Sunday, August 28, 2016

Weekend Roundup

Not very happy with all that follows, let alone all that I haven't gotten to, but it looks like there's enough to chew on for now. Latest odds at 538 show Clinton as having slipped to a 80.9% chance of winning as Georgia and Arizona have tilted back in Trump's favor. Clinton's big problem is that she's still unable to crack 50% of the popular vote -- seems like an awfully flawed, weak candidate given that all she has to beat is Trump, and he's pretty handily beating himself. I suspect the media deserves much of the blame for normalizing and legitimizing Trump, and also for tarring Clinton with an endless series of silly scandals -- the biggest eye-opener for me was to discover that GW Bush's Foundation, even with no prospects of future dynasty, has been raking in even more money than the Clinton Foundation. While I don't doubt the corruption inherent in the latter, I find it curious that no one ever mentions the former. Matt Taibbi attacked the media this year in a piece called The Summer of the Shill, lamenting especially the partisanship of news channels like Fox and MSNBC, where one airs nothing but Hillary "scandals" and the other little but Trump "gaffes." Still, it's not clear to me that the quality has dropped much since Taibbi wrote up his brilliant Wimblehack series in 2004 (cf. his book Spanking the Monkey), and at least there's more parity now. Still, I guess you have to make do with the candidates you got.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Michelle Goldberg: Hillary Clinton's Alt-Right Speech Isolated and Destroyed Donald Trump: Trump's hiring of Steve Bannon has brought the "alt-right" brand to the mainstream media's attention, making it possible for centrists to draw a line between Trump and run-of-the-mill conservatives, neocons, and/or Republicans -- letting the latter off the hook if they can somehow see clear to cut themselves loose from Trump.

    But the killer in Hillary came out on Thursday, delivering a devastating indictment of Donald Trump's associations with the far-right fringe, one meant to permanently delegitimize him among decent people. "A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military," she said, daring Republican officials to disagree.

    With Trump already trailing badly in most polls, Clinton could have tried to yoke him to the Republican Party so he would drag it down with him. Instead, she sought to isolate and personally destroy him.

    Let me interject here that I would much prefer that she "yoke him," since I personally find mainstream Republican apparatchiks even more odious than fringe personalities like Trump, and since her ability to do anything positive as president depends on beating the Republicans down in both houses of Congress. Continuing:

    First came her campaign's Twitter video earlier today about Trump's white-supremacist admirers. Usually, a politician trying to link her opponent to the KKK would come dangerously close to the Godwin's Law line, but Clinton appears to have calculated that few Republicans would rally to their nominee's defense. Her speech, in Reno, further painted Trump as a creature from the fever swamps, one who has nothing to do with legitimate conservatism. It was able to briskly explain some of the crazier figures and theories Trump has associated with, without getting bogged down in obscure detail. Her list of Breitbart headlines, including "Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy" and "Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement's Human Shield," tells you much of what you need to know about Trump's new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, the former head of the site.

    Given such a ripe target, Clinton's pitch can get yucky, as when she said (quoted in this article):

    Twenty years ago, when Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination, he pointed to the exits and told any racists in the party to get out. . . . The week after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and declared for everyone to hear that Muslims "love America just as much as I do." . . . We need that kind of leadership again.

    Uh, no, we don't need or want that kind of leadership again, and if that were all Hillary has to offer we'd be having second thoughts about her, too. Goldberg obviously considers that a stinging rebuke to Trump (else why quote it?), and she admires the way Hillary strung so many of Trump's outrages together, without noticing that in doing so Hillary is making her move on high center ground, intent on establishing herself as the blandest, most conventional establishment candidate ever. That will probably work for her, and given her other handicaps that may be her safest route to the presidency. But in her self-conceit, she's also missing a golden opportunity to help her party and her people.

    For more, see: Lincoln Blades: Call the 'Alt-Right' Movement What It Is: Racist as Hell; Nancy LeTourneau: Quick Takes: Clinton's Speech in Reno.

  • Rochelle Gurstein: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump's Thuggery: "His refusal to prosecute torturers and his Wild West assassination of bin Laden show how moral complacency can all too easily degenerate into full-blown corruption." I would shift the focus a bit here: by failing to end America's involvement in the wars in the Middle East, and by failing to embrace a consistent doctrine of democracy and justice in the region, Obama has kept those wars and their side effects -- like Guantanamo and the plight of Syrian refugees -- central to American political discourse. So now we're forced to choose between Trump's incoherent bluster and Clinton's bumbling continuity. Still, it's flat-out wrong to say that Obama was the one responsible for laying this groundwork. He inherited that entire foundation from GW Bush, who actually was in a position where he could have ordered the military and CIA to stand down and seek justice for 9/11 through international law. He pointedly did not do that, leading to one disaster after another, many only becoming obvious after he left his mess to Obama.

