A Few US Election-Related Thoughts

1. someone pointed out in the other thread that Posner is 77 yrs old. No pres. is going to nominate someone that age to the Sup Ct. So your Posner scenario doesn’t work w/r/t Posner himself; the more general point behind it stands, I guess.

2. your ‘pragmatic’ case for Sanders depends on Trump being the Rep nominee. But what if Trump isn’t the nominee? then yr pragmatic case goes up in smoke. It’s way too early to declare ‘the establishment lane’ in the Rep primary a “pile of burning wrecks.”

Most pundits and even intellectuals seem unable to tell the difference between economic populism and a Klan rally. Or, to put it another way, they would go to a Klan rally and report the underlying economic anger and join in calling out political elites for creating it. Trump is leading Klan rallies across the US. That’s the sum total of it.

From what I have read and heard, Clinton has been much clearer about calling out Trumpism for what it actually is and critiquing it root and branch than even Sanders has. She even refers to white privilege.

The Democrats don’t win on the basis of white vote. White women even after Todd Akin voted Republican. The Democrats win if they can turn out the black and Latino vote, so don’t underestimate the power of a candidate who can speak to minorities.

Can we take an ethnic count of who composes the Crooked Timber collective and then the people who post comments here. Anyone else a minority married to another minority with minority kids? Or is it just me?

RNB: The Democrats don’t win on the basis of white vote.

This. The idea that Sanders is more electable than Clinton only makes sense if you assume that only white votes count.

In 2014, turnout for Black voters was *higher* than for Whites. Black voters are going more for Clinton in part because she has spoken to them for many years, but also because they think she’s more electable — and Blacks have more to lose in a Republican administration than Whites do.

Bernie Sanders: come now, we need to adjust those polls for the negative ads that would surely come. Sanders is a self-described socialist, who comes across as incompetent when asked about any issue other than income inequality and veterans’ affairs, and who quite literally went on (in his words) a “honeymoon” in the Soviet Union.

I *agree* that he might do better among the white working class than Clinton. But that he’s more likely to win overall? That is crazy.

(I should also point out that we should surely care about what happens when a win occurs. As an economist, I can’t help but notice that Sanders put out a list of 200 “prominent” economists who support his tax and health plan, and yet there is not a single professor at a single top 100 economics department in the United States on the list. Paul Krugman, certainly on the left, thinks Sanders is getting advice from completely unqualified people. The two major Trump problems are bigotry and an unyielding belief that his instincts are right and that suasion rather than intellect is the property politics needs best. Just dropping the bigotry and putting a candidate in the Democrat camp does not solve the latter problem.)

At one point I was favoring Trump as the Republican nominee but I keep encountering angry white guys who claim to have voted Democratic in the past but who are salivating at the idea of electing Trump. They seem to buy into all of the anti-establishment cliches of him not needing money, saying what others fear to say, standing up for the little guy (!?) and so on. How many voters fit this mold? I don’t know. Scary enough that there are any at all.

I too, fear the complacency of some Democrats that the country couldn’t possibly elect any of the current Republican crop. Clinton is running a campaign as if her goal to to belittle everyone who’s ever said a critical word about her or Bill rather than getting elected. She has the potential of crashing and burning, taking alienated Sanders supporters along with her.

Among Richard Posner’s works is “Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency”. I would summarize the message as “Oh, just fuck the constitution, torture is *cool*.”

There is no way I would want that man on the Supreme Court. I don’t care if he’s trying to walk back some of the idiocy he was spouting during the Bush Junior years, some things you can’t just take back.

@18. Not as many as you, evidently.

“Trump’s support in South Carolina is built on a base of voters among whom religious and racial intolerance pervades. Among the beliefs of his supporters:

-70% think the Confederate flag should still be flying over the State Capital, to only 20% who agree with it being taken down. In fact 38% of Trump voters say they wish the South had won the Civil War to only 24% glad the North won and 38% who aren’t sure. Overall just 36% of Republican primary voters in the state are glad the North emerged victorious to 30% for the South, but Trump’s the only one whose supporters actually wish the South had won.
-By an 80/9 spread, Trump voters support his proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. In fact 31% would support a ban on homosexuals entering the United States as well, something no more than 17% of anyone else’s voters think is a good idea. There’s also 62/23 support among Trump voters for creating a national database of Muslims and 40/36 support for shutting down all the mosques in the United States, something no one else’s voters back. Only 44% of Trump voters think the practice of Islam should even be legal at all in the United States, to 33% who think it should be illegal. To put all the views toward Muslims in context though, 32% of Trump voters continue to believe the policy of Japanese internment during World War II was a good one, compared to only 33% who oppose it and 35% who have no opinion one way or another.”
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2016/02/trump-clinton-still-have-big-sc-leads.html

We need Bernie to slow the hemorrhaging of white men to the Republicans possibly led by the white nationalist Trump? But then why not support Clinton to reduce the margin by which the Republicans have been winning the white woman vote (Romney won a greater percentage of white women than McCain and Bush had) and to take advantage of her greater appeal to minority voters? This seems clearly to be a better bet for winning the election.

@32. Just missing the point. Clinton is not trying to attract Trump supporters–they are hopeless. She is trying to win the confidence of minority voters.

Again we find nothing about Bernie’s viability until Clinton starts swinging the way she and Mark Penn swung at Obama in 2008.

RNB – maybe people think your question about how many people are minorities on CT is bad taste or something – but anyway I’m happy to say it. I’m white (Australian) my ex is white, my kids are white. The reason I’ve had a relatively privileged existence because my white ancestors invaded this country and dispossessed the Indigenous peoples and came close to wiping them out. I owe them, we all owe them. Not quite the same as US, but yeah privilege is a real thing and it’s both social and material. Good on Hillary.

I feel a bit for you because I’ve been a similar position on CT – when I’ve asked how come the conversations are dominated by men? And people sort of admit it but in a way that makes it seem as if you’ve been a bit rude, bad taste or ‘aggressive’. And them someone will probably start talking about ‘identity politics’ in a slightly condescending way.

Anyway I don’t know a lot about US politics but I find your perspective interesting so thanks.

Socialist? Republicans have been saying Obama was a socialist for almost a decade.

Lightbulb moment! One of the things that’s been puzzling me the most about Sanders is his repeated adoption of the word ‘socialist’, when (a) he’s not, particularly & more importantly (b) you’d think it would be electoral poison of the highest order. The current leader of the Labour Party over here may actually be a socialist – and we have in the past had elected governments that described themselves as such* – but Jeremy Corbyn has scrupulously avoided the word, concentrating on specific policy proposals which don’t require any big ideological commitment. (And any policy that nudges us half a millimetre towards socialism will generally be good in the short term for (a) the economy (b) ordinary people or (c) both, so it’s not as if losing the ideological branding reduces those policies’ potential appeal.) And yet Sanders, from the country that gave the world Wilson’s Red Scare, HUAC and Rush**, seems quite happy to wrap himself in the red flag – and doesn’t seem to suffer for it.

I’ve been wondering for a while what’s happened to detoxify the word ‘socialist’ over there – not wholly, but partly; not to the point where it can’t be used as an insult, but certainly to the point where it can’t only be used as an insult. And maybe that’s it – the Right’s just been crying Wolf for too long***, and eventually it was bound to stop working.

The question then is how far the “I listened to what the guy was actually saying and you know what…” effect can take Sanders. I’m not convinced it’ll take him all the way, sadly – an awful lot of people just don’t listen. But stranger things have happened.

*Even Tony Blair had a period of describing his brand of politics as ‘new socialism’.
**Not the Canadian one (although they would actually work).
***As indeed they still are. I was reading the other day that one of Cruz’s gag lines is “one of the Democratic candidates is a wild-eyed socialist – and the other one’s Bernie Sanders!” (Ba-doom tish.) Calling Hillary a socialist reallly is devaluing the currency of invective.

‘The Democrats win if they can turn out the black and Latino vote, so don’t underestimate the power of a candidate who can speak to minorities.’ (RNB, 7)
OK, so if Sanders gets the nomination, they’ll will stay away from the polls, because they have no reason to prefer Sanders to Cruz or Trump?

One assumption that I see continually, among pundits, is that Clinton’s negative ratings are already priced in, so her score can be taken as more accurate reflection (as opposed to Sanders’ whose will fall once the whole ‘commie’ rhetoric picks up speed). I’m not sure it is though. Among Democrat and Republican voters perhaps, but among the swing voters? I’m not so sure. And it continues to be a worry that Clinton supporters in the press appear unwilling, or unable, to address the substantive criticisms made about her (Krugman essentially just dismissed all of them as right-wing myths).

As an observer from across the pond who witnessed his entire political establishment go into meltdown over an outsider being the front-runner the parallels are in some ways worrying: flapping away difficult questions as if they don’t matter; playing the man not the ball (and playing indirectly through attacks on supporters and denunciations of them); and parroting the word ‘electability’ over and over again. All that’s really needed is someone in the Democratic establishment to start wibbling about how ‘principles are not enough, you need power’ and the bingo sheet will be complete.

I still expect Clinton to win – the superdelegates are likely going to push her over the line – but I think the Presidential contest will end up being a lot closer than people think it should be; with a real possibility of the Republican candidate winning.

The white working-class is itself already sorted along partisan lines. The smaller portion votes very much like the black and hispanic working classes. The larger portion doesn’t. Trump polls very well among this larger portion, but I don’t see that Sanders peels away any more of them than Clinton. (Trump’s biggest applause lines are anti-immigrant, or anti-“p.c.”, or pro-torture/war crime. Which of those thunders could Sanders steal? I’d say none of them.) I don’t think its the case that in times of economic hardship, working people are casting about for an answer, and Trump has a brand of answers at the right time and the right place. Rather, I think that some people despise immigrants and foreigners, and blame them especially for any economic hardships they face.

Phil 41: There was this hilarious criticism of young Sanders supporters not knowing the correct definition of the word socialism. Well nobody in America apart from political scientists knows the correct definition of socialism. Almost everybody uses socialism as shorthand for “European style welfare state”. Americans have been told for years that free tuition, universal health care, paid maternity leave and other stuff that Europeans (mostly) take for granted are “socialism”, with the understanding that Americans will oppose anything smelling of socialism. But apparently the bluff has worn off and Americans start embracing socialism because it means free tuition and so on.

John Holbo #5: “In the event that there IS a tide of white, working-class populist sentiment that might seriously erode the Democratic base…”

It’s not conditional, it’s already here. Racism is a component for some, but the bigger wider phenomenon is populist economic discontent.

It is subtracting from both Dems and Repubs. It’s left + right. This possibility became apparent when Occupy Wall Street & the Tea Party arose at the same moment (the Teas were heavily astroturfed but do not discount their own sentiments).

A populist using fascist techniques including nativism, racism, & blanket statement (e.g. Trump) can make a sizable inroad. But then he’s got to game the system to parlay it further.

It’s only the lamestream media (and perhaps Hillary & Krugman) who don’t notice that most people are still pissed as hell. 1930s Depression showed that people took this with them until the day they died. They distrusted finance, and stayed out of household debt. This attitude remained with oldtimers who survived into the 2000’s.

Hillary & her people do not appear to understand how to deal, politically, with the most likely description of the socio-economic condition we face: 1. Supply-side technological unemployment is meeting demand-side secular stagnation. 2. The only temporary way out is for homeowners to take on more debt and for gov’t to take on more debt. 3. But people are going to distrust taking on debt in the future, not least especially because: 4. The financial system is still obviously crooked, and 5. Less than 1-in-10 can distinguish Fed from Treasury; i.e. economic incomprehension is rife.

Trump doesn’t understand this whole thing either. But then who cares, when you’re a technical fascist?

But Hillary? Even short of her lack of a clear reading of the overall situation, (no surprise really, even Krugman steers clear of engaging the most holistic thesis,) I don’t understand Hillary’s rhetorical ineptitude. Ineptitude should be a word. On the pure politics of it, she should have subsumed Bernie’s message and included it in a bigger picture, before Iowa began. She was likely to be the nominee in any case. But the way it is now, she is damaging herself with the economically-discontent populists in the general election. It’s Trump’s biggest card against her, he’s already begun it: “She takes money from the big interests, but I don’t have to, I’m free from their influence.”

Bernie is electable in a national general election?

– Socialist
– 74- years old (5 older than Reagan at election)
– Conscientous objector
– Was a pacifist when applying for Conscientious objector status to avoid the draft, apparently isn’t now that he’s in national politics– big problem for a “truth-teller.”
– Atheist (he can try to fudge this, but by July he will be an atheist to >60% of the public). Atheists are about as trusted as Muslims by the US electorate.

