It's not a conspiracy, Donald Trump really is losing

Speaking as a marketing and market research professional, I could get offended by this sort of stuff:

It is not "wishful thinking" to distrust the polls. Nor is there a "natural tightening up" of the polls as election day approaches. The entire polling industry is an exercise in attempted manipulation of public opinion. That's why there is so much media attention focused on it.

Yes folks this is the "the polls are fixed" line we see from Corbynistas in the UK. Unsurprisingly this is from the World of Trump, a strange place filled with paranoia about the actions, motives and capabilities of anyone who questions - let alone presents evidence contradicting - the weird-haired one's march to supreme power.

The truth - there's no getting away from it - is that Donald Trump is crashing and burning. OK so there are glints and glimmers of hope as the odd poll shows Trump within the margin of error - this is like the Brexit polling but not in the way The Donald's fans want to believe. Polling in the run up to the EU Referendum didn't show a lead, let alone a big lead, to Remain but rather that it was 'too close to call' or a narrow lead for Leave. What Trump enthusiasts are doing is the same as Remain - believing their own propaganda.

So no, the polls ain't fixed. The voting machines ain't fixed. The 'mainstream media' isn't in secret cahoots with the Pentagon. The problem is that Donald Trump - the classic 'Republican in Name Only' - is an absolutely appalling candidate only made remotely credible by the happenstance of Hillary Clinton being an almost equally appalling candidate. What is sad here is that the fall out from Trump's candidacy will be the crippling of America's conservatives - embracing a warmed over, pig-ignorant version of 'know-nothing' nativism and mixing it with the gung-ho stupidity of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives closes off any chance at all of Republicans ever getting back any support among the urban middle-class let alone the Hispanic Americans so carefully cultivated by Reagan and Bush father and son.

There's no winning, however, with this sort of viewpoint:

The Podesta email doesn’t merely prove that the poll-doubters are right to be dubious about their credibility, but demonstrates, once more, that the conspiracy theory of history is the only one that can properly account for historical events.

For the record, I'm a firm and dedicated supporter of the 'Cock-up Theory of History':

Brazilian economist Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira suggests that the relevant variable in this case is incompetence. Incompetence is an independent explanatory variable; it cannot be explained in rational or historical terms.

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Common Purpose - purveyor of received wisdom but no conspiracy

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Are you a joiner? No, I don’t mean someone who’s good with wood but someone who joins thing, who “takes part”, who becomes a ‘member’. This is important because some people who aren’t joiners worry that people who are joiners are getting together to fix stuff in their collective interest. I guess all this starts with Adam Smith:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The criticism of masons, trade guilds, unions and other combinations has always been that the purpose of meeting is to arrange matters so as to exclude those outside the ‘club’ or to promote the interests of members at the expense of others. And now, it seems that the centrist, social democrats have their secret society, their go at doing the fixing things in their members’ interest – it’s called “Common Purpose”. And – as sure as eggs is eggs – the tin hatted, conspiracy theorists are on the case:

“Common Purpose is identifying leaders in all levels of our government to assume power when our nation is replaced by the European Union, in what they call “the post democratic society.” They are learning to rule without regard to democracy, and will bring the EU police state home to every one of us.”

Now this is admission time. I have spoken to “Common Purpose” meetings on several occasions (although I haven’t done and would not do their “course”) – all “Chatham House Rules” but otherwise very cuddly and convivial. For me, it was a chance to ‘tell it like it is’ rather than feel constrained by the possibility of publicity. But what stood out was the sheer lack of challenge, of questioning of independent thought. As if those assembled were unable to see what was said and to ask whether it was right. What I saw was the triumph of received wisdom rather than some attempt to form the vanguard of some new authoritarian super-state.

Now for the tin-hatted ones, I have a further guilty secret to reveal – my wife is a Common Purpose ‘graduate’. She quite enjoyed the course, got some business from it and came away with a very jaundiced view of public sector values.

For most folk Common Purpose is just a networking organisation, something to put on the CV and a break from work. True, it promotes a pro-state, EU supporting view at its national level but locally it’s just a networking group that has disappeared up the pompous backside of the state so as to get funding.

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