|
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Weekend Roundup
First a few loose ends left over from yesterday's
Trump post:
For more on populism, see
Russell Arben Fox: Ten Theses on Our Populist Moment: He quotes
Damon Linker's monumentally stupid claim that "Trump may be the purest
populist to receive a major-party presidential nomination in the nation's
history," but the Linker also argues that:
Populism doesn't have a fixed agenda or aim toward any particular
policy goal, like liberalism, progressivism, conservatism,
libertarianism, or socialism. It's a style -- one that favors
paranoia and conspiracy-theorizing, exaggeration of problems,
demonization of political opponents (politicians but also private
citizens), and most of all extravagant flattery of "the people"
(which the populist equates with his own supporters, excluding
everyone else).
In other words, Linker has his own private definition of Populism.
To most other people, what he's describing is the propaganda pitch
of fascism to the masses (as opposed to the pitch made behind closed
doors to the oligarchy). So it shouldn't be surprising that recent
examples are mostly Republican ("From Newt Gingrich . . . to Sarah
Palin . . . and Donald Trump") as the Republican conservative project
is so similar in intent to the fascist project. Fox himself comes up
with a more sensible definition ("whatever articulation of economic
justice, community protection, and local democracy one comes up with"),
but he's ambivalent about calling it Populism. I haven't researched
this, but I suspect part of the problem is that Populism has always
been a label to attack the movement -- the proper name back in the
1890s was the People's Party -- and it was chosen by high-handed snobs
who despised the people even more than the dead-end thinking of isms.
Even today, I suspect that most of the people who regard Trump as a
Populist do so because they regard "the people" as too ignorant, too
intemperate, too irrational even to look out for their own interest.
Of course, many of those same people also decry true economic populism
as well, hoping that by linking Trump and Sanders they can dispose of
both. If you take one thing away from the Trump post, it should be
that Trump's real problems are endemic to the Republican Party and
its conservative ideologues and propagandists. Sure, Trump lacks the
message discipline of a GW Bush and the ideological fervor of a Dick
Cheney, but in the end he always retreats to the orthodox party line.
And that's what doesn't work, and that's what you should really fear
about him or any of the other party leaders. On the other hand, what the party leaders hate about Trump is
his loose mouth. They understand that belief in their economic ideas
and their foreign policy doctrine depends on strict repetition, on
never allowing a morsel of doubt to creep into the discussion. If you
ever stop and think about whether the free market optimally solves
all economic equations or whether the world would descend into chaos
if the US ever stopped projecting its global superpowerness, you might
realize that those doctrines, upon which rests so much privilege and
luxury for the fortunate few, are in fact remarkably flawed. Trump is
so ignorant and so uninhibited that he simply can't be trusted to keep
those cherished myths inviolate. One thing that the Trump debacle should impress upon people
is that the idea that successful businessmen are really great problem
solvers and managers, and especially that those are skills that can
be transferred to politics and government, is sheer nonsense. Could
be that some are, but circumstance and luck count for a lot, as does
starting out with a fortune, as Trump did.
Some scattered links this week:
Andrew Bacevich: The Decay of American Politics: "An Ode to Ike and
Adlai," major party nominees of sixty years ago -- the author's "earliest
recollection of national politics," somewhat more vaguely mine as well
(I turned six just before the election). I'm not quite as nostalgic about
this pair, but Eisenhower was a centrist who, like previous Republican
nominees Thomas Dewey and Wendell Wilkie, had no desire much less delusions
of rolling back the redefinition of what the federal government meant and
did known as the New Deal. And Eisenhower was so respected that if in 1952
he had declared his party differently he might most likely would have been
nominated by the Democrats. Stevenson was an eloquent, highly respected
liberal, no less adored albeit by a narrower base. From his conservative
perch, Bacevich underrates Stevenson, and Hillary Clinton as well, although
as a long-time critic of American foreign policy and militarism he has no
trouble marshalling his arguments against the latter:
When it comes to foreign policy, Trump's preference for off-the-cuff
utterances finds him committing astonishing gaffes with metronomic
regularity. Spontaneity serves chiefly to expose his staggering ignorance.
