Weekend Roundup [210 - 219]

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Weekend Roundup

The New York primaries were held last week. Hillary Clinton won a huge win with 58.0% of the vote, giving her 139 delegates to Bernie Sanders 108. On the Republican side, Donald Trump won with his first majority in a primary all year, a big one with 60.4% of the vote vs. 25.1% for John Kasich and 14.5% for that sworn enemy of "New York values" Ted Cruz. Trump got 89 delegates, Kasich 4, and Cruz 0, so this primary went a long ways to putting Trump back on track for a first ballot win at the Republican Convention. Still, it's worth noting that Trump only got 19.5% of the votes cast on Tuesday. Sanders got 28.4%, and Clinton got 39.2% -- together the Democrats got 67.7% of the total vote, a big change from earlier primaries where Republicans generally got more votes than Democrats.

I looked at 538's What Went Down in the New York Primaries, and one thing I checked was the Clinton-Sanders split by congressional district. What I found was that Clinton ran especially well in New York City, and was much stronger in districts represented by Democrats (she won 17 of 18, only losing around Albany). Sanders, on the other hand, won 5 (of 9) districts represented by Republicans, and did better than his state average in the other four (also in Democratic districts in Buffalo and Rochester, plus the 6th in Queens and the 18th in Westchester). What this suggests is that the party machine and its patronage network held firm for Clinton. Of course, one thing that helped the machine was that the primary was closed (way in advance of the vote), so independents, which Sanders has regularly won this year, often by large margins, couldn't vote.

I came out of this feeling pretty down, not so much because I expected a Sanders win -- I did think it might be closer, but knew Clinton had a lot of structural advantages there -- but because it underscored how difficult it's going to be to dislodge the Party's power structure. Sanders could win in Republican areas because he appealed especially to people deprived of power, but the Democrats so controlled New York City that the oligarchy -- especially the nabobs of Wall Street -- owned the Party. And what made matters worse for me was that while this smackdown was going on, I was reading Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, where his big point is that the Democrats ever since Carter had courted educated professionals (following Chris Hedges, he calls them the Liberal Class), often at the expense of the workers and unions who had previously been the most effective supporters of the Democratic Party -- the net effect is that the Democrats are as much in bed with big business as the Republicans, making them preferable only in that they'll try to defend certain liberties and civil rights, and work a bit less hard at destroying the middle class. That explains the sort of marginal differentiation that is supposed to convince us that we need Clinton to save the world from Trump or Cruz, even though there is no reason to think she'll even try to do the things that need to be done to reverse the increase in inequality and the rot in practically everything else. So while the horserace watchers saw New York as the primary that virtually cinched Clinton's nomination, it looked more to me like the end of any hope for change.

Next Tuesday's primaries promise to be more of the same. Clinton is favored in Connecticut (56.2-41.3%, closest poll Clinton +6), Maryland (63.3-33.9%, closest +13), and Pennsylvania (58.9-38.2%, closest +6); I don't see any polling on Delaware and Rhode Island, but I'd expect them to be similar to Maryland and Connecticut (although there is one Delaware poll with Clinton +7, suggesting much closer than Maryland). Trump is also expected to mop up: 45.2-31.7-21.3% in Connecticut (Kasich over Cruz), 40.3-30.6-27.1% in Maryland (Kasich over Cruz), and 41.1-29.4-27.4% in Pennsylvania (Cruz over Kasich -- looks like a second straight brutal week for Cruz).

Looking further ahead, Clinton should keep on winning: 52.7-44.4% in Indiana (May 3), 56.8-41.7% in California (June 7), 51.0-41.4% in New Jersey (also June 7). Trump continues to lead in the Republican races (with Cruz getting a bit closer): 38.1-37.5-22.2% (T-C-K) in Indiana, 41.9-33.5-23.4% (T-C-K) in California, and 50.4-23.4-17.2% (T-K-C) in New Jersey.

Meanwhile I have to share the following image. Just think, with three-hundred million people in America, this is the best we can do?

Back in 1776 there were only four million people in America, yet somehow we managed to find a wide range of capable leaders. Now we find that the only possible surrogate for one Clinton is another, and that the best the opposition party can come up with is their former party pal. Hard to see any significant differences among this crowd, yet both Trump and Clinton have managed to convince most of their followers that the other is the Devil incarnate, and those followers are hysterical as expected. Still, the odds of a comparably jovial post-election photo are pretty high -- especially if Clinton wins and reverts to form, serving the billionaire class.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Gerald Friedman: Orthodox Economics Has Become a Place Where Visions Die and Hopes Are Banished: Subhed: "Why liberal economists dish out despair." Friedman was the economist who analyzed Bernie Sanders' platform and concluded that it would lead to a growth rate that the US economy hasn't seen in over fifty years. He was, in turn, attacked by economists like Christine Romer and Paul Krugman for suggesting that such growth rates were even possible. Basically, they regarded Friedman's calculations as proof that Sanders was fantasizing. (In fairness, a few economists like James Galbraith defended Friedman.) Much of interest here:

    There is, of course, a politics as well as a psychology to this economic theory. If nothing much can be done, if things are as good as they can be, it is irresponsible even to suggest to the general public that we try to do something about our economic ills. The role of economists and other policy elites (Paul Krugman is fond of the term "wonks") is to explain to the general public why they should be reconciled with stagnant incomes, and to rebuke those, like myself, who say otherwise before we raise false hopes that can only be disappointed. But this approach leaves liberals like Hillary Clinton with few policy options to offer in response to the siren call of demagogues like Donald Trump. And it makes the work of self-proclaimed "responsible" elite economists that much more pressing. They have to work even harder to persuade the public that nothing can be done to head off the challenge of Trump and other irresponsible politicians who capitalize on the electorate's appetite for change. They have to slap down critics like myself. "Responsible" elite economists have to keep the party of "good arithmetic" from overpromising at all costs.

    Were the orthodox classical economists correct, then of course their politics would follow. But what if they are wrong? What if government action could, in fact, raise growth rates or narrow disparities? What would be the expected value of a higher GDP growth rate? Would it be worth some academic debate, even if it leaked into the public realm? Might this debate even serve a socially useful function by giving voters an alternative to the xenophobic political economy of Donald Trump? Many Americans believe that government action can improve economic conditions, especially for workers, and many of these support Trump because they see him as the only candidate who is even willing to consider government action to help working Americans. These voters can look long and hard at the "responsible" Clinton platform for some policy, for any policy to raise growth rates and narrow income disparities. But they won't find it, because policy elites have closed their minds to the possibility of change.

    This reminds me that Krugman has repeatedly defended Democratic Party compromises (e.g., ACA, Dodd-Frank) as adequate and satisfactory (even if not ideal) solutions, while implying that little more can be done, and that when Sanders argues otherwise, he's out on some lark beyond anything that is economically possible. This gets me wondering whether there were any Keynesians during the 1930s, even after it had become clear that government spending was working to bring the economy out of the Great Depression, who could imagine what a radical expansion -- one aimed not just as restoring the pre-depression equilibrium but achieving a whole new level of prosperity -- might accomplish. That experiment was (perhaps unwittingly) done with the total mobilization for WWII. What Sanders is proposing goes way beyond repairing the damage done by Bush's bubble. What's lacking is political will, not the "laws of economics," and the net effect of Krugman's (and others') naysaying is to help suppress that political will.

    I don't doubt that there are long-term issues with sustaining economic growth, but it's also clear that the US economy is performing way below what it's capable of, and a crash program of public works -- not just to fix our sorely degraded infrastructure -- would make a big difference (even Krugman understands that much, although his argument doesn't go nearly as far as Sanders or Friedman). The infrastructure work would also move a huge current liability into the asset column, and would improve future productivity, but there's much more value to be gained from spending on public works. One area where Sanders may be overly optimistic is how to pay for this: it's not clear to me that simply "soaking the rich" with higher taxes will raise enough revenue (not that that's not worth doing in its own right), especially if one implements other reforms to reverse increasing inequality. Most likely we would need some sort of broad-based consumption tax (in addition to more progressive taxes on profits and estates), but that's almost a technical issue compared to the broader question of vision.

    I should also remind you of Philip Mirowski's big book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013), which is largely about how mainstream economists throttled (well, more like strangled) any serious political change following a severe crisis which pretty clearly proved that their understanding of the economy was faulty.

  • Emmett Rensin: The smug style in American liberalism: Much I agreed with here, and much that rubbed me the wrong way. I believe that good politics derives from respect for everyone, notably people who grew up differently from yourself, who consequently have different world views. However, that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't disagree with some of those world views. It's just that the ones you should reject are the ones where respect isn't reciprocal or generalizable. Many people, for instance, think they should be privileged over other groups of people, and that is a creed that is based on disrespect for the unprivileged, that cannot be generalizable. We can all, for instance, settle for equality, which is what makes it such a fundamental principle of political society. Given all this, smugness is inappropriate and often counterproductive. Yet it is pretty much impossible to engage in political discourse without at some point appearing to someone as smug. And consequently, Rensin's examples are all over the range from sensible to outrageous. There are some ideas -- the gold standard, for instance, or creationism -- that are so indefensible many of us skip past re-litigating them and resort to derision, even if that leaves the impression of smugness. Similarly there are people -- e.g., Sen. Jim Inhofe on climate change (fresh on my mind because I read a quote from him today) -- who having repeatedly clung to indefensible positions have lost the right to be taken seriously, even though such instant rejection smacks of smugness. At some point you have to realize that it's not practical to re-argue everything from first principles every time it comes up (though it is useful to be able to cite someone who has thought the issue through). Still, I don't disagree with the following:

    It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people from the duty to respect them. It becomes all at once too easy to decide you know best, to never hear, much less ignore, protest to the contrary.

    At present, many of those most in need of the sort of help liberals believe they can provide despise liberalism, and are despised in turn. Is it surprising that with each decade, the "help" on offer drifts even further from the help these people need?

    Even if the two could be separated, would it be worth it? What kind of political movement is predicated on openly disdaining the very people it is advocating for?

    The smug style, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. Further: It is a failure to believe that empathy has any value at all. It is the notion that anybody worthy of liberal time and attention and respect must capitulate, immediately, to the Good Facts. [ . . . ]

    The smug style did not arise by accident, and it cannot be abolished with a little self-reproach. So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further. They will choose the smug style.

    One thing that Rensin has stumbled onto here is that the relationship between liberalism and the working class has been fraught with difficulty throughout American history, perhaps only bound together by accident of the egalitarian words of the Declaration of Independence and the power shifts of the New Deal. Liberalism has always focused on individuals, defined as free and equal as opposed to the old orders of aristocracy (and peasantry or slavery). As such, liberals sought to advance people one-by-one based on merit, whereas socialists sought to "level up" the working class to share in the entire nation's wealth (mostly created by the labor of the working class). As such liberals -- Chris Hedges and Thomas Frank speak of a distinct "liberal class" rooted in highly educated professionals -- have tended to accept inequities, provided that opportunities were more or less equal -- all the more so in times of increased inequality, such as ours.

    Indeed, at this point I suspect that the only thing that keeps the liberal class and the working class -- which is a pretty fair first approximation of the Clinton-Sanders contest -- from splitting the Democratic Party in two is their shared horror at the prospect of Republican rule. It will be interesting to see whether the dominant liberal faction makes any serious nods toward the white working class (with Republicans like Trump and Cruz, blacks and Latinos are pretty much locked in).

  • Yusef Munayyer: Wanted: A US Strategy in the Middle East:

    In 2006, as Israel and Hezbollah were engaged in what would be a 34­day war, the longest of any Arab­Israeli war since 1948, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reflected on the region's volatile dynamics calling them "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." She further stated, "We have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East not back to the old one."

    Indeed, there was something new in the Middle East that Dr. Rice was observing then. For the first time, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan all seemed to align with Israel in the war and condemned Hezbollah in a very overt way. Earlier in the year, Al-Qaeda in Iraq launched the first major salvo in what became a sectarian war in Iraq when it bombed the Shi'a Al­Askari Mosque in Samarra. The Iraq war had made this regional realignment, which we have seen develop further in the years since, come into fruition.

    The invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent dismantlement of the Iraqi state had many devastating implications for the region. Perhaps most significant was the fact that it shattered any semblance of regional order in the Middle East and the long­standing modus vivendi between Riyadh and Tehran. Saddam had been a bulwark against Iran and a buffer that limited Iranian influence from reaching the Arab Gulf countries and the Levant. With Saddam gone, the US fired the starting pistol in a regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Militias, insurgencies, sectarianism and bloodshed would characterize this power struggle.

    Today, more than a decade into this contest, the labor pains have subsided and a demon child called ISIS, nurtured from embryo to beast in the womb of a failed Iraqi state, has not only learned to walk but is running amok across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.

    Munayyer's big point is that while the US thought it had all the power in the world, it had no real idea what it wanted to do with that power, and consequently wound up thrashing, unable to decide on goals, or even friends and enemies (actually, both camps tended to be defined by their opposite in ways that wound up contradicting one another). And in this context US power turned out to be far less than super (let alone hyper). Munayyer sees the 2003 invasion of Iraq as pivotal, but the 1990 war was nearly as bad, and the US had made a muddle of its strategy ever since Carter declared the Persian Gulf a "vital US interest," or Nixon looked to Saudi fundamentalism as a bulwark in the Cold War, or LBJ had no interest in brokering an end to the Arab-Israeli wars despite having friends on both sides. And all through America's Orientalists never showed the slightest interest in the welfare of the region's people, least of all their desires for free societies and modern economies.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

  • Dean Baker: Patently Absurd Logic on Budget Deficits and Debt: Time did a cover story attempting to rile up hysteria about the federal deficit again, so Baker knocks it down plank by plank -- stuff you should already know by now, but I'm flad he's also talking about patents:

    There is one other point about treating the debt as a serious measure of generational equity. Interest payments on debt are just one of the ways in which the government makes commitments for the future. When the government grants patent and copyright monopolies, it is also making commitments that carry into the future. Patent and copyright monopolies allow the holders to charge prices for the protected items that are hugely higher than the free market price. They are in effect a tax that is privately collected by drug companies, software companies, the entertainment industry and others.

    These payments are in fact enormous relative to the interest burdens that get the deficit hawks so excited. In the case of prescription drugs alone, the difference between what we pay for patent protected drugs, compared to drugs being sold at free market prices, is in the neighborhood of $360 billion a year. That's equal to 2 percent of the GDP, twice the size of the current interest burden on the public debt.

  • Jesse Eisinger: Why Haven't Bankers Been Punished? Just Read These Insider SEC Emails: Follows longtime SEC lawyer James Kidney. Ends with:

    Kidney became disillusioned. Upon retiring, in 2014, he gave an impassioned going-away speech, in which he called the SEC "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors."

    In our conversations, Kidney reflected on why that might be. The oft-cited explanations -- campaign contributions and the allure of private-sector jobs to low-paid government lawyers -- have certainly played a role. But to Kidney, the driving force was something subtler. Over the course of three decades, the concept of the government as an active player had been tarnished in the minds of the public and the civil servants inside working inside the agency. In his view, regulatory capture is a psychological process in which officials become increasingly gun shy in the face of criticism from their bosses, Congress, and the industry the agency is supposed to oversee. Leads aren't pursued. Cases are never opened. Wall Street executives are not forced to explain their actions.

  • Rebecca Gordon: Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial: Author of a new book titled American Nuremberg: The US Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Previously wrote Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (2014, Oxford University Press). This excerpt focuses on the torture of Abu Zubaydah, which surely qualifies although I'd say that the decisions to invade and start decades-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are far more serious crimes.

  • William Hartung: What a Waste, the US Military: Given all the evil that the US military perpetrates, the fact that they do such a lousy job of managing their bloated allowance ranks rather low on in my view, but it's always worth a reminder that their lack of care and foresight starts at home, well before they use it to screw up the rest of the world.

  • Matt Karp: Against Fortress Liberalism; Lily Geismer: Atari Democrats; Rick Perlstein: The Chicago School: three essays from Jacobin magazine, which we recently subscribed to. On the other hand, they also published a hatchet job by Jonah Walters on "hippie-hating hawk" Merle Haggard that totally misses the boat. (Kathleen Geier fumes here, and Eric Loomis gets down to brass tacks in a reply titled Walking on the Fighting Side of Me.)

  • David Swanson: US Wars Are Not Waged Out of Generosity or for Democracy: Interview by Mark Karlin with the author of War Is a Lie, originally written in 2010 and now out in a 2nd edition paperback (Just World Books), and founder of the World Beyond War website.

    In 2006, Republicans believed they'd have to end the wars, and Democrats were elected to congressional majorities with that mandate. Rahm Emanuel then openly told The Washington Post that the Democrats would keep the wars going for two more years in order to run "against" them again in 2008. The Democrats took the chairs of committees and proceeded to do nothing with them. And people who identified with the Democratic Party in 2007 began obsessing with the 2008 presidential election, at the expense of ending the slaughter in 2007 or 2008.

    Endless, lawless war at massive expense was clearly established as a bipartisan norm. Entire presidential debates in 2016 have passed by without a single mention of the world outside the United States. No candidate has been asked whether 54 percent of discretionary spending on militarism is too much, too little or just right. Young people have grown up in this climate and accepted in some cases -- just like most old people -- all the propaganda or at least the part that maintains that we are powerless to stop wars. Corruption by war profiteers and general cultural taboos contribute: The big environmental groups won't take on the biggest destroyer of the environment, the big civil liberties groups won't touch the biggest cause of rights violations etc. But the fact is that a massive movement against war is extremely active and broad in comparison to what the media suggests.

    For an excerpt from the new edition of War Is a Lie, see Fear of ISIS Used to Justify Continued Military Intervention in Middle East.

  • How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk: As Secretary of State, Clinton was consistently more hawkish than President Obama. Indeed, she's always been quick to resort to military force. Long story, including a possibly apocryphal story about Clinton wanting to join the Navy.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Weekend Roundup

Quickly, some scattered links this week:

  • George Monbiot: Neoliberalism -- the ideology at the root of all our problems: The term is scarcely ever used in the US, where right-wing pundits insist that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (pictured at the top) are regarded as purely conservative folk heroes. Yet the term was coined at a 1938 conference featuring Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who used it to articulate an extreme belief in free markets in opposition to "collectivism" -- a term they felt rounded up all the evil political movements of the era: nazism, communism, and most importantly social democracy. The term soon fell out of use: in the US the ideas mostly appealed to red-baiting right wingers who preferred to call themselves "conservatives"; in Britain, the term has mostly been picked up by its opponents, since it seems to tie together both the Conservative and Liberal parties, as well as describe where the "New Labour" party faction went so terribly wrong. Of course, the same ideas infected the Democratic Party, particularly through Carter's deregulation mania, Clinton's embrace of "free trade" deals and "small government," continuing through Obama (whose signature plans, like health care reform and a "cap-and-trade" greenhouse gas market were originally hatched in neoliberal "think tanks"). Still, I wonder if it isn't too pat to catalog every instance of self-serving capitalist greed and dignify it with an innocuous ideological label. Monbiot notes that neoliberal policy directives have failed so often their underlying theories have achieved zombie status, then complains that "The left has produced no new framework of economic thought for 80 years. This is why the zombie walks." The zombie walks because the rich have rigged the system. What we need isn't another framework; it's countervaling power.

    Much quotable here; this is just a sample:

    The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

    Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

    Monbiot has a new book, How Did We Get Into This Mess? (Verso). He also cites another interesting title, Andrew Sayer: Why We Can't Afford the Rich (Policy Press, paperback in May). Also links to Paul Verhaeghe: Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.