Each of those will hemorrhage parts of the American electorate. And I’m sure the Republicans already have a more fully fleshed-out oppo book on him.

Apart from these and things in #13 (Honeymoon in Moscow) and others above, the perception of Bernie people have now will be drastically different by mid-year, should he gain the nomination.

Ignoring these factors is folly.

The discussion has veered off into presidential politics, but I want to get back to your suggestion that Obama nominate Posner as “insurance against dire, downside risk” of Republican victory in November.

I don’t see how this works even on its own terms. First, Posner is so old that whether he survives a one-term Republican presidency is iffy. Second, you don’t mention the ages of Ginsburg and Breyer, neither of whom would be a good bet to last until 2020.

The fact is that the Dems need to win in November or else the Court will be conservative for the next generation. An appointment now is nice in that it gives us a year or so and blocks some potentially horrifying decisions in pending cases, but it doesn’t change the long term risk.

The times they are a changin’ What’s happening now reminds me of ’68, except without the draft: most of us came out of school choosing among good jobs, but talk to college kids today — they have no idea where or how they will find a job, much less a job they want. No surprise they are Bernie, and working at it. Also, Bernie is very good when attacked, and he will stay that way. Ms. Clinton has already tried clean and dirty tricks on him, and he stays on message. Go Bernie!

JG

I support the idea of nominating Posner as an expression of my wish that I lived in a world where he had been a possible pick fifteen or twenty years ago.

I would also like to live in a world where the Democrats and moderates in the Senate were less likely to have convinced themselves that Roberts or Alito would be much more like Posner than they are.

If Clinton is the nominee, I would guess that only a Kasich-Rubio ticket in some order has a chance of beating her.

Only four Democratic Senators voted for Alito’s confirmation, a point, btw, that goes some way toward refuting TM’s contention in a previous thread that Senate Dems have not vigorously opposed Repub SCOTUS nominees.

From Wikipedia:

The Senate voted 58-42 on Tuesday, January 31 [2006], to confirm Alito as the 110th Justice of the Supreme Court. All but one of the 55 Senate Republicans voted to confirm Alito, as well as four Democrats: Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD), and Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND). Forty-two Senators voted against Alito’s confirmation (40 Democrats, Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), and Jim Jeffords (I-VT)).

From Krugman’s twitter
https://lettertosanders.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/open-letter-to-senator-sanders-and-professor-gerald-friedman-from-past-cea-chairs/

Half of the Democrats in the Senate voted in favor of Roberts, and IIRC a lot of the press at the time seemed to assume the Federalist Society was some highly intellectual organization (true enough) that naturally would produce judges who were “reasonable” in a centrist way (not true at all).

Not that they’re monolithically ideological–I have a cousin who’s an appellate lawyer and active in the Federalist Society, who describes himself as a libertarian and some of his colleagues as paleos.

She *is* (the war previous to) the last war.

I’m rather unimpressed by the high opinion some commenters here seem to have for Trump and his “populism”. Even among the white, poor-hating, liberal-hating republican primary crowd he hasn’t managed to win more than 35% vote share. He is the frontrunner among a discredited field, in part (and I repeat myself from another thread) because our dumb-ass celebrity-maniac news-is-entertainment media have given him more exposure than probably any candidate in history ever got, vastly more by orders of magnitude than Sanders received although he actually got the most votes cast to date. Nothing suggests that Trump has the superior political skills some people here impute to him (and Kasich again gets touted as the strongest candidate ever, really folks???) .

I am generally dismayed that this discussion on CT has descended to that level of horse-race politics. The November election really shouldn’t be about just Hillary and Bernie. progressives (or liberals or whatever label you prefer) need to mobilize and fight and win on all levels. Given the horror show going on on the Republican side, this shouldn’t be that hard. But it takes more than picking the “most electable” candidate.

Also “15-20 years ago” doesn’t mean I think Clinton should have nominated Posner, necessarily, just that I’m guessing he would have been around the right age then.

Here’s a scenario for ya: Trump’s ceiling of support is insufficient to secure the GOP nomination, which goes elsewhere in a brokered convention, and so he launches his third-party bid, which owing to differing state demographics gives him a slim plurality in a handful of states, enough to deny the major-party candidates the 270 threshold, and so Congress gets to decide …

On the nomination, I would not mind being in Obama’s shoes. Mitch was right to be scared. O has two nice options: Broderist and partisan. The first is to nominate a centrist like Srinasavan, recently confirmed as an appeals judge by a huge bipartisan majority. This paints the Republicans as partisan hacks. The other is to nominate a black loyalist like Loretta Lynch. The Republicans would find it hard to resist the chance of attacking her in hearings and voting her down in person. This paints the Republicans as racists and ensures high black turnout in the election.

Scott P @ 86

The concept of Mrs Clinton lecturing on white privilege also seem like a political winner?

Tl;dr on the entire comment list, but i will point out on election scenarios that the news is in that Dem turnout is down so far in the primaries while Rep turnout is up vs 2008.

Although it was a banner year for Dem enthusiasm, it would be interesting to know what turnout is wrt to 2012 which was still a solid win but not as broad-tented. Nonetheless, if this is turnout with or even despite Sanders it might be hard to say he is going to get better turnout that Clinton even if there are no PUMAers.

Meanwhile, its even more of a question mark what turnout will be when the Rep field is finally reduced to The One…. PUMA seems to be very likely there but it is a big if for the time being and potentially as far away as months or weeks (or even days) to the election.

@89,

If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it’s what real “very serious people” have known since the 19th century: economics is at best a very, very soft science and at worst a pseudo-science that can produce whatever results we want it to.

You do remember, don’t you, that until quite recently the right never had any trouble getting economists to sign on to their policies, despite 20 years of refuted predictions?

The only reason Krugman holds the modest amount of respect he does among the left-leaning is that, when the other side held the reigns, he was using economic analysis in the only respectable way it can be used: to call into question, to cast doubt on, the certainty of very serious people’s economic prognostications in favorite of the current ruling class. It clearly went to his head, and he’s now Prognisticator-in-Chief on behalf of the new ruling class.

If we really want to play the Very Serious Person game, we should probably ignore both the pro-Sanders and the anti-Sanders economists.

@Ze ke (57)

Wow… that really shows just how badly the reforms of the Russian economy went…

Perhaps mostly white males (“pale, stale, and male” as the saying goes), but I doubt we are mostly working class white males. At any rate, not a cross-section of the American voting public.

Let’s be honest here: most political analysis, particularly on the blogosphere, is based on what people want to see happen.

100 years of mass enfranchisement, and only twice has a party been elected to a third term in the whitehouse. Both times occurred during times of economic recovery and foreign policy crisis. I’m betting that this won’t be the third time, what with a laughable economy and the biggest foreign policy issue being the perennial ‘Muslims are angry in the some other country’.

The internet has put too many people into bubbles. Every election, the polls don’t mean a thing until the summer, and every year the blogosphere acts like they’ll actually predict someone. But history predicts a Republican win. The economy predicts a likely Republican win. That polls before labor day don’t predict it, and that liberals on the internet don’t possibly see how it could happen, matter very little to me.

Keep on wishing, I’ll keep on assuming that things will go the way they’ve always gone. Presidents get re-elected, then the other party takes power. This is nothing like 1940 or 1988 in terms of economic activity.

Sebastian H: This is the sort of place where commenters say things like ‘Stale, pale and male’, and see no problem with it or hypocrisy when it’s contrasted against their other racial views.

This is not the sort of place that ‘gets’ Trumps appeal, because they think he’s a demagogue and they’re reasonable people. And they are half right — Trump is a demagogue, and he is dangerous. But to people who are, as they put it ‘Stale, pale and male’, they too are demagogues. And people will take a demagogue who hates the other over the demagogue who hates them. That’s just logic — it will never end well, supporting someone who has it in for you.

So they cling to their SJWisms, which function entirely to give them an acceptable group of people to hate — the stale, the pale and, to a much lesser degree than they want to admit, the male, because most women can’t stand this kind of stuff, either, particularly younger women have not become embittered over the fact that life didn’t go the way they were hoping it would. They don’t hate racism, they love to hate poor white people, and pretending that poor white people are a lot more racist than they really are (for a lot of these liberals, it will forever be 1972, and they will forever be arguing with yokels who died decades ago), which allows them to justify their complete abandoment of economic justice. If poor white people are just shitlord monster racists, then they don’t have to care about selling out to Goldman Sachs or insurance companies. Those filthy subhumans have it coming anyway.

We have nothing but clowns to choose from. Hillary says, ‘Vote for me, I’m a woman! That’s what matters!’. Trump says, ‘Vote for me, I’m white. That’s what matters!’. Nobody actually cares about this country or its people. They’re all just competing to serve us up to people who have even more money than they do.

I think everything you say here is spot on. Posner is a stroke of brilliance. You get this feeling though that the Republican prey drive has been activated and you couldn’t distract them with even the juiciest cut of meat. They are having a nostalgia-fest for the time when the abortion issue would win elections. Opposing Obama gives them the will to live–I think he’s going to have to fight this one out.

You do wonder how the attacks will play out. Darn it, I found this great example of an anti-Bernie right wing site…but I can’t find it now.

Right now, they only have the New Yorker story to go on which gave us these tidbits (1) He had a child out of wedlock! (2) He was a bad carpenter! (3) He lived in a messy house! (4) He has been making his entire living working in the public sector for years!

That’s pretty much all they’ve got on him at the moment.

We also know, thanks to recent online proof that he was deeply involved in civil rights work that he (5) got bad grades in college and almost flunked out one semester (because he spent too much time working on de-segregating housing).

The hilarious thing is when googling to find it I can only find a bunch of ‘skeletons in Bernie’s closet’ from the further left. Did you know that Bernie Sanders is not a pacifist at all? I first became aware of Bernie Sanders because Alexander Cockburn would devote some portion of his column excoriating him. Who was this evil man so worthy of note in a column on US militarism? Wait…a socialist from Vermont in the House of Representatives?

The truth is that in any sane country, Bernie Sanders would be known far and wide as a centrist moderate. I’m surprised by how many of my much-further-to-the-left-than-I friends support his candidacy.

The right will come after Bernie with the kind of dog-whistle cultural things that they used to come after Hillary with. She was a bad mother, a feminist, an elitist, a bossy harridan, etc. That’s all been played out now so it’s unlikely to have much effect on those not already of that view. If Bernie gets it, he’ll be a hippie, a radical, a loony-bird, and a Red Sea Pedestrian…but against Trump will this play the same way? If it’s Trump or Cruz this is going to take some of the wind out of those sails because they can’t appear normal no matter how hard they try. So Bernie’s weirdness is definitely going to look less weird. If there’s a video of Sanders singing folk one can always counter with a video of Trump’s steak commercial or Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham.

The Republicans will try to attack him with cold war motifs. Let them. Try explaining to the voting public that Putin was our friend before he was our enemy and then sometimes our friend and Bernie Sanders actually VISITED RUSSIA! Undecided voters are the ones they have to convince. Good luck with that.

There’s already been a Berlusconi.

Ze K cannot imagine why anyone would vote for Hillary in any circumstances. This shows Ze K’s impoverished imagination. That Trump is an ignorant demagogue is irrelevant to Ze K, probably because he will be completely personally unaffected by the outcome of the election. Thus to him it’s all a game and an opportunity to write clever comments about the ‘clowns’ and the ‘circus’.

Ze K seems incapable of drawing distinctions between different kinds of oligarchies. In the U.S. oligarchy, I can get on the subway tomorrow, ride it to the vicinity of Lafayette Square opposite the White House, and stand there all day with a big hand-drawn sign reading “Obama is a crook and a plutocrat” and not a goddamn f***ing thing will happen to me. Whereas if I did that in Cairo with a sign about al-Sisi, I likely would be thrown in jail very quickly. Probably ditto with the same scenario involving a sign about Putin in Moscow.

Btw, Ze K has never addressed afaik the question why, if there is such nostalgia now for the command economies of the former USSR and E Germany, those regimes collapsed in the first place.

On the order of, “If Wisconsin beats Kentucky in the semi-final, then they have an excellent chance of beating Duke in the final,” doesn’t Sanders beating Clinton for the nomination ipso facto mean he’s got the chops to beat Trump, Cruz or even Rubio.

She’s going to go down swinging, and her partisans will do a lot of swinging for her. If Sanders can weather that, I’m pretty sure he can take on the rest pretty successfully.

My mother, a squishy centrist who AFAIK usually voted Democratic, who has never hated a public figure in her entire life, loathes Hillary Clinton. It’s a complete mystery to me and it scares me.