By comparison, the carefully scripted Clinton commits few missteps,
as she recites with practiced ease the pabulum that passes for right
thinking in establishment circles. But fluency does not necessarily
connote soundness. Clinton, after all, adheres resolutely to the highly
militarized "Washington playbook" that President Obama himself has
disparaged -- a faith-based belief in American global primacy to be
pursued regardless of how the world may be changing and heedless of
costs. [ . . . ]
So while a Trump presidency holds the prospect of the United States
driving off a cliff, a Clinton presidency promises to be the equivalent
of banging one's head against a brick wall without evident effect,
wondering all the while why it hurts so much.
Bacevich at least concedes that both candidates are representative
of their parties, each having mastered what it takes to get nominated.
And as such, he regards them less as flukes than as symptoms of some
underlying shifts. He blames "the evil effects of money," and "the
perverse impact of identity politics on policy." He doesn't unpack
these points nearly well enough, so let me take a shot:
Money seems pretty obvious: he links to Lawrence Lessig's
"brilliant and deeply disturbing
TED talk. Of course, money has bought political influence in America
for a long time -- Karl Rove's hero William McKinley would never have
been elected president without the backing of wealthy patrons -- but
Eisenhower was sought out by backers of both parties because he was
already hugely popular, and because in the 1950s popular appeal was
still worth more than money. That's changed over the years, utterly
so in 2016. The Republican candidates were all selected by their
billionaire backers -- Trump, of course, had an advantage there in
being his own billionaire, which made him look a little less shady
even though his own business history was plenty suspect. Clinton,
on the other hand, cornered all the party's big money donors, so
she would have ran unopposed had Sanders not come up with a novel
way of financing a competitive campaign. The matter of identity politics is somewhat subtler. In a
sense it's always existed -- indeed, it seems to be the dominant
factor in "third world" countries with weak democratic traditions,
like Pakistan and post-Saddam Iraq. If you've read Kevin Phillips'
The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), you'll recall that
most of his arguments about shifting political alignments were
based on demographics. Early in the 20th century the Republican
Party was preponderately northern and protestant, mostly white
but most blacks who could voted Republican, while the Democratic
Party represented a mix of northern Catholics and Jews along with
southern whites. Economic factors occasionally appeared, but were
often secondary: northern farmers shifted to the Democrats with
Bryan, while labor more slowly shifted from R to D, especially
with the New Deal. Phillips' scheme was for the Republicans to
capture southern whites and northern Catholics -- Nixon started
the former with his "southern strategy" and the latter came to
be known as "Reagan Democrats." Still, I think Bacevich is getting
at something more. Back in the 1950s America was, in self-concept
if not quite reality, a homogeneous middle-class nation with a
single mass market. Since then, America has become a good deal
less homogeneous: immigration, which was suppressed in the 1920s,
has greatly increased, as has inequality. But just as importantly,
advertisers and media programmers have learned to target specific
niche audiences, and politicos have followed their lead -- to the
extent that even news and political opinion shows are now targeted
to specific factions. In this atmosphere, identity has taken on
increased significance.
Still, political parties have to distinguish themselves somehow,
and the main alternative to identity is class, something that became
clearer when Franklin Roosevelt sided with the labor movement in the
1930s. Nixon and Reagan tried to counter this by pushing identity to
the fore, which should have sharpened the class division of parties,
but Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton went out of their way to screw over
their labor supporters, and were able to get away with that as labor
unions lost membership and clout, and as Republican hostility to
non-whites, immigrants, gays, and anyone of a liberal disposition
pushed those groups toward the Democrats. That the result appears to
be "identity politics" mostly speaks to the fact that the sense of
national unity that was forged during the New Deal and World War II
has been fractured, most emphatically by economic inequality.