  • Adam H Johnson: Pundits, Decrying the Horrors of War in Aleppo, Demand Expanded War: Nicholas Kristof, Joe Scarborough, presumably many others unnamed, but you know the types as America's punditocracy is rife with them:

    This is part of the broader problem of moral ADD afflicting our pundit class -- jumping from one outrage in urgent need of US bombs to the next, without much follow-through. Kristof, for example, was just as passionate about NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, writing several op-eds that called for bombing in equally moralistic terms. Yet as Libya descended into chaos, the country faded into the background for him. His last post on the subject? September 2011. The plight of Libyans was urgent for the Times columnist when it involved selling war to weary liberals, but once the smoke cleared, his bleeding heart dried up and he moved on to the next cause.

    OK, let's think about this for a moment. Civil Wars, such as Libya in 2011 and Syria from then to now, and you could throw in dozens more (including our own in 1861-65), occur when you have two (or more) groups fighting to seize power and to dominate the other. Civil Wars end two ways: one side "wins" exacting its toll on the others, the "losers" bearing grudges for generations, so in some sense those wars never really end -- they just become relatively quiescent; or both sides agree to share power somehow. The latter is vastly preferable -- in fact, arguably the only thing that works. (The Soviets, for instance, clearly "won" the Russian Civil War by 1922, but the repression they instituted crippled the country for generations. Franco clearly "won" the Spanish Civil War, but was troubled by Basque "terrorists" until his death, when the king he installed allowed democratic elections to move the country far to the left.)

    When outside nations intervene in civil wars, they invariably tilt the tables one way or another, allowing their favored groups to escalate the violence and making them less inclined to compromise. Intervention also resupplies the war, usually extending it, and may cause it to lap into neighboring countries and/or draw in others -- the US intervention in Vietnam's civil war extended the war by ten years, cost millions of lives, destroyed Cambodia and Laos, and led to Nixon's "madman" nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union's insertion of troops into Afghanistan to support a friendly coup led the US and Saudi Arabia to recruit and arm a jihadist insurgency that is still active more than 35 years later, having lapped into Pakistan and inspired acts of terror around the globe.

    One thing that has made recent civil wars in the Middle East especially destructive is that opposition groups have often been fractured and divisive. We saw this in Afghanistan, where following the Soviet withdrawal the jihadist groups continued to fight each other for over a decade, with the Northern Alliance still holding territory from the Taliban when the US invaded in 2001. Again, in Libya the NATO intervention degraded forces loyal to Ghadaffi but left the spoils to be fought over by numerous clans and schisms. Syria is even worse, with dozens of anti-Assad groups unable to unite into a coherent opposition, not least because foreign powers have chosen to intervent in often contradictory ways. For instance, the US is funneling weapons to so-called moderate groups to fight against Assad (weapons that are quickly resold to less friendly groups) while at the same time the US bombs ISIS, perhaps the most formidable of the anti-Assad groups. Turkey too is opposed to Assad, also to ISIS, and even more so to the anti-Assad, anti-ISIS Kurdish militia.

    Recent calls by Kristof and others mostly focus on "establishing a no-fly zone" over Syria -- a tactic which short and shallow memories recall as working so well in Iraq and Libya -- although the task is rather more complicated in Syria. For one thing, would the US also guard against anti-Assad forces flying over Syria (not just NATO allies but also Turkey, Jordan, and Israel). Moreover, Syria's air force is augmented by Russian planes and pilots, and those forces at least occasionally attack ISIS. I don't see how the US can negotiate this, but even if it works you're left with something like Libya but many times as much firepower left on the ground, with Assad weakened to where he cannot win but no other group strong enough to prevail except locally. A subsequent ground assault on ISIS might break it up, with splinters retreating into Iraq or going underground -- but the idea that an Islamic caliphate is needed to save the Muslim world isn't going away anytime soon.