  • Michael Specter: Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America:

    It will surprise nobody to learn that life expectancy increases with income. Coming, however, in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which the corrosive effects of income inequality have been a principal debate topic, the data and its implications for public policy are particularly striking: the richest one per cent of American men live 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest one per cent. For women, the average difference is a just over ten years.

    The gap appears to be growing fast. The researchers, led by Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University, analyzed more than 1.4 billion federal tax returns, as well as mortality data from the Social Security Administration, from the years 2001 to 2014. In that period, the life expectancy of the richest five per cent of Americans increased by roughly three years. For the poorest five per cent, there was no increase.

  • DR Tucker: Ship of Fools: The fourth down of five straight rants about "Bernie or Bust"-ers ("who still insist that under no circumstances will they vote for the 'corporatist' Hillary Clinton if she defeats Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination"). After five paragraphs of imagining Trumpian hell, he concludes:

    The inconvenient truth is that the "Bernie or Bust" crowd is indistinguishable from right-wing fundamentalists in their loathing of compromise and their refusal to recognize that sometimes people can make bad decisions in good faith. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore are neither evil nor corrupt. Neither is Bernie Sanders, for that matter . . . but what does it say about those who only recognize morality in the latter, and malevolence in the former?

    First, he probably should have stopped at "evil" and not brought up "corrupt": if there's anything the Clintons have done consistently throughout their political careers, it's been to cozy up to moneyed interests -- be they Tyson and Walmart in Arkansas, or Goldman Sachs and Citibank in New York. Maybe it's legal for a company that was saved by billions of dollars of federal bailouts to pay you $650k for one little speech, but it's hard to say there's nothing corrupt about it. Second, are we really talking about compromises, or simply different goals? When the Clinton's concocted their health care scheme, were they backing off from a single-payer approach just enough to secure passage, or were they trying to pitch fat business opportunities to the insurance companies and HMOs? If you want an example of a compromise, take Sanders supporting Obama's ACA even though he clearly was aware of and wanted something better. I'm not saying that the Clintons don't compromise, let alone that they have no principles to compromise. But I do think it's fair to say that their principles and aims are very different from those of people who prefer Sanders. Probably very different from their own supporters too.

    It's pathetic that Tucker can't tell the difference between Sanders supporters and right-wing fundamentalists. Also that he doesn't recognize that most Sanders supporters aren't died-in-the-wool leftists. The least of Clinton's problems is that those "Bernie-or-bust"-ers will wind up voting for Jill Stein. Two much bigger problems are that Clinton won't campaign on anything that materially promises to help the lives of the voters who have been energized by Sanders' campaign and/or that she's already lost so much credibility that many people won't trust her. And again, her problem isn't with confirmed leftists, who are hypersensitive to the perils of fascism and accustomed to settling for "lesser evils." Her problem is the vast mass of Americans who can't tell the difference between the two parties, either because they're uninformed or because they're all too aware that changing the guard in Washington hasn't made any appreciable difference in their own lives.

    Worse still is Tucker's Running Up That Hill, where he urges the DNC to ban Sanders from speaking at the Democratic Convention:

    Why should Clinton genuflect to someone who a) explicitly said she doesn't have what it takes to be president, b) called for a primary challenge to the current Democratic President, and c) is not a Democrat?

    Speaking of concessions, a compelling case can be made that if Sanders suspends his campaign after losing badly in this Tuesday's New York Democratic primary, he should be excluded from speaking in any capacity at the Democratic convention. It would be rather divisive to give a prominent speaking position at that convention to someone who seems to believe that the Democratic Party has prostituted itself to economically powerful johns and contracted the social disease of "corporatism." If Sanders addressed the convention and repeated his campaign rhetoric, would he not offend convention attendees who regard certain elements of Sanders's shtick as a tone-deaf and tacky trashing of President Obama? [ . . . ] Those who are thinking dispassionately will not be offended by the exclusion of Sanders from the convention, and will understand the reasons why he wasn't invited to speak.

    Didn't the DNC try to suppress dissent (or do I mean democracy?) once before -- in 1968? As I recall, that didn't work out so well. A sane person would see the convention as an opportunity to bind the Party divided by the primaries back together, but Tucker seems to prefer laying waste to those who had challenged party orthodoxy, thereby exacerbating the split in the Party. I suppose he could point to Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican Convention in 1992 as an example where such a concession backfired. (If you recall that speech, it's probably because Molly Ivins allowed that "it probably sounded better in the original German.") Nonetheless, I can't imagine Sanders following suit -- especially after the votes are counted -- unless Clinton follows Tucker's advice and pushes him out. And if she's that thin-skinned, she's unprepared for the job ahead.

    PS: I wouldn't have read these pieces had they not appeared in the otherwise admirable Washington Monthly blog, which Tucker has totally hijacked for his rants. Please bring back Katherine Geier.

  • Corey Rubin: Magical Realism, and other neoliberal delusions: Among many other thoughts, this on the obsolescence of the DLC political style:

    Though I'm obviously pleased if Sanders beat Clinton in the debate, it's the other two victories that are most important to me. For those of us who are Sanders supporters, the issue has never really been Hillary Clinton but always the politics that she stands for. Even if Sanders ultimately loses the nomination, the fact that this may be the last one or two election cycles in which Clinton-style politics stands a chance: that for us is the real point of this whole thing.

    I'm always uncertain whether Clinton supporters have a comparable view. While there are some, like Jonathan Chait or Paul Starr, for whom that kind of politics is substantively attractive, and who will genuinely mourn its disappearance, most of Clinton's supporters seem to be more in synch with Sanders's politics. They say they like Bernie and agree with his politics; it's just not realistic, they say, to think that the American electorate will support that.

    Which makes these liberals' attraction to Clinton all the more puzzling. If it's all pure pragmatism for you -- despite your personal support for Bernie's positions, you think only her style of politics can win in the United States -- what are you going to do, the next election cycle, when there's no one, certainly no one of her talent or skills and level of organizational support, who's able to articulate that kind of politics?

  • Daniel Larson: The Libyan War and Obama's 'Worst Mistake': When asked one of those self-flagellating questions, Obama offered that his worst mistake was "Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya." I can think of several worse ones. One was not fixing the Bush tax cuts when he had the votes to do so right after the 2008 election. (Sure, I understand that he didn't do so because raising taxes in a recession would have seemed contractionary, and because he wanted to play up his bipartisanship, and because they were due to sunset in a few years anyway, but they would have cut into the swollen deficits that caused so much alarm, in turn leading to austerity cutbacks that really were contractionary. Moreover, he could have floated tax rebates to counter the increases short-term, so they would have been neutral or better while improving the long-term outlook.) Another was pretending that the US had succeeded in Iraq when his belated withdrawal was complete, which left him open to the charge that his withdrawal turned Bush's victory into the rise of ISIS. I could come up with a few dozen more before getting into Libya, where in retrospect the intervention has come to look like a worse decision than the aftermath. As Larson puts it:

    I don't think this was Obama's biggest mistake, but it is revealing that he remains convinced that this lack of post-Gaddafi planning is worse than the far greater error of intervening in Libya in the first place. As we saw last week, this has become the self-serving rallying cry of Libyan war supporters. The only error interventionists are capable of recognizing is that of doing "too little." They can't admit that the intervention itself is a mistake without fully acknowledging their bad judgment in supporting it. [ . . . ]

    Obama knew at the time that there was absolutely no political support in the U.S. or anywhere else for a prolonged mission in Libya. Promising not to start an open-ended mission in Libya is what made the war politically viable here at home. The public would tolerate bombing for eight months and then writing off the country, but there wouldn't be similar patience for a new occupation in yet another Muslim country with the costs and casualties that would likely entail.

    It was not an oversight by the intervening governments when they left Libya to its own devices. That was part of the plan, such as it was, from the very beginning. So it is hard to take Obama seriously when he faults himself for not committing the U.S. to a larger, costlier role in Libya when he and the other allied leaders deliberately decided against doing that. They made that decision because they wanted a low-risk intervention on the cheap, and they certainly weren't prepared to make a long-term commitment to police and rebuild Libya. But they were willing to help throw the country into chaos and to destabilize the surrounding region and declare victory when the regime change they supposedly weren't seeking had been achieved.

    One last point is that the US intervention didn't end when the bombing did. Obama may not have planned for the aftermath, but the CIA blundered in anyway, which is how that Benghazi! fiasco happened.

I want to close with a fairly long quote from Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (pp. 89-91):

[Bill] Clinton's wandering political identity fascinated both his admirers and biographers, many of whom chose to explain it as a quest: Bill Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. He had to grow into presidential maturity. And the way he had to do it was by somehow damaging or insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party's tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was really dead. Then we could be sure.

This became such a cherished idea among Clinton's campaign team that they had a catchphrase for it: "counter-scheduling." During the 1992 race, as though to compensate for his friend-of-the-little-guy economic theme, Clinton would confront and deliberately antagonize certain elements of the Democratic Party's traditional base in order to assure voters that "interest groups" would have no say in a New Democratic White House. As for those interest groups themselves, Clinton knew he could insult them with impunity. They had nowhere else to go, in the cherished logic of Democratic centralism.

The most famous target of Clinton's counter-scheduling strategy was the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, the bête noir of centrists and the living embodiment of the poilitics the Democratic Leadership Council had set out to extinguish. At a 1992 meeting of Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, with Jackson sitting to his left, Clinton went out of his way to criticize a controversial rapper called Sister Souljah who had addressed the conference on the previous day. The exact circumstances of Clinton's insult have long been forgotten, but the fact of it has gone down in the annals of politicking as a stroke of genius, an example of the sort of thing that New Democrats should always be doing in order to discipline their party's base.

Once Clinton was in the White House, counter-scheduling mutated from a campaign tactic to a philosophy of government. At a retreat in the administration's early days, Bill's chief political adviser, Hillary Clinton, instructed White House officials how it was going to be done. As Carl Bernstein describes the scene, Hillary announced that the public must be made to understand that Bill was taking them on a "journey" and that he had a "vision" for what the administration was doing, a "story" that distinguished good from evil. The way to dramatize this story, the first lady continued (in Bernstein's telling), was to pick a fight with supporters.

You show people what you're willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends -- by which, in this context, she clearly meant, When you make them your enemy.

NAFTA would become the first great test of this theory of the presidency, with Clinton defying not only organized labor but much of his own party in Congress. In one sense, it achieved the desired results. For New Democrats and for much of the press, NAFTA was Clinton's "finest hour," his "boldest action," an act befitting a real he-man of a president who showed he could stand up to labor and thereby assure the world that he was not a captive of traditional Democratic interests.

But there was also an important difference. NAFTA was not symbolism. With this deed, Clinton was not merely insulting an important constituency, as he had done with Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah. With NAFTA he connived in that constituency's ruin. He assisted in the destruction of its economic power. He did his part to undermine his party's greatest ally, to ensure that labor would be too weak to organize workers from that point forward. Clinton made the problems of working people materially worse.

One effect of Clinton's NAFTA push was that the unions were unable to muster effective support for Clinton's signature health care bill. Then in 1994 the Republicans gained control of Congress and Clinton never again had to worry about the Democrats pushing some progressive reform through Congress. And by crippling the unions, Clinton was able to consolidate his control of the Democratic Party machine, something which kept Democrats weak in Congress (except for 2006-2010, when Howard Dean was Party Chairman) and set up Hillary's campaigns in 2008 and this year. (Sure, Obama beat Hillary in 2008, but welcomed her people into his team, got rid of Dean, and restored presidential crony control of the Party machinery, making Hillary a shoe-in this year -- at least until the rank-and-file weighed in.)

The bottom line here is that most people's interests should align with the Democrats -- they damn sure don't line up with the Republicans -- yet the Democrats don't get their votes, because party leaders like the Clintons, despite whatever they may promise during a campaign, cannot be trusted to support them.

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Sunday, April 3, 2016

Weekend Roundup

Started to work on this, then got so waylaid by allergies my brain froze up. Of course, trying to write about whether Trump is a fascist is a question that begs so much backtracking it's easy to get lost.

Worth noting here that the Wisconsin primary is Tuesday. Cruz has long been favored over Trump and Kasich: the latest 538 poll averages are 44.1-32.1-21.4%, and since it's mostly winner-take-all Trump is likely to fall short of the delegate count to stay on track for a first ballot win -- so expect some pundit talk about Trump stumbling, but Trump is a lock for a big win in New York on April 19, and has a good chance of scoring his first greater than 50% win there (538's poll average is 52.1-24.0-21.8%, with Cruz second and Kasich third).

More interesting is the Democratic primary, which 538 still gives to Clinton, but the poll averages have narrowed to 48.8-48.6%, with Sanders leading in five of the seven most recent polls. At this point I expect Sanders to win there, but it won't be a landslide. 538 is still showing Clinton with a huge lead in New York, 61.0-37.0%, but the last two polls there have Clinton +12 and +10, a far cry from the 71-23% outlier 538 still factors in. Clinton also has big leads in the other April primaries (65.9-30.5% in Pennsylvania, 70.6-27.0% in Maryland); also in California and New Jersey on June 7.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Steve Coll: Global Trump:

    Trumpism is a posture, not a coherent platform. [ . . . ]

    Trump hasn't indicated that he would definitely pull out of treaty commitments to Europe and Asia. He seems to think that his threats and his pleas of poverty will soften up allies so that, once in the White House, he can close some of those great deals he often talks about. For "many, many years," he told the Times, the U.S. has been the "big stupid bully and we were systematically ripped off by everybody," providing military security without adequate compensation.

    Like a hammer viewing everything as a nail, Trump desperately wants to reconceive foreign relations as something that can be fixed by a flamboyant and shrewd deal maker -- i.e., by himself. He reminds me of a guy who was brought in to become CEO of a troubled company I used to work for. The company had racked up massive losses over several quarters, staving off bankruptcy only because they had sold a lot of bonds a few years earlier -- they didn't need the bonds but sold them "because they could" and just sat on the cash until they burned it all up. Anyhow, this new CEO (I don't even remember the name now) had the huge ego you get in jobs like that, so the first thing I decided to do was to renegotiate all of the company's supplier contracts, just because he figured he was a better negotiator than his predecessor. Turned out that he never successfully renegotiated a thing: all he did was piss off suppliers the company was already in arrears to, companies that no longer saw us as viable long-term customers. America isn't in as bad shape as my company was, but if Trump follows through and tries to shake down traditional allies, he's not likely to net much other than bad will. (Japan, for instance, pays us for defense because it's a pittance compared to our trade deficits. Maybe they'll pay a bit more, but the US market isn't what it used to be, nor is the US commitment to defend them.)

    Coll has a pretty rosy view of American military spending abroad -- surprising for someone who's mostly covered the Middle East for the last twenty-some years:

    Trump also argues that reduced defense spending abroad would free up funds for investment at home. We do need to rebuild bridges, airports, railways, and telecommunications. But defense spending isn't stopping us from doing so; the problem is the Republican anti-tax extremists in Congress, who refuse to either raise revenues or take advantage of historically low long-term interest rates. In all probability, the U.S. can afford its global-defense commitments indefinitely, and an open economy, renewed by immigration and innovation, should be able to continue to grow and to share the cost of securing free societies. The main obstacle to realizing this goal is not an exhausted imperial treasury. It is the collapse of the once-internationalist Republican Party into demagoguery, paralysis, and Trumpism.

    That, of course, is pretty much the Clinton position, one that argues that America is still great, has never been anything else. Such platitudes are baked into the Belt Area foreign/security policy professional class. They even seep into Stephen M Walt: No, @realDonaldTrump Is Not a Realist.

  • Tierney Sneed: How Trump Ticked Off Anti-Abortion Groups by Trying to Prove His Creed: So Trump commits this gaffe, realizes his error (or more likely has it pointed out to him), and walks it back within hours.

    For months, the major concern the anti-abortion movement had with Donald Trump was that he was too wobbly on the issue. But on Wednesday, Trump staked out an abortion position so extreme that he blew up years of abortion foes' careful messaging.

    Trump's remark at an MSNBC town hall that an abortion ban should carry a punishment for women who seek out the procedure sent anti-abortion activists immediately scrambling to correct the damage.

    "Mr. Trump's comment today is completely out of touch with the pro-life movement and even more with women who have chosen such a sad thing as abortion," Jeanne Mancini, the president of March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said in a statement rushed out about an hour after Trump's remarks were first broadcast. "No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion. This is against the very nature of what we are about."

    In practical terms this should be treated as a wash -- like a muons which appears in a high-energy burst then vanishes within microseconds -- except that I think it shows two things:

    1. Trump understands the logic of the anti-abortion movement, which is about little more than punishing women (for sexual licentiousness, or getting raped, or just being poor), much as he understands punishment as the essential means of disciplining errant children and other rabble. No doubt being a major league misogynist helped Trump on this score.
    2. The much alleged "political correctness" police on the left are pikers compared to those who dictate orthodoxy on the right: the latter turned Trump around in hours, whereas Trump held firm on his assertions that "Mexicans are rapists" and his embrace of support from the KKK and outright Fascists. Sure, one might argue that this proves that the offenses he held firm on reflected deeply held beliefs, whereas his anti-abortion stance was never more than pure political opportunism. But I doubt he has any bedrock beliefs beyond his obsessions with the media spotlight and making money off that.

    Also see Here's How a Republican Is Supposed to Answer That Abortion Question Trump Flubbed, which shows how Ted Cruz handled the same question. The summary:

    See, Donald? That's how you do it. When someone asks you about abortion penalties after the overturn of Roe, here's what you do:

    You attack the questioner.

    You attack the media.

    You attack Barack Obama.

    You tell them what a swell pro-life person you are.

    You do everything except answer the question.

  • Olivia Ward: Is Donald Trump actually a fascist? I'll add that leftists like myself are hypersensitive to fascist airs, and apply the label broadly to any right-winger who threatens violence, glories in empire, and/or seeks to reverse liberal progress (which they often decry as decadence and decay). Trump loosely qualifies, but so does Cruz and Kasich and most Republican activists, especially anyone who thinks America enjoyed a golden age under Calvin Coolidge or William McKinley (or Jefferson Davis). What makes Trump seem exceptional is the way he draws the sort of people who historically have supported fascism: racists, xenophobes, ultra-nationalists, those who want to use state power to enforce religious morality, those who hate unions, those who are contemptous of democracy (and other people), those who are prone to violence and hung up on patriarchy, those who feel the need to follow a charismatic and forceful leader. So it's not so much that Trump started out as a fascist as that by style and temperament he's been anointed as the Führer of the fascists, a role he hasn't shirked.

  • Susan Sarandon Lives in a Very Small World: A not-very-smart critique of the "scandal" caused when Sarandon said that some Sanders supporters won't vote for Clinton against Trump, and that her own view was "I don't know. I'm going to see what happens." I wrote more about this piece then tore it up. Two points are that Sanders' popularity shows that there is much more quasi-left in America than anyone gave us credit for, and that transitioning from voting for one candidate who wants changes you want to another one who wants to defend the status quo (or somewhat mitigate the damage the goons on the other side are plotting) isn't likely to be smooth or automatic: perhaps if Clinton wins the nomination she should campaign for Sanders' supporters instead of veering to the right so to come off as slightly saner than Trump or Cruz, assuming everyone else will fall in line. At any rate, it's premature to worry about Sanders' supporters breaking ranks. As for the ad hominem attacks about Sarandon "living in a very small world," I think her political engagement is admirable and far-sighted, showing much more awareness of other people than is common in her tax bracket.