Bacevich skips over here because he wants to move to say this:
The essential point here is that, in the realm of national security,
Hillary Clinton is utterly conventional. She subscribes to a worldview
(and view of America's role in the world) that originated during the
Cold War, reached its zenith in the 1990s when the United States
proclaimed itself the planet's "sole superpower," and persists today
remarkably unaffected by actual events. On the campaign trail, Clinton
attests to her bona fides by routinely reaffirming her belief in American
exceptionalism, paying fervent tribute to "the world's greatest military,"
swearing that she'll be "listening to our generals and admirals," and
vowing to get tough on America's adversaries. These are, of course, the
mandatory rituals of the contemporary Washington stump speech, amplified
if anything by the perceived need for the first female candidate for
president to emphasize her pugnacity.
Bacevich then adds a third explanation: "the substitution of 'reality'
for reality" -- the idea, facilitated by mass media and the PR industry,
that well-managed perceptions count for more than what actually happens.
Bacevich cites Daniel Boorstin's 1962 book The Image: A Guide to
Pseydo-Events in America, written a mere decade after Americans
started learning to see the world through the selective images beamed
to their television screens. He could also have mentioned Joe McGinniss'
The Selling of the President 1968 (1969), on Richard Nixon's PR
campaign.
John Holbo: Is the Cato Institute a, Your Know, Libertarian Think-Tank?
Article about libertarians bitching about the Libertarian Party ticket of
Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. That's not a fight I care to get into, but I
will say that, regardless of their stands on issues, Johnson and Weld were
two of the more decent and respectable Republican governors of the last
few decades. I have less sense of Johnson, but Weld did one commendable
thing that I don't think any other politician of either party has done,
which is to (admittedly only partially) free up a toll road. I'd like to
see a national program established to convert toll roads and bridges to
the (free) interstate highway system, and to outlaw the construction of
new toll roads. As far as I know that's on no political agenda -- I'm not
even sure libertarians would support it, but they should. But that aside,
I linked to this piece to quote a comment from "derrida derider" which
seems about right:
When thinking of libertarians I always think of Lenin's aphorism about
anarchists -- "fine people, but an ideology for children."
Because the hook libertarianism always get stuck on is that we are
social animals where every action we take affects someone else. So the
JS Mill stuff that "you are free to do what you like so long as you
don't hurt anyone else" in practice comes down to a choice of "you are
free to do lots of stuff which will really hurt other people" or "you
are free to anything I judge will not hurt me."
The first is so obviously untenable that actually existing "libertarians"
adopt the second -- that is, they are in fact conservatives engaged in JK
Galbraith's conservative project throughout the ages -- to find a higher
justification for selfishness. So it's no surprise to find that they
are usually in the same political bed as conservatives.
E.g., the Kochs may think they're for freedom in the abstract, but
they're mostly for freedom for themselves, to make money at everyone
else's expense. It was libertarians like the Kochs that led Mike
Konczal to write
We Already Tried Libertarianism -- It Was Called Feudalism.
David E Sanger/Maggie Haberman: 50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump
Would Put Nation's Security 'at Risk':
Fifty of the nation's most senior Republican national security officials,
many of them former top aides or cabinet members for President George W.
Bush, have signed a letter declaring that Donald J. Trump "lacks the
character, values and experience" to be president and "would put at risk
our country's national security and well-being."
Mr. Trump, the officials warn, "would be the most reckless president
in American history."
The letter says Mr. Trump would weaken the United States' moral authority
and questions his knowledge of and belief in the Constitution. It says he
has "demonstrated repeatedly that he has little understanding" of the
nation's "vital national interests, its complex diplomatic challenges,
its indispensable alliances and the democratic values" on which American
policy should be based. And it laments that "Mr. Trump has shown no interest
in educating himself."
"None of us will vote for Donald Trump," the letter states, though
it notes later that many Americans "have doubts about Hillary Clinton,
as do many of us."
You'd think this would be good news for Clinton, but what they're
accusing Trump of not understanding is the unexamined foundation of
every foreign policy disaster of recent decades. Trump half discerns
this, but in the end he decides they're only doing this for spite
and personal gain -- i.e., the reasons Trump himself would use:
Late Monday, Mr. Trump struck back. The signatories of the letter, he
said in a statement, were "the ones the American people should look to
for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming
forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for
making the world such a dangerous place." He dismissed them as "nothing
more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold onto their power."
