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Sunday, September 20, 2015

Short post this week. Got a late start, and didn't get beyond the usual US political campaign grist. Rest assured though that the Middle East remains as fucked as ever, that Europe is struggling with a refugee crisis, that Greece is stuck with a choice between two defeatist parties, that the rich still aren't satisfied, and environmental disasters are still multiplying. Meanwhile, our "best and brightest" reporters are mired in what Matt Taibbi calls "the stupid season."

• David Atkins: Why Does the Press Continue to Get It So Wrong on Donald Trump?: Why do pundits, and for that matter pretty much all of the mainstream press, keep getting popular political opinions wrong?

  Conservatives will claim that journalists are liberal and don't understand Republican politics. Perhaps, but progressives have made equally scathing critiques of the press for years in their underestimation of progressive populist sentiment and elevation of centrist candidates. It's less that the political press is liberal, and more that it is trapped' in a bubble inhabited by the wealthy and powerful. [ . . . ]

  But more importantly, there is a bias in the press toward political neutrality and the perception of balance. After a debate in which Republican candidates peddled an endless string of falsehoods and fantasies, the political press has a crisis on its hands: let it all slide and simply transcribe the lies without challenge, or contribute to a perception of "liberal bias" by actually calling out the falsehoods and holding the candidates accountable?

  Trump presents a similar problem. Trump's extremist positions on immigration and foreign policy, combined with his vulgar, racist and sexist remarks, are so obviously appalling that for him to continuously lead the GOP field not only proves the Mann/Ornstein thesis that the Republican Party has grown uniquely extreme, but also shows that problem extends beyond Republican Party leadership to the actual voters themselves. Even more, the fact that Trump's apostasy on taxes and healthcare has not significantly damaged him is a demonstration that GOP voters are not actually so committed to the libertarian supply-side economics of the Republican Party as they are to using the power of government to benefit traditionally powerful whites at the expense of women and minorities.

  This a problem for the press. As long as Trump leads, it's impossible to maintain the fiction of equally extreme "both sides do it" partisanship. As long as Trump rules (and, to a lesser extent, that Bernie Sanders continues to rise on the left) it's also increasingly difficult to pretend that "moderates" in either party are actually the center of public opinion, rather than caterers to a unique brand of corporate-friendly upper-class comfort that labels itself as moderate without holding any legitimate claim to the title.

  Acknowledging those realities would force the press to start reporting the fundamentals of American politics as they stand today:

  First, that the Republican base wants a rebel leader to take their country back from the inconvenience of being nice to women, gays and minorities;

  Second, that the wealthy Republican establishment and its center-right Third Way Democratic counterparts don't actually have a legitimate base of voters, but rather illegitimate institutional capture of government via legalized bribery; and

  Third, that the rest of the country wants liberal public policies that would resemble a Scandinavian government, but most of them are so turned off by the futility of the American political process that not enough of them turn out to vote to make a real difference outside of the bluest states.

  The first two of these points could be phrased better but are pretty self-evident. The Republican Party is an uneasy coalition of leaders and followers: the former that segment of the wealthy that seeks to gain through zero-sum strategies (reducing taxes, suppressing wages, growing monopolies, exchanging wealth for debt, arbitrage); the latter various segments of gullible single-issue voters (racists, religious bigots, anti-abortion, pro-gun, flag wavers, anything that distracts one from class). The appeal to the latter is a combination of flattery (you're the real Americans) and demagoguery (they're hell-bent on destroying your life). That coalition is unstable because the leaders are actively undermining the followers' material basis, and this fracturing only increases as the leaders gain power. It may be possible for a politician to crack this coalition by running against the elites, but I don't see any reason to expect Trump will do that. Rather, as his own billionaire sponsor, his potential independence worries the elites and offers some hope to the gullible followers. Still, I don't see it panning out: even if his understanding of class never extends beyond his own bottom line, you know where he's going to land on every significant issue.

  The third point is the controversial one, because the main obstacle a significant extension of social democratic policies faces comes not from the Republicans -- who would cut their base's throats to achieve their goal of reducing government -- as from the mainstream Democrats, who chase after campaign money with the avarice of Republicans but at least have some scruples against wrecking the status quo (not that they always have the wisdom, as shown by their support for wrecking Carter-Glass banking regulation). The public may very well want more than the Democrats are offering, but without unions or other groups pressuring the Democrats to deliver, they'll keep playing defense (with the occasional fumble).