    Seems like it would be easier to negotiate a truce, if not between the local warlords then between the foreign powers, and much better for all in the long run. I could even imagine a military intervention helping here, but only if it was done by a neutral party with the sole interest of disarming all parties, with preference or malice toward none (even ISIS, even Assad, even everyone) -- by disarming I'm not just talking about the big stuff like mortars and RPGs; I'm talking about total NRA nightmare. As areas are cleared of arms, another international group can move in and organize local elections and aid. Over time this would lead to a loose federalism, but most power would remain local and representative. Both the military and the international group would have to rigorously police themselves against corruption, and function with the scrutiny of a free press. No foreign power would have any claim to local property or privilege. All foreign powers have to agree to let Syria manage itself, except for three restrictions: no guns; corruption to be prosecuted in international courts; and prisoners have the right to appeal to insure no discrimination against minorities (needless to say, this also means no capital punishment).

    It should be obvious that the US cannot intervene like this -- it's simply not in the military or political culture to go into a country and not pursue some probably misguided sense of national interests (usually the military's own interest, above all in their own survival). One indication of the problem is that when the US had the opportunity to stand up governments in Afghanistan and Iraq -- two countries with distinct local ethnic and religious communities with longstanding grudges -- US politicians insisted on setting up very centralized governments that would inevitably run up against local dissent, and to arm those governments against the people they may or may not represent. That immediately labeled the natives put into nominal positions of power as Quislings and made the Americans foreign occupiers. That proved disastrous yet the US never wavered from that model: it simply kept training and arming more police and buying friends through calculated corruption, and that, too, never worked, no matter how much "hearts and minds" gibberish was added.

    The best choice for the ground disarmament force is probably the Chinese because they have no hidden agenda -- indeed, they would have to be well-paid mercenaries, barred from plunder -- supplemented by Arabic speakers (also hired from abroad so they have no clan ties). The ground force can be supplemented by US and Russian surveillance and air power which can be called in to pulverize any armed resistance to the ground troops. They would, of course, commit the occasional atrocity -- that is what they do, and why they should be feared. But they won't attack anyone who is not firing back, and should vanish as areas are disarmed.

    The international relief groups should be organized by the UN. Once they organize local governments, they should step back and function as resources for those governments. They may initially depend on ground forces for security, but as security is met the ground forces should move on and out of the country. Border control will probably be their last role, as, alas, the rest of the neighborhood is awash in guns and corruption.

    Americans need to realize that their true national interest is in a peaceful world where all people are respected and treated fairly. This isn't a new idea -- Franklin Roosevelt sketched it out in his "Four Freedoms" speech, and it was the basis for the United Nations, but it got lost in America's post-WWII pursuit of profit and empire. But for now the United States military is only good at one thing: killing. Better to focus that skill set on other people killing than to give the military missions it cannot possibly fulfill, like "winning hearts and minds" and projecting US power as anything other than the terror it is. Of course, better still to set an example and stop the killing altogether. Until we learn better the one thing the US shouldn't be doing is entering into wars. Of course, if we knew better we wouldn't be doing it anyway.

  • Paul Krugman: No, Donald Trump, America Isn't a Hellhole:

    Back when the Trump campaign was ostensibly about the loss of middle-class jobs, it was at least pretending to be about a real issue: Employment in manufacturing really is way down; real wages of blue-collar workers have fallen. You could say that Trumpism isn't the answer (it isn't), but not that the issue was a figment of the candidate's imagination.

    But when Mr. Trump portrays America's cities as hellholes of runaway crime and social collapse, what on earth is he talking about?

    Krugman answers "race" -- indeed, for Trump's followers, all it takes to constitute a hellhole is non-white skin and/or non-American accents. Krugman explains "Trump's racial 'outreach'" as meant "to reassure squeamish whites that he isn't as racist as he seems." I think it's more like he wants to reassure whites that blacks will welcome his draconian law enforcement fantasy once they see how much safer it makes them (the "good ones," anyhow). And besides, living in the hellholes of their own skin, what do they have left to lose?

    Still, it's a pretty ridiculous pitch, but even sympathetic white people tend to underestimate how much progress blacks have made over the last 50-70 years, and therefore how much they stand to lose if white supremacists like Trump regain power. (One is tempted to credit the civil rights acts of the 1960s for those gains, but to some extent they simply codified and consolidated gains made in the early postwar era.