Mr. Trump correctly identified many of the signatories as the architects
of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But he also blamed them for
allowing Americans "to die in Benghazi" and for permitting "the rise of
ISIS" -- referring to the 2012 attacks on the American mission in Libya
and the spread of the Islamic State, both of which occurred during the
Obama administration. At the time, most of Mr. Trump's Republican foreign
policy critics were in think tanks, private consultancies or law firms,
or signed on as advisers to the Republican hopefuls Mr. Trump beat in
the primaries.
If Trump was smarter he'd figure out a way to turn the tables and
cast Hillary as the intemperate, dangerous warmonger and point to the
hawks who are abandoning him and (in many cases) embracing her as
further proof. It's not happening because he's fully absorbed the
party line that all of America's problems abroad are because Obama
is weak (or some kind of America-hating traitor), so he feels the
need to continually reassert his own toughness, even though he's so
shallow and erratic this comes across as recklessness. A good recent
example is his refusal to concede that there are any conditions where
he'd rule out the use of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, many neocon hawks have moved past dissing Trump and on
to supporting Clinton. In particular, see:
Some campaign-related links:
Sedgwick County Republican chairman: 'Hold your nose' and vote Trump:
Catchy new slogan here in Wichita. Latest SurveyUSA poll shows Trump
still leading in Kansas, 44-39%, close enough for
538 to give Clinton a 17.3% chance of winning Kansas. In related
Wichita Eagle articles, Governor Sam Brownback reiterated his
firm support for Trump (he does, after all, have a lot of experience
holding his nose). Also Sen. Pat Roberts was named as a Trump adviser
on agriculture (i.e., agribusiness, in whose pocket Roberts has spent
much more time than he has in Kansas).
John Cassidy: Why Trump's Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters:
More hectoring on "right-wing populist movements," charging that Trump
is out to create a neo-fascist America First movement that will outlive
his own scattershot candidacy. I agree with Steve M's critique,
No, he's just parroting what he's heard from Fox and the GOP. But
as I pointd out the other day, Trump not only hears Republican "dog
whistles," he responds to them like a dog (apologies, of course, to
anyone who thinks I just insulted their best friend).
Maureen Dowd: The Perfect GOP Nominee: Hillary Clinton, of course:
"They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval
Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals
beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and
hawk it up -- unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where
else."
Lisa Lerer/Ken Thomas: What Have We Learned From Hillary Clinton's Tax
Returns? She released them for 2015 last week, presumably to taunt
Trump. Headline figure was that Bill and her reaped $10.6 million, which
seems like quite a bit for run a foundation and get most of their money
(some $6 million) from speaking fees. They've also released earlier tax
returns, showing that they've made $139 million from 2007-2014 -- I
suspect that's more than any other ex-president has owned, a remarkable
reward (not that Clinton, as president, didn't make other people even
more money). These figures put them in the lower rungs of the 1%, so
one may wonder where their allegiances actually lie.
Ryan Lizza: What We Learned About Trump's Supporters This Week:
The main thing is that Jonathan Rothwell, a researcher at Gallup,
did a deep dive into their polling database to see whether Trump's
base of support comes from economic distress caused by trade deals
and immigration, and finds that it doesn't. He finds that Trump's
supporters "are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar
occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and
perhaps the contradiction there leads to economic anxiety. They're
also socially isolated: it's easier to hold stereotyped views of
immigrants if you don't know any. No real news here for anyone
who's been paying attention.
Mark Joseph Stern: "Second Amendment People" Solutions: Argues
"Trump's Clinton 'joke' was no coincidence. The GOP espouses a right
to bear arms whose logical conclusion is political assassination."
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton's E-Mails:
Well, to save you some scanning, it's that there is none, other than
the cozy access donors have to politicians for decades now.
Finally, a few links for further study (ran out of time to comment):
Ask a question, or send a comment.
|