I guess the thought implies that there are some voters whose ordered preferences are 1) Sanders, 2) Trump, 3) Clinton. Do we know how many people like this exist? I’ve never met one, but that’s not saying much.

I think those are my ordered preferences, though I would not actually vote for Trump or Clinton.

Trump seems a horror show to me. Clinton — I do not see the point in voting for a blood-thirsty neoliberal, who wants to just keep doing the same wrong things.

But, I accept that voting in national elections is less efficacious than voting on a reality teevee show like The Apprentice. Clinton doesn’t need my vote; she has all the money she needs to get the necessary votes to legitimize her reign in the Era of the Plutocrats she has pledged to serve.

I just downloaded a few polls. There’s very little specific data on minority support for any Republican, which seems strange. Either it’s non-existent, or folks don’t want to know. One Latino writer put the Nevada Latino split at 80% dem/20 gop, with Trump leading the pack in the 20% sliver. On the issues there’s surprising uniformity on the importance of the economy and jobs. HRC continues to be viewed by most Dems as the candidate with the experience to do a good job as president (ahem). That’s 90% plus in at least one poll. The lastest NBC/WSJ poll that puts Cruz above Trump 28%-26% is of relatively small sample 400 registered Republican primary voters, effectively the base. So, that number tells us nothing about minority support, or the lack thereof, but (more important) attrition to Trump by the GOP establishment base – a full 1/4 ready to jump.

If you haven’t watched any of the candidates speak for a full hour, it’s quite difficult to gauge the content of their message. On the issues, everyone is concerned about the economy and jobs across all categories. Immigration is less important to Trump supporters than the press suggests and more important to non-whites than we might expect. There are, of course, specific issues – climate change, that reveal real divisions among voters.

Sanders comes out extremely well, especially on the question about the candidate sharing values. He’s about 10 pts behind HRC among African-American voters and given the importance of the minority vote to Dems we can expect more Sanders = KKK from Clinton surrogates.

While people are worried about Clinton losing white men to Trump, here are some interesting poll data
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2016/02/clinton-leads-in-10-of-12-early-march-primaries-benefits-from-overwhelming-black-support.html

@117 Sanders=KKK has been said by Clinton surrogates? This is absurd. Who has made this equation?

This is what I wrote @3: “Most pundits and even intellectuals seem unable to tell the difference between economic populism and a Klan rally. Or, to put it another way, they would go to a Klan rally and report the underlying economic anger and join in calling out political elites for creating it. Trump is leading Klan rallies across the US. That’s the sum total of it.

From what I have read and heard, Clinton has been much clearer about calling out Trumpism for what it actually is and critiquing it root and branch than even Sanders has. She even refers to white privilege.”

And again Trump calls today for torture/lynching
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-torture-works-n520086

It seems that Gerald Friedman forgot about the aging of the population in his projection of how high the Sanders’ spending package could raise the employment to population ratio. That’s Krugman’s apparent criticism. But assuming that Sanders is sticking by the paper, shouldn’t we ask about the multipliers? Perhaps govt spending can have the kind of multiplier Friedman is banking on in a slump but in a growing economy over a decade? Like to hear more discussion about this, because Sanders is more of a tax-and-spend liberal than we have seen before. This may all be to the good, as Piketty insists. But a program of this size deserves scrutiny.

NBC/WSJ also shows that voters split evenly almost along party lines on whether Scalia should be replaced before election. Independents split evenly too.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/poll-voters-deeply-split-over-whether-scalia-should-be-replaced-this-year

123: Stephanie Kelton

MMT and Neochartalist, was Sanders Chief Economist on the Senate Budget Committee.

Just found that out yesterday. A pleasant surprise, I have read Kelton for a decade and argued with her (I like taxes more than she) at Thoma’s.

In this theory, sovereign government is not financially constrained in its ability to spend; it is argued that the government can afford to buy anything that is for sale in currency that it issues (there may be political constraints, like a debt ceiling law). The only constraint is that excessive spending by any sector of the economy (whether households, firms or public) has the potential to cause inflationary pressures. MMTers argue though that generally inflation is caused by supply-side pressures, rather than demand side.

In Neochartalism, there is no limit to gov’t spending, or if there is, it’s political. No limit.
Buy every mortgage, every bond, every student loan, no problem.

“Some people might think war, imperialism, and aggression were important and rank on ‘least likely to start yet another war’.”

Ok, maybe… but admiration for Putin, John Bolton, promise to ‘take’ Iraq’s oil, promise to target civilians…

@128 The Social Text candidate touting a paper recently submitted by Alan Sokal is in danger of losing crucial support, and become unelectable.

The hard line conservatives have been counting on the lottery-like American election system to eventually put a ‘real’ right winger in office. I guess a lefty could hope for an analogous result with the signs reversed. Thing is, though, if Sanders somehow won, which is surely not impossible, the question is whether he could possibly govern granted that he has very little support among the movers and shakers of the economy or in the military. It has been hard enough for a centrist like Obama to govern granted Republican intransigence. This is an oligarchy, after all, and imagining it’s a democracy is going to change that fact. Precisely because of the much bemoaned impurity of her politics, Clinton may have enough of a coalition to govern, i.e. a coalition of the powerful as well as the voters. Sanders would face a constellation of billionaires, generals, and bureaucrats who would surely put their own interests over loyalty to the political process and the nation itself in order to defeat a structural threat to their privilege.

“There’s a reason the Whigs haven’t been doing so well in elections for some time. ”

This made me laugh out loud

Since Obama did law he should be able to make a proper appointment to the Supreme Court not based on your pragmatic considerations of politics and age.

Your American way of working out who should be appointed to the Supreme Court by their political views is completely wrong, appointing justices in this manner compromises the rule of law in my opinion. You should only discuss the appointment of justices based on their legal knowledge and sound judgement in previous cases they have decided.

You discuss this in a very proper legalistic way going over the legal knowledge in the decisions and whether justice was seen to be done etc not by talking about the proposed appointees politics and ages

This is like if you discuss a philosopher in your classes you address their philosophical points and arguments and the logic and whether they are sound and did they support nazis in real life etc

You don’t just choose a bunch of philosophers who make some arguments you agree with and say they are the best philosophers without looking at their philosophy in detail

But you do this with the law discipline, not the philosophy discipline

ZM @139
Every single word a nominee or potential nominee has written or spoken — in past judicial opinions, speeches, op-ed pieces, law review articles, addresses to the Third Annual Meeting of the Bayview Chowder and Marching Society, or whatever — is scrutinized. It is not accurate to suggest that a pres. simply goes looking for someone whose politics are congenial and that’s that. Choosing a nominee is typically a much more thorough process.

Just want to strongly second JH @135.

And about younger voters: I asked both my 101 sections (48 total) to name one elected representative beside their mayor (my former student BTW and serving his second term at 28, one of the youngest in the US), which included city, county, state, and congressional representatives. One student correctly named our county Executive. That’s it.

Is it any wonder that voting stats in the US are so unreliable given this level of ignorance about government in younger demographics? (And yes, I’m well aware that I do not teach at Madison. But my students track a much more significant chunk of the younger demo.)

I like Sanders because he knows how to do propaganda. I love that his policy proposals are fantasy.

Free Healthcare! Free College! 5% growth!

And if we don’t get it we know Wall Street is to blame!

Against very unfavorable demographics the Republicans have had incredible political success over the past 10 years because they where able to use right wing ideology to motivate their base. It’s time the left started fighting back.

And if a cranky elite like Krugman gets pissed off, well that’s all the better for mass motivation.

Does Bernie Sanders have to live with right-wing attacks like this?
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/269460-rove-super-pac-links-clinton-to-trump-on-immigration-in
Is Sheldon Adelson getting in on the fun; after all, Clinton helped to negotiate a deal with a country that he thinks a nuclear weapon should be dropped on.

There’s an insane amount of anti-Clinton propaganda at Karl Rove’s site (I am not providing the link); I could not find a single attack on Sanders obviously because Rove wants him to do maximum damage to the Democrat he actually fears. How many other right-wing Super PACS are gunning for Clinton in this way? Does anyone know? Seriously interested.

John Holbo at 128: See my comment at 152.

Not just anyone but Sanders’ policy director called the paper “outstanding work”. This is probably how the NYT and CNN came to know of the paper and reported the findings.

If electability is so important to mainstream dems then why did they they let Clinton run unopposed? She ran a very poor campaign in 2008, and all the evidence this year is that she hasn’t improved much.

The health care issue is a different one than the projected growth rate. But if growth is increasing at 5%+ per annum and incomes rising substantially, then Sanders’ tax hikes are compatible with rising post-tax incomes. In a general election he will be hammered for having promised an unrealistic rise in pre-tax income so as to fool people into accepting his “confiscatory tax regime”. And he has already made himself vulnerable to charges of playing tricks with numbers by his policy director touting this paper.

On health care the problem is that someone who seems sympathetic to his efforts in VT (Thorpe?) and who may also be a former Clinton adviser has expressed skepticism. Sanders proposes to raise taxes something like 2% on employees and then another 6% or so percent on employers, so first the employers may reduce wages to cover their costs. And second Sanders may have to raise taxes even more to cover the costs of his program due its universality and its absorbing the costs of deductibles and co-pays. So Thorpe seems to have guessed that Sanders health care plan will end up increasing the costs for perhaps 71% of the population, though he thinks the expansion in coverage is worth it. Like many people here, I agree that single-payer makes sense, but again Sanders’ proposal will be a very hard sell in the the couple of months before the general election and he may well be sabotaged by other Democrats who will distance themselves from his promises to win a general election. We could end up getting a Republican sweep.

“She ran a very poor campaign in 2008”

She lost by a razor-thin margin to the most talented politician of our generation. No way is that a poor campaign.

@154. Yes we’ll learn more about Sanders’ viability if or when Clinton goes after him. I think she is confident that she’ll have a lot of success in March and sees no reason to alienate Sanders’ supporters. If Sanders proves as strong as Obama in 2008, then he will be tested earlier.
On the temporary ban on Muslims, of course what this would mean is a ban on and suspicion towards all colored people since any brown/black person not admitting to being Muslim would obviously be a Muslim hiding secret jihadist tendencies just as the Japanese-Americans had to be interned exactly because there being no evidence of their treason showed how insidiously treasonous they were.

@164. She seems to talk about expanding health care for women in particular and trying to get drug prices down. But Clinton seems to want to tweak ACA.

But expanding health care for women is complete fantasy. The states are controlled by republicans and it is harder to get an abortion now than it was 8 years ago. Why would Clinton put forward a fantasy proposal like that?

115: “I very much doubt the GOP candidate will accrue a higher percentage of the white vote than any GOP candidate did before.”

Just as African-American turnout reached record levels because of Obama, so did (especially southern) white support for Republicans reach record levels because of Obama. Without Obama on the ballot, I indeed don’t see why anyone would expect a better Republican result in the white demographic, which is already exceptional (59 vs. 39 for Romney). Just out of curiosity, what mechanism would account for a further Republican swing among whites? Why would a white voter who voted Obama in 2012 switch to Republicans?

I didn’t read BW as voting for Trump over Clinton, but abstaining in despair if it came to that choice. But even that needs thinking about hard. Not just Americans but many others face really hard choices:

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/02/we-dont-have-rights-but-we-are-alive/

Clinton would be a battle against the plutocracy one failed to win. Trump with a Republican Congress and appointments to the Supreme Court would be a stain on America’s political conscience it would take decades to scrub clean. A registry of Muslims? ICE dumping a few million in Guatemala or El Salvador? A Major upsurge of violence – state-condoned if not conducted – against anyone looking “foreign”. And, as I point out here:

http://howlatpluto.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/states-of-stupidity-guest-post-by-peter.html

the US parallel government has been doing stupid, vicious stuff at enormous cost in lives for decades. I see no reason to believe that Trump would have any more control over this than any previous president.

In short, it currently sucks to be an American voter. But it could suck much, much worse.

The problem with the comments regarding Trump is that pretty much all assume that Trump will somehow lose his ability to control the discussion. At that point, the Democrats will mount an immense barrage of negative ads against an immobile actor who will for some inexplicable reason remain a sitting target and offer no bouquets in reply. His supporters will be denigrated and shunned as Klans-people and no fair-minded American will ever admit to once supporting him. Then the drugs may wear off.

Republicans of the Cruz, Bush, Rubio, NRO, Koch variety hate Trump because they suspect rightly that inside the Trumpster’s barbaric rhetoric beats the heart of a moderate perfectly capable of sitting down to cut deals with Dems on a host of issues, including some form of single-payer health care. Those not paying attention to Trump promises elide determiners such as ‘temporary’ and stop listening half-way through Trump’s promise to ‘repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better.’