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    Saturday, March 26, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    We finally got around to seeing the movie Spotlight (A-) on Wednesday afternoon. When we came out of the theatre in west Wichita, the sky to the west was extremely dark but mostly featureless, and the wind was blowing hard from the south. Looked very ominous, but not like the squall lines and thunderstorms we're used to seeing. Turns out that what we were seeing was smoke from wildfires to our southwest: at the time, about 72,000 acres had burned from the Oklahoma border to near Medicine Lodge, and there were two smaller fires to the northwest in Reno and Harvey counties. The next day the wind turned around to the north, which cleared the smoke from Wichita but expanded the wildfire to more than 400,000 acres (625 square miles). Here's a report on Anderson Creek fire in Oklahoma and Kansas. The fire is still burning as I write this, although reports are that it is no longer expanding.

    Winters are typically dry in south-central Kansas, and high winds are common, so this is the prime season for grass fires. (A large chunk of south-central Kansas was subject of a red flag warning back on February 8.) Still, this year has been dryer than normal, and much warmer, which set the stage for what is already the largest wildfire in Kansas history. The area is very sparsely populated, the farms more used to pasture cattle than to grow wheat. No cause has been determined (although we can rule out lightning). I've seen lots of reports about cattle (and deer) but nothing yet about oil wells, which are fairly common in the most heavily fracked (and recently most earthquake-prone) part of the state. (Most wells collect oil in adjacent tanks, so I'd be surprised if a few didn't contribute to the fire.)

    I also ran across this report on a 160-acre fire near Salina caused by gun nuts shooting at exploding targets:

    Exploding targets consist of two ingredients that when mixed by the end user create an explosive when shot by a high-velocity projectile. They have caused many fires since they became more popular in recent years, have been banned in some areas, and caused the death of one person. In June, 2013 a man attending a bachelor-bachelorette party in Minnesota was killed after shrapnel from the device struck him in the abdomen causing his death. The Missoulian reported that two years ago a woman in Ohio had her hand nearly blown off while taking a cellphone video of a man firing at an exploding target placed in a refrigerator about 150 feet away.

    You'd think that natural selection would start to limit this kind of stupidity, and evidently it works very slow.

    Meanwhile, Governor Brownback declared two counties to be disaster areas. That leaves him 103 counties short, but if he declared disasters everywhere he has caused them he'd have to commit to fixing some of the problems he's caused. That would cost money, and require that someone in power care, so no chance of that.

    Bernie Sanders won all three Democratic caucuses on Saturday, by landslides, with 69.8% in Hawaii, 72.7% in Washington, and 81.6% in Alaska. When Kansas voted back on March 5, Sanders' 67.7% share here was his second largest total (after Vermont), but he has since done better in Idaho (78.0%), Utah (79.3%), and yesterday's trio. Next up is Wisconsin on April 5, Wyoming on April 9, and New York on April 19. 538's polling average favors Clinton in Wisconsin 55.6-42.1%, and much more dubious polling has Clinton ahead in New York 67.4-24.3% (only one poll in March, a 71-23% outlier; three previous polls had Clinton +21, going back to September). Nothing on Wyoming, but Sanders has won four (of four) abutting states (Montana and South Dakota haven't voted yet).

    If you care about such things, Cruz is heavily favored to win Wisconsin (polling average 42.8-32.2-22.4%, Trump ahead of Kasich), while Trump is ahead in New York (limited polling: 58.8-11.6-2.8%, which would give him his first majority win, but Kasich's share strikes me as way low). The Republicans have already done Wyoming, with Cruz winning.

    Not much time for this, but some quick scattered links this week:

    • Franklin Foer: Donald Trump Hates Women: E.g.:

      Humiliating women by decrying their ugliness is an almost recreational pastime for Trump. When the New York Times columnist Gail Collins described him as a "financially embittered thousandaire," he sent her a copy of the column with her picture circled. "The Face of a Dog!" he scrawled over her visage. This is the tack he took with Carly Fiorina, when he described her facial appearance as essentially disqualifying her from the presidency. It's the method he's used to denounce Cher, Bette Midler, Angelina Jolie, and Rosie O'Donnell -- "fat ass," "slob," "extremely unattractive," etc. -- when they had the temerity to criticize him. The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O'Brien, "My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: 'Bitch be cool.' I love those lines." Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early '90s, "Women, you have to treat them like shit."

      Also see: Nancy LeTourneau: The Nexus of Trump's Racism/Sexism: Dominance. She quotes Foer and various others, including Rebecca Traister, whose summed up her reflections on Trump (and Cruz) as The Election and the Death Throes of White Male Power. While I don't disagree with the general point, pieces like this tempt me to point out that Trumpism isn't the only common response to economic and/or social decline by whites (even males). Said group also makes up a substantial slice of support for Bernie Sanders' campaign -- and I doubt that any white males who've backed Sanders have done so expecting him to restore lost white/male privileges, or to deny the benefits he's campaigned for to blacks, Latinos, and/or women.

      Meanwhile, I suppose this is where I should file links like Mary Elizabeth Williams: Donald Trump despises women: Mocking Heidi Cruz's looks is a new low in this grotesque sausage-waving campaign and Gary Legum: Trump vs. Cruz: How the National Enquirer became a battleground in the GOP primary

    • David Kurtz: What Just Happened in North Carolina?: Quotes a reader, who was more on the ball than TPM:

      In a span of 12 hours, the GOP political leadership of this state [North Carolina] called the General Assembly back to Raleigh for a special session, introduced legislation written by leadership and not previously made available to members or the public, held "hearings" on that legislation, passed it through both chambers of the legislature, and it was signed by the GOP Governor.

      The special legislation was called, ostensibly, to prevent an ordinance passed last month by the Charlotte City Council, from going into effect on April 1. That ordinance would have expanded the city's LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance, and would have allowed transgendered people to use public restrooms that corresponds with their gender identity.

      But the legislation introduced and passed into law by the General Assembly yesterday didn't simply roll back that ordinance. It implemented a detailed state-wide regulation of public restrooms, and limited a person's use of those restrooms to only those restrooms that correspond with one's "biological sex," defined in the new state law as the sex identified on one's birth certificate. [ . . . ]

      But wait, there's more. The legislation also expressly states that there can be no statutory or common law private right of action to enforce the state's anti-discrimination statutes in the state courts. So if a NC resident is the victim of racial discrimination in housing or employment, for example, that person is now entirely barred from going to state court to get an injunction, or to get damages of any kind. The new law completely defangs the state's anti-discrimination statute, rendering it entirely unenforceable by the citizens of the state.

      For more, see Caitlin MacNeal: NC's Sweeping Anti-Gay Law Goes Way Beyond Targeting LGBTs. The US prides itself on a unique system of "checks and balances," but this is the clearest example yet of what can happen when voters cede complete political control to one party, at least if that party is of one mind -- in North Carolina that would be Art Pope, who personally spent millions electing that legislative majority and governor. (Of course, it's still possible that the courts will throw this law out, but the Republicans are working that angle too.) Also note two key things: the speed, intended to produce a fait accompli before there could be any public discussion let alone organized opposition; also how the bill's used the "emergency" to push through extra measures that most likely couldn't have stood on their own.

      Also in the captured red state category: Amanda Marcotte: Mike Pence's sadistic abortion law: Indiana passes draconian anti-choice bill geared towards humiliating and bankrupting women who have abortions.

    • Caitlin MacNeal: AIPAC Denounces Trump Criticism of Obama's Relationship With Israel: Trump's actual speech to AIPAC contained nothing but red meat for Israel's bloodthirsty right wing, yet somehow he managed to offend at least one important faction in the lobby's leadership -- perhaps the one that realizes that Obama is still president, and that while he hasn't been the perfect lackey of their dreams, he has still treated pretty generously. AIPAC's annual conference provided an opportunity for all aspiring American politicians to show their colors and salute the flag of the Jewish State. And once again pretty much everyone played their assigned role as expected -- indeed, Hillary Clinton was second to none in her obsequiousness, which may be why she has a fair number of AIPAC's high rollers backing her. I doubt that they really minded what Trump said in his speech -- I heard the thing, and he certainly didn't lack for applause -- so their worries have more to do with what he's said elsewhere. And even there it's probably not so much that he's promised to be a "neutral" peacemaker (hard to take that seriously) or that he doesn't think the US should spend so much on military aid to the 4th (or 5th) largest military power on earth (more possible, but still not likely) as in his slogan about "making America great again" -- as opposed to being a big country in thrall to its little "ally."

      Some other AIPAC-related links:

      You can also Read the speech Bernie Sanders planned to give to AIPAC. Doesn't go nearly as far as I'd like, but wouldn't have gone over well at AIPAC (see the link above). Also see: Richard Silverstein: Bernie Finally Addresses Israel-Palestine.

    • Eamon Murphy: 'Do we get to win this time?': Trump foreign policy appeal based on revenge for Iraq War failure: The notion that the American military's persistent failure to win wars -- in the sense of achieving initial intentions; I'm more inclined to argue that all sides in war invariably lose, so the concept of winning is excluded by definition -- is caused by civilian leaders holding the soldiers back is America's own peculiar version of the Dolchstoßlegende (the stab-in-the-back myth). Trump's embrace of this theory is one more thing he shares with past generations of fascists, a minor one unless his own ego is so huge that he thinks his leadership genius will turn the tide.

      Though the public may feel burned by what was undeniably a wasteful war launched on trumped-up pretexts, withdrawal is always unacceptable, on patriotic grounds -- a sentiment at least as old as the overseas U.S. empire. ("American valor has easily triumphed in both sea and land," declared Senator David Hill, an advocate of annexing the Philippines, in 1898, "and the American flag floats over newly acquired territory -- never, as it is fondly hoped, to be lowered again.") The advent of ISIS compounded this problem, mocking official claims that American arms had achieved some measure of progress in Iraq. The resultant agony was epitomized by a January 2014 New York Times story, "Falluja's Fall Stuns Marines Who Fought There": completely ignoring Iraqi suffering, the reporter rendered vividly the anguish of veterans at the city's takeover by Sunni insurgents, which left them "transfixed, disbelieving and appalled," and was "a gut punch to the morale of the Marine Corps and painful for a lot of families who are saying, 'I thought my son died for a reason.'"

      So what is to be done? If invading Iraq was a costly mistake, how can we keep fighting there? But if we paid so dearly for it, how can we not?

    • Richard Silverstein: Identities of IDF Soldier Who Executed Unarmed Palestinian -- and His Commanding Officer -- Exposed: You've probably read about stabbing incidents in Israel/Palestine, where typically Jewish victims receive light injuries, often treated at the scene, and Palestinian assailants are usually shot dead. You may be expected to think that the shooting was necessary to disarm fanatic knife-wielders, but this is a case where the Palestinian was executed after being disarmed, and this case is not unique or all that exceptional (aside from the video).

      The shooter later told investigators that he shot a-Sharif because he was "moving," and was afraid he would detonate a suicide vest. The victim is seen clearly on the video and he has no suicide vest. Nor does his Shapira seem to sense danger as he stands near the wounded man speaking on the telephone.

      Let no one think of this is a one-off aberration. Palestinians are executed in the same fashion virtually every day. Nor are these summary executions a product of Israeli policy over the past few months alone. Such murders go all the way back to the 2002 incident I described above. The murderers are rewarded for their callousness as Levy has been, by being a respected member of the Knesset.

    • Stephen M Walt: Monsters of Our Own Imaginings: A big news story last week was the terror bombing in Brussels, which unlike other big bombings last week (e.g., in Baghdad and Lahore) was meant to scare us and/or was used to promote further reinforcement of the war against ISIS (see More US Combat Troops Headed to Iraq Soon -- no, we don't get any say in the matter; how could we when Brussels is on TV 24/7?). Walt says, sure, this is a serious problem, but let's not get hysterical, and offers four key points. The fourth is the most important: "Terrorists cannot deeat us; we can only defeat ourselves."

      The bottom line: Terrorism is not really the problem; the problem is how we respond to it. My first thought when I heard the news from Brussels, I'm sorry to say, was "Brexit," meaning my worry that this act of violence might irrationally bolster support for the United Kingdom leaving the EU, thereby dealing that already-struggling experiment another body blow. It might also boost the political fortunes of xenophobes in other Western countries, further poisoning the political climate in Europe. It is also worth noting that presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have already offered up idiotic proposals of their own (such as Cruz's call for stepped-up police patrols in Muslim neighborhoods in the United States), steps that would give the Islamic State a new propaganda victory. But these developments would be entirely our own doing, and we have no one to blame but ourselves if we try to fight extremism by abandoning our own values and becoming more like them.

      Does anyone really fail to understand that Brussels was attacked because it's the headquarters of NATO and NATO is engaged in killing Muslims in a broad swath from Afghanistan to Libya but especially in the parts of Iraq and Syria ISIS is trying to govern? But who actually says that? Hardly anyone, because doing so would imply that the most effective way to safeguard Europe and America against terrorism would be to withdraw from the fruitless wars the US and Europe (and proxies like the Saudis who epitomize "Islamic extremism") have been waging. Walt prays for leaders who understand the "value the calm resolution in the face of danger or adversity" without noting that (a) that's a fair description of Barack Obama, and (b) Obama still hasn't managed to end the wars his predecessors started. Granted, replacing Obama with Trump or Cruz could result in even more counterproductive acts -- their proposals to "police Muslim neighborhoods" (are there any?) and otherwise harass Muslims seem deliberately designed to radicalize US Muslims, even worse than their reckless escalation abroad.

      Walt's exemplars are WWII heroes -- he even asks "what would Churchill say?" which is like asking the proverbial stopped clock for the time -- but his list includes one name who did successfully face a colonial quagmire not unlike the present situation: Charles DeGaulle, who stood up to enormous pressure and withdrew French forces from Algeria.

      Also see: Tom Engelhardt: Don't Blame It All on Donald Trump, or "Entering Uncharted Territory in Washington," which points out how far "grown ups" like Obama have already veered toward creating a world where terrorism will long be a fact of life. Engelhardt cites a news story from the last week or two (I forget exactly), when the US "killed 150 more or less nobodies (except to those who knew them) and maybe even a top leader or two in a country most Americans couldn't locate on a map" (Somalia):

      The essential explanation offered for the Somali strike, for instance, is that the U.S. had a small set of advisers stationed with African Union forces in that country and it was just faintly possible that those guerrilla graduates might soon prepare to attack some of those forces (and hence U.S. military personnel). It seems that if the U.S. puts advisers in place anywhere on the planet -- and any day of any year they are now in scores of countries -- that's excuse enough to validate acts of war based on the "imminent" threat of their attack. [ . . . ]

      When was it, by the way, that "the people" agreed that the president could appoint himself assassin-in-chief, muster his legal beagles to write new "law" that covered any future acts of his (including the killing of American citizens), and year after year dispatch what essentially is his own private fleet of killer drones to knock off thousands of people across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa? Weirdly enough, after almost 14 years of this sort of behavior, with ample evidence that such strikes don't suppress the movements Washington loathes (and often only fan the flames of resentment and revenge that help them spread), neither the current president and his top officials, nor any of the candidates for his office have the slightest intention of ever grounding those drones.

      And when exactly did the people say that, within the country's vast standing military, which now garrisons much of the planet, a force of nearly 70,000 Special Operations personnel should be birthed, or that it should conduct covert missions globally, essentially accountable only to the president (if him)? And what I find strangest of all is that few in our world find such developments strange at all.

    • Brief links:

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    Sunday, March 13, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    Not much time for my usual weekly survey, but I did find a few pieces on the Donald Trump/Fascism axis, and for your convenience I've added a bit of forecasting for Tuesday's elections at the bottom.

    • Josh Marshall: Someone Will Die: Reflecting on recent incidents at Trump rallies, violent and merely threatening or maybe just disruptive:

      For all the talk about Mussolini, let alone Hitler, George Wallace is the best analog in the last century of American politics -- the mix of class politics and racist incitement, the same sort of orchestrated ratcheting up of conflict between supporters and protestors. As all of this has unfolded over the course of the day there have been numerous instances of Trump supporters calling for protestors to "go back to Africa" and another on video calling on them to "go to fucking Auschwitz."

      Is the man invoking Nazi concentration camps in that video an anti-Semite or just a ramped hater in a frenzy of provocation? I'm not sure we know. And as I'll argue in a moment, in a climate of incitement and crowd action, it doesn't necessarily matter.

      It may sound like hyperbole. But this is the kind of climate of agitation and violence where someone will end up getting severely injured or killed. I do not say that lightly.

      Actually, more than Wallace this reminds me of the Rolling Stones at Altamont, hiring Hell's Angels for "security" then playing "Sympathy for the Devil" as they killed a fan. That's the sort of thing that happens when a cavalier attitude toward violence makes it cool.

      I'll add that I don't particularly approve of protesting at Trump events. That's partly because I don't regard him as in any way unique in the Republican Party today -- he's certainly not the "worst of the worst" policy-wise, although he does seem to be the most careless and cavalier regarding the racist violence they all more or less pander to. I do understand that the people who protest Trump are concerned to nip his attitude in the bud, and to make it clear that his kind of incivility will always be challenged in America today -- although I also think it's hard to make that point in the heat of a rally. But also I think there's a fuzzy line where protest becomes harrassment -- indeed, I think anti-abortion activists often cross that line -- and I worry it might backfire. Marshall concludes:

      The climate Trump is creating at his events is one that not only disinhibits people who normally act within acceptable societal norms. He is drawing in, like moths to a flame, those who most want to act out on their animosities, drives and beliefs. It is the kind of climate where someone will eventually get killed.

      I'm reminded that one of the defining characteristics of fascism is how readily, in the very early days in Italy and Germany, fascists resorted to violence against people they regarded as enemies (which is to say pretty much everyone).

    • David Atkins: Donald Trump is Merely the Symptom. The Republican Party Itself is the Disease: We on the left have long had an acute sense of the smell of fascism -- possibly the most basic definition is that fascists are the people who want to kill you, so we're talking less about political theory than existential anxiety. It's long been clear to me that there are elements of fascism in the American right, but I've been more focused on the anti-democratic manipulations of the elites than on the swelling tide of hatred they've stirred up. Still, interesting to read this:

      We no longer have to speculate whether fascism, in Sinclair Lewis' famous words, would come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. We already know what its beginnings look like in the form of Trump rallies, which are carrying an increasingly violent, overtly racist, authoritarian aura strongly reminiscent of the 1930s in Germany or Italy.

      Those comparisons were once the province of liberal activists or traffic-seeking headline writers. No longer. The incipient racist violence has reached such a fever pitch that a Trump rally in Chicago had to be canceled entirely. It's one thing to talk in theoretical or strictly political terms about Trump's authoritarian behavior, his effect on the Republican Party generally or the potential feasibility of Trump's policy proposals. But the influence of Trumpism on the country is already so obviously toxic and dangerous that it must be called out and mitigated before people start getting seriously hurt or killed.

      That's not the fault of Donald Trump. It's the fault of the GOP itself, for three main reasons.

      First, the Republican Party abandoned the notion of shared truths and shared reality. They set up an alternative media empire and convinced their voters that every set of authorities from journalists to scientists were eggheaded liberals not to be trusted. They peddled conspiracy theories and contrafactual dogmas of all stripes -- from the notion that climate scientists were all lying about global warming in order to get more grant money, to the notion that tax cuts for the rich grow the economy and pay for themselves. Their base became convinced that no one could be trusted except for the loudest and angriest voices who told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Fox News, talk radio and the Drudge Report became the only trusted media sources. But at a certain point those outlets stopped becoming the media arm of the Republican Party; instead, the Republican Party became the legislative arm of those media outlets. It should come as no surprise that when the Republican establishment seemed unable to deliver on its promises to their voters, conspiracy theory peddlers new and old from Breitbart to Drudge would turn on the establishment and convince the GOP masses that Fox News was the new CNN, just another liberal arm of the media not to be trusted.

