestrial TV has begun its coverage. This will give me plenty of material.

23:01 Right then. First polls closed.

22:52 The Guardian is reporting - with appropriate caution - that turnout seems to comparable to 2012, and that this is liable to be good news for Clinton. They don't say why, but I assume the logic is that a depressed turn-out would suggest Democratic fatigue, and a decent turn-out is unlikely to mean people who didn't vote for Romney are desperate to vote for Pussy-Grab Magoo.

22:46 (I know. As a joke that's both cliche and cheap. I just get instinctively annoyed about a country that trumpets its commitment to democracy but insists on doing it on the cheap.)

22:45 Reports of issues with voting/registers now not just in Durham County NC but also in Colorado. If only the US was one of those rich countries that could afford a robust and efficient voting system, huh?

22:35 I see FOX has turned to "Mr Brexit" in their coverage, hoping to gain magical powers from their proximity to an inexpertly-carved mahogany dildo possessed by Satan's stupidest nephew.

22:27 (That's funny because you will never see that much yellow on a political map of Britain again, ever.)

22:26 CNN calling a surprising number of states for the Lib Dems.

22:17 Lindsey Graham, too. A man who would vote for the Babadook if it promised to only scare Muslims decides Trump is just a step too far.

22:16 Political analogy of the decade, there.

22:15 Rather indecently amused by a spokesperson confirming George W Bush didn't vote for Trump. That's like Hordak finding out Skeletor won't help out with fighting She-Ra.

22:10 Maybe adding R's is just Donald's thing. Maybe he thought he'd been secretly working for Usher all this time. Though given Usher's skin-tone, probably not.

22:09 Apparently Trump has jimmied the lock on the safe his people put his phone in and has begun tweeting once more. Already he's insisting there are problems with voting machines across the country, based on a CNN report. The CNN report was referring to a single county.

22:05 So far the biggest surprise on election day is that there's no sign anyone has been shot at the polls by armed Trump "observers". That doesn't erase how horrifically successful the Republicans have been at suppressing the "wrong people's" ability to vote, of course. And yes, the "wrong people" are exactly who you think they are.

21:56 (538 might be talking about a historical loss for the Republican candidate, of course, in which case the low-water mark for the modern GOP would be Barry Goldwater against Lyndon B Johnson in '64. Goldwater carried just six states and 52 electoral votes. Of course, he was running against a man who'd stepped up to lead the country after his enormously popular boss had been murdered in Dallas. Trump is running against someone who dares to own a vagina.)

21:52 Addendum to last: obviously just winning the Senate wouldn't mean Clinton's problems would be over. There's still the issue of the filibuster, and the fact that ousting Republicans from control of the House will be exceptionally difficult. 538 suggests that it would require Trump to lose by a historical margin, and when history includes Walter Mondale losing 59 states against Ronald Reagan in '84, that kind of margin really means something, damn it.

21:42 I'll give you a break from the statistics and move into some political noodling. The big issue for most of this cycle wasn't actually whether Clinton would beat Trump - that was always the way to bet, and still is right now. Obviously defeating Trump is crucial, but it wasn't the toughest fight for Democrats. Winning back the Senate was. Without that, there's almost no chance a hypothetical President Clinton can get a damn thing done, given the Republican's clear preference for letting first the federal government and ultimately the entire country collapse over being seen to agree with Democrats on any issue whatsoever.

A little over a fortnight ago on October 23rd, the chances of the Democrats doing that were almost as high as Clinton's own, at 68%. Since then, the chances have collapsed to 52% (both of these stats come from the New York Times). I've heard it said the collapse is mainly and perhaps almost entirely due to the after-effects of the FBI "re-opening" their investigation into Clinton's emails. The result of that almost comically ill-timed announcement (or well-timed, depending on your position, I guess) may well be that Clinton takes the Oval, and can't do a damn thing for at least two years, at which point the Democrats will almost certainly lose ground in the Senate anyway.

Naturally, some people are suggesting this was exactly FBI Director Comey's aim.

21:32 Ah, OK. The argument is about how likely the electoral college estimates are to result in one candidate or the other winning. Wang thinks Clinton is an inevitable winner, Silver thinks she "only" has a 70% chance. There's more here, which also contains an explanation of the limitations of both models. I've only skimmed it, so I won't bet my reputation on it being correct in the details, but the basic problem of such a high number of variables and such an infrequent rate of observations is indeed, well, a problem. Title's bullshit, obviously, but such is par for the course for pop stats articles.

21:24 Here's the prediction from Sam Wang's stable. Not too much difference, beyond not wanting to call North Carolina and a little more certainty about Wisconsin and Washington State breaking for Clinton. Wang and Silver have been showing some interesting differences recently, but if they still have major disagreements as to the result, it's not translating into a quick eyeball of their electoral college predictions.

21:16 Now let's check in on the statisticians. Nate Silver's 538 site offers this forecast of the electoral college. Note that the states not coloured in the previous map are split between Clinton and Trump, but not evenly. More of them are blue than red, and those that are red seem more pale than their blue equivalents. Again, though, these are just different knife-edges of different sharpness, and when the cuts come, their likely to mostly come from the same side.

21:09 Unfortunately, the electoral college polls are a bit less comforting, although Clinton still clearly has the edge. The problem, of course, is that battleground states are not independent - the vast majority of them are likely to all break the same way.

21:04 Let's kick off with the image I've been taking comfort from all day; the final image from the RealClearPolitics aggregate polls for this election cycle. It shows Hillary Clinton having one more good day amidst an almost uninterrupted run of good days since last summer.

21:00 Welcome, everyone, to the blog's quadrennial dive into the ins and outs of the US Presidential Election and the surrounding Senate and House races.  The rules are simple: no abuse, no fascists. Otherwise, have at it in comments. Delighted to have you aboard.