  • Jim Newell: Why Is the Trumpish Right Inept at Hardball Politics? Case study is "making stuff up about their opponents' health," as in claims by Rudy Giuliani and other Trumpsters that Hillary Clinton is covering up a secret debilitating illness (presumably somewhere under a blanket of traitorous emails and Clinton foundation favors). Newell spends much too much time investigating a similar line of attack used by Sen. John McCain's primary opponent, Tea Party partisan Kelli Ward, and probably not enough on everything else -- after all, didn't "the big lie" work just fine for Goebbels (although I guess it was never really tested in a general election)?

    Conservative media has been the lifeblood of Ward's campaign, and with Trump's hiring of Steve Bannon, it is in direct operational control of the Republican presidential nominee's campaign. And so crappy attacks, workshopped inside the conservative tabloid media bubble, get greenlit even if they confuse 70 percent of the electorate. Trump was able to say a lot of stupid things and get away with them in the Republican primary, but the lesson from that shouldn't have been that the idea was replicable: He was in a 17-person field, against a group of mostly undefined opponents, depriving them of oxygen. And he could at least be funny. John McCain and Hillary Clinton have total name recognition and well-known histories. It doesn't convert anyone new to suggest, sans evidence, that they're near death. It just hastens the death of the campaigns suggesting it.

  • Ben Norton: No, they don't support Trump: Smeared left-wing writers debunk the myth: "Clinton-supporting neoconservative pundit James Kirchick published an article in the Daily Beast this week titled "Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left." Norton did some checking and none of the named writers, no matter how much they loathed Hillary, supported Trump. OK, one writer -- all fifteen are quoted here, making for entertaining reading -- somename I had never heard of named Christopher Ketcham, said he would vote for Trump, who he described as "an ignorant, vicious, narcissistic, racist, capitalist scumbag, and thus an accurate representative of the United States." There have always been a tiny number of leftists who hold a romantic idea of revolution erupting as conditions deteriorate unbearably. I think those people are out of touch, especially with the people they think their revolution would help, but they're also very marginal -- "idiots," perhaps, but not useful to anyone. I'm tempted to retort that the real "useful idiots" are the neocons supporting Hillary (like Kirchik, although he's small fry compared to Max Boot and the Kagans) as they actually represent a faction with real money and clout and they give her an air of legitimacy in a domain Republicans like to think they own, but for the most part they at least are making rational choices to advance their most cherished goals -- not so much that Hillary will plunge the country into more wars than Trump but that she will more reliably parrot the neocon line, which in turn legitimizes the neocons. Kirchik, on the other hand, is merely doing what he habitually does: slandering the left, which is still America's best hope for peace.

  • Mark Oppenheimer: 'Blood in the Water,' a Gripping Account of the Attica Prison Uprising: A review of Heather Ann Thompson's new book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon) -- easily the most definitive history of the famous prison revolt, the brutal assault on the prison ordered by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, and the long legal struggle that ensued. I'll also add that what made this picture so clear was the trove of documents and testimony elicited by defense lawyers, especially the late Elizabeth Fink. Also, that the one underlying theme from each step of the history -- the reason the revolt started, and the reason the state protracted the legal fight so long -- was the state's dogged refusal to grant or acknowledge even basic human rights to prisoners; in short, to see prisoners as people. Rather, the state felt free to punish prisoners virtually without limit. For more on this, including how little has changed, also see: Michael Winerip/Tom Robbins/Michael Schwirtz: Revisiting Attica Shows How New York State Failed to Fulfill Promises.

  • Scott Shane: Saudis and Extremism: 'Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters': The al-Saud clan made a deal with al-Wahhab back in the late 18th century where the latter would bless the Saudis' expansion from the Arabian Desert into the Holy Cities and the Wahhabis would control religious doctrine in the Kingdom. I'm not sure when the Saudis started proselytizing Wahhabism outside of Saudi Arabia: probably in the 1960s when they bankrolled a war with Egypt over Yemen and coincidentally adopted Egyptian Sayyid Qutb -- the subject of the first chapter of Lawrence Wright's 9/11 pre-history, The Looming Tower. [Shane dates this from 1964, when King Faisal ascended to the Saudi throne.] But the Saudis spent more in the 1970s and more still in the 1980s when the US decided that militant Islamist Jihadis would be useful against the Soviets in Afghanistan. And they've kept it up, even as virtually every Sunni terrorist you can think of traces religious doctrine back through the Saudi-Wahhabis to the medieval Salafists. As Shane explains, in the 1980s the US was completely complicit in this:

    Throughout the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and the United States worked together to finance the mujahedeen in this great Afghan war, which would revive the notion of noble armed jihad for Muslims worldwide. President Ronald Reagan famously welcomed to the Oval Office a delegation of bearded "Afghan freedom fighters" whose social and theological views were hardly distinguishable from those later embraced by the Taliban.