      Second is, of course, the Southern Strategy of exploiting racial resentment. That worked just fine for Republicans while whites were the dominant majority under no particular threat. It was a great way to win elections in much of the country while discounting voters who couldn't do them much damage. As long as the rhetoric remained, in Lee Atwater's words, "abstract" enough, the tensions created wouldn't boil over into anything much more damaging than the slow, quiet destruction of generations of minority communities via legislatively enforced instituional racism. But as whites have become a smaller and smaller part of the electorate, that Southern Strategy has not only cost the GOP elections by throwing away the minority vote; it has also heightened the fears and tensions of the formerly dominant white voters it courts. What was once quiet and comfortable racism has become a loud and violent cry of angst. That, again, isn't Donald Trump's fault. It's the Republican Party's.

      Third and most important is the effect of conservative economics. For decades laissez-faire objectivism has hurt mostly the poorest and least educated communities in America. Due mostly to institutional racism, those have tended in the past to be communities of color. The deregulated economy simply didn't need their labor so it tossed them aside, leaving squalor and a host of social problems in its wake. This was convenient for those peddling racist theories, as it laid the blame for drug and family problems in those communities directly on the individuals involved -- and by extension on their racial background.

      I would phrase these last two points slightly differently. Republicans not only swept up white southerners who had grown up as the supposedly top dogs in a racially segregated society. They also appealed to new suburbanites in the north, again white, many Catholic, many moving up the economic ladder, hoping (among other things) to escape what they viewed as the decay of the (increasingly black) central cities. These were the so-called Reagan Democrats, and they were recruited through ploys as tinged with racism as the Southern Strategy.

      I would also point out that Republican economic orthodoxy did more to destroy the middle class than it did to pillage the already poor. They used a two-prong strategy to slide their agenda past an unwary and somewhat oblivious base: on the one hand, they convinced their target voters that the were only for those other people and that real Americans like themselves didn't need to be propped up by the government -- indeed, they made it a point of pride that they weren't; on the other, they made it possible for their audience to live beyond their means by offering credit so things like education and housing, previously "affordable" thanks to government programs, could still be had. They realized that most people don't recognize a declining standard of living until it smacks them in the face, and even then they assured you that your misfortune was you own damn fault -- not something government could (let alone should) help you out with.

      Tuned up a bit, this is pretty accurate, but still missing a key fourth point: war. You may think that war's good for "absolutely nothing," but it's proven very useful for Republicans. For one thing it creates a false unity of us-against-them, which they can exploit with God-and-country shtick; it undermines democracy, which they fear and dread anyway; more importantly, it debases the value of human life, elevating killing to a patriotic act, and tempting us to think that the solution to all our problems is to kill supposed enemies; needless to add, it also opens up incredible opportunities for graft; it forestalls any pressure to collaboratively work on worldwide problems, to shift from competition to cooperation. It also turns out that it's been pretty easy to sucker Democrats into supporting war, which both saddles them with insupportable costs and alienates them from their base.

    • Michael Tomasky: The Dangerous Election: Written before "Super Tuesday" this has some details that have been overtaken by events -- one certainly wouldn't write about Rubio's nomination path today -- but it's worth quoting his own three-item explanation for Trump's domination of the Republican Party (it is both more succinct and more narrowly political than Atkins'):

      The fury that led to Trump's rise has three main sources. It begins with talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh, and all the conservative media -- Fox News and, now, numerous blogs and websites and even hotly followed Twitter and Instagram feeds -- that have for years served up a steady series of stories aimed at riling up conservatives. It has produced a campaign politics that is by now almost wholly one of splenetic affect and gesture. If you've watched any of the debates, you've seen it. The lines that get by far the biggest applause rarely have anything to do with any vision for the country save military strength and victory; they are execrations against what Barack Obama has done to America and what Hillary Clinton plans to do to it.

      A second important factor has been the post-Citizens United elevation of megarich donors like the Koch brothers and Las Vegas's Sheldon Adelson to the level of virtual party king-makers. The Kochs downplay the extent of their political spending, but whether it's $250 million or much more than that, it's an enormous sum, and they and Adelson and the others exist almost as a third political party.

      When one family and its allies control that much money, and those running want it spent supporting them (although Trump has matched them), what candidate is going to take a position counter to that family and the network of which it is a part? The Kochs are known, for example, to be implacably opposed to any recognition that man-made climate change is a real danger. So no Republican candidate will buck that. [ . . . ]

      This fear of losing a primary from the right is the third factor that has created today's GOP, and it is frequently overlooked in the political media. [ . . . ]

      Few Americans understand just how central this reality is to our current dysfunction. All the pressure Republicans feel is from the right, although they seldom say so -- no Republican fears a challenge from the center, because there are few voters and no money there. And this phenomenon has no antipode on the Democratic side, because there exists no effective group of left-wing multimillionaires willing to finance primary campaigns against Democrats who depart from doctrine. Very few Democrats have to worry about such challenges. Republicans everywhere do.

      This creates an ethos of purity whose impact on the presidential race is obvious. The clearest example concerns Rubio and his position on immigration. He supported the bipartisan bill the Senate passed in 2013. He obviously did so because he calculated that the bill would pass both houses and he would be seen as a great leader. But the base rebelled against it, and so now Rubio has reversed himself on the question of a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens and taken a number of other positions that are designed to mollify the base but would surely be hard to explain away in a general election were he to become the nominee -- no rape and incest exceptions on abortion, abolition of the federal minimum wage, and more.

    • Bob Dreyfuss: Will the Donald Rally the Militias and the Right-to-Carry Movement?: OK, that makes three straight pieces on Donald Trump and fascism, a subject we'll have to call "trending." This one consults Richard J Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich -- premature antifascist that I am, that occurred to me more than a decade ago, but I have to admit I never got around to reading the book:

      If you decide to read the book, try doing what I did: in two columns in your head draw up a list of similarities and differences between the United States today and Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.

      In this edgy moment in America, the similarities, of course, tend to jump out at you. As Trump repeatedly pledges to restore American greatness, so Hitler promised to avenge Germany's humiliation in World War I. As Trump urges his followers, especially the white working class, to blame their troubles on Mexican immigrants and Muslims, so Hitler whipped up an anti-Semitic brew. As Trump -- ironically, for a billionaire -- attacks Wall Street and corporate lobbyists for rigging the economy and making puppets out of politicians, so Hitler railed against Wall Street and the City of London, along with their local allies in Germany, for burdening his country with a massive post-World War I, Versailles Treaty-imposed reparations debt and for backing the Weimar Republic's feckless center-right parties. (Think: the Republican Party today.) As with Trump's China-bashing comments and his threats to murder the relatives of Islamist terrorists while taking over Iraq's oil reserves, Hitler too appealed to an atavistic, reckless sort of ultra-nationalism.

      He finds some differences too, but expects American fascism to be uniquely American.

    • Corey Robin: This is why the right hates Donald Trump: He doesn't question their core beliefs, but they still see the danger:

      Trump hasn't dared touch a lot of the orthodoxy of the right, including its penchant for tax cuts, which is the keystone of the conservative counterrevolution, as everyone from Howard Jarvis to George W. Bush understood. But without the fear of the left -- listening to the Republican debates, you'd never know the candidates were even concerned about their opposition, so focused is their fratricidal gaze -- Trump is free to indulge the more luxurious hostilities of the right.

      And this, in the end, may be why Trump is so dangerous. Without the left, no one has any idea when his animus will take flight and where it will land. While counterrevolutionaries have always made established elites nervous, those elites could be assured that the wild Quixotism of a Burke or a Pat Buchanan would serve their cause. As today's Republicans and their allies in the media have made clear, they have no idea if Trump won't turn on them, too. Like Joe McCarthy in his senescence, Trump might try to gut the GOP. At least McCarthy had a real left to battle; Trump doesn't.

      Trump is dangerous, then, not because he is an aberration from conservatism but because he is its emblem. He's a threat not because the movement he aspires to lead is so strong but because the one he will lead is so weak. It's weak not because it has failed but because it has succeeded.

      This doesn't make an obvious lot of sense, but we can unpack a few things here. The best evidence of the weakness of the left is how much politicians like Clinton and Obama remain in thrall to still hegemonic parts of the conservative mindset, even as the so-called conservative movement has moved on to even more dysfunctional hysteria. Or maybe the best evidence is how alien Sanders' programs seem to the Clinton (and Obama) worldview, even though they'd be little more than common sense in any social democracy in western Europe. On the other hand, the conservative movement has greatly weakened since Reagan, at least in the sense that nothing they do works (unless you consider obstruction and fraud forms of art). I've long assumed that the right hates Trump because they fear that if given power he would abandon their batshit theories for compromises that might at least muddle through, and that that would undermine the hegemony of key ideas they've invested so much money and effort in. Or to put it slightly differently, they may just fear that he wouldn't follow orders like the political hacks who've spearheaded the party for the last few decades. I suspect in this they're giving him too much credit.

    • Bill Clinton's odious presidency: Thomas Frank on the real history of the '90s: The history should be familiar. The conclusion:

      Some got bailouts, others got "zero tolerance." There was really no contradiction between these things. Lenience and forgiveness and joyous creativity for Wall Street bankers while another group gets a biblical-style beatdown -- these things actually fit together quite nicely. Indeed, the ascendance of the first group requires that the second be lowered gradually into hell. When you take Clintonism all together, it makes sense, and the sense it makes has to do with social class. What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is endless indulgence.

      I don't necessarily agree with the argument that financialization requires dismantling the safety net, although history does show us that once the bankers got their bailout, they weren't bothered that nobody else did. The bigger point, I think, is that the Clintons went to elite colleges and spent all their lives rubbing shoulders with the rich and super-rich and that rubbed off on them. Whereas in politics they were ready to do whatever was expedient, in their personal lives they always yearned to be one with the rich, and they were pretty successful at that. I also think the same can be said for Obama, which is a big part of why he worked so hard to avoid upsetting the status quo.

    By the way, here are the latest poll projections at 538, for Tuesday's primaries. First, Democrats:

    • Florida: Clinton 67.6%, Sanders 29.4%. Best Sanders poll 34%.
    • Illinois: Clinton 56.2%, Sanders 40.8%. Latest polls show Sanders +2 (YouGov, 3/9-11) and Clinton +6 (3/4-10), so this has tightened up a lot; all earlier polls Clinton +19 or more (two early March polls have Clinton +37 and +42). Nonetheless, 538 gives Clinton a 95% chance of winning.
    • North Carolina: Clinton 63.0%, Sanders 33.7%. Best Sanders poll 37%.
    • Ohio: Clinton 58.9%, Sanders 38.4%. Latest polls are +9 and +20 for Clinton; Sanders led one poll in February, but his best recent poll is 43%.

    Clinton is likely to sweep, but Sanders has a real upset chance in Illinois, and a more remote one in Ohio. I wouldn't be surprised if Sanders beats his polling averages in all four states.

    For Republicans:

    • Florida: Trump 39.9%, Rubio 30.6%, Cruz 17.2%, Kasich 10.1%. Rubio's best poll is 32%, but other recent polls give him 22% and 20%. 538 gives Trump a 85% chance of winning.
    • Illinois: Trump 32.1%, Rubio 27.1%, Cruz 21.1%, Kasich 17.4%. Trump has led every poll there since last July, when Walker was the front runner, but 538 doesn't give any of the polls much weight.
    • North Carolina: Trump 36.4%, Cruz 28.8%, Rubio 20.3%, Kasich 12.5%. Latest, highly weighted poll shows Trump over Cruz 41-27%.
    • Ohio: Kasich 37.8%, Trump 31.8%, Cruz 20.9%, Rubio 7.7%. Latest poll shows a Kasich-Trump tie at 33%, with Cruz at his highest polling number ever, 27%. Two previous polls show Kasich +6 and +5 leads, but everything before that favored Trump.

    Florida and Ohio are "winner take all" states, so the stop Trump effort has to stop him there. Kasich is done if he loses Ohio, and Rubio is done if he loses Florida. Cruz isn't likely to have much good news, but he can rationalize away his losses -- especially if Rubio is eliminated.

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, January 6, 2013

    Weekend Roundup

    Kansas held both Democratic and Republican Party caucuses yesterday. Both had record turnouts, in many cases forcing voters to wait in line for hours. Still the caucus format is so inconvenient that at most 10% of the number of people who will vote in November showed up. I suppose you could argue that that means only the hard core fanatics showed up. You could go further and point out that both caucuses were won by the party's extremists -- Cruz and Sanders -- with both trouncing national favorites (Trump and Clinton) by more than 20 points. Still, while a primary might have narrowed the outcomes, I seriously doubt if it would have overturned either winner.

    The Republican caucus was a big show here in Wichita, with most (or maybe all) registered Republicans required to head downtown to the Century II Auditorium, where the voting took place after speeches in favor of the candidates. Cruz and Trump represented themselves in person. Marco Rubio was AWOL, his slot filled in by local Congressman (and Bill Kristol favorite) Mike Pompeo. Trump was singled out for a counter-demonstration, and had some hecklers removed from the caucus. When the votes were counted, the results were: Cruz 48.2%, Trump 23.3%, Rubio 16.7%, Kasich 10.7%, out of about 72,000 votes (Romney got 689,000 votes in 2012).

    The Democratic caucuses were organized by State Senate district. We attended the 25th, at the SEIU union hall on west Douglas. The 25th district covers the near west side of Wichita, between the Arkansas River and the flood control ditch from 25th North to Pawnee (23rd South), plus Riverside (the area between the Little Arkansas River and the big one -- this is where we live) and a chunk of south Wichita from the river east to Hillside, bounded by Kellogg (downtown) on the north and Pawnee on the south (this is the area I grew up in). The district is represented by creepy Republican Michael O'Donnell -- a "preacher's kid" who long lived rent-free thanks to his father's church, and who is best known for authoring a bill passed last year which placed many restrictions on what welfare recipients could do with their money (including a restriction that they couldn't draw more than $25 at a time from an ATM), but who was most recently in the news for providing beer to a party of underaged "campaign supporters."

    The district is mostly working class, overwhelmingly white -- Wichita is still pretty segregated, and the Republicans who drew up the Senate district map worked hard to put every black person they could find into the 29th district -- the result is that Sedgwick County has only one Democrat in the state senate, compared to 7-9 Republicans (some suburban and rural slivers overlap into other counties). The district was formerly represented by Jean Schodorf, a liberal Republican who was ousted by O'Donnell in the 2012 GOP primary purge. He will be opposed this year by Lynn Rogers, a popular school board member who recently switched parties, so I think he has a good chance to flip the district (until they redraw it -- Republicans control the state senate 32-8).

    We managed to park about three blocks from the caucus site, and spent a little more than an hour in line to get into the building. By that time, they had decided to run a primary instead of a caucus as they couldn't fit a tenth of the people who turned out into the hall. We saw a couple dozen people we knew (including a couple carrying Hillary signs), and many hundreds we didn't (a great many with Bernie signs or stickers). When we got in, I was chagrined to find that my name wasn't on the voter roll, so I had to register. (Being Democrats, they didn't require ID or proof of citizenship, so I'm not sure how my registration will set with the Voter Suppression Bureau -- or whatever they call it these days. I've been registered here since 1999, but changed from independent to Democrat for the 2008 caucus, so it's possible that the party change didn't stick).

    The final vote total was 67.7% Sanders, 32.3% Clinton, with 41,000 votes cast (Obama got almost 440,000 in 2012). I've looked around for more local election results, but haven't found much yet. I do know that the 4th Congressional District, which includes Wichita and mostly rural counties southeast to Montgomery (Independence and Coffeyville), broke 70-30% for Sanders -- the highest of any Kansas Congressional District. There's a good chance my caucus went 75-80% for Sanders. It's likely blacks in Kansas broke for Hillary: I saw few, but those who did have signs supported Hillary. Sanders got 81.4% in Lawrence (where Cruz only got 37% and Rubio beat Trump 20-18%), but (as I recall) the 3rd District was the closest, so Hillary must have done better in Wyandotte (largely black) and/or Johnson (KC suburban) counties.

    The 4th was also Cruz's top congressional district. He slumped a bit in the 3rd (suburban Kansas City, Lawrence) and, a bigger surprise, in the 1st, represented by his most prominent booster in the state, Tim Huelskamp. Good chance Huelskamp's endorsement actually cost Cruz votes: Huelskamp is much hated in the most Republican district in the state, mostly by farmers who don't appreciate his efforts to wipe out the government gravy train. Not a good day for other prominent endorsers either: Gov. Brownback, Sen. Roberts, and Rep. Pompeo all threw their political weight behind Rubio, who came in a distant third, performing well below his statewide average in Pompeo's district. The top Trump supporters -- Kris Kobach (ALEC) and Phil Ruffin (Wichita's other billionaire, like Trump a casino mogul) -- had no discernible effect. One might also add Clinton-backer Jill Docking, possibly the best known Democrat in the state -- she lost a couple statewide races, but bears the name of two former governors and a state office building in Topeka.

    [PS: Here are some figures by Congressional District: Cruz got 58% in the 4th, 49% in the 1st, 46% in the 2nd, and 42% in the 3rd. Rubio led Trump in the 3rd 22-20%, but with Pompeo's help trailed in the 4th 13-22%. Kasich got 15% in the 3rd, only 6% in the 4th. Sanders did best in the 2nd District (Topeka) with 72%, followed by 70% in the 4th, 69% in the 1st, and 62% in the 3rd.]

    Sanders also won in Nebraska (57.1-42.9%), while Clinton mopped up in Louisiana (71.1-23.2%). Evidently Clinton finished the day with a slight increase in her delegate edge. Maine votes today, and should go to Sanders. [PS: That indeed happened, Sanders leading 64.2-35.6%.] Michigan and Mississippi vote on Tuesday -- Michigan should be an indicator of whether the Sanders campaign is looking up or down. Recent polls there favor Clinton (60-36%, 57-40%, 55-44%; 538's weighted average is 57.1-37.2%), but Michigan Democrats have been known to think out of the box -- George Wallace and Jesse Jackson are former winners -- and the last-minute focus there will be intense. (Trump is a heavy favorite on the Republican side, leading Cruz 37.0-21.4% with Kasich above Rubio 20.7-18.4%.)

    Trump won primaries yesterday in Kentucky (35.3-31.6% over Cruz, with Rubio at 16.4% and Kasich 14.4%) and Louisiana (41.4-37.8% over Cruz, with Rubio way out at 11.2% and Kasich half that), while Cruz solidly beat Trump in Maine (45.9-32.6%, Kasich over Rubio 12.2-8.0%). The latter was a surprise to me: Cruz had done very poorly in New England thus far, and Maine is about the last place in the nation where moderate Republicans have any traction. May be worth noting that turnout in Maine was extremely low (18382 votes vs. 292276 for Romney in 2012, so 6.3% -- about half the ratio in Kansas).

    For more on this round, see 538's How the States Voted on Semi-Super Saturday. They are very impressed by Cruz, at least as unimpressed by Rubio, and quick to dismiss Sanders. You also get things like:

    The Republican race is quite challenging to model demographically, and also isn't all that well-explained by ideology. So I expect that personality really might have something to do with it. Is it a coincidence that some of Trump's worst performances so far are in "nice" states like Minnesota and Kansas, and that his best is in neurotic, loud Massachusetts?