The election is still a very long way off and the one thing Trump has proven repeatedly is that he can do all the things that the very clever among us insist can’t be done. Being wrong about Trump and his ability to make it this far hasn’t discouraged those with an unbroken track record of failure from declaiming that voter X will do this, and never do that, all pretty much based on the deeply suspect notion that Trump will be unable to steer the national conversation back in whatever way he pleases.

My guess is that a great many Latinos will be very willing to at least listen to any Trump plan to offer a path to citizenship to all, irrespective of past infractions. In other words, Trump is highly likely to push the amnesty that real Republicans abhor. Cruz and the Kochs understand better than just about everyone here that this sort of unimaginable reversal is not a big deal for Trump.

And, at that point, if Trump is offering some version of single-payer and a path to citizenship, and generally moderates his position, will he still be Mussolini-Hitler?

My choice is Sanders, but continuing to believe that Trump is the actually the cartoon character he pretends to be: ‘he’ll implode’ long before Iowa, confirms a complete indifference to all recent evidence. I’ve already addressed, btw, the NBC/WSJ poll, up-thread. For the present, it’s an anomaly. Trump is still the front-runner and until proven otherwise, the prospective nominee. I was around when Dem pros were all predicting O would fold after Iowa, New Hampshire, etc. It takes some a remarkably long time to understand that coming first in state primaries is no easy feat. Just ask the Bush donors who’ve watched their candidate vaporize 128 million plus in three races for a place at the bottom. This shit ain’t easy and if you think you’re looking at a clown when you look at Trump, then we’ve got him right where he wants us.

Oh yeah, the link: http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-hostile-gop-takeover-1455668387

“what if there are MORE Dems whose preferences are, in effect, Bernie-Trump-Clinton, rather than being MORE Dems whose preferences are, in effect, Clinton-Trump-Bernie.”

I doubt there are many Dems with the former ranked prefs, but I don’t think that’s a useful way to conceive it, as what the voters will face is ultimately a binary choice (barring a Jeb or Jebeqsue figure as I suggested above). Hillary campaigns as an establishment reformer against a xenophobe; Bernie campaigns as a left populist against a plutocrat. They are not even entirely running against the same Trump. A voter who hates plutocrats, but is afraid of Muslims and tired of Mexican immigrants driving down low-end wages may well vote for the Trump Clinton runs against, but not the one Bernie does. There are also voters who hate xenophobia, but are not upset at the general distribution of wealth, of course. Those are Hillary’s people, and they are not in play if Clinton gets the nom. But it is going to be hard for Clinton to reach the plutocrat-haters, because she is very clearly aligned with the plutocrats. Trump is a plutocrat himself, of course, but also a renegade, and he has shown that he can be credible to people not generally given to fawning over the elite.

Accidental partial repost.

152 re the VSP concern troll Swift Boaters sympathetically concerned Democratic economists who wrote to NYT about Sanders/Friedman, there was a pretty forthright defence in the FT (a noted hot-bed of communist ideology of course…)
ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/02/17/2153540/extreme-doesnt-mean-what-it-used-to-sanders-vs-the-cea

what if there are MORE Dems whose preferences are, in effect, Bernie-Trump-Clinton, rather than being MORE Dems whose preferences are, in effect, Clinton-Trump-Bernie.

I suspect there is a significant group of voters whose top two candidates are Trump and Sanders. Many of them are weakly identified with either party, so “Dems who prefer Trump to Clinton” or “Reps who prefer Bernie to Jeb!” doesn’t capture the dynamic well.

I’d summarize this as the “not one of the same rotating cast of fools” voter pool. Things have been getting steadily worse for some people and geographies since the mid-70’s; at this point, “not one of those guys” beats any coherent polciy position.

LFC,

“I don’t know much about Australia’s legal system — and I’d be happy to learn something about it — but in the U.S. it happens that the Supreme Court, though different from a legislature, is in effect a political institution. While the Sup. Court sometimes declines to hear cases on the grounds that they raise “political questions” rather than legal ones, the legal issues the Court does decide often implicate hot political issues (not always by any means, but some of the time). It is therefore not possible for a president to nominate a justice without some thought about the nominee’s “politics” in the broad sense.”

Our High Court is like this as well, people can appeal to the High Court on various issues to see if they are lawful.

But our High Court is not as politicised, and I wrote on the other thread about how issues that are decided by the Supreme Court in America are dealt with differently in Australia.

I can’t work out why, since we both inherit law from England, both are federations, both have a federal Supreme/High court, the courts should be similar, but yours is more politicised but no one seems to like it being politicised so I don’t see the benefit and neither do I see why it should be politicised based on law alone as it would be like Australia’s then.

Maybe since you have a longer constitution and a bill of rights, this gives the Supreme Court extra things they can make decisions on

Plume’s question is the right one, though.

Then maybe the right question to ask is why the question your post raises is the wrong question to ask you, generally and/or in this instance.

The late Christopher Lasch had a good shot at America’s collective breakdown way back in 1979. In ‘The Culture of Narcissism’ he described a political type that fits Trump to a ‘T.’ Soaked in hedonistic egoism, a classical instance of the pathological narcisissm which Lasch argued had taken over the American mind. And that was 35 years ago. So, time like the ever rolling stream, has finally brought Trump to the American yard. Taking Lasch’s argument forward it is no use blaming Trump for what he is, but there is every reason to ask why America entertains force which is not fascism but a dangerous polarised populism. Fascism is a branch of the enlightenment (like socialism). Populism is narrow and specific and arises very largely in navel gazing cultures. In Trump many Americans see themselves and they like what they see.

ZM @ 191: since [the U.S.] have a longer constitution [than Australia]

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia is considerably longer than the 1787 Constitution of the United States — something you could see immediately, if you just eyeballed the text.

I used Word to do a word count of the 1787 text and the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 text minus the preamble and legislative framing (which are not considered part of Australia’s Constitution). Australia’s Constitution was more than two and half times as long . The U.S. has added more amendments, and custom tacks U.S. amendments on as additional verbiage, while I think Australia revises the official text, but it isn’t enough to tip the balance. The Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942 and the Australia Act 1986 can also be considered part of Australia’s Constitution, but I didn’t consider them.

ZM@191,

I-am-not-a-lawyer, so take this with a pinch of salt, but as I understand it both Britain and Australia, like all the other countries that come out of the Westminster parliamentary system, came up with a different method of ensuring the independence of the judiciary from the 18th c recipe solidified into place in the US. Rather than declaring that it is a separate branch of government, and then staffing it through the patronage of elected politicians, but with tenure for life, we allow our courts, including the highest one, to be staffed by a self-governing legal profession. New judges are chosen by existing judges, and we rely on the internal culture of the profession to keep things uncorrupt. This kind of system is likely to be small ‘c’ conservative in terms of its own professional norms, but it doesn’t align with party politics very easily. The party with the majority in parliament gets to choose the Lord Chancellor, Solicitor-General etc, but they only preside over a High Court/Supreme Court not of the government’s choosing. The rather tacky America-philia of the New Labour years in Britain disguised the difference a bit by giving the British institutions US-sounding names (so modern!) but essentially the US system is a cleaned-up arms-length 18th c patronage model, and the Westminster systems are on a cleaned-up 19th c reform-of-the-professions model. There’s a similar difference in our senior civil services.

At the risk of overdoing analogies . . . . cuz I probably like them too much:

It goes without saying that America is divided along partisan lines. Severely. We should be able to assume, then, that the two parties have different agendas that reflect those divisions — though I think that’s been overblown, and that both parties work for the same masters . . . One plays good cop to the other’s bad cop, etc. etc.

Okay, so you have two guys in a foot race, and each has to carry a bag full of stuff (his or her agenda). The Republican stumbles a lot, his stuff falls out of his bag quite often, and the Democrat constantly stops to pick up her fallen peer and his fallen stuff. They both start to run again. The Democrat stumbles, and her stuff falls on the ground as well. She looks around and her Republican peer just keeps running. He doesn’t look back. He just keeps running toward the finish line.

Yes, it’s very nice of her to help him out. Yes, it’s a sign she’s the better person. But because she’s helped him out several times, he wins the race, gets his agenda through, and he never helped her, and he doesn’t care that she helped him. Plus, he won’t change the way he runs future races, just because she’s the better person and helped him.

@208. Great data points, Detlef. Have to be very quick. And just from eyballing your data

If Sanders entitles every American to Dutch levels of health care
And if America due to being a bigger and poorer country would have to spend more of its GDP on health care than do the Dutch
Then it seems to me possible that Sanders plan would yield paychecks smaller after health plan costs are deducted for at least many Americans (unlike in Europe, the costs will be seen on the paycheck because it won’t be funded via VAT)
It’s true that many of Americans may save more ultimately by not having co-pays and deductibles
It’s also true that even if many Americans were paying more that Sanders health plan may be worth it due to the gains in the universality of coverage and the quality of available care.

But I am saying that Sanders cannot defend such a complex plan which will produce some immediate losers in this election campaign for two reasons.

He’ll be blitzed with ads as a tax-and-spend liberal, and this will raise grave concerns that he is making health care more expensive which may not be entirely false and putting it in the government hands to ration

Than this will lead other Democratic candidates to run on Obamacare rather than Sanders plan.

Then the Democratic Party is routed, and the Republicans win everything.

At the same time, Obamacare has begun to reduce costs and massively expanded coverage.

I agree with Sanders plan but see it as a political loser given the constraints of the election cycle and the probable defection of other Democratic candidates whom Sanders has not won over.

Again I don’t see Sanders’ chances of being able to deliver big gains as justifying the risks of running him, as his unfavorability ratings would begin to skyrocket once the Republicans launched attack ads on him.

Plus, I do not like at all the way his camp is responding to the charge of inflated growth rates. Kevin Drum has written incisively about this today.

I hope you find others to have this important discussion with. I am open to being convinced otherwise.

bianca 210,

To be honest, I’m not really sure anymore about the intended object of that question, after I read your comments. It was directed at John and not John. At him and not him, but “them.” Probably more “them” than John.

His idea regarding how to proceed is in the air. I think a lot of people agree with him about this. A lot. And I don’t think many agree with my suggestion of appointing a true leftist . . . . just as so many disagreed with those of us who felt Single Payer was the right way to go . . . . not only from a moral and ethical POV, but from an economic and cost-effectiveness POV . . . and, ironically, from a political one as well.

In the Scalia case, I think it’s actually far more “savvy” politically to nominate someone who causes damage to the GOP if they say no — aside from considerations of morality, ethics, etc. And I don’t think it’s politically savvy to reward them for their obstructionism, etc. Ever.

My hopeful take is that Trump can’t win because he’s too stupid and arrogant. He is able to parrot a few stock phrases, and when the opportunity comes to bully someone (Jeb!), he pounces, but he doesn’t know the first thing about ideological messaging. He just shoots from the hip, and some of his schtick has worked, mostly due to blind luck. His remarks about Bush lying and the Iraq war are just one example; if he were able to listen to his advisers, he might have a chance, but he’s got no impulse control. His support has peaked, and his negatives are too extreme for him to win in the general election. The Democrats could run a golden retriever against Trump and he’d still lose.

RNB keeps mentioning negative ads. Yes, there will undoubtedly be some nasty things said about Sanders, but the same is true of Trump. Trump’s whole appeal is based on the mistaken impression that he’s a straight shooter. But scratch him a bit, and there’s nothing but hypocrisy, and all kinds of very obvious inconsistencies, particularly those that will paint him as what he is: a vain, out-of-touch rich person with occasional liberal sympathies. A Manhattan billionaire. Sanders at least has a record he can run on. He should be able to eat Trump for lunch.

@RNB, 214: Clinton surely has done nothing to alienate people from him

I’ll assume you’re talking about the general population; nationwide attack ads, etc. You are surely aware that she and her keepers have been aggressively attempting to undermine his support among relatively affluent liberals (yes, they are a contemptible lot, but they are still people.) Funny thing is, it ain’t working that well. So she’s already using the big guns to win the liberal intelligentsia, who are much more ignorant and narrow-minded than the general population. When it comes to Joe T shirt, it’s going to be even harder to draw voters away.

Richard Cottrell @ 203: Fascism is a branch of the enlightenment (like socialism). Populism is narrow and specific and arises very largely in navel gazing cultures.

I thought the remarks about applying Lasch to Trump were interesting, but I think you are wrong about both Fascism and Populism.