    In fact, the United States spent $50 million from 1986 to 1992 on what was called a "jihad literacy" project -- printing books for Afghan children and adults to encourage violence against non-Muslim "infidels" like Soviet troops. A first-grade language textbook for Pashto speakers, for example, according to a study by Dana Burde, an associate professor at New York University, used "Mujahid," or fighter of jihad, as the illustration: "My brother is a Mujahid. Afghan Muslims are Mujahedeen. I do jihad together with them. Doing jihad against infidels is our duty."

    The US government still loves the Saudis: they are big business, especially to the oil, defense, and banking sectors which have so much clout over American foreign policy. On the other hand, large segments of the American public are beginning to wonder about Saudi Arabia, especially since King Salman was crowned last year and immediately attacked Yemen (with America's tacit blessing). Those segments include the Islamophobes which have been a predictable result of 15 years of American wars targeting Muslims (or 25 or 35 years, pick your starting date), but they also include, well, me: it looks to me like Saudi Arabia is the real Islamic State ISIS wants to grow up to be, the differences mostly explained by ISIS having been created in a war zone with the US, NATO, Russia, and Iran joining the attack (despite all their various differences). As Shane notes, Saudi Arabia's cleric Saad bin Nasser al-Shethri has condemned ISIS as "more infidel than Jews and Christians," but, you know, he would say that -- doing so protects the Saudi's exclusive claim to rightful jihad, but it perpetuates the Salafi habit of declaring their enemies takfir (impure, false Muslims).

    I'm afraid that the instinctive American response to ISIS is tantamount to genocide -- and it's not just the Islamophobic right that insists that ISIS must be crushed and destroyed. On the other hand, the US has proved that we can live with an Islamic State, even one that insists on dismembering or even beheading subjects it deems to be criminals, one that joins in foreign wars just to assert its religious dogma (the Saudis like to describe their opponents in Yemen as proxies of Iran, but the real problem is that they're Shiites). Of course, it helps that the Saudis have huge oil reserves and a deep appetite for American arms, but even if ISIS can never become as lucrative as Saudi Arabia, that still suggests that the US should be willing to make some sort of accommodation to ISIS, especially one established by votes as opposed to arms.

    As it is, the US insistence on destroying ISIS makes it impossible to negotiate an end to the Syrian Civil War, as does other irrational American impulses, such as simultaneous opposition to Assad. On the other hand, uncritical support for Saudi Arabia creates and deepens regional conflicts, including Syria and Yemen, in ways that have and will continue to blow back on America. The fact is that American support for Saudi jihad was never just a shortsighted policy. It was from the beginning a schizophrenic assault on world piece, order, and justice.

    For more on the Saudi assault on Yemen, see: Daniel Larison: 'The Administration Must Stop Enabling This Madness' in Yemen, and Mohamad Bazzi: Why Is the United States Abetting Saudi War Crimes in Yemen? Note how US arms sales to Saudi Arabia have continued and even increased even though Clinton is no longer in the State Department:

    On August 9, the State Department approved the latest major US weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, mainly to replace tanks that the kingdom has lost in its war in Yemen against Houthi rebels and allies of the former president. The $1.15 billion deal highlights the Obama administration's deepening involvement in the Saudi-led war, which has escalated after four months of peace talks broke down on August 6. Since then, warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition have bombed a Yemeni school, a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, and a potato-chip factory, killing more than 40 civilians, including at least 10 children.

    Also note Trita Parsi's tweet: "Fun fact: When ISIS established its school system, it adopted official Saudi textbooks for its schools."

  • David Sirota/Andrew Perez: Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton's State Department: At some point I should look for a good article by a reputable investigative journalist to explain what the Clinton Foundation does and where all the money went -- looks like a big chunk went into the Clinton's own pockets (their personal income was $11.2 million last year; if memory serves about 2/3 of that came from the Foundation) which is a funny way to run a non-profit charitable institution. Actually, it looks more like a political slush fund, one that's even more free of regulation than Clinton's PAC. I wonder, for instance, whether having the ability to launder so much corporate and foreign money through the Foundation wasn't a big part of the reason virtually no other mainstream Democrats ran against Hillary for president this year.