    My first reaction to the first line was that there's no division in the Republican party either demographically or ideologically, but then the third line made me think of one: Catholics, especially those who got worked up over race and left the Democratic Party for Reagan. Massachusetts, which Reagan won in 1984, was ground zero for them, but Kansas and Minnesota have far fewer Catholics and a lot less urban/suburban race panic. They are also states where the Republican Party has never made much effort to pander to racism -- I suppose you could say that was "nice" of them, but they didn't really have the need in Kansas, nor the opportunity in Minnesota. Of course, we don't really need to define this group as Catholic: the more generic term is racist, and Trump does very well in those ranks.

    One thing that 538 does point out is that Carson's votes seem to be going to Cruz, not Trump. I think he's right there, especially in Kansas, where Carson is very highly regarded and would probably have pulled 10% were he still in the race. They also note that while Trump led Louisiana in early ballots, Cruz may have gotten more votes on primary day than Trump.

    Some scattered links this week:

    • Jeffrey Toobin: Looking Back: The New Yorker's legal expert, author of two books on the Supreme Court -- The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (2007), and The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court (2012) -- considers the legacy of the late Antonin Scalia and gets to the point quick:

      Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward. [ . . . ]

      Scalia described himself as an advocate of judicial restraint, who believed that the courts should defer to the democratically elected branches of government. In reality, he lunged at opportunities to overrule the work of Presidents and of legislators, especially Democrats. Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama's climate-change regulations. Scalia's reputation, like the Supreme Court's, is also stained by his role in the majority in Bush v. Gore. His oft-repeated advice to critics of the decision was "Get over it."

      Toobin has a follow-up piece, The Company Scalia Kept, including an overdose of the wit and wisdom of Scalia's hunting buddy, C. Allen Foster ("when the last duck comes flying over with a sign around his neck 'I am the last duck,' I will shoot it"). Also post-mortem is Jedediah Purdy: Scalia's Contradictory Originalism, which treats Scalia's signature rationale with more respect than I can muster. I've felt "originalism" was nothing more than Scalia's way of echoing Pope Urban's "Deus vult" -- a cheap way of selling anything that enters his wretched mind (although effective only if you think Scalia, like the pope, is infallible).

    • Nate Silver: Republican Voters Kind of Hate All Their Choices: My first thought was, not as much as I hate them, but then I remembered that we're talking about Republicans, who seem to have a boundless capacity for hating other people -- so why not themselves? One chart here shows that in in the 2012 primary season, Republicans were more likely to have at least a "satisfied" view of Romney (63%) than of Santorum (55%) or Gingrich (52%). The current leader is Rubio (53%), followed by Cruz (51%) and Trump (49%). Another chart puts Trump's 49% well below that of all but one previous nominee or major candidate since 2004: Ron Paul in 2012 was lower; Cruz, Gingrich, and Rubio were the next lowest, behind Huckabee (2008), Santorum (2012), and Edwards (57% in 2004). Another chart shows that the 2008 race between Obama and Clinton was less divisive: Clinton led 71-69 -- the main difference was that while Clinton never dropped below 58 (in Mississippi), Obama had lower scores in a few states that turned hard against him in the general election: West Virginia (43), Kentucky (43), Arkansas (47), Oklahoma (49), and Tennessee (51). Clinton's figure this year is even higher at 78, while Sanders is well behind at 62 -- still high enough to suggest he would do a better job of uniting the party than any of the current batch of Republicans.

      No More Mister Nice Blog has a piece which looks beyond Rubio's bare margin in acceptability, arguing there's not much to it: Cruz is the other Trump, and Rubio continues to be friendzoned. The argument is basically that Trump and Cruz, as militant outsiders, are more acceptable to each other's bases than an obvious corporate tool like Rubio would be to either's. The result is that if a brokered convention hands the nomination to Rubio, a big chunk of Cruz and/or Trump supporters would go home or break loose or otherwise wreck the Republican Party.

    • Stephem M Walt: It's Time to Abandon the Pursuit for Great Leaders: From Napoleon to Donald Trump, the track record of investing great power in a charismatic individual has been lousy (in Walt's words, "always a mistake"). The Germans had a word for this, Führerprinzip, which has since become as discredited as it deserves to be. That's one example Walt doesn't bother with, for the problem is not just the higher you fly the harder you fall (surely no one can argue about Napoleon in any other terms), but that Great Leaders may not even be possible any more (and that may be for the better). Walt surveys the recent wreckage:

      I suspect the appeal of the Great Leader also reflects the present shortcomings of existing democratic institutions in Europe and North America, the transparent hypocrisy of most career politicians, and the colorlessness of many current office-holders. If you strip away the well-scripted pageantry that tries to make presidents and prime ministers seem all-powerful and all knowing, today's democratic leaders are not a very inspiring bunch. I mean, seriously: whatever their political skills may be, can one really admire an undisciplined skirt-chaser like Bill Clinton, an insensitive, privileged bumbler like George W. Bush, or an unprincipled opportunist like Tony Blair? Does listening to David Cameron or François Hollande fill you with confidence and patriotic zeal? I still retain a certain regard for Barack Obama, who is both thoughtful and devoid of obvious character defects, but nobody is talking about him being a "transformational" president anymore. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's lackluster performance on the campaign trail and the clown show that is the Republican primary season is just reinforcing the American public's sense that none of these people are sincere, serious, genuinely interested in the public's welfare, or deserving or admiration or respect. Instead, they're mostly out for themselves, and they would say and do almost anything if they thought it would get them elected. And if that is in fact the case (and many people clearly believe it is), then a buffoon like Trump or a grumpy outsider like Bernie Sanders are going to look appealing by comparison.

      Leaving aside the irrelevant sidepoint of whether Sanders is grumpy, the obvious follow-up points are that lacking any policy goals that in any way bear up under scrutiny, the Republican primaries have turned into a forum on leadership posturing, may the greatest of the great prevail (although it's not clear to me how this hasn't ruled Rubio out yet). Meanwhile Clinton has developed (or should I say was given?) the counter, that it is not the president but America that is great, a blessing she will surely shepherd and sustain. From where I stand, all this adds up to is a culture of narcissism -- the last thing in the world we should look to our political leaders to fix.

      Still, I'm haunted by Trump's "make America great again" -- the nagging question being, when was America ever really great? Indeed, what could that possibly mean? Sure, empires from Rome to Brittania to Nazi Germany have exulted in their brutal power while lavishing their elites with the spoils of war, but hardly any of their gains trickled down to the masses, and every last one sowed the seeds of its own destruction. What's so great about that? For that matter, what's so good? The difference is not just rhetoric: back when Lyndon Johnson was president, he had an argument with Bill Moyers over what to call his programs to lift the poor out of poverty and broaden the middle class. Moyers wanted to call this vision the Good Society, but Johnson insisted on cranking up the superlatives, giving us the Great Society. Problem is, while it's easy to think of lots of things that would make most lives better, no one could really envision what it would take to make them great. By overselling his programs, burdening them with grand gestures and empty rhetoric, he undermined them. (Same for his War on Poverty, which he actually did a much better job of executing than his Vietnam War, but which could never be won as definitively as Americans had come to expect from WWII.)

      Perhaps Sanders seems grumpy because he's stuck thinking about real problems and viable solutions instead of engaging in the great national ego stroke of our collective and/or individual greatness?

    Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, February 28, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in South Carolina by a good deal more than I expected (73.5% to 26.0%). This has finally given the media carte blanche to harp on the viability of Sanders' campaign as opposed to his issues and the relative merits (and weaknesses) of the candidates. I expect that will be the rap from now to convention time, so it may be true that the fun part of the campaign is over. In theory, Super Tuesday could mark a turnaround, but that doesn't seem very likely. Nate Silver has a piece where he estimates the share Sanders would take in each state if he split the Democratic vote 50-50 with Clinton (see Bernie Sanders Doesn't Need Momentum -- He Needs to Win These States). The table compares Silver's estimates with actual results through Nevada and polling (where available) later on. Where figures are available, Clinton is consistently beating her estimates -- even in New Hampshire, where Sanders +22 win fell short of his +32 projection. Silver figures Sanders needs to win six (of eleven) Super Tuesday states: Vermont (a cinch), Minnesota-Colorado-Massachusetts (maybe but not much polling, and Mass. is very close), and Oklahoma-Tennessee (which seem pretty hopeless, although the Okla. polling isn't so bad -- Clinton +2). Later in next week, he also lists Sanders as Kansas +18, but polls here favor Clinton. There are some fishy things about the model -- I'd be surprised if Sanders ran the table in the Rocky Mountain and Upper Midwest states like Obama did, and I suspect Clinton has more support in the "white belt" from Oklahoma up through West Virginia than Silver's model suggests (Silver has West Virginia +17 for Sanders, but Bill Clinton won the state, and Obama lost it bad).

    Still, it's been fun, and regardless of what happens on Tuesday, we'll probably go to the caucus on Mar. 5 and get counted for Sanders.

    Meanwhile, Donald Trump is increasingly viewed as the Republican winner. 538 has estimates on the following upcoming Republican primaries (some with very little polling data, and many states are still missing). Trump is projected to win all but Texas (Cruz), although his leads in Florida (Rubio) and Ohio (Kasich) aren't unassailable. I've tabled up the raw poll averages below (* indicates only a single poll was used).

    DateStateTrumpRubioCruzCarsonKasich
    03-01Alabama36.4%26.3%15.5%10.4%8.5%
    03-01Georgia35.9%26.0%21.2%7.9%6.9%
    03-01Massachusetts43.2%23.3%9.5%3.6%18.5%
    03-01Oklahoma31.5%29.1%23.2%6.6%5.9%
    03-01Tennessee *40.0%19.0%22.0%9.0%6.0%
    03-01Texas24.9%23.3%38.1%5.1%6.4%
    03-01Virginia37.8%30.4%17.5%5.4%7.0%
    03-08Michigan37.3%23.5%15.3%8.3%13.5%
    03-15Florida40.4%34.9%12.0%4.0%7.4%
    03-15Illinois36.0%28.9%16.1%5.6%11.7%
    03-15North Carolina29.4%27.8%20.3%9.8%10.4%
    03-15Ohio29.1%21.2%18.3%4.8%25.5%
    03-22Arizona *35.0%23.0%14.0% 7.0%
    04-05Wisconsin *30.0%20.0%19.0%8.0%8.0%

    They don't seem to have any Kansas polling. As I understand it, Trump is leading among Kansas Republicans, although Rubio has racked up most of the big endorsements (Brownback, Roberts, Pompeo, Dole). Tim Huelskamp has endorsed Cruz. Lynn Jenkins was the first Rep. to endorse Carly Fiorina, so I guess she's due for a do-over. Last two Republican caucuses went to the holy roller -- this year that's split between Carson, Cruz, and Trump (not an evangelical, but he tends to hate the same people evangelicals do, and that seems to be what counts with them).

    Trump, by the way, has very few endorsements: two sitting governors (Christie and LaPage), one senator (Sessions), two reps; but he has done well among European fascists (Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders) and with some comparably shady Americans (David Duke, Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Jerry Falwell).

    More about Trump in this week's links, below. Didn't even get around to last week's mass shooting incident in Hesston, KS:

    • Martin Longman: How Will Trump Unite the Party? Remember Ronald Reagan? He used to go around the country saying that the "11th commandment" was "never speak ill of a fellow Republican." The GOP was a much larger tent in those days, encompassing Mark Hatfield and John Chaffee as well as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms (and my own so-far-to-the-right-he's-left favorite, Iowa Rep. H.R. Gross -- younger folks can substitute Ron Paul, but you'll miss something). Reagan was himself pretty far gone on the right, but he never called anyone a RINO, much less any of the following, courtesy of Donald Trump:

      When it comes time to unite the party, he'll have to contend with having insulted all his opponents:

      • Kasich: "total dud"
      • Rubio: "a lightweight choker"
      • Carson: "Pyramids built for grain storage -- don't people get it?"
      • Cruz: "the worst liar, crazy or very dishonest"
      • Fiorina: "if you listen to Carly Fiorina for more than ten minutes straight, you develop a massive headache"
      • Graham: "dumb mouthpiece"
      • Walker: "not smart"
      • Pataki: "terrible governor of NY, one of the worst"
      • Jindal: "such a waste."
      • Paul: "reminds me of a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain"
      • Perry: "should be forced to take an IQ test"

      And those are just the Twitter insults. Don't forget some of his other antics, like saying no one would vote for Fiorina's face and that Ben Carson is a pathological sociopath.

      Trump is going to have some problems with Fox News, too. Here's a sample of what he's said about their personnel:

      • Brit Hume: "know nothing"
      • Megyn Kelly: "I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct"
      • Carl Cameron: "consistently fumbles & misrepresents poll results"
      • Charles Krauthammer: "should be fired"
      • Bill Kristol: "a sad case," "always wrong"
      • Frank Luntz: "a low-class snob"
      • George Will: "boring and totally biased," "should be thrown off Fox News"

      What about other organs of the right?

      Trump said "very few people read" the "dying" National Review, and their editor in chief, Rich Lowry, is "clueless," "incompetent," and "should not be allowed on TV."

      The Club for Growth is "crooked" and filled with "total frauds."

      Brent Bozell of the right-wing Media Research Center is "begging for money like a dog."

      Charles Koch is "looking for a new puppet."

      Most of these strike me as pretty accurate, perceptive even. Kristol, in particular, is wrong so often he makes stopped clocks seem brilliant. His judgments on Luntz, Will, Lowry, and Koch also get to the point, but he could stand to expand on Krauthammer. Still, one might note that no Republican candidate can claim Reagan's commandment as his (or her) own: they may admire the Gipper for lots of petty and vindictive shit, but not for the flexibility which made him seem much less the ogre than his record indicates. Even GW Bush was careful to sugar coat his conservatism, but to fight Obama the right-wing had to make sure that the ranks would hold, so they started a purge and everything turned nasty. Trump has taken that nastiness to a new level, but he didn't start it. He just took advantage of the seething hatefulness of the Republican masses -- ground tilled and sown by the right-wing propaganda mills. His only innovation was to turn that bile toward the Republicans' own puppet- and pundit-class -- the same people who had conned those masses into thinking that conservative economic orthodoxy was somehow in their interest (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

      Somewhat related: see Nancy LeTourneau: Unprecedented for a laundry list of things that Republicans have done to oppose Obama that no opposition party in US history has previously done.

      Longman also has an interesting post, The Conservative Movement Collapsed Before Trump. As you know, since Obama became president the Republicans haven't offered any alternative policies, because a policy might provide a starting point for compromise. They've focused on obstructing everything that Obama has wanted to do, with the sole exception of a couple issues where Obama broke with the Democratic base (e.g., TPP): they're OK because they both undercut Obama within his own party and undercut the Democratic Party in the nation at large. Twenty years ago the Republicans had a largely unearned reputation as "the party of ideas" -- that was mostly due to the well-funded right-wing think tanks. Since then, well, most of the ideas turned out to be duds, and once Obama and the Tea Party arrived thinking went out the window, replaced by narrow-minded fervor. Hence every Republican candidate this year tried to run on leadership character, and mostly what they tried to lead the party in was being an asshole. Ergo:

      What the Republicans failed to do is to adjust to losing in 2008 and 2012 and come up with a new kind of conservatism that could win where McCain and Romney had lost.

      And that left a giant opening for someone like Trump to walk right through and begin denouncing everyone on the right as dopes and idiots and ineffectual morons.

      One of the reasons that the Republican Establishment has no answer for Trump is that their alternatives (basically, now down to Marco Rubio at this point) have never had an answer for how they could make the modern brand of conservatism a winner on the presidential level.

      If you are definitely not electable, then you can't convince people to vote against Trump because he's unelectable.

      Curiously enough, neocon godfather Robert Kagan is saying pretty much the same thing: Trump is the GOP's Frankenstein monster. Now he's strong enough to destroy the party. Kagan's so alarmed by Trump he's already endorsed Hillary Clinton as the best hope for Washington's war mongers. Personally, I find this as disturbing as David Duke's embrace of Trump. And I'm reminded that when Antiwar.com was doing a fundraiser a few weeks back, they included Clinton along with Trump, Cruz, and Rubio under the headline "are you scared yet?"

    • DR Tucker: The Sum of All Fears: This is the most over-the-top paranoid rant I've heard to date regarding Donald Trump. It's worth quoting, partly for entertainment value, partly to show how sensible fears can sometimes run amok:

      I'm scared for my friends' children. They will be of an impressionable age over the next four years. When they see President Donald Trump on the TV screen, what warped values will penetrate their minds? What flawed lessons will they carry with them for the rest of their lives? Will I have to tell my friends not to let their kids watch President Trump, for the same reason one doesn't let children watch movies with explicit sex, violence and profanity?

      What kind of world will those kids inherit? A Trump victory would be far more devastating for our climate than the Keystone XL pipeline would have been. I guarantee that within 24 hours of a Trump victory, China, India and other major polluters will abandon the Paris climate agreement, reasoning that by electing an unrepentant climate-change denier, America cannot possibly be trusted to hold up its end of the deal. Without that deal, you can say goodbye to a livable future -- and say hello to more fires, more floods, more disease, more death. [ . . . ]

      Think about what's at stake. This country is only so resilient. In 1992, America could have survived four more years of Poppy Bush. In 1996, America could have survived four years of President Bob Dole. In 2008, America could have survived four years of President John McCain. In 2012, America could have even survived four years of President Mitt Romney.

      Does anyone think this country could survive four days, much less four years, of President Donald Trump?

      I certainly agree that there are some pretty unsavory aspects to a prospective Trump presidency, but I wouldn't put our prospects under four years of Trump any lower than McCain or Romney. The one most inordinate power US presidents have is their ability to start wars, and McCain would easily have been (even without the legacy of GW Bush) en the most trigger-happy US president since Jackson. You should never forget that McCain was eager to push the US into war with Russia over Abkhazia. Romney has less history to review, but he ran for president in 2012 as an unreconstructed neocon -- an ideology also embraced by Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich. (I briefly turned on a recent GOP debate only to find Kasich answer another question by demanding that the US send arms to the Ukraine. That was, for me at least, the scariest single moment of the campaign I've witnessed thus far.) It's not unlikely that Trump, who has on purpose remained vague about most of his policy intentions, will turn out to be as bad as any of the above, but Tucker isn't reacting to Trump's agenda so much as to the aesthetics of his whole campaign. My own take is that Trump is significantly the least objectionable of the remaining Republican candidates. Also, my intuition is that once elected, Trump will (more readily than most) adjust to the confines of business-as-normal. (He will, for instance, have a much easier time learning to go with the flow in DC than a president Bernie Sanders would.)

      I also want to note that during his business career, Trump has actually built a few things. That's a pretty stark contrast to Romney, whose business career mostly consists of buying up companies and raping and pillaging them. I'm not saying that Trump has done mankind many favors, but he's not a pure predator like Romney.

      I'm not saying that Trump won't go bonkers over immigration: that is, after all, his signature issue. And sure, he'll do lots of other horrible things. Tucker tried enumerating some of those in another post, Mad World: Part I, although he does get carried away with the hyperbole:

      I doubt your pro-Trump friends or family members will acknowledge that the Republican frontrunner's mendacious mutterings about minorities are what really attracts them to the former pro wrestling personality, so it will be up to you to bring that issue up. Ask them if they are bothered by the bigots in Boston who pledged allegiance to Trump after beating up a homeless Latino man. Ask them if they are troubled by the violent assault on an African-American man at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama. Ask them to put themselves in the shoes of Muslim Republicans who are horrified by Trump's religious intolerance. [ . . . ]

      As I write this, I think of my own fears about a Trump presidency, fears that quite literally keep me awake some nights. I'm troubled by the thought of young and impressionable men and women thinking that Trump's behavior is something that should be emulated. I fear that a President who makes jokes about Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle will escalate the level of misogynist microaggression American women have to put up with on a daily basis. I'm scared that President Trump's Supreme Court nominees will make Antonin Scalia look like William Brennan. I worry that during a Trump administration, we will see the worst racial violence since the pre-civil rights era, with story after story of innocent Mexicans and Muslims being lynched in the night.