Historical Fascism, it seems to me, was far less a product of the Enlightenment than a reaction against the Enlightenment produced from relicts of feudalism and the pre-modern agrarian order. While socialism, arguably, was an extension of the Enlightenment’s optimistic desire to rationally design and reform, Fascism involved a rejection of rationalism in favor of “blood” and violence for its own sake. Fascism is hard to define, precisely because it seemed to pick up disparate ideas and elements and combine them into a political chimera in its attempt to embrace of modernity amidst a deep ambivalence and insecurity concerning lost roots of community and tradition, deference and loyalty.

Populism isn’t a totalitarian political ideology; rather it is a label for a kind of political appeal, aimed at people who hold the political attitudes and receptivity of (“right-wing”) authoritarian followers. [Quotes around “right-wing” indicate that I intend the term of art adopted by political psychologists in their study of the cluster of political attitudes formerly (mis)labeled the authoritarian personality.]

A key distinction regarding authoritarian followers is that they are followers. They don’t share the psychology, or philosophies, of their leaders. The political pathologies associated with authoritarian followers have a lot to do with this group of followers being so easily persuaded by unscrupulous demagogues.

Difference between leaders and followers in populist alignments can be quite sharp. One example: although prone to xenophobia, authoritarian followers are natural economic egalitarians, but they are so easily manipulated by formulaic poses and language that they tend to attract leaders, who are oriented to social dominance and may be seeking to establish or maintain strongly hierarchical political arrangements with themselves on top. So, a demagogue may capture a following by xenophobic rhetoric. Authoritarian followers feel economically insecure and want their membership in larger whole to confer economic benefits; they want to be taken care of, and are strongly supportive of broad-based social insurance arrangements (though, of course, prone to be jealous and suspicious that the Other is taking advantage.)

Authoritarian followers are distressingly predictable and prone to doing and encouraging reprehensible things. At base, they are dependent and frightened, and making them more dependent and more frightened will just make them more predictable (and more reprehensibly extreme in their attitudes). (It is why a well-timed Terror Alert could predictably provide George W. Bush with a few percentage point uptake in the polls during election week, November 2004.)

I guess my point is that Trump may be the narcissist, but his following isn’t. His following, I suspect — I haven’t seen a lot of genuinely insightful analysis — is suffering economically and is scared. They may be racist, xenophobic, sexist and all the rest, but mostly the extremity of those political expressions are symptoms of economic problems of plutocracy that we shouldn’t be ignoring and by-products of uncontested demagogic political leadership.

The relationship of historical Fascism to Populism is the economic distress that set masses of authoritarian followers into political motion and available to worst kinds of unscrupulous demagogues.

Bruce Wilder,

Well even if the Australian constitution is longer when you do a word count, it is a much duller text. If you read it you will see why I thought it was shorter without doing a word count, because it is very sensible and dull, not like the American constitution. Maybe the elevation of your constitution has influenced your Supreme Court to make such a role for themselves compared to our High Court.

Francis Spufford,

In Australia the Prime Minister appoints the Justices to the High Court on the advice of the Commonwealth Attorney General who consults with the Attorney Generals of all the States. And they have to be under 70 which is the compulsory retirement age, so John Holbo’s preference for a 77 year old to be appointed primarily on the basis of politics and age would not happen in Australia.

So it is like the American system I think.

On Trump, Lasch, and narcissism:

“Narcissism” has an everyday and a psychoanalytic meaning. A story in the September 4 New York Times illustrates the everyday meaning: “The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism. Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition, most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration.” Trump is certainly a narcissist in this sense, but the psychoanalytic sense is different: a weak, beleaguered self rather than an overbearing, assertive one. A disciple of Lasch’s (i.e., me) has described the narcissistic personality in these terms: “wary of intimate, permanent relationships, which entail dependence and thus may trigger infantile rage; beset by feelings of inner emptiness and unease . . . ; preoccupied with personal “growth” and the consumption of novel sensations; prone to alternating self-images of grandiosity and abjection; liable to feel toward everyone in authority the same combination of rage and terror that the infant feels for whoever it depends on; unable to identify emotionally with past and future generations and therefore unable to accept the prospect of aging, decay, and death,”
(http://thebaffler.com/salvos/dialectic-love-authority)

On “populism” being “aimed at people who hold the political attitudes and receptivity of (“right-wing”) authoritarian followers”: Can we be a bit more respectful of the term’s history in the United States? It is, after all, the name of the most significant anti-capitalist movement this country has seen. Cf. Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise and Lasch’s “The Decline of Populism” in The Agony of the American Left.

Excellent analysis on the political dynamics of Populism by Bruce the Dour.

I do think there is something to Cottrell’s point about Fascism being a product of The Enlightenment, however. Fascist leaders surely had a knowledge of the socio-cultural and economic histories of their political milieux that was superior to that of their mass follower-ships.

It could be argued that, in something like a historical-dialectical sense, reactionary, anti-Enlightenment political irrationalism , from Joseph de Maistre (its most eloquent early spokesman) to Mussolini, Franco, and Pinochet, was a “product” of the Enlightenment.

Think of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, e.g., or Marx’s analysis of the relationship between Feudalism and Capitalism.

“Populism” seems like an unenlightening term, to me- both in this case and in general.

ZM @ 221

The 1787 Constitution may have been short in part because the authors were inexperienced and had few modern examples of the art from which to learn. Their document may have been short, because they used elegant but imprecise prose to express general principles, which had to be elaborated into details in part by courts. But, they also made a lot of rookie mistakes. Amendments had to be promised to secure ratification and the amendments arguably included some additional errors.

I don’t think either factor explains the politicization of the American Supreme Court though. The desire to use constitutionalism to enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s social statics and secure the power of private property against the public power of the state — that was always the rub. Money and power.

PGD @222
our accepted establishment policies, which…effectively register and monitor every single American through mass surveillance?

If every single American were indeed being effectively registered and monitored through mass surveillance, then the San Bernardino shootings likely would never have happened and the FBI would not have had to go to court to get an order directing Apple to get into the phone of one of the deceased shooters.

The NSA collects phone metadata, and I think (though am not sure) that the cong. authorization for even that has expired; in any event, metadata (the number one has called) is not the same as content (what was said), as was repeated ad nauseum, and never afaict tell effectively refuted, when the program was being debated in the media.

Cyberhackers may be more able to monitor one’s movements online than the natl. sec. agencies. At any rate, I remain unpersuaded that the U.S. is an under an official regime of mass surveillance so total and far-reaching that privacy vis-a-vis the govt has effectively ceased to exist. If that were the case, then the myriad of orgs. concerned w safeguarding privacy shd surrender and close up shop. That they haven’t done so suggests they think privacy is still a thing that exists and needs to be protected from various threats.

Why Bernie Can Win

Geo, thanks for the link – really interesting piece.

John @230,

“This might be true, but is it always true that you shouldn’t retreat? Is prudence never the better part of valor? I have my doubts.”

Not saying one should never, under any circumstances, retreat. Just saying you shouldn’t ever reward your opponent for being a ____ (fill in the blank). If the tactical retreat is on your terms, in order to live to fight another day, it can sometimes be useful. But I think the prudence thing, the tactical retreat thing, and the rewarding your opponent thing aren’t really connected. And I don’t think we should make the connection.

All of that said, I’m still not getting why it makes sense to retreat and regroup in the case of Scalia’s replacement. Not seeing why Obama and the Dems should do this, what purpose it serves, etc. etc. The GOP appears intractably against even allowing an up or down vote, and if it ever allows one, I doubt an Obama nominee would get through, short of Scalia’s clone.

To me, if the choice is another Scalia or just accepting the 4-4 impasse, I take the latter. Worst case scenario, if the GOP wins the White House, it nominates a Scalia clone, thus doing what Obama would have done for them (if he wants to get a nominee through). Or, we get Clinton or Sanders, in which case Obama would have made their lives much more difficult.

So my choice is — and I don’t think this is what Obama will do — find a true leftist, a person with a stellar record of battling for “the people.” If it’s a she, all the better. If she’s Hispanic, Native American, black or Asian, better still. Gay, better still. And I’d throw in openly atheist for good measure. But it’s not going to happen. He’s likely to nominate a moderate, and it won’t get to a vote.

PGD @222,

It wasn’t just an off the cuff remark by Trump concerning Muslims. He went into more detail about this than most of the things he’s talked about, and he repeated it under questioning. He called for a total shutdown of all Muslims entering America — including Muslim Americans who may have left the country before Il Duce takes office.

He’s said we should shut down all mosques in America and impose mass surveillance on Muslims. His comments on Mexican immigrants are textbook fascist. His treatment of BLM protesters at his rallies and the reaction of his supporters is straight out of the Beer Hall Putsch.

And the entire “Make America Great Again” is classic fascism, but worse in our case. Because we’re not some defeated, humiliated former power. We’re already the most power nation on earth.

He’s pushing fascism. It’s obvious. And his rabid, frothing at the mouth supporters love it. See the stats I list above at @204.

Also:
Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
By Umberto Eco

I think the reason the US courts are so political is partly that all other Liberal democracies outside the USA have Parliamentary systems where economic and social policy is made by the leaders of the Parties in Parliament who enjoy deference based on the tradition of the Queen in parliament as the origin of political and legal authority. Plus the fact that in practice both top Judges and the party leaders come from the same class of usually well off people with a shared education. In the UK case at Eton and Oxbridge. All the top people as they are called just happen to be on the same page and share an essentially Utilitarian non religious ethical code of conduct. So reforms can be introduced by Parliament based on liberal ideas shared by the Judges who thus stay within their bounds. In south America the Law is based on Roman Law and codification so this plays the same role as deference based on Parliamentary supremacy. The USA is odd in having a system where there are multiple power centres at the political level who can all claim political authority but not legal finality. Only the SCOTUS has that as the interpreter of the Constitution. The Constitution has become a kind of holy grail that can solve all problems if you get the priests in the temple of the Constitution to interpret it one way rather than another. It is a kind of idolatry. With political factions vying to get their team of priests on to the temple board of Government to get the holy writ to advance their objectives.

RNB @213 Does it follow that other Dems running on Obamacare is really the death knell of Sanders (presumably by crashing his credibility)? 1) Isn’t even HRC pledging to tweak Obamacare? and therefore won’t every other Dem be pledging to improve it as well? 2) Will credibility even matter to Dems who have only a marginal preference for either of the plans (marginal especially relative to the GOP alternatives) or the sought-to-be-preserved blue collar voters who probably won’t care at all. The credibility claim, as I understand it, it based on regard for “expert opinion” or technocratic nuance which has been notably lacking this election cycle, and perhaps for good reason. Cheers.

RNB @238: I don’t quite feel up to getting into an internet fight right now (or mostly ever!)—but yes, it’s a bit galling.

RNB and js
I find it depressing the way diversity has been treated on this thread. Ignore or mock, by most commenters and the OP, it seems.

I think CT is great in many ways, which is why I keep coming back – really intelligent and informed conversations. But there does seem to be this glaring weakness – well it’s more than weakness, it’s an ethical problem really. Maybe if we could understand it, we could understand why the US is in the really dire political situation facing the US at present. I admit our last Australian Prime Minister was a joke and worse, and many of us despaired that he could ever have been elected, but any country where someone like Trump can be taken seriously as a presidential candidate seems to be in significantly worse trouble.

Seriously I think there is something in this – what is it about the culture that can produce something like CT, where so many commenters are so intelligent, well informed and well meaning, yet apparently unable to take seriously the voices of women and minorities, even when people from those groups are speaking (well virtually) directly to them?

JH I thought in this instance it was fair to say as someone (I think it was RNB) suggested, that your responses sounded a bit mocking. But I was by no means directing my comments only or even primarily at you. I was disappointed in your response, but am more concerned by those who seem to ignore the issue, or, as BW seems to do, side-step it in a rather lofty way as if they are above it (as one might some messy thing on the pavement, I suppose).

In terms of the Trump racist policy, in Australia in the 2000s we had a MP Pauline Hanson who was racist, I can’t remember how she got elected in the first place, but then she started her own party. It is difficult to imagine a prospective leader of one of our major parties having that racist policy, possibly a back bencher could say something like that without party support, but not someone who was a choice for Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition, at least that is what I would expect

Hillary Clinton’s Lead Shrinks as More Women Shift to Bernie Sanders, WSJ/NBC News Poll Finds

That is the same in Australia, the Commonwealth Attorney General – a politician – discuses who to recommend with the State Attorneys General – politicians – and the recommend the person to the Prime Minister – a politician – who has the power to appoint them as justice of the High Court.

I appreciate the interest, but honestly, my remarks were directed squarely at quite specific things that BW said, and I wasn’t really fishing for responses beyond that. (Which isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy RNB’s sarcasm @238 or appreciate Val and LFC’s responses.)