    Sirota and Perez plumb the more obvious question, which is where the money came from and whether it maps to political favors, and they conclude that at least in the area of American arms sales to foreign countries -- something that the State Department, headed by Hillary from 2009-13, has to sign off on -- lots of things look suspicious. Clinton (and Obama) sure approved a lot of weapons deals. I suppose it's possible that Obama, like presidents going back to Truman and Eisenhower, saw foreign arms sales as a cheap, politically safe jobs program (and following the financial meltdown of 2008 Obama desperately needed one of those). Or maybe you can just chalk it up to Hillary's notorious hawkishness. None of those explanations are really very calming.

    Still, see, for instance, Kent Cooper: 16 Donors Gave $122 Million to George W. Bush Foundation, which notes among other things that Bush's Foundation raised $341 million in 2006-2011, a period that overlaps Bush's presidency. Maybe the Clintons weren't so unique in monetizing their political "service"?

    As for all those weapons sales, see: CJ Chivers: How Many Guns Did the US Lose Track of in Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of Thousands. It's been absurd to listen to Trump claim that Obama and Clinton "founded ISIS," especially given that most of ISIS's guns were delivered to the region by the Bush administration. For example:

    One point is inarguable: Many of these weapons did not remain long in government possession after arriving in their respective countries. In one of many examples, a 2007 Government Accountability Office report found that 110,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 80,000 pistols bought by the United States for Iraq's security forces could not be accounted for -- more than one firearm for every member of the entire American military force in Iraq at any time during the war. Those documented lapses of accountability were before entire Iraqi divisions simply vanished from the battlefield, as four of them did after the Islamic State seized Mosul and Tikrit in 2014, according to a 2015 Army budget request to buy more firearms for the Iraqi forces to replace what was lost.

  • Sean Wilentz: Hillary's New Deal: How a Clinton Presidency Could Transform America: A distinguished historian -- I learned a lot from his The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln -- but less than reliable when it comes to putting recent political movements into historical perspective (e.g., The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008). A historian should be able to bring some perspective to a campaign, but Wilentz does little more than regurgitate campaign hype:

    Hillary Clinton has already indicated what she would pursue in her first 100 days in office: launching her infrastructure program; investing in renewable energy; tightening regulation of health-insurance and pharmaceutical companies; and expanding protection of voting rights. She has also said that she will nominate women for half of her Cabinet positions. And not far behind these initiatives are several others, including immigration reform and raising the minimum wage.

    Even without a unifying title, it is a sweeping agenda, the latest updating of Democratic reformism. Democratic politics at their most fruitful have always been more improvisational than programmatic, more empirical than doctrinaire, taking on an array of issues, old and new, bound by the politics of Hope pressing against the politics of Nostalgia. So it was with FDR and Truman, so it has been with Barack Obama, and so it would be with Hillary Clinton.

    Still, a historian should recall that FDR's remarkable first 100 days -- the since-unequaled model for that concept -- was accomplished mostly due to conditions Clinton, even if she scores a personal landslide, will not enjoy: Roosevelt had an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress (and for that matter a large percentage of surviving Republicans were progressives), and in throwing out Hoover and Mellon the voters had sent a clear message that the new administration should do something about desperate times. Clinton has yet to do anything significant to elect a Democratic Congress -- indeed, she seems preoccupied with capturing anti-Trump Republicans for her campaign only. Moreover, historians should recognize that the last two Democratic presidents -- Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, for whom she represents nothing if no continuity -- delivered very few of their campaign promises, even when they had Democratic majorities before they squandered them away through inaction. Hillary may think she wants to do wonders as president, but unless Congress changes she won't be able to. Indeed, if the Republicans hold onto the Senate, she may have trouble even getting those women confirmed to cabinet posts.

    For a more serious example of a historian looking at present politics, see Corey Robin: Donald Trump is the least of the GOP's problems, where he argues that it's not just Trump's gaffes that are dragging the party and the conservative movement down: both are also "victims of their success." Robin argues that reactionary movements lose their "raison d'être" as they become successful. I'd argue that success leads to them overshooting their goals in ways that turn destabilizing and self-destructive. On the other hand, I don't really believe that there is some sort of left-right equilibrium that needs to be periodically recentered. Rather, I believe that there is a long-term liberalizing drift to American politics, which is occasionally perverted by the corruption of business groups. We are overdue for a course correction now, but it's only happening fitfully due to the Republican focus on rigging the system and the generous amnesia of Democrats.

  • Miscellaneous election tidbits:

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