      From this you'd think that Trump is planning on relaunching the Brown Shirts and Hitler Youth. No doubt there are elements of fascism in Trump and his followers, but Trump spent much of his life working in a medium where you snarl and gruff a lot but always pull your punches. No doubt some of his admirers are more prone to violence, but we have that now. Groups like Black Lives Matter aren't going away if Trump wins. They're going to become more vigilant than ever.

      Finally, it's hard to let the hyperbole about Scalia and Brennan pass by without comment. I'm not much of an optimist, but I can't imagine a supreme court justice worse than Scalia. Ok, if you credit his brains there's Alito, or take away his wit and you get Thomas -- where do they get these guys? Well, they get them from central casting at the right-wing think tanks, and they keep them in line by keeping them on the conservative gravy train (otherwise justices have been known to take the constitution too seriously -- Brennan being something of the gold standard there). Ok, maybe Trump can find someone a shade more corrupt and venal and flat-out evil than Scalia, but if anything he's less likely to rubber stamp the next movement crony in line.

      Still, here's something real to worry about: Trump: We'll Prune Back 1st Amendment. Trump wants to make it easier for rich people to sue the media for "libel." While this could cut both ways, in America civil suits favor those with deep pockets, as those without can hardly afford to defend themselves, while the rich can sue to harass even if their cases have no merit.

      More Trump links:

    • Conor Lynch: Charles Koch's deceptive Sanders ploy: How the right-wing oligarch cloaks his dangerous agenda: Koch wrote an op-ed which appeared in the Washington Post, the Wichita Eagle, and presumably elsewhere, where he suggested that he shares at least one common cause with Bernie Sanders: ending "corporate welfare." The op-ed still fell far short of an endorsement: evidently ending "corporate welfare" is actually less important to Koch than preventing government from providing a wide range of services, including more affordable education and health care, to the middle class, let alone taxing the rich to pay for it all. The Kochs like to claim their opposition to "government picking winners and losers" is based on sound economic principles, but the case examples that they most care about are subsidies that make "green energy" more cost-competitive with the fossil fuels the Kochs are so invested in. On the other hand, what makes fossil fuels attractive economically is that a large portion of the real costs of their use, especially air and water pollution -- what economists call "externalities" -- is never factored into the market price of coal and oil products. A simple way to correct for these market distortions would be a carbon tax, which is something else the Kochs are dead set against.

      Growing up in Wichita, I've occasionally wondered whether it would be possible to tempt the Kochs to support, even if only through their professed libertarian lens, some progressive issues. (Disclosure: in the 1970s I worked in a Wichita typesetting shop where one of my jobs was to retype several books by Murray Rothbard, which the Kochs were reprinting as part of their missionary work. So I do have some insight into the philosophy they espouse as opposed to the corruption they actually practice.) In particular, anyone concerned about the size and reach of the federal government should be very critical about the military-industrial complex and the dozens of federal spy agencies. They should also be extremely concerned about "the war on drugs" and similar excuses for building up a police state. The Kochs have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their narrow political views, yet have never -- at least to the best of my knowledge -- contributed a dime to the Peace & Social Justice Center of South Central Kansas, which is very active on those very issues. Rather, they've spent a ton of money buying a congressional seat for Mike Pompeo, who has turned into one of the worst neocons in Congress. And they have thus far failed to kill off subsidies for windmills in Kansas -- turns out too many (Republican) farmers depend on "corporate welfare."

    • Sean Illing: Delusional David Brooks: His blind spot for Republican nihilism has become pathological: Could have filed this under Trump as this is yet another explanation how the Republican Party has succumbed to its intellectual and moral rot, but I figured it's worth quoting at some length:

      The Republican Party no longer aspires to governance. The Tea Party, an offspring of Republican politics, is a nihilistic political movement. Everyone one they've sent to Congress they sent for one reason: negation. Under the guise of some nebulous goal to "take the country back," they've done nothing but undermine Obama and destroy the possibility of compromise. And this delirium has spread throughout the party. Recall that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said explicitly that the GOP's "top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term."

      Only one party insists America is in perpetual decline. Only one party puts the culture wars at the center of its agenda. Only one party cultivates anti-intellectualism in its ranks. Only one party sold its soul to religious fanatics. Only one party refuses to accept the legitimacy of a democratically elected president.

      It was Republicans who abandoned conservatism as a serious governing philosophy. It was Republicans who repeatedly defied custom with radical non-filibuster filibusters. It was Republicans who used the nation's credit rating to blackmail the opposing party. It was Republicans who threatened to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood funding. And yet Brooks says our problem isn't "exclusive to the right"?

      Well, Brooks would say that, wouldn't he? He knows that his bread is buttered on the right. He understands that being a "conservative" pundit is more of a career decision than a philosophical option. Once you agree to carry water for the reactionary rich, you have to expect to get wet now and then. It's not like he doesn't make a tidy living abandoning any pretense of principles. As a bought man he'll always make excuses for his proprietors, even when he can't understand them himself.

      Illing continues:

      Bernie Sanders may be an outsider, but only in an ideological sense. The man has served in public office for more than three decades. Trump is a political arsonist with no ideas, no experience, no plan -- and he's the most popular candidate in the party. With a grenade in one hand and a half-articulated list of platitudes in the other, he's brought the Republican Party to its knees. And that's because he's a perfect distillation of the Republican zeitgeist. The establishment doesn't approve, but Trump didn't emerge from a whirlwind -- he's an unintended consequence of their cynicism.

      Brooks is right: There is a metastasizing cancer in our body politic, of which Trump is a symptom. But the disease flows from the compromises of the Republican Party, a party increasingly of ideological troglodytes with no interest in policy or compromise.

      The Republican fringe has become the Republican mainstream, and the country is the worse for it. Brooks is wise to lament that, but he discredits himself by pretending this is a bipartisan problem with bipartisan roots. This is a Republican problem -- and he knows it.

    • Martha Rosenberg: The FDA now officially belongs to Big Pharma: I complained above about how Republican obstructionism against Obama is only briefly lifted on occasions when Obama does something that actively harms the Democratic Party base. The Senate's confirmation of Obama appointee Robert Califf to head the FDA is a good case in point. The vote for Califf was 89-4, with three Democrats (Markey, Manchin, and Blumenthal) and one Republican (Ayotte) opposed. (Sanders didn't vote, but spoke against Califf.) Nor is this the first Obama favor to Big Pharma, as the ACA was written to their specifications.

      Califf, chancellor of clinical and translational research at Duke University until recently, received money from 23 drug companies including the giants like Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, Merck, Schering Plough and GSK according to a disclosure statement on the website of Duke Clinical Research Institute.

      Not merely receiving research funds, Califf also served as a high level Pharma officer, say press reports. Medscape, the medical website, discloses that Califf "served as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant or trustee for Genentech." Portola Pharmaceuticals says Califf served on its board of directors until leaving for the FDA.

      In disclosure information for a 2013 article in Circulation, Califf also lists financial links to Gambro, Regeneron, Gilead, AstraZeneca, Roche and other companies and equity positions in four medical companies. Gilead is the maker of the $1000-a-pill hepatitis C drug AlterNet recently wrote about. This is FDA commissioner material?

    • Richard Silverstein: Another Mossad Assassination, This Time in Bulgaria:

      There are only a few things the Mossad is "good" at. And killing is the primary one. They don't do much that's constructive. They don't make the world better or safer for Israel. They don't bring peace. They don't persuade people to compromise.

      They kill. They cheat. They steal. They're good at all those things. But how do those things do anything to help Israel in the long-term? They don't.

      Yeah, they take out an enemy. But only to see a stronger, more formidable enemy replace the one they murdered. Often, as in tonight's case, they get revenge on someone who last posed any danger to any Israeli decades ago. So what benefit is it to Israel to murder an unarmed man (story in Telegraph and Ynet) who left militancy long ago and was eking out a life as a shop owner in a foreign country to which he'd fled so long ago?

    Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

    • Celebrating Allen Ginsberg 50 years after 'Wichita Vortex Sutra': I was surprised to see this long feature piece in the Wichita Eagle. After I dropped out of high school in 1967 I read a lot of poetry, and Ginsberg was very important to me. I assembled a poetry notebook for my younger brother when he was in ninth grade -- I had had a similar assignment and by then I felt embarrassed at my own pathetic notebook -- and picked out over a hundred poems, typing up over 300 pages. I don't recall whether I included "Wichita Vortex Sutra" -- if so it would have been the longest thing in the notebook -- but I am pretty sure that the first poem was Ginsberg's "Howl." By then I had a large poster of a bushy-bearded Ginsberg, which I attached to the ceiling over the stairs to my room with wallpaper paste. (My mother hated it. Unable to tear it down she painted over it as soon as I left home.) My brother got kicked out of school for that notebook -- the vice principal, who had been my ninth grade science teacher (the one that turned me from a future in science to never taking another science class) was especially livid. We were both sent off to see a shrink, who found the whole episode rather amusing. What I find amusing is that it only took fifty years for upright Wichita citizens to honor the greatest piece of literature ever situated in our fine burg.

    • Barbara Ehrenreich: Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City: Book review. Many stories. For example:

      The landlord who evicts Lamar, Larraine and so many others is rich enough to vacation in the Caribbean while her tenants shiver in Milwaukee. The owner of the trailer park takes in over $400,000 a year. These incomes are made possible by the extreme poverty of the tenants, who are afraid to complain and lack any form of legal representation. Desmond mentions payday loans and for-profit colleges as additional exploiters of the poor -- a list to which could be added credit card companies, loan sharks, pay-to-own furniture purveyors and many others who have found a way to spin gold out of human sweat and tears. Poverty in America has become a lucrative business, with appalling results: "No moral code or ethical principle," he writes, "no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become."

    • Tom Engelhardt: The Disappointments of War in a World of Unintended Consequences: I agree that Edwin Starr answered the key question with his 1970 hit song. Still, Engelhardt's litany of the sheer waste that is devoured by America's war machine took me aback. On the other hand, when he asks "has war outlived its usefulness?" I start to wonder whether he's really going far enough.

    • Alfred McCoy: Washington's Twenty-First-Century Opium Wars: Author wrote a book about the CIA's role in the heroin trade in and around the Vietnam War, but that was so 20th-century. Since 2001 the world's heroin trade has moved to another American war front: Afghanistan. The CIA's interest in heroin in war zones seems to have been how handy the business was for producing cash and corruption, but that works both ways as the Taliban has turned itself into one of the world's leading drug cartels -- its own potent source of cash and corruption.

    • Bill McKibben: It's Not Just What Exxon Did, It's What It's Doing: We now know that Exxon had internal documents as early as 1982 that acknowledged that global warming is a real (and possibly irreversible) threat and is caused by burning fossil fuels. Exxon buried the report, and hasn't become any more conscientious since.

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Saturday, February 7, 2015

    Weekend Roundup

    I threw this together rather quickly, but here are some links of interest this week:

    • Thomas Frank: It's not just Fox News: How liberal apologists torpedoed change, helped make the Democrats safe for Wall Street:

      As the Obama administration enters its seventh year, let us examine one of the era's greatest peculiarities: That one of the most cherished rallying points of the president's supporters is the idea of the president's powerlessness.

      Today, of course, the Democrats have completely lost control of Congress and it's easy to make the case for the weakness of the White House. For example, when Frank Bruni sighed last Wednesday that presidents are merely "buoys on the tides of history," not "mighty frigates parting the waters," he scarcely made a ripple.

      But the pundit fixation on Obama's powerlessness goes back many years. Where it has always found its strongest expression is among a satisfied stratum of centrist commentators -- people who are well pleased with the president's record and who are determined to slap down liberals who find fault in Obama's leadership. The purveyors of this fascinating species of political disgust always depict the dispute in the same way, with hard-headed men of science (i.e., themselves) facing off against dizzy idealists who cluelessly rallied to Obama's talk of hope and change back in 2008.

      Frank brings up many examples, especially the Obama administration's response to the financial collapse and recession of 2008:

      It would have been massively popular had Obama reacted to the financial crisis in a more aggressive and appropriate way. Everyone admits this, at least tacitly, even the architects of Obama's bailout policies, who like to think of themselves as having resisted the public's mindless baying for banker blood. Acting aggressively might also have deflated the rampant false consciousness of the Tea Party movement and prevented the Republican reconquista of the House in 2010.

      But Obama did the opposite. He did everything he could to "foam the runways" and never showed any real interest in taking on the big banks. Shall I recite the dolorous list one more time? The bailouts he failed to unwind or even to question. The bad regulators he didn't fire. The AIG bonuses that his team defended. The cramdown he never pushed for. The receivership of the zombie banks that never happened. The FBI agents who were never shifted over to white-collar crime. The criminal referral programs at the regulatory agencies that were never restored. The executives of bailed-out banks who were never fired. The standing outrage of too-big-to-fail institutions that was never truly addressed. The top bankers who were never prosecuted for anything on the long, sordid list of apparent frauds.

      Frank concludes that "the financial crisis worked out the way it did in large part because Obama and his team wanted it to work out that way." After all the "hopey-changey" campaign blather in 2008, it came as a shock to discover how hard Obama would work to conserve a banking industry which had frankly gone berserk: not only could Obama not imagine America without its predatory bankers, he couldn't imagine changing ownership of those banks, or even dislodging Jamie Dimon from Chase. It's not clear that anyone in the Republican party is that conservative. Rather, they are like those proverbial bulls in the china shop, blindly breaking stuff just to show off their power.

    • Paul Krugman Reviews The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon: Gordon's big book (762 pp.) argues that growth is largely driven by the introduction of new technologies, but that not all technologies have the same growth potential. In particular, a set of technological breakthroughs from the late 19th century up through the 1930s drove high rates of growth up to about 1970, but more recent innovations have had much less effect, so the prospects for future growth are much dimmer. This is pretty much the thesis of James K. Galbraith's 2014 book, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth, who I suspect is clearer about why this is the effect, while spending a lot less time on the case histories. For Galbraith, the key is that the earlier innovations tended to move work from the household to factories while cheaper transportation and energy made those factories much more cost-effective. On the other hand, recent innovations in computing and automation increase efficiency at the expense of jobs, and increasingly some of those labor savings are taken as leisure. One reason this matters is that our political system was built around an assumption that growth makes up for inequality -- that conflict over the distribution of wealth is moot as long as there is ample growth for all. But this isn't something that we're just discovering now: growth rates in the US started to dip around 1970, and the result over the next decade was the growth of a conservative political movement that aimed to maintain profit rates even as growth slumped. I actually think that shift was triggered by more tangible factors -- peak oil, moving from a trade surplus to deficit, the many costs of the Vietnam War (including inflation) -- but the technology shift helps explain why no amount of supply-side stimulus ever did any good: every subsequent growth spurt has turned out to be a bubble accompanied by more/less fraud. Krugman suggests some of this, but the more explicit (and challenging) suggestions are in Galbraith's book. Krugman:

      So what does this say about the future? Gordon suggests that the future is all too likely to be marked by stagnant living standards for most Americans, because the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a set of "headwinds": rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more.

      It's a shocking prediction for a society whose self-image, arguably its very identity, is bound up with the expectation of constant progress. And you have to wonder about the social and political consequences of another generation of stagnation or decline in working-class incomes.

      A couple more things worth noting here. One is that the exceptionally high growth rates of recent years in China, India, and similar countries is tied to them belatedly adopting the technologies that fueled high growth in Europe and America nearly a century ago. Nothing surprising here, although one would hope they'd be smarter about it. The other is that while newer technologies produce less economic growth, they still quite often have quality of life benefits. So while wages and other economic metrics have stagnated, many people don't really feel the pinch. (And where they do, I suspect is largely due to the oppressive weight of debt.)

    • Paul Krugman: Electability: Alright, so Vox asked 6 political scientists if Bernie Sanders would have a shot in a general election, and they said: no, no way. In particular:

      Fear of sudden, dramatic change could impede Sanders in a general election. But just as powerfully, Republicans could also successfully portray Sanders as out of step with the average American's political views, according to the academics interviewed for this story.

      There isn't a lot of doubt that this would have a big impact in an election. Political scientists have had a pretty good idea since the 1950s of how voters tend to make their choices: by identifying which candidate fits closest to them on an ideological spectrum.

      Who's Krugman to argue with such august personages:

      I have some views of my own, of course, but I'm not a political scientist, man -- I just read political scientists and take their work very seriously.

      After all, man, they're scientists! They must be right, even though Krugman has occasionally -- well, more like 3-4 times a week -- been moved to note that the professional practitioners of his own branch of the social sciences, economics, often have their heads wedged. But, I guess, political science must be much more objective than economics, more predictive and all that, less likely to be biased by the political biases of its researchers and analysts. Sure, makes a lot of sense. After all, I know a lot of people who went into political science, and who among them did so because they were interested in politics? Uh, every one of them. I myself majored in sociology, and spent most of my time there dissecting the myriad ways biases corrupt research. I could have done the same thing in economics or political science, but the nonsense in those social sciences was just too easy to debunk. But it's been ages since I've been so reminded how shoddy political science is as I was by the Vox article.

      As for Krugman's value-added, there really isn't any. He doesn't even explain why electability is such a concern. He just proclaims, "The stakes are too high for that, and history will not forgive you," after taunting us: "That's what Naderites said about Al Gore; how'd that work out?" So, like, it's my fault Gore couldn't make a convincing argument why Bush would be a much more terrible president than himself? Sure, in retrospect that's true. In retrospect, it's also clear that enough hints were available at the time to make that argument -- and it's not only Gore's fault that he failed to do so, you can also blame a press that was totally smitten with Bush's good ol' boy shtick.

      I don't doubt the importance of the election, at least in terms of how much damage a Republican victory might inflict. But I don't buy the idea that we all live on a simple left-right ideological continuum, let alone that we all make rational choices based on who is closest to one's individual perch. Gore's problem, for instance, wasn't that he wasn't close enough to the median voter. It was more like he didn't convince enough of his base that he would fight for them, that his election would be better off for them than Bush's. No doubt Clinton is closer to that median voter, but will she fight for you? Or will she cut a deal with whatever donor woos her most? My first close encounter with Hillary was listening to a radio interview with her while her ill-fated health care plan was still in play. She was asked how she would feel if it was rejected, and she said "sad." Right then I realized this was a person who didn't care enough even to get upset. Sanders wouldn't take that kind of rejection lying down. But the Clintons simply forgot about health care for the rest of his terms, and went on to doing "pragmatic" things the Republicans would let them pass: NAFTA, welfare "reform," the repeal of Carter-Glass.

    • Robert Freeman: The new social contract: This is what's roiling the electorate & fueling the success of anti-establishment candidates Trump, Cruz and Sanders: Actually, less about those candidates -- that's just bait -- than the dissolution of the notion that rich and poor are bound together through a "social contract":

      But shared prosperity is no longer the operative social contract. Ronald Reagan began dismantling it in 1981 when he transferred vast amounts of national income and wealth to the already rich. He called it "supply side economics."

      Supposedly, the rich would plow their even greater riches back into the economy, which would magically return that wealth -- and more -- to everyone else. George H.W. Bush called it "voodoo economics." It seemed too good to be true. It was. Consider the facts.