MilitaryAardvark @ 258 nails an important point. For a candidate who touts her experience, HRC certainly doesn’t seem to learn from it. Far from leading, she waffles and equivocates on any issue where taking a stand might alienate some unknown independent voter, alienating the base she must have to win. Every move seems calculated and insincere.

I would refer her to Revelation 3:15-16: “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

See @ 255

I’ve always loved Bernie – for years and years. Yay for a politician who unabashedly calls himself a socialist. But speaking from my place as an older, tired, lefty woman, it’s hard for me to hear all my young prog friends use their new-found love for Bernie to rip on Hillary. Especially if they still love Obama, or make easy excuses for the drones and the deportations when they’re talking about him, but not about her. It’s just really really hard for my overly sensitive ears not to hear it as sexism. I’d love to be convinced otherwise.

225: “It could be argued that, in something like a historical-dialectical sense, reactionary, anti-Enlightenment political irrationalism , from Joseph de Maistre (its most eloquent early spokesman) to Mussolini, Franco, and Pinochet, was a “product” of the Enlightenment.”

It could be argued that everything is a product of the enlightenment, either emanating from or rebelling against. That goes for religious fundamentalism as well as fascism.

Keth 241, with respect, assuming that all liberal democracies are either modeled on the US or the UK is only a marginal improvement over the the widespread belief that the USA is the only model of democracy.

‘He’s a crude demagogue who successfully appeals to the most bigoted slice of the right wing electorate. No more, no less.’ (TM, 266)
He is more in that he has no career in politics to worry about, he can say anything he likes, including things that no other Republican could say.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I think this is the only case in the developed world where the judiciary found the right to abortion already in a constitution.

The Irish case is a funny one – the Prolifers were afraid that a European court would assert a right to abortion based on Human Rights treaties we had signed, so they inserted a clause to ban abortion completely into our Constitution.

And then our Supreme Court found the right to abortion in that clause!

Way to defeat Trump on Muslims is NOT to try to convince people that it is vicious racism and betrays the ideals of the country. If they are voting age, and don’t already KNOW this, then they are “immune to your consultations.”

Anyway there is a “war” on. So use that, instead:

You can easily explain to any young rightwing Marine inductee:

“Trump’s slandering of Muslims ALREADY worsens the US image and makes it harder for US soldiers to find ‘friendlies’ in Muslim lands. You need that, for counterinsurgency to work. Trump has ALREADY screwed it up. And it makes it harder to expect US Muslims to come forward with intel about domestic terror. He’s already got white supremacists in the US trumpeting his cause. Electing Trump will make it more dangerous for US citizens to travel abroad. It will severely screw up US counterintelligence policy and US foreign policy, and US diplomacy to keep us from getting into another wrong war, and wasting our assets. Stupid bragging would be BAD in the White House. It works in commercial real estate, because they are all greedy schmucks.”

There! Mission accomplished!

This argument works on some Trumpsters. Maybe lefties won’t use it because it betrays purist principles: “…’Wrong war’? B-b-but there are no ‘right’ wars!…”

TM #266: “let me be clear that I’m *not* advocating for leaning back and enjoying the popcorn.”

Well not me, dudettes and dudes!

At this point I am CERTAINLY in favor of, “leaning back and enjoying the popcorn”.

Worrying about trying to redirect this momentous trainwreck — when none but primary voters are paying much attention — just sets you up emotionally to make your own miscalculation of the November debacle.

TM #82: “I am generally dismayed that this discussion on CT has descended to that level of horse-race politics. The November election really shouldn’t be about just Hillary and Bernie. Progressives (or liberals or whatever label you prefer) need to mobilize and fight and win on all levels. Given the horror show going on on the Republican side, this shouldn’t be that hard. But it takes more than picking the “most electable” candidate.”

I am generally dismayed when people denigrate horse-race politics, and turn to horse-race political-economic ideology!

You got yer college academics, imprisoned in their intellectual categories… You got yer armchair activists, insisting that it’s “now-or-never,” and insisting that plutocrats are pulling the strings of puppets, everywhere you look…

It’s a whole lot duller that this, I think.

My premise: The world is already inexorably moving to the left. (I have been writing this here for years now, to much derision.)

This US election won’t matter much in that larger scheme of things. There is little to stop slow movement to the left, short of major war or climate disaster. There is little that can hasten it, so long as people stand up for themselves, and put 2 + 2 together.

Who can stop it? Certainly not the plutocrats, whose ages-old knuckleheadedness is now revealed in nearly complete loss of message-control, control which is perhaps irrecoverable to them.

What can be done to hasten it? Very little, without beginning to predict things incorrectly.

Why is the world moving to the left? Largely for the same reasons that many writers felt in the 19th Century; cue-up the basic list: {Accelerating technological innovation} + {The evidently unequal ownership of its output} + {Human psychology}.

All, pushing the world in that direction. For a 20th-century exposition of the thesis — from a conservative! — I cite Schumpeter’s remarkable & prescient updating of Marx. To this date, a thesis unchallenged on either right or left, and being verified empirically.

I am not sure that the 19th-Century’s more “moderate” thinkers would have disagreed either, even those who are taken to be classical market economists, such as my own beloved avatar of sound judgment, Alfred Marshall. Middle-of-the-roaders such as Marshall (even Smith before him) tried to describe a current phenomenon, but NOT necessarily to prescribe the future.

This new idea further added-on — that market psychology is somehow prescriptive of the way that humans always will be — appears to be an inference suggested in post-WWII textbooks, propelled by the bad example of totalitarian communism, and with perhaps some unjustified academic respect paid to the systems-psychological error of Hayek.

This gets us to a discussion of that remarkable psychological error as evinced symmetrically from both left and right: The right thinks that market psychology is an eternal human trait. The left (mostly) seems to think that market psychology is an illusion, an ideal alienation, that is imposed by material conditions.

Thus, the left writes as if we need only to break the material chains, to dispel the illusion.

But this makes the error that people have a hidden psychology that is simply suppressed, or else it supplants their present psychology with the “correct” one to have.

I tend to think that nothing will work at this deep level by partisan fiat. The process needs too much intellectual argument and meets too much cognitive inertia.

But it’s clearly changing slowly, and {accelerating technological innovation} + {the evidently unequal ownership of its output.} may make a fait accompli.

In the meantime of this long but accelerating change, what’s on the menu is picking the “most electable” candidate. One who also helps people stand on their feet — and to help people say what they themselves want to say — and who will try to prevent people from getting hurt. Pick the “most electable” candidate who is headed in that general direction. That’s what’s on the menu, after the party conventions in the US. Then, after November, there will be something else to knowingly fret about.

Sanders leads Clinton in national poll for first time

Lee A. Arnold @272: “Doesn’t worry me, necessarily. Early matchups are mostly meaningless.”

That’s what I’d always assumed, but according to the Jacobin article linked earlier, that may be simply untrue:

“In a comprehensive analysis of elections between 1952 and 2008, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wleizen found that matchup polls as early as April have generally produced results close to the outcome in November. Even much earlier “trial heats” seem to be far from meaningless. As partisan polarization has increased over the last three decades, there’s some evidence that early polling has become more predictive than ever. In all five elections since 1996, February matchup polls yielded average results within two points of the final outcome.”

In any case, the alternative suggestion to “imagine them on stage” in a pretend GE while trying super hard not to let bias color our imaginary test election doesn’t sound like a more reliable source or evidence than early polls.

CRW @263,

I’m sure it is in large part due to sexism, but not entirely. But I agree we should apply the standard more stringently to Obama and Sanders than most do.

In the comparison to Obama, one reason he gets (too much of) a a pass is because we’ve known him less long and in that shorter time he’s been comparative consistent. A lot of people didn’t [choose to] notice in the 2008 campaign, but every time he criticized the Iraq war, he repeated how gung ho he was about Afghanistan and the war on terror in general. We don’t like how he runs that war, but on some level it’s what we expected, so we don’t get as upset as we should.

In Hillary’s case, I think a lot of people tend to use her hawkishness as an opportunity to vent anger and disappointment about all the other good stuff she’s sometimes on board with and they feel betrayed about when she’s not entirely consistent about. Hawkishness is the one thing she never lets us down on, which is a real let down.

In Sander’s case, I think it’s because the wars haven’t been a central topic in the debates. Even where foreign policy arises, the left’s concerns about the war on terror and drone strikes aren’t raised–it takes the standard Republican form of “how will you protect our country?” So he doesn’t have to address questions that might draw out views on the war that progressives would find less appealing. And of course it helps that he’s always been against Iraq.

All of which reminds me. Why haven’t any of the speculations about democratic electability talked about terrorism? The republicans had, for a while, a pretty successful strategy of making every election about terrorism. The Paris attacks weren’t that long ago, and it’s unfortunately possible there will be another before the election. Isn’t it likely that the Republicans will make that their key attack issue?

Seems important, since Sanders is weak here–if only in his reluctance to engage the issue. He rightly wants to focus on domestic policy as a first priority, but republicans are going to portray that as weakness on the issue, just as Hillary has.

On the other hand, will Hillary be any better off? She’s been playing up her presidential hawkishness for a long time, but for whatever reason, it hasn’t seemed to work.

CRW 02.19.16 at 8:20 am @ 263 —
Elizabeth Warren is said to be extremely popular. Some people think she could have had the Democratic nomination just by asking for it. I think there is a large set of people who like Warren and do not like Clinton. These must be subtracted from the set of putative anti-Clinton Left misogynists.

TM #281, So you now predict that you will regret it until [time x]?

Oh, didn’t realize I forgot the link about the accuracy of early polls:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/karp-bernie-sanders-electability-clinton-republicans-trump-election/

In other words, Sanders favorability rating will fall once Americans figure out that he is not in fact Larry David.
Sanders will also eventually be asked to defend his claim that he was a major author of the ACA when evidence is surfaced that he mostly obstructed it out of his commitment to single-payer.
By the way, did people see the fine piece on Trump’s stances on the Central Park rape cases in not an American rag but The Guardian. In light of evidence that the wrong people had been jailed, he has never once reflected on what safeguards should be in place to prevent the execution of innocent people. Of course he has not rethought his support of the death penalty. And he never gave thought to what should be done to prevent false coerced confessions. The behavior seems sociopathic to me.

I am, by the way, going to vote for Clinton in November if she gets the nomination. I will do it as a lesser of two evils vote. The prowar and pro-lobbyist establishment will have won. But at least Trump or Cruz or some other insane clown won’t be in the White House.

I would also vote for Sanders fully expecting that many people in both parties will fervantly wish him to be an utter failure as President and will probably work hard to make that happen.

@291. Fair point, Donald. But correct me if I am wrong: HRC’s main foreign policy adviser is not Henry Kissinger but Jake Sullivan, who played a big role in the deal with Iran.

Hillary Clinton’s cynical race appeals: The revenge of neoliberal identity politics

Apropos of some the discussion on this thread about Trump here’s a link to John’s frequent interlocutor/conservative main man, R.D.

Spoiler: He senses something afoot among the (white-skinned) disaffected.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-class-republican-fishtown-belmont/

Interpretation: when American Conservative Thinkers are openly fretting about class (and not merely devising Lunzian ways of mystifying it) then you can be relatively sure that a rough beast is on the slouch.

The contradictions are getting too hot to handle. Hiding the political economy behind cultural politics is no longer viable for the democratic and republican parties. A status quo candidate may yet prevail, but the status quo is going to require increasingly intensified and naked displays of force, violence, and general mal-apportion to maintain. When was the last time American centers of power were genuinely afraid of American citizens?

RNB– The Kissinger connection is telling, but it’s not just her poor taste in friends that bothers people.

Clinton’s been fawning over Netanyahu–Greenwald has a piece on that, but anyone who follows the Israel- Palestine issue knows she has been to Obama’s right on Israel, though oddly enough Sidney Blumenthal has sent some of his son Max’s work to her, or so I’ve read. It hasn’t had much influence.

Here is a piece which mentions a distortion she got away with about Syria–

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/02/18/the-media-are-misleading-public-syria/8YB75otYirPzUCnlwaVtcK/story.html

As Kinzer said, nobody corrected her. That’s Bernie’s real weakness on foreign policy– his instincts are right, but he just doesn’t know enough to challenge her effectively. He isn’t my ideal candidate by any stretch– Warren would be better on domestic issues . I don’t know who would be knowledgeable enough to call out HRC on foreign affairs. Her record stinks, but you have to know it to debate her.