• Josh Marshall: The War Party: Responding to the Republican dog and pony show, Marshall points out that when foreign policy issues came up, "Trump may have been silent because he just doesn't know enough details or doesn't care enough about them to engage," while the others "turned not so much to foreign policy as to each candidate trying to outdo the other in embracing the sort of petulant unilateralism that made the aughts such a disaster for the United States. It was, to put it simply, a race to embrace Bush foreign policy on steroids." I wouldn't give Trump much of a pass here -- he has, after all, claimed he's "the most militaristic person there is" (see Scott Eric Kaufman and Glen Healy -- the latter defending Trump by arguing that his boast is the "biggest lie" of a pathological braggart). Still, Marshall is right to focus on Rubio and Fiorina, who pundits like to praise for their ability to spew this shit with a straight face.

  Let's start with Marco Rubio, who has tried to carve out a space as the candidate of the neoconservatives in exile. Joe Klein saw him as the clear winner of the debate with a crisp and incisive command of national defense policy. "To my mind, Marco Rubio won that debate with his obvious fluency on a range of topics . . . Marco Rubio is becoming a force to be reckoned with -- on the debate stage. He is fluent, smart and bold."

  That is not what I saw at all.

  I agree that Rubio continues to come off as likable and he makes no obvious mistakes in these encounters. I actually think that just by dint of process of elimination he has a substantial better shot at the nomination that most people realize. But in his recitations on foreign policy he doesn't come off as knowledgable or seasoned. He comes off as someone who has obligingly internalized, in a kind of rote manner, the wisdom of Bill Kristol to get the money of Sheldon Adelson. There is a strong DC insider appetite for these nostrums. So it's not just the money. But these are dangerous, discredited ideas that were tried and failed miserably under the last Republican President. Indeed, they failed so miserably that even in President Bush's second term the standard-bearers were largely ushered aside in favor of a slightly more realist approach to cleaning up the messes created in the first term.

  If there is one thing the country does not need it is another impressionable foreign policy neophyte who comes under the influence of this war-addicted DC coven.

  Next is Carly Fiorina. I entirely agree that she had a strong, commanding debate. She seemed particularly focused and knowledgable on national security questions as she rattled off a number of things she would do to take a more aggressive posture toward America's adversaries and rivals.

  Unless of course you actually have any idea what you're talking about. In which case, the things she said seemed quite different. At a broad level, it's the same kind of confrontational and dangerous foreign policy that got the country into trouble a decade ago. But as Ezra Klein explains here, Fiorina's list of proposed actions were a mix of things that were irrelevant to the questions at hand, are already happening, or things that operate on a time scale such that they can't have any real affect on the challenges she suggests they're aimed at countering. The dangerous ground of half-knowledge. Or policies as puzzle pieces with no larger picture or understanding.

  I think the appeal the necons have among Republicans now is tied up with the right's obsession with condemning all things Obama. It is, after all, an extremist doctrine, one that takes common assumptions of the cold war security state and through a combination of logical rigor and macho posturing drives them to seductive but untenable extremes. It's worth recalling that the neocons' original nemesis was none other than Henry Kissinger, no minor war criminal himself, so casting Obama as cowardly and unpatriotic was easy. (Lazy and shameless too: after all, the crime they wailed about in Benghazi! wasn't Obama's running an illegal CIA operation there or getting it blown up but not spouting the correct anti-Islamic bigotry afterwards -- i.e., the one that would justify further disastrous intervention.)

  The neocon parlor game of rhetoric is hard to beat in the salons of Washington, even though it has never been shown to work in the real world -- where America isn't omnipotent, where American efforts to "shock and awe" other into submission merely publicize the moral rot that somes with superpower hubris. The neocons always have the excuse that their principles were compromised by weaklings who didn't believe and didn't try hard enough. The real antidote to neoconism is to question the assumptions -- something Obama and Clinton never had the guts to do, because the institutional power of the security state is too entrenched. Some of the leading dimwits of the Tea Party movement were tempted in that direction, but Michelle Bachmann fizzled before she could articulate much, and Rand Paul let himself be convinced that only by prevaricating could he win the nomination -- leaving himself no principle to stand on.