      Since the late 1970s, labor productivity in the U.S. has risen 259 percent. If the fruits of that productivity had been distributed according to the post-World War II shared prosperity social contract the average person's income would be more than double what it is today. The actual change?

      Median income adjusted for inflation is lower today than it was in 1974. A staggering 40 percent of all Americans now make less than the 1968 minimum wage, adjusted for inflation. Median middle-class wealth is plummeting. It is now 36 percent below what it was in 2000.

      Where did all the money go? It went exactly where Reagan intended.

      Twenty-five years ago, the top 1 percent of income earners pulled in 12 percent of the nation's income. Today they get twice that, 25 percent. And it's accelerating. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent.

      This is the exact opposite of shared prosperity. It is imposed penury That is the new deal. Or more precisely, the new New Deal, the new social contract.

      Freeman is right that this is the rot and ferment that breeds support for "anti-establishment" candidates. Trump and Sanders have different answers to the problem: Trump flames foreigners, and that seems to appeal to certain voters; Sanders blames the rich, and that appeals to others. I'm less sure why Freeman lumps Cruz here. Sure, he's "anti-establishment" in the sense that he too has a scapegoat: the government. But he has the very opposite of a solution.

      I should also quote Freeman on Clinton and Sanders, since this runs against the "common sense" of Krugman's "political scientists":

      It is unlikely Hillary will pull many Republicans away from whomever the Republicans nominate. She is both an object of visceral hatred to most Republicans and the establishment candidate in a year of anti-establishmentism.

      Sanders, on the other hand, pulls well from disaffected Republicans. He has little of Hillary's baggage and polls much better against either Trump or Cruz than does Hillary. He is anti-establishment in a year of ervid anti-establishmentism, a fiery mouthpiece for the intense cross-partisan anger roiling the electorate.

      If Sanders can survive the primaries he has a much greater chance of beating any Republican challenger than does Hillary. Whether he can implement his vision of a retrofitted social contract is another matter.

    • Links on the presidential campaign trail:

    Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

    • Andrew J Bacevich: Out of Bounds, Off-Limits, or Just Plain Ignored: Sub: "Six national security questions Hillary, Donald, Ted, Marco, et al., don't want to answer and won't even be asked." Only one has to do with the "war on terror" -- still the biggest game in town. Not sure that Bacevich has much of a handle on his question six: "Debt."

    • Tom Engelhardt: "The Finest Fighting Force in the History of World": Take Afghanistan, for instance. Engelhardt cites Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living, America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which argues that the Taliban disbanded and dissolved after their first taste of American firepower, but the US couldn't leave well enough alone:

      Like their Bush administration mentors, the American military men who arrived in Afghanistan were determined to fight that global war on terror forever and a day. So, as Gopal reports, they essentially refused to let the Taliban surrender. They hounded that movement's leaders and fighters until they had little choice but to pick up their guns again and, in the phrase of the moment, "go back to work."

      It was a time of triumph and of Guantánamo, and it went to everyone's head. Among those in power in Washington and those running the military, who didn't believe that a set of genuine global triumphs lay in store? With such a fighting force, such awesome destructive power, how could it not? And so, in Afghanistan, the American counterterror types kept right on targeting the "terrorists" whenever their Afghan warlord allies pointed them out -- and if many of them turned out to be local enemies of those same rising warlords, who cared?

      It would be the first, but hardly the last time that, in killing significant numbers of people, the U.S. military had a hand in creating its own future enemies. In the process, the Americans managed to revive the very movement they had crushed and which, so many years later, is at the edge of seizing a dominant military position in the country. [ . . . ]

      It's probably accurate to say that in the course of one disappointment or disaster after another from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia to Iraq, Yemen to Pakistan, the U.S. military never actually lost an encounter on the battlefield. But nowhere was it truly triumphant on the battlefield either, not in a way that turned out to mean anything. Nowhere, in fact, did a military move of any sort truly pay off in the long run. Whatever was done by the FFFIHW and the CIA (with its wildly counterproductive drone assassination campaigns across the region) only seemed to create more enemies and more problems.

      Engelhardt concludes that "Washington should bluntly declare not victory, but defeat, and bring the U.S. military home. Maybe if we stopped claiming that we were the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensable nation ever and that the U.S. military was the finest fighting force in the history of the world, both we and the world might be better off and modestly more peaceful."

    • Ann Jones: Social Democracy for Dummies: After having written books on American failure in Afghanistan and on how maimed US veterans have fared on their return, Jones moved to Norway, to see what life is like in an affluent country free from war. Not bad, really.

    • Thomas Piketty: A New Deal for Europe: The author of possibly the most important book yet in growing inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, offers a few modest proposals for reforms in the Eurozone. Also see Piketty's earlier review of Anthony B Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done?: A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society.

    • Philip Weiss: Dov Yermiya, who said, 'I renounce my belief in Zionism which has failed,' dies at 101. Yermiya fought in Israel's "War for Independence" in 1948, and only issued his renunciation in 2009, in a letter quoted here. You might also take a look at Steven Erlanger: Who Are the True Heirs of Zionism? -- which starts with a bloody admission:

      ZIONISM was never the gentlest of ideologies. The return of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty there have always carried within them the displacement of those already living on the land.

      The Israeli general and politician Yigal Allon defined Zionism in 1975 as "the national liberation movement of a people exiled from its historic homeland and dispersed among the nations of the world." Some years later, and more crudely, perhaps, another general and politician, Rehavam Ze'evi, a tough right-winger, said, "Zionism is in essence the Zionism of transfer," adding, "If transfer is immoral, then all of Zionism is immoral."

      Admissions like this were rarely broadcast to the public during the early days of Israel, when David Ben-Gurion spoke of Israel becoming "a state just like any other." So the recent tendency to speak in such terms may sound like a confession but is rarely accompanied by reflection much less shame: rather, they are bragging, and preparing the grounds for another round of "ethnic cleansing."

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, January 10, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    Some scattered links this week, mostly about that perennial favorite, war in the Middle East -- nothing on the Oregon standoff (aside from this link to Josh Marshall, who describes it as "white privilege performance art"). Also, in honor of the five 4.0 or higher earthquakes that hit just northwest of Enid, Oklahoma, here's Crowson's cartoon:

    You'd think anyone worried that much about the price of gas would take an interest in the wars disrupting the world's largest oil producing region, but, well, Kansas isn't lacking for "stone-age brains" (see below). So back to the wars:

    • Thomas E Ricks: What are the Saudis up to with those executions? Regional dominance: Actually, this column appears to have been subcontracted to Sarah Kaiser-Cross, no great loss since Ricks has never impressed us as a deep thinker. The argument:

      Saudi Arabia had a difficult year. Despite Saudi Arabia's best efforts at restoring order in neighboring Yemen, the Kingdom's efforts to pummel its way to peace have largely failed. Near Saudi Arabia's northern borders, Syria and Iraq continue to struggle through maddening states of chaos and civil war. Internally, Saudi Arabia is battling domestic terror cells, ISIS recruiters, and Shiite protesters. Finally, its American partner, in Saudi Arabia's eyes, all but abandoned the Kingdom by signing the nuclear deal that resulted in greater economic and political power for its long time rival, Iran.

      Saudi Arabia's recent executions and the subsequent tension with its rival, Iran, were calculated moves, designed to send a clear message to opponents at home and abroad that Saudi Arabia remains in control. Simultaneously, the executions forced Iran to engage in a no longer subtle political battle for regional dominance.

      Power (and hubris) in Saudi Arabia has long been based on two things: the world's largest and most profitable oil reserves, and possession of the "holy cities" of Mecca and Medina. Even in the 1960s the Saudis thought they could take on the rising tide of pan-Arab nationalism in a proxy war against Egypt in Yemen. Oil provided the money to advance their ambitions, and much of that went into propaganda as they pushed their rigid, backward-looking version of Islam throughout the region. Through the 1970s, that seemed to be working out, with oil prices on the rise and the Nixon-Kissinger policy of bolstering regional allies (Iran and Saudi Arabia). However, in 1979 there were two crises: one was the revolt in Mecca that seized the Grand Mosque; the other was the revolution in Iran which, among other things, presented a new claimant for leadership of the Islamic world. The Saudis struggled through the depressed oil market of the 1980s, doubling down on their proselytizing -- conveniently tied to the US-sponsored jihad against the infidel Soviets in Afghanistan -- and helping finance Iraq's ambitious and brutal war against Iran. That led to a new crisis in 1989-90, when Iraq, ending its bloody stalemate with Iran, turned on Kuwait and threatened the rest of the Persian Gulf. The Americans saved Kuwait then, at the expense of compromising the sovereignty of the Saudi Kingdom -- at least in the eyes of its salafist followers. Meanwhile, Iran carefully cultivated ties to Shiite Muslims, aided by the increasingly virulent anti-Shiite behavior of the salafists. Then the US finally returned to "finish the job" in Iraq in 2003, igniting a full-bore Sunni-Shiite civil war that eventually spread into Syria, and erupted elsewhere where order had broken down (mostly due to the sort of interventionism Saudi Arabia has so long engaged in). The net result is that the Saudis find themselves facing opposition from the increasingly restless Shiites living in the Kingdom's eastern parts (i.e., where the oil is), from the increasingly militant salafists who resent the Kingdom's cozy relationship with the US, and from the ever-present pressures to liberalize -- iconically represented by efforts to overturn the Kingdom's ban on women driving, although the prospect of the people voting for their own leaders is surely more disconcerting. And, well, bummer about those low oil prices, which has plunged the government into deficits for the first time in many decades.

      This situation has been deteriorating for some time, but has gotten much worse in the past year -- especially after King Abdullah's death, which brought to power a new king and a much more aggressive coterie of bureaucrats. It suits this power elite to see every turn against them as having been orchestrated by archenemies in Tehran, much as it suited American cold warriors to see every peasant revolt and strike as the handiwork of devious manipulators in Moscow. Hence, the mostly Shiite Houthis in Yemen were viewed as Iranian proxies when they had more likely emerged as an indigenous alternative to the complete mess that pro- and anti-Saudi Sunnis had made of the country. (Much the same happened with Hezbollah in Lebanon, although the fracturing and the level of foreign manipulation there was much more complex.)

      So, sure, Ricks (Kaiser-Cross) is right that the mass executions were KSA's way of showing who's in charge, and that the consequences of rebellion will be severe. (And thankfully they didn't throw in a couple of women drivers to round out their demonology.) But they've also demonstrated to the world that their ridiculous regime rests on little more than sheer brutality, with even its usual trappings of piety looking shamefully tattered. Thankfully, the Iranians reacted crudely as usual: if they had any sense, they'd stop chanting "death to . . . ," issue a fatwa that capital punishment is un-Islamic, and curtail their own efforts to force a return to medieval religion. It would, after all, be easier to counter anti-Muslim hysteria in the west if the self-appointed leaders of the Islamic world can't control their bloodlust.

      For more on the paranoia and madness underlying Saudi aggression, see Kenneth M Pollack: Fear and Loathing in Saudi Arabia. I found the following paragraphs particularly amusing:

      • Finally, the Saudis feel frustrated and abandoned by the United States. Many Saudis and other Gulf Arabs consider President Barack Obama deeply ignorant, if not outright foolish, about the world and the Middle East. They evince out-and-out contempt for him and his policies. From their perspective, the United States has turned its back on its traditional allies in the Middle East. Washington is doing the least it can in Iraq, and effectively nothing in Libya and Syria, with the result that none of those conflicts is getting better. If anything, they are actually getting worse. Moreover, Saudi Arabia seems to differ over whether Obama is using the new nuclear deal with Tehran to deliberately try to shift the United States from the Saudi side to the Iranian side in the grand, regional struggle or if he is allowing it to happen unintentionally. The more charitable Saudi position is the former, because that suggests that Obama at least understands what he is doing, even if they think it a mistake and a betrayal. The latter view, for Saudis, sees him as a virtual imbecile who is destroying the Middle East without any understanding or recognition.

      The depth of Saudi anger and contempt for the current American leadership is important to understand because it is another critical element of their worldview and policies, as best we can understand them. With the Middle East coming apart at the seams (in Saudi Arabia's view), the United States -- the traditional regional hegemon -- is doing nothing to stop it and even encouraging Iran to widen the fissures. Since the United States can't or won't do anything, someone else has to, and that someone can only be Saudi Arabia. The dramatic increase in Riyadh's willingness to intervene abroad, with both financial and military power, has been driven by its sense that dramatic action is required to prevent the region from melting down altogether and taking the kingdom down with it.

      This view of Obama correlates with reading too much Chales Krauthammer, a certifiable form of dementia. The fact is that US interests have never aligned very well with Saudi interests, but the US humored the theocratic despots because they helped recycle a lot of money back to the US, and the Saudis had a way of dismissing what they didn't like (especially US support for Israel) because alignment with the US let them pursue their real interests -- pre-eminence in the Islamic world -- relatively freely. Along the way they (like Israel) learned that they could push America's buttons by opposing Iran, so they wound up blaming everything on Iran. American enmity toward Iran has been irrational (and counterproductive) ever since the 1980 Hostage Crisis. Obama wasn't ignorant in realizing that, although he was perhaps foolish in not admitting as much, and in not pursuing a more constructive relationship with Iran -- one that would defuse much of the hostility in the region, not least by undermining the rationales for Saudi (and Israeli) aggression. Pollack's next paragraph almost admits that the Saudis have a cockeyed view of everything:

      That is why the Saudis have been consistently overreacting to events in Washington's eyes. We look at Bahrain and see an oppressed Shiite majority looking for some degree of political participation and economic benefit from the minority Sunni regime. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed mass uprising that could spread to the kingdom if it were to succeed -- which is why the Iranians are helping it do so. We look at the Yemeni civil war and see a quagmire with only a minor Iranian role and little likelihood of destabilizing Saudi Arabia. The Saudis see an Iranian bid to stealthily undermine the kingdom. We see a popular Saudi Shiite cleric who would become a martyr if he is executed. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed firebrand stoking revolution in their country's oil-producing regions. In the Syrian peace talks, we see a need to bring the Iranians in because of their critical support for Bashar al-Assad's regime. The Saudis see the United States legitimizing both a Shiite/Persian/Iranian influence in a majority Sunni Arab state and the murderous, minority Shiite regime. The list goes on.

      Pollack then suggests that the Saudis are right and the the US is abandoning its traditional ally in favor of its enemy. Actually, Obama's real shortcoming is his failure to criticize nominal allies like Saudi Arabia when they are dead wrong (and Iraq and Egypt and Turkey and most of all, in case you're wondering where this cowardice comes from, Israel). But then his failure to criticize is symptomatic of a deeper problem, which is the lack of constructive principle behind US foreign policy -- a legacy of the cold war when America routinely favored pro-business despotism over popular democracy -- and the naive faith that a sufficient show of force solves every problem.

    • Stephen M Walt: Give Peace a Chance (And why none of the current presidential candidates want to talk about it): As a "realist" Walt admits "one could argue that the United States benefited from war in the past." I won't let myself be sucked into that one, even though one of his examples -- "the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s" -- cries out for correction. The thing about being a "realist" is that you can excuse anything if it furthers your "national interest" -- whatever that means. For a long time American foreign policy was nothing but service to American business interests: mainly supporting "open trade" (as in the "opening" of Japan), allowing American banks and business to make loans and investments abroad. Then came WWII and the US started building bases around the world, evolving into the capital vs. labor class struggle known as the Cold War. Business (and not just American business) obviously gained from this shift, but along with foreign bases and alliances came a cult of power for its own sake. When you go down a list of the world's countries, America's view is that the "good guys" are the ones largely subservient to US power, and the "bad guys" are the ones that chafe and resent us, or worse still go their own way. (The closest to exceptions here are Israel and Saudi Arabia, which profess alliance but go their own way, showing that one of the traits we most appreciate in a foreign country is hypocrisy.)

      Walt lays out four reasons why promoting peace should be considered part of the national interest, and therefore a goal of our government:

      1. "When a country is on top of the pyramid, the last thing it should want is anything that might dislodge it." The US is the richest country in the world, so why risk that through the risk and uncertainty of war? Especially since the US hasn't been very successful at war lately (like since WWII). Or, as Walt puts it, "as we learned to our sorrow in Iraq, what looks like a smashing success at first can easily turn into a costly quagmire."
      2. "Second, peace is good business." Sure, there are a few businesses that sell arms, but they are "a small and declining fraction of America's $17 trillion economy." He adds, "peace encourages economic interdependence and thus global growth and welfare. . . . If you think globalization is a good thing, in short, promoting peace should be a key part of your agenda."
      3. "Third, peace privileges people who are good at promoting human welfare, whether in the form of cool new products, better health care, improved government services, inspiring books, art, and music, and all the other things that bring us joy. War, by contrast, elevates people who are good at using violence and who profit from collective hatred: rebel leaders, warlords, terrorists, revolutionaries, xenophobes, etc."
      4. "Last, but not least, peace is morally preferable. There's an enormous amount of human suffering in any war, and our basic moral instincts tell us that the alleviation of that suffering is intrinsically desirable."

      Still, every Republican presidential candidate dwells on how much more tougher he'd (or she'd) be than any Democrat, and every Democrat (including Sanders) takes pains to show how high a hurdle that would be to clear. So why isn't anyone even giving lip service to peace? Walt offers some reasons, including the excess adulation for "the troops" that practically everyone feels obliged to buy into. Let me add a few more:

      • We've become highly compartmentalized, so very few people (voters) in America have any conscious stake in foreign policy, or indeed in the rest of the world. If the US overthrows a democratic government in Iran or Chile, that may be big news there but it means nothing here. As such, the few people who really care about foreign policy are like a special interest group, and virtually all of them are economically bound to the current system. That only gives a practical politician one option for a campaign pitch. And it's even worse when you win and find yourself stuck in an unmovable system.
      • The title of "commander in chief" has become baked into the job description of President of the United States, and indeed has come to tower over the position's other responsibilities (like respecting and protecting the constitution). Maybe it has something to do with the idea that chief executives delegate tasks but commanders lead. Politicians certainly prefer the latter image. (Indeed, we came to wonder whether Bush thought the job entailed anything else.)
      • People readily accept the assertion that "we're engaged in a war" even though the alleged war is almost totally disconnected from their everyday lives. Selecting a president is one of the few war-related acts anyone has to do -- an appeal that the media readily subscribes to. This is especially attractive to Republican candidates, who have nothing else of substance to offer (their economic programs are all geared to the donor class).
      • It is widely thought that leading the nation in a time of war is a higher calling than leading it during peace. Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, broke tradition and ran for a third term because war loomed and he wanted to be the man who ran it. Both Bushes started wars to recast themselves as glorious commanders (although one failed to pick fights he could claim to win).
      • Indeed, the US has a long history of electing former generals to become president: Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, the other Harrison, but only Eisenhower in the last 120 years. Theodore Roosevelt was famous for his Rough Riders stunt. Truman in WWI, and Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, and the first Bush in WWII, and Carter post-WWII all made a big point about their service (if not their rank; Reagan was in the US Army Reserve, where he "narrated pre-flight training films").

      Walt also revisits Syria, asking Could We Have Stopped This Tragedy? It's a fair question, and after a fair review he concludes "no" -- vindicating his initial suspicions. Still, his "realism" trips him up, leading him to imagine counterfactuals whereas simply listing what the US in fact did should have sufficed to show that no variation could have worked. He touches on that here:

      To be sure, the Obama administration has not handled Syria well at all.