( incidentally, with respect to the link, no, I’m not a fan of Assad, who is a war criminal, but the rebels might be worse if they won. )

Though, to add: Sanders is no Corbyn (as I’ve mentioned on here before). So who knows how much daylight there would really between the two when it comes to Palestine, e.g.

TM at 265

“Keth 241, with respect, assuming that all liberal democracies are either modeled on the US or the UK is only a marginal improvement over the the widespread belief that the USA is the only model of democracy.”

Well the issue is the different degree of politicization of the judiciary. In fact most liberal democracies are based on the UK Westminster system as in the Commonwealth, e.g. Canada, New Zealand, Australia etc Or were reconstructed by the allies after the second world war, e.g. Germany, Italy. Or have been based on the same theory of a Constitutional monarchy e.g. Holland, Sweden. Or Finland which is a Parliamentary republic. Finland has a written Constitution but no judicial review!

Some Liberal democracies instituted a system of Judicial review, but most have never had one and were always based on the supremacy of the political institutions. The adoption of a strong form of judicial review is a late development in most countries and it is certainly based to a large degree on imitating US practice. With some academic advocacy thrown in e.g. “Pure Theory of Law” by kelsen . After the fascists took control of Austria Kelsen had to leave in a hurry… so his ideas seem not very effective.

Keith:
After the fascists took control of Austria Kelsen had to leave in a hurry… so his ideas seem not very effective.

I haven’t really been following the judiciary discussion in this thread, but this is a very strange sentence. Or at least the causal connections implicit in the sentence have to be explained more clearly than they were in the comment. What does the fact that Kelsen had to escape the fascists have to do with the soundness or otherwise of his legal theories? (Kelsen was, among other things, an intellectual adversary of Carl Schmitt, who certainly did not leave Nazi Germany but rather lent support to the regime. Does that prove Schmitt’s theories were sounder? I think not.)

I have no idea why Haley endorsed Rubio. I hear that Rubio is the establishment candidate, which I have taken to mean that the RNC is excited about him. Perhaps Haley sees this as an opportunity for a long-term relationship with the RNC? But you are right: this is just a wild guess.

@300 I don’t think Sanders has criticized Clinton for not supporting the Kurds in their battle with ISIS due to a cozy relationship with Turkey. I don’t think he has criticized Clinton for stymieing Iranian efforts to level blows against ISIS. This is the kind of foreign policy that Mohammed Ayoob seems to be calling for; a couple of pieces have been published at yaleglobalonline. Kinzer and he may Ayoob on the same page, but I think these positions are outside US presidential politics.

Why would it be surprising for Haley to endorse Rubio? She came out against the Confederate flag, didn’t she? Of course she’s not gonna like Trump/Cruz. And Rubio is the conventional wisdom alternative to them.

Donald@292 “I would also vote for Sanders fully expecting that many people in both parties will fervantly wish him to be an utter failure as President and will probably work hard to make that happen.”

Gotta say, this is by far the best argument against Sanders nomination. I’m pretty sure that some of the people with Clinton-Trump-Sanders preferences also hold official positions in the Democratic Party and allied institutions. There’s a decent argument out there that presidential politics is just completely unviable as a tool for leftism for reasons like that.

Donald@300 “I don’t know who would be knowledgeable enough to call out HRC on foreign affairs. ”

I even don’t know what an electorally viable but non-horrible U.S. foreign policy would look like. Ultimately I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that bad foreign policy is popular among the citizens of the country with the biggest military.

js@303, Sanders:guns::Clinton:Wall Street makes sense to me. Sanders supporters probably just put lower priority on guns as an issue. Some of them may indeed have problematic feelings on guns.

I’ll just come out and admit it–gun control is good, but I just don’t think private gun ownership is categorically evil in the same way that racism, misogyny, poverty, plutocracy, imperialism, pollution, theocracy, censorship, police brutality, torture or mass surveillance are. If you think that armed self-defense is not merely foolish but intrinsically evil, that’s an honest position held by lots of people with better souls than mine, but it’s not a position I share. I guess I would side with 2008 Clinton (responding to Obama’s “clinging to guns” comment) over 2015/16 Clinton (talking about Australian gun control as a hypothetical).

@Donald Johnson
“I just need to squeeze that into a bumper sticker.”

How about:

“HRC – unprincipled enough to succeed; will burn fewer heretics than Ted Cruz”.

Joseph Brenner “There is no way I would want that man on the Supreme Court”

Seconded

I don’t think Sanders has criticized Clinton for not supporting the Kurds in their battle with ISIS due to a cozy relationship with Turkey. I don’t think he has criticized Clinton for stymieing Iranian efforts to level blows against ISIS. This is the kind of foreign policy that Mohammed Ayoob seems to be calling for; a couple of pieces have been published at yaleglobalonline. Kinzer and he may Ayoob on the same page, but I think these positions are outside US presidential politics.

It’s not, all the Republican candidates are very strongly in favour of stepping up support to the Kurds and bombing the hell out of ISIS.

This is why the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment is so positive and exciting. None of them are that interested in appeasing the Turks or Gulf States (with the possible exception of Jeb). The Bush Republicans had longstanding connections and relationships with the Sauds though the oil industry and their response to 9/11 was always colored by the fear it might jeopardize their business interests (“Islam is peace”). Obama as an intersectionalist who was raised a Muslim has overt pro-Islamic sympathies (“The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam”). Getting a president who has a principled opposition to Islam would be an enormous change.

Always wondered how one makes war on a religion without killing all its adherents, but if the Republican lineup and anti- Islamic sentiment is so positive and exciting, perhaps that’s not an issue that troubles you. One could go for carpet bombing or torture or killing families of terrorists…

I liked the proposed bumper stickers above. People should use slogans that more accurately describe our choices and it helps to be pithy.

phenomenal cat 02.19.16 at 10:22 pm @ 298:
‘When was the last time American centers of power were genuinely afraid of American citizens?’

Late 1960s: Civil Rights/Black Power movement, anti-war movement, New Left, mutinies, hippies, drugs, other citizens reacting violently to these things.

Worthwhile read from Yves Smith, over at Naked Capitalism:

The Crackpot Realism of Clintonian Politics

Charles Wright Mills writing nearly sixty years ago captures this dynamic perfectly. Whereas then the steps towards war could be apocalyptic because of nuclear annihilation now the steps towards war seem more like a distraction while we sink into greater economic doldrums and come closer to social death. But not only does all this ignore the existential threats, it completely misses how American politics has evolved for over four decades. To the liberal commentariat the status quo is irrevocably right wing and politicians like Obama and Clinton are simply “grappling” with this reality. As Klein said “Clinton’s theory of change is probably analytically correct”.

What they miss is these right wing Democrats have profoundly shaped this status quo. Bill Clinton’s treatment of poor people was unimaginable before him and par for the course after him. Obama’s treatment of ordinary homeowners would have been a preposterous fictional story of campy villany. Now it’s just how the world works. Sanders (for all his faults on issues like Israel and immigration) is actually looking to push the center to the left for once and is hoping to galvanize ordinary people to do it. It’s the realism of the psych ward that says we’ll solve climate change, help ordinary people and build a workable economy by supporting an endless series of politicians who care less and less about the issues that matter and exploit hopeful supporters more and more cynically. Admonishing young people for both not voting and desiring anything other than a debt-crippled, climatologically-unstable future feels more like admonishing serfs for being insufficiently pious and for caring about what happens to themselves or their children on this plane of existence. In short, realism is just a code word for “shut up, sit down and be quiet”.

And for goodness sake, where is the evidence that Sanders has a better plan than Clinton to tackle climate change? It was not my impression that this is why the youth were supporting Sanders over Clinton.

RNB @326,

That’s a pretty cavalier (mis)reading of the article, to put it most generously.

As for electability. The latest Quinnipiac Poll shows Sanders would defeat every GOP opponent, whereas Hillary would lose to all of them except for Trump.

Quinnipiac

This has been the norm in polling for several weeks now. Sanders does better in general election heats than Hillary. Which makes perfect sense. He’s actually liked. He actually has higher positives than negatives, which she can’t claim. He’s considered trustworthy and honest. She isn’t.

And, unlike Hillary, Sanders appeals to independents in general and leftists in particular, many of whom just might sit the election out (or vote for Jill Stein) if Hillary wins. Dems will vote for the nominee no matter who it is. So the question is, which one can pull in voters beyond the Democratic base. That’s Sanders, not Hillary.

= = = Karl Rove clearly wants to run against Sanders, not Clinton. = = =

Would that be the Karl Rove of “THE numbers”, the Karl Rove of the Romney meltdown on Fox News, or the Karl Rove who was desperate (_desperate_ I tell you) to run against Howard Dean rather than war hero John Kerry?

Rove lies, he lies about his lies, and he lies about lying about his lies. If you want to argue for HRC, against Sanders, or any other combination go ahead, but invoking Karl Rove is not likely to strengthen your argument.

I don’t know how, but if you have been alive and conscious the last 15-20 years, how can you blame anyone for getting the impression that the US is indeed at war with Islam?

Apparently the perception is so strong and so common, that the US president has to publicly deny it: Obama proclaims: ‘We are not at war with Islam’.

Yes, they should be blamed for their ignorance, as it’s absolutely clear to anyone paying attention that for the last 15-20 years the West had been in league with the Mohammedan tyrannies of the Gulf against nonconformist regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria. This is the context in which Obama spoke and he was ritually stating the standard position of the US establishment while surrounded by clerics. Here is the full quote that line comes from, note his siding with Islamic orthodoxy and the explicit declaration of war against heretics:

We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie. Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders — they’re terrorists. (Applause.) And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.…

…there are respected Muslim clerics and scholars not just here in the United States but around the world who push back on this twisted interpretation of their faith. They want to make very clear what Islam stands for. And we’re joined by some of these leaders today. These religious leaders and scholars preach that Islam calls for peace and for justice, and that women should cover up and not walk about looking like whores, and for sodomites to desist from their vile sins…

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/18/remarks-president-closing-summit-countering-violent-extremism

This is what the US has been reduced to. The heirs of Jefferson are terrified that the next president may not be able to carry out his now traditional role of supporter of the true Islamic faith and will not participate in the ritual denunciation of heretics and apostates.

Even if we allow (and I certainly wouldn’t) that he’s too incompetent to put his ‘policy ideas’ into practice, having a president (or even a presidential candidate) who openly proclaims the desire eg. to shoot Muslims with bullets soaked in pig’s blood matters. Obviously.

The Clinton-Bush-Obama consensus has the US Gov, in league with states where apostasy is a crime, Countering Extremism by using drones to burn people to death and justifying this by calling the victims heretics. Getting a critic of Islam like Trump in the Whitehouse would be an enormous improvement.

Referring to anti-racism and/or anti-fascism as ‘identity politics issues’ is a serious misuse of terms. (NB. I would never vote for Hillary and like several others think Sanders has a much better chance of beating a far right populist).

The comment by Ecrasez L’Infame @333 is one of the more deranged things I’ve read here in quite some time.

Donald Johnson @ 321 too clever paradoxes

I don’t think I was doing that.

I am not going to support either one for the Presidency, but as a personality on television or a representative of a certain (differing) brand(s) of smarmy politics, I do prefer Trump over Clinton. It may be that his style of speaking “offends” me less, because I see the sometimes outrageous things he says as a reflection of political attitudes in his audience rather than philosophy or a policy program of his own deliberate design. At this moment, it is still all just a protest at an unresponsive political establishment, and I am sympathetic with that spirit, much more than with Mrs Clinton’s obliviousness to all that she (and her husband and their faction of establishment Dems) has wrought at home and abroad.

Trump, himself, strikes me as a narcissist in love with his own celebrity, not as as a megalomaniac bent on race war or world domination. ymmv may vary, of course. As for his fan base, political bad attitudes are bad, of course, but they are attitudes, a by-product of a personality under stress, not a consistent indicator of personal or social pathology. Their views are incoherent in relation to any philosophical frame one wants to place on them, because attitudes are not philosophy — they aren’t even thinking, when it comes down to it. Sure, with serious effort, bad attitudes like that — and resentment, envy, paranoid suspicion et cetera — can be fashioned into the political foundation of some really ugly political movements and institutions. Which would be a good reason not to stand aloof or in condescending horror at frightened people being, well, frightened, angry and resentful, while waiting for a transformation of consciousness to eliminate that and all political problems.

I think I just realised a possible reason why there don’t seem to be many CT commenters who are female or from minority groups – every now and then there are comments that make you want to yell at the commenter, and knowing they can’t do that, think it better to walk away. Anyway taking a deep breath I will try to respond to BW’s and engels’ ‘ comments.