  Marshall's conclusion:

  The attitude of embattlement and grievance that currently animates the Republican party is something we're quite familiar with in the domestic sphere but it's even more present in the outlook abroad. It is a dangerous thing to take a coalition which feels embattled, victimized and disempowered and put them in charge of the most powerful military in the world. A coalition like that, with an untrained hand at the helm, guided by terrible advisors is a recipe for disaster.

• Philip Weiss: Coulter's point is that Republicans pander on Israel to win donors, not voters: I referred to the Republican presidential debate above as a "dog and pony show" -- a phrase that back in my corporate days we used to refer to any staged presentation (to customers, to investors, or to anyone else you hoped to deal with). I was looking for an alternative turn of phrase, but also I was a bit uncomfortable with "debate" -- that suggests a high-minded collegiate contest being scored by experts, and while many pundits are conceited enough to think of themselves that way, that wasn't necessarily the judgment the candidates were looking for. Some were mostly intent on selling themselves to potential voters, while some were no doubt more concerned with donors. It now occurs to me that the latter may have been the main focus, one that resonates with my "dog and pony show" quip: after all, who bothers to watch a dog or horse race unless they have some money riding on the result?

  Coulter is a thoroughly obnoxious pundit, one who built her entire career by heaping hateful invective on liberals, a torrent so vile it's consumed her, turning her into such a fount of hatred that she's lost the ability to distinguish between former friends and foes. It wouldn't surprise me if her "fucking Jews" tweet reveals anti-semitism because her hate has become so universal, although it sounds as much like her usual stock in trade. Still, the sequence of her tweets shows she's at least trying to think through what she's seeing. She quickly figures out that Republican appeals on Israel aren't meant to curry favor with Jewish voters, because there aren't that many of them, and most vote Democratic anyway. She considers whether it's "to suck up to the Evangelicals" -- they are more numerous, and they're a key target constituency for Republicans: many see Israel as an essential step toward the second coming of Jesus, the "end times" and all that. (I've known people obsessed with that, although you don't read much about them as it's considered impolite to talk about such delusions.) But in the end Coulter decides the candidates are pitching their donors, and she comes up with this tweet, which despite everything is pretty much on target:

  How to get applause from GOP donors: 1) Pledge to start a war 2) Talk about job creators 3) Denounce abortion 4) Cite Reagan 5) Cite Israel.

  Worth noting that (1) is an implicit case of (5), not that war with Iran isn't the only pledge, but if it wasn't Iran it'd be someone else on Israel's "existential threat" list -- ISIS, for one, is looming. Coulter's hot button issue at the moment seems to be nativism, which whenever it has erupted in American history has been rooted in racism (and often linked to anti-semitism, although these days the semites are much more often Muslim). Nativism has also tended to be associated with autarky and isolationism, and Coulter seems to be leaning that way -- if you don't want foreigners coming to America, you shouldn't go around the world starting wars and stirring up distress, like America's liberal interventionists have been doing ever since FDR. One could build a coherent conservative argument around such notions, but I have yet to hear one from Trump or Coulter or even Rand Paul. Part of the problem there is that Fascists in the 1930s discredited those notions for generations. Part is that capital -- the money of the superrich who think they run the GOP -- has become so globalized that any real autarky has become unimaginable. And while it's not clear that global capital really requires America's military sprawl, no Republican has come around to asking that question.

  In a sense, (3) has become the core point: not so much that the money Republicans hate abortion, but abortion has become a litmus test issue, something no Republican can question without being drummed out of the tribe. But then all the points are increasingly like that: litmus tests, articles of faith, self-commitments. They draw applause because Republicans love to applaud themselves. But they're increasingly self-selecting themselves into a power-losing minority.

  By the way, we can thank Netanyahu for moving Israel out of the realm of bipartisan consensus and into the Republican column. That will eventually free the Democrats of a terrible burden. As Weiss puts it:

  One good result of this conversation will be more Jews condemning Sheldon Adelson and Norman Braman and the Republican Jewish Coalition moneybags for trying to have a war with Iran, more Jews declaring that they aren't Zionists.

  As for Coulter's (4) point, see: Jon Schwarz: Seven Things About Ronald Reagan You Won't Hear at the Reagan Library GOP Debate: "And maybe that's appropriate -- since if Reagan stood for anything as president, it was creating a completely fictionalized version of the past."

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