      President Barack Obama erred when he jumped the gun in 2011 and insisted "Assad must go," locking the United States into a maximalist position and foreclosing potential diplomatic solutions that might have saved thousands of lives. Second, Obama's 2012 off-the-cuff remark about chemical weapons and "red lines" was a self-inflicted wound that didn't help the situation and gave opponents a sound bite to use against him. The president wisely backed away from that position, however, and (with Russian help) eventually devised an arrangement that got rid of Assad's chemical arsenal. This was no small achievement in itself, but the whole episode did not exactly inspire confidence. The administration eventually agreed to start a training program for anti-Assad forces, but did so with neither enthusiasm nor competence.

      And consider what has happened since then. More than 200,000 people are now dead -- that's approaching 100 times as many victims as 9/11 -- and numerous towns, cities, and villages have been badly damaged, if not destroyed. There are reportedly some 11 million displaced people either internally or out of the country, about half Syria's original population. A flood of refugees and migrants has landed in Europe, provoking a new challenge to the European Union's delicate political cohesion and raising the specter of a sharp increase in right-wing xenophobia. The carnage in Syria has also helped fuel the emergence and consolidation of the so-called Islamic State, intensified the Sunni-Shiite split within Islam, and put additional strain on Syria's other neighbors.

      Obama's failures here largely stem from his blanket acceptance of the main tenets of American foreign policy. The only thing he's rejected has been the Bush (Cheney/Bremer/but probably not Rumsfeld) notion that US troops can occupy and rebuild a Middle East nation like Iraq -- a tenet that no one in the security establishment still believes. But he still accepts: that the US has vital interests in the region; that the main thing there is to credibly project power such that the nations' leaders defer to American directives; that the US should have a free hand to intervene destructively anywhere we are challenged (or evidently just for the hell of it); and that the people in those nations don't matter at all. Thus the US instinctively saw the uprising in Syria as an opportunity to get rid of the insufficiently servile Assad regime. They just couldn't figure out a way to make that happen once a direct command failed. Even now, there is no "humanitarian" option: all they can do is destroy, so all they can do is to add ISIS (and Al-Nusra and who knows what else) to their enemies list. The result is that the US is actively engaging in attacking both sides of the civil war. It's as if the US had decided to fight WWII by bombing both German and Russian forces on the Eastern Front, hoping that they'd be able to recruit some Free Poles once everyone was killed.

      Until the US realizes that the lives and welfare of ordinary people matter more than the fickle allegiances of a handful of corrupt elites, the US will have nothing constructive to offer the region (or the world). And if they did, they'd realize that the brutal force they so worship is the problem, not part of the solution. Of course, it's hard to imagine the US changing to improve the lives of people abroad when Republicans here are working so hard to reduce the livelihoods of most Americans here. (Similarly, Democrats need to realize that they cannot help their voters here unless they start to respect people abroad, which means they have to start to unwind America's imperial tentacles, and return to the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt envisioned as the New Deal of the postwar order. You'd think that Sanders, at least, would figure that out.)

    • Rick Shenkman: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing: Lest you think that my comments above about how Americans react to problems with brute, unthinking force, without any care for the human lives affected, here's a case example: when Sen. Ted Cruz promised to "carpet bomb" ISIS, his poll numbers went up.

      While many factors can affect a candidate's polling numbers, one uncomfortable conclusion can't be overlooked when it comes to reactions to Cruz's comments: by and large, Americans don't think or care much about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition backed by the United States "carried out at least six apparently unlawful airstrikes in residential areas of the [Yemeni] capital," Sana'a. The attacks resulted in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about no one in the United States took notice, nor was it given significant media coverage. More than likely, this is the first time you've heard about the HRW findings.

      Shenkman has a theory on this, something to do with what he calls "our stone-age brain" -- in fact, he has a whole book on the subject (Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics). In particular, we fail to recognize the victims of our bombs as human, let alone as people much like us. Distance has much to do with this, as do the various grouping words we use to sort people. I tend to think of it as a failure of imagination: in particular, the ability to imagine the situation reversed, as almost any interaction can be. (The Golden Rule, in its numerous variations, is an attempt to formulate this logically. When you hear someone talk like Cruz, you should realize that he lacks the most basic skill needed to live in society.) Shenkman emphasizes the value of storytelling as a means of restoring humanity to the people our warriors target.

      Shenkman suggests that this "stone-age brain" may have had some Darwinian advantage, but you don't have to buy that. What you do need to recognize is that we're no longer living in stone-age tribes. We live in a complex society where we routinely confront strangers, and indeed depend on their good will for our own survival. In this world, the instinct to rally behind a charismatic strongman is overrated and quite possibly disastrous, even though it still seems to be the bread and butter of American politics -- at least it's second nature to politicians with a natural knack for appealing to our basest instincts. But it's not uniquely American: people all around the world think the same thing. The difference is in who has the power to "carpet bomb" other countries. In that regard, the US is most potent and dangerous, but probably not unique -- despite neocon fantasies of a unipolar world.

    • Paul Woodward: How to lose the propaganda war with ISIS: Big announcement Friday was that the Obama administration is launching a new propaganda ministry to counter ISIS's mastery of social media (see New York Times article). After all, nothing can be more potent than their lies except for our lies. Woodward comments (emphasis original):

      Picture the many meetings that must have taken place over recent months in which policymakers repeatedly said: in order to stop ISIS we need to improve the image of the West.

      This proposition should have been met with howls of scorn and yet instead, multiple teams of straight-faced bureaucrats from multiple agencies nodded their heads in agreement.

      At the same time, I greatly doubt anyone believes this kind of PR exercise will have any value whatsoever and yet the consensus of support derives from one fact: no one has come up with a better idea.

      Better to do something worthless than to do nothing at all -- so the thinking goes.

      The term radicalization has been pathologized, thereby divorcing it from its psychological meaning. It's viewed as a disease, with the implication that if the right steps are taken, the contagion can be controlled.

      But to be radicalized is to rebel and anyone who has taken up such a position of defiance has, in the case of ISIS, already reached a conclusion about the West. Indeed, they have most likely reflected more deeply on the West than the majority of their generational counterparts who, being less likely to engage in cultural critiques of any kind, don't have a particularly coherent view of the West -- good or bad.

      Woodward's critique is right but the problem is worse than that. The one group of people most likely to swallow the propaganda whole is the one that creates. It amounts to a process of self-delusion, where constant reiteration drums the talking points deep into the psyche. As such, it moves the argument away from reality and into the fantasy world of the propagandist, where logic turns self-fulfilling. It's already hard to think of any war the US entered more thoughtlessly than the war against ISIS, and the propagation of this propaganda is likely to cement current delusions (e.g., about our righteousness and their evil). If, that is, it works at all, which I guess isn't a given.

    Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

    • Nu'man Abd al-Wahid: How Zionism helped create the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Delicious lede:

      The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British imperialism. The problem is the study of British imperialism has very few students. . . . but if you would like to delve into how and why the British Empire waged war on mankind for almost four hundred years you're practically on your own in this endeavor. One must admit, that from the British establishment's perspective, this is a formidable and remarkable achievement.

      The Saud family took over Hijaz in 1925 after the British switched sides against their former "Arab revolt" client, Sharif Hussain -- the main disagreement between the latter and the British was the Zionist colony in Palestine. Thus Saudi Arabia became a Beitish (and later American) client state.

    • Justin Fox: Why Economists Took So Long to Focus on Inequality. Income of the top 1% started to grow cancerously in the 1980s, but few economists noticed let alone studied it, at least until Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez came along and made the data impossible to ignore. Fox has some ideas, but they aren't very convincing. Paul Krugman has a comment here.

    • Olivier Roy: France's Oedipal Islamist Complex: Roy is a French expert on militant Islam -- has written several books on the subject. He points out that French jihadists are either recent converts, which he sees as radicalized youth who turned to Islam to formalize their revolt, or second generation Muslims, similarly radicalized from their experiences. On the other hand, he notes that there are no jihadis among first-generation immigrants or the more thoroughly integrated third-generation. That seems roughly right for the US as well.

      Why Islam? For members of the second generation, it's obvious: They are reclaiming, on their own terms, an identity that, in their eyes, their parents have debased. They are "more Muslim than the Muslims" and, in particular, than their parents. The energy that they put into reconverting their parents (in vain) is significant, but it shows to what extent they are on another planet (all the parents have a story to tell about these exchanges). As for the converts, they choose Islam because it's the only thing on the market of radical rebellion. Joining the Islamic State offers the certainty of terrorizing.

    • Omid Safi: Ten Ways on How Not to Think About the Iran/Saudi Conflict: All are worth considering, including "we in the United States should do some long and hard looking into our own culpability" -- and not just for the two points Safi mentions (selling arms to Saudi Arabia and overlooking Saudi human rights violations) -- for starters, I recall how we did the same things when Iran was controlled by a despotic monarchy, how much we resent Iran's rejection of us, and how we've let Israel and Saudi Arabia manipulate our loathing of the Iranian government to hurt the Iranian people. Also noteworthy is oil: Saudi Arabia is already suffering from low oil prices; once we let Iranian oil flood the world market, Saudi Arabia will be hurting even more. The history of the waxing and waning of Shi'ism is fascinating, but that's the sort of fact that opportunists can parlay into an excuse for war and repression, as we've seen, e.g., in America's attempts to pit Shi'a against Sunni since 1990 (not that Iran didn't try something similar after Iraq attacked in the 1980s).

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    Sunday, December 6, 2015

    Weekend Roundup

    Very busy with other stuff today, so these are abbreviated -- mostly links to pieces I happened to have left open, and scattered comments when I had something quick to say.

    • Eoin Higgins: The double standard for white and Muslim shooters: I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the week's mass shootings, but the San Bernadino case took a weird turn when it was discovered that the two shooters were Muslim.

    • Rhania Khalek: US cops trained to use lethal Israeli tactics: "Officers from 15 US police agencies recently traveled to the Middle East for lessons from their Israeli counterparts." You may recall how on 9/11 Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu were crowing about how Israel could help the US with its newfound terrorism problem. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when David Ben Gurion offered to help Charles DeGaulle with its little problem in Algeria. DeGaulle rejected that offer, fearing that Ben Gurion wanted to turn France into another Israel. On the other hand, the neocons who dominated the Bush administration (and who still exercise some strange magic over Obama) envy Israel, which is one reason they organize these junkets for American cops to learn how to use "advanced Israeli technology" like "skunk spray" and rubber bullets. However, this is happening at a time when Israel's own law enforcement groups have gone on a rampage of summary executions, where they've killed more than 100 Palestinians since October 1. Also happening at a time when police killings of (mostly black) Americans are subject to ever more scrutiny and outrage.

    • Ed Kilgore: Extremist Republican Rhetoric and the Planned Parenthood Attack: Given the current state of rhetoric on abortion even by such supposedly respectable as Republican presidential candidates, it's not surprising when anti-abortion violence occurs -- if anything the surprise is that it's as rare as it is (although living in Wichita, where much violence and one of the most notorious murders occurred, it pains me to write that line).

      Conservative opinion-leaders should, however, be held accountable for two persistent strains of extremist rhetoric that provide a theoretical basis for violence against abortion providers specifically and enemies of "traditional values" generally.

      The first is the comparison of legalized abortion to the great injustices of world history, including slavery and the Holocaust. The first analogy helps anti-choicers think of themselves as champions of a new civil-rights movement while facilitating a characterization of Roe v. Wade as a temporary and disreputable constitutional precedent like Dred Scott. The second follows from the right-to-life movement's logic of regarding abortion as homicide and treats the millions of legal abortions that have been performed in the U.S. since 1973 as analogous to the Nazi extermination of Jews and other "undesirables." [ . . . ]

      And virtually every Republican presidential candidate has supported the mendacious campaign to accuse Planned Parenthood of "barbaric" practices involving illegal late-term abortions and "baby part sales."

      But there's a second element of contemporary extremist rhetoric from conservatives that brings them much closer to incitement of violence: the claim that the Second Amendment encompasses a right to revolution against "tyrannical" government.

      Kilgore quotes from Messrs. Carson, Cruz, Huckabee, and Rubio, who are merely the most egregious demagogues.

    • Martin Longman: What's in a Lie?:

      In The New Republic, Jeet Heer says that it is much less accurate to call Donald Trump a "liar" than it is to simply refer to him as "a bullshit artist." [ . . . ]

      A liar is fully aware of what is true and what is not true. They know whether or not they paid the electricity bill, for example, so when they tell you that they have no idea why the power is out, that's a lie.

      A bullshitter, by contrast, doesn't even care what is true. They're not so much lying to deceive as to create an impression. Maybe they want you to be afraid. Maybe they want you to think that they are smarter or more well-informed than they really are.

      It's a useful distinction to make, I think, although I also think people who engage in a lot of bullshit probably lie their heads off, too. [ . . . ]

      That's a lot of academic language that basically says that stupid and gullible people are easy to fool. I think we knew that.

      But the real key is that, although there is never any shortage of credulous people, they need to be lied to first before they are led astray. If you don't exploit their cognitive weaknesses and you lead them toward the truth, they aren't so misinformed. By constantly bullshitting them, you're making them less informed and probably more cynical, too.

      Few books have been more influential on my thinking than one I read when it came out in 1969, Charles Weingarten and Neil Postman: Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The main argument there was that the main goal of teaching should be to equip students with a finely-tuned "bullshit detector," so they would learn to recognize whenever they were being conned with bullshit. It was clear to me then that the actual schools I had attended were much more preoccupied with spreading bullshit than with subverting it, but then authorities had long viewed schools as factories for turning out loyal citizen-followers. Didn't really work with me -- some bullshit was much too obvious to miss.

    • Tierney Sneed: At Jewish Summit, Trump Says He's a Good Negotiator Like 'You Folks':

      Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition 2016 candidate forum, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump repeatedly returned to a riff about being a good negotiator like "you folks." He also said the attendees wouldn't support him because "I don't want your money."

      Early in his remarks, he bragged about how little money he spent on his campaign thus far, adding, "I think you, as business people, will feel good about this and respect it."

      I suppose you could argue that these old-fashioned Jewish caricatures weren't anti-semitic because he was so obviously enthralled with those traits -- maybe the awkwardness was just that he wasn't used to buttering up an audience so obscenely? And rest assured that the ADL won't be bothered because he reminded them that "you know I am the best thing that could ever happen to Israel." Still, I find it all pretty creepy. For another view, here's Philip Weiss.

    • Gary Younge: Bombing Hasn't Worked. Bombing Won't Work. And Yet, We Will Bomb: I should link to something like this every week. This one is specifically addressed to the UK, recently deliberating on whether to join the bombing party in Syria, perhaps out of nostalgia for the old Triple Entente -- their alliance with France and Russia which trapped them in the Great War of 1914, although this time Germany will also be on their side, and they won't have to wait for the United States to pick up the slack. Wouldn't you think that someone would have noticed this reunion of the world's faded imperialist powers, resolved as they are to once again attack (or as they might prefer to put it, "rescue") an impoverished but less than properly subservient third world country -- even to have been a bit embarrassed by the fact? One can't help but be reminded that Britain and France have still not come to grips with the much deserved collapse of their worldwide empires. Actually, Younge gets some of this:

      Which brings us neatly to the second point: The West's desire to intervene in the name of civilization and Enlightenment values betrays a stunning lack of self-awareness. The military and philosophical force with which it makes its case for moral superiority, and then contradicts it, is staggering.

      Unfortunately, his first point was not just that bombing never works -- he doesn't recall the Blitz, which mainly consolidated British public opinion against the Nazis in a way that concern for the Poles never could have -- but he questioned their seriousness, taunting them to send ground troops instead. The problem there is that while sufficient ground troops might be able to advance against ISIS, we know from the failures of the French and British colonial projects in the Middle East (and, well, everywhere) as well as the more recent US occupation of Iraq that a renewed ground invasion will also fail. (If you think Russia might make the difference, cf. Afghanistan.) Younge admits that:

      ISIS isn't limited to a handful of states in the Middle East, places like Syria, Iraq, and Libya; instead, it's a multinational phenomenon. Many of those who terrorized Paris came from Belgium and France. The West can't bomb everywhere. And wherever it does bomb, it kills and injures large numbers of civilians. These civilian casualties, in their turn, stoke resentment and outrage, not least in the Muslim communities from which jihadis draw their recruits. Since 9/11, the West's military interventions have created far more terrorists than they have killed, and have generally made things worse, not better.

      Yet Younge adds this snark: "If ISIS represents a true threat against humanity, as is claimed, then we should do the heavy lifting of mobilizing humanity to fight it." I suppose he would admit that mobilizing "the willing" (as Bush did against Iraq) doesn't quite add up to "humanity," but why taunt people to do the impossible if they're just going to cheap out and do the expedient anyway? All the "humanity" that the combined forces of ISIS and the US have managed to mobilize is a handful of sad European states nostalgic for the golden days when they thought they ruled the world.

      OK, I should find better links to make this point each week.

    Also, a few links for further study (even more briefly noted):

    • Barbara Ehrenreich: Dead, White and Blue: "The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites." This story has been kicking around for a while, and Ehrenreich covers the basics. But to me the story has less to do with what's killing people younger than how it upsets the customary expectations that science and the ever-more-expensive health care industry will make everyone live longer. It turns out that how those benefits are distributed matters, and is subject to politics as well as economics. It also may mean that such progress itself is tainted: that businesses searching for more profits aren't necessarily searching for more effective health care. And by the way, singling out whites hides (or reveals) some other truths: notably that the things that are killing more whites now are things that have been depressing the life expectancy of blacks for many years. One way to put that is that we're leveling down, not up.

    • Paul Krugman: Challenging the Oligarchy: Review of Robert B Reich's new book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (Knopf). He spends a lot of time talking about Reich's 1991 book The Work of Nations, which I read at the time (well, a couple years later, in paperback), thought insane (his thesis that we didn't need to care about declining low-skill jobs because everyone was going to move upscale as they learned the arts of symbol manipulation), but found one brilliant (and scary) insight (the withdrawal of the rich from mainstream society and into their own gated communities and clubs -- not that the real rich hadn't done that forever). Krugman takes great pains to demolish the insane part before moving on to the new book and the messier question of what to do about inequality.

      Krugman also has a couple of brief notes about the abuse of history: The Farce Is Strong in This One, and Avars, Arabs, and History. Krugman various dubious lines about the fall of the Roman Empire and a couple books he's read on the expansion of Arab influence after 700. I can recommend Timothy Parsons' The Rule of Empires, which dovetails nicely with what Krugman has learned -- the first two cases are the Romans in Britain and the Arabs in Spain, both how they came and why they failed. Parsons piles on eight other case studies and a postscript about the US in Iraq, showing how empires always fail.

    • Michael Massing: Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent: The first of two parts on the rich and how they are covered (or not) by an often subservient press.

    • Rick Perlstein: The Secret to Trump's Ratings. Much here, but let me single out this story about bullshit detection (some got it, most don't):

      I've covered three Republican conventions. Watching The Apprentice was by far the hardest reporting job I've ever endured. If you watched it, you'd probably agree. But political junkies aren't the type of people who watched it. Let me tell you a story. Once, when I was in my early 20s, my parents dragged my entire family to a performance of Donny Osmond in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It was awful -- and again, if you watched it, you'd probably agree. When the curtain fell, every last person in the audience leaped to their feet in a standing ovation, except me and my three siblings. We sophisticates, we looked at each other, incredulous, glued to our seats.

    • Andrea Thompson/Brian Kahn: What Passing a Key CO2 Mark Means to Climate Scientists: The mark, as measured at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, is 400 parts per million. As I recall, Bill McKibben named his organization 350 because that was the highest limit he felt the world could stand. I think it's safe to say that global warming is no longer a treat. This is one of those numbers we've been warned about for decades. It's here now, a fact.

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