BW is doing that move beloved of some CT commenters, which is to use the term “identity politics” as a bludgeon to keep women and minorities in their places. engels, to his credit, calls him out on it, but then goes on to say that it’s ok for us to vote against people who threaten to oppress us, but it is not ok for us to vote for people just because they are ‘like’ us.

Students of American history can correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know, in the history of American presidential elections, Obama was the first chance people ever had to vote for a black President, and people have never had the chance to vote for a woman (and quite likely won’t this time).

You might like to think about structural oppression and why, when you do get female or minority candidates, they are likely to be ‘compromise candidates’, before piously telling women and minorities they shouldn’t vote for people just because they are like them. I agree we should not vote for them on those grounds alone, but they are certainly relevant factors to take into account.

Also those people who say to me ‘there’s no such thing as patriarchy’ etc, might also like to think about why all American presidents have been male. It’s like patriarchy is so obvious that people can’t see it – hiding in plain sight, as the saying goes.

Suzanne @ 338

I am glad you feel your superior intellect and political perceptions saved you from disillusion with Obama. At least you have your self-esteem.

I can’t speak to the challenges of self-presentation faced by women in politics — or life. I only recently learned of the perils of vocal fry, that’s how out of it I am. Mrs. Clinton has sounded consistently belligerent on Iran over many years, a consistency she draws attention to. I remain skeptical about her taking credit for a deal to which her major contribution was vacating office.

As for the financial reform issues, if you are not someone whose job, home, kids’ college, and retirement are not under threat of being gobbled up, you can be complacent. Until next time, . . .

Val: BW is . . . us[ing] the term “identity politics” as a bludgeon to keep women and minorities in their places.

No, I’m not. Please don’t lie. You can express your point of view without attributing to me views I do not hold and have not expressed.

One more link, in case anyone didn’t see it, Erica Garner’s endorsement of Sanders
https://youtu.be/oP4Xasc1t7Q

For those who support Clinton because electability – doesn’t it worry you that Clinton is so unelectable she barely eked out wins in two caucus states where literally the entire local democratic political machine supported her? To me it is a big red flag – it signals that the Clinton team (a team that won one election b/c of Perrot, and another with an incumbent running against the least inspiring candidate before going on and losing a quasi-incumbent presidential race in the midst of a huge economic boom) has not moved on at all from what worked in 1992.

if you are not someone whose job, home, kids’ college, and retirement are not under threat of being gobbled up, you can be complacent.

The lack of self-awareness is frankly fucking hilarious.

If Trump won, it would be because a very sizable portion of the American people has joined a movement led by Trump, and distinguished from the other terrible reactionaries running by a racist discourse of national rebirth. That really would be a major disaster – much more so than, say, Cruz getting elected even though Cruz is as an individual person more frightening than Trump is. Sometimes the lesser evil is in fact so discernibly lesser it outweighs the very real concerns about “lesser evilist” politics that I generally share.

Plume 02.20.16 at 5:16 pm @ 324 —
I don’t think the Establishment types were afraid of Occupy Wall Street and its progeny in the same sense they were afraid of the dissidents of the late Sixties, who put millions of people in the streets, started riots, fought the police, burned buildings, mutinied in the Army, dropped out, founded a middle-class drug culture, and so on. Most of the Occupies’ occupations were wiped out in a few hours once our lords and masters became impatient with them. If by ‘Left’ one means those who would like to see more peace, freedom, and equality than they now observe, we now seem to be very few and very weak. The great people of the state, secure in their bubbles of ignorance, incompetence, and unconcern, are not afraid of us; we are afraid of them. We wonder if we will be permitted to have some of the New Deal back. Permitted to ask.

js. @309
But LFC (@305) — Surely it needn’t be that direct or coercive, no? A little nudge and a wink would do the trick mostly. It just seems to me fairly obvious that political influence from establishment bodies (among which I’d surely count the RNC) works, and works this way mostly (stressing the word “influence”). You don’t even need winks and nudges, just a knowledge of their preferences (not hard to divine: definitely no Trump or Cruz!), a desire to be in their good graces, and a guess as to who you think they think is the most likely establishment candidate (also not hard to divine), would do the trick.

Maybe. But I really don’t know anything about Haley or how internal Repub politics works. It may be she is indebted to the RNC for support in her gubernatorial race, or the primary thereof — I don’t remember. I just think/guess that governors in general wd tend to be somewhat recalcitrant to endorsement pressure, unless Rance Preibus (or whatever his name is), chair of the RNC, has some particular hold over them. Which he might. Another possibility is that Haley wants to be picked for vice-president and thinks Rubio might pick her. Just guessing.

“In any case, HRC wouldn’t/isn’t going to take away the shotgun you presumably have at home for self-defense. I have one myself. ”

I do have a shotgun, but only because it and a couple hunting rifles were passed down to me. Not for self-defense.

Honestly, if you find a genie and wish for Australian gun control in America, it’s not gonna bother me too much, though it might be nice if you also wished for de-militarized police with your second wish. I just don’t see much hope for progress here. Clinton has said Obama has gone as far as possible with executive orders, right? The gun lobby’s control of Congress seems more secure than ever (given rural domination of that body), and every time Obama opens his mouth over guns, gun and ammo sales go nuts. (This, by the way, was the very valid point Sanders was making over “all the shouting in the world”. Is there any other issue where you can watch, in real time, everything get worse as soon as the president mentions it, as you can watch gun sales?) Horribly, though the mass shootings have galvanized Democratic politicians, they seem to have desensitized voters. There is a non-insane argument that making the mass shootings into a political issue only encourages crazies to carry them out.

The only bright spot is that though the number of guns per capita in the country is rapidly growing, the percentage of households with a gun is slowly falling or at least holding constant (around 40% now). Maybe some day America will grow out of its gun obsession, but I’m not sure that a politically polarized debate would speed that process along.

I’m not even sure that gun control is the available best policy lever for reducing the homicide rate–e.g. https://newrepublic.com/article/124445/beyond-gun-control

I’m fairly sure, though, that whether or not political focus on guns could actually make any progress on gun control, it will impede our progress on every other issue–even if more voters favor gun control, the ones who oppose it are absolutely obsessed with it and get more obsessed every time you say the work “gun”.

“I wonder if a lot of this argumentation over reining in Wall Street seems to me to be pretty much closing the barn door after etc.”

I’m not sure if by closing the barn door [after the horse has bolted?] you mean A) the 2007 financial crisis already happened and there is no point preventing any future crisis or B) Wall Street is already unstoppable so it’s better to just accept their rule? I don’t think A is true, and if B is true there’s really no point to political discussion at all–might as well just make Bloomberg king. I hear he’s really good on guns.

Thanks for the detailed corrections BW, I should have said “presidential candidates of the Democrat or Republican parties” – again I may be showing my ignorance, but isn’t the election de facto between those two candidates?

Nice for you that you got an opportunity to patronise me though, no doubt.

I am not ‘lying’ when I say that you (and Bob McManus subsequently in this thread) use identity politics as a bludgeon to keep women and minority groups in their places. That is how your comments read to me. I suggest you ought to think about that and respond to it rather than making a knee jerk angry response.

On the other hand I strongly approve in principle (without actually knowing much about the candidate) of your actual voting choice, so will try to lay off the snark a bit now.

LFC @357 & Suzanne @360 — I hadn’t thought of the VP angle (just: general future possibilities), but one way or another, that makes sense.

Val @361 — You should probably specify a Republican or Democratic nominee in the general election; otherwise you’re liable to be “misunderstood” again.

——

I did try to read the fine print.

The print wasn’t even that fine, no?

I think the question is really whether it (i.e. “identity”) can be a legitimate factor in marginal cases. Obviously, Thatcher/Gandhi fille/Palin (yikes!) is a total disaster. And there’s a genuine argument to be had about whether Clinton should be considered a marginal case (I actually don’t have a settled view on this, mostly because I care more about parties than about individual candidates). But Clinton aside, I do think that in marginal cases, what now gets called “identity” can be a completely legitimate factor qua expression of solidarity.

Re: identity politics and what Bruce Wilder says is “the challenge of self presentation faced by women in politics”

Part of this is that women are not automatically considered as leadership candidates, and the same for black and Asian and middle eastern and pacific islands people etc, or gay people.

In Australia the case in point is Penny Wong, who is one of the most capable people in the Parliamentary Labor Party, but she is never considered as a future candidate for Prime Minister, despite being more capable than other people who are considered as possible future Prime Ministers.

The only reason for this is her identity – female, Asian-Australian, and gay. But she is very capable, if she was male, white, and straight she would be one of the front runners to lead the Labor Party and definitely be considered as a future Prime Minister.

Identity politics works to exclude people at least as much, or more, than it helps people.

So Bob, according to Wikipedia, class based arguments are an example of identity politics. But doesn’t that rather destroy all the arguments against ‘identity politics’ that you have previously put forward?

Are you now saying that all forms of politics are identity politics, but class based identity politics are better than gender or race based identity politics?

bob mcmanus,

She isn’t a victim. She is very capable and has held reasonably high positions like Finance Minister, but she just is never discussed as a future leader of the Labor Party, or potential Prime Minister, which other people are considered as who are less capable.

engels @370: Sorry, yes. I’d missed that.

Also: the Erica Garner video is great.

engels:
Curiosity sated?

Yup, thanks.

ZM interesting example. I just recently moved to Australia, and the ALP is the most disastrously “third way” center left party I’ve ever seen anywhere. There is literally no way i would/will if I become an Australian citizen ever vote for them unless they are blown up completely and reconstructed from the ground up – even a farce like Tony Abbott didn’t implement any substantive policy that a Gillard or Rudd government couldn’t our wouldn’t have. The identity of whoever they put up for prime minister really makes zero difference to me in that case. (Despite my complete agreement that it is entirely legitimate to take the signal that electing a person of marginalized or oppressed identity sends into account in voting decisions.)

376: So 19th century nationalisms and imperialism didn’t involve localized understandings and constructions of identities? Hobsbawm (et al) and B Anderson are just a start, no, Durkheim the better start.

Whatever, as I said, we are juggling identities in this thread, using definitions as tribal markers. Wilder needs to distance himself from me, I prefer alienation.

Now, Taebaek Mountains is a long movie, and I am late.

I still would like to see equal representation of women in parliament

So would I fwiw

So 19th century nationalisms and imperialism didn’t involve localized understandings and constructions of identities?

Sorry, I was just trying to give my pejorative sense of the phrase ‘identity politics’, not claiming anything more general about the importance of ‘identity’ in social conflict.

“eg js’ concern about what a Trump victory would mean for Muslims is about playing the victim, is it?”

js’ “concern” wasn’t about Trump, but about B Wilder, whose victim apparently js somehow was.

But yeah. Wilder was tempted to play the card himself.

I put extra effort into playing the asshole. I refuse allies.

Re ‘identity politics’ and the question of women voters and HRC:

(1) I don’t think the Wikipedia excerpt quoted by b. mcmanus is especially helpful in this context. In contemp. U.S. political discourse, ‘identity politics’ tends to refer, it seems to to me, primarily to racial and/or ethnic and/or sexual-orientation identity. So if someone sees the political scene/universe primarily through his/her status as, say, black, Hispanic, Asian, or LGBT, I think that person is doing ‘identity politics’ — which I’m *not* saying is necessarily bad; I’m just trying to give my descriptive sense of things here. It’s a phrase whose resonance, in other words, seems to be connected to belonging to a minority group or status. At least that’s how I’ve interpreted it.

(2) I totally understand why some women really want to see a woman Pres. of the U.S. in their lifetimes and why some of them are making that an important consideration in deciding to support HRC. And I further understand why some of them feel that women in politics face double standards when it comes to ‘presentation of self’ and public behavior — I think there’s considerable truth to that. (It’s not fair, of course, but it does seem to be the situation.)

HRC, whatever her faults (and she does have serious ones), has actually been concerned about and active on women’s issues (access to justice, equal pay, domestic abuse, reproductive rights) during her career, afaik. An HRC presidency wd represent an important symbolic, and possibly in some ways substantive, milestone for feminism. The Thatcher analogy, I think, is quite inapt. Thatcher wasn’t a feminist. HRC is.

LFC, in what sense is Hillary a feminist in ways that Bernie isn’t? Because he’s a man and she’s a woman? Choosing one candidate over the other based on their gender, when they have equal credential to claiming a feminist mantle, would be precisely identity politics. It names an essence that organizes an identity and creates an in-group/out-group dynamic, a lens through which one makes politics.

I would actually like to see the structure of Parliament changed to ensure more women and Indigenous and other cultural groups etc

For women this would be easy since women are 50% of people, you just make two positions available in every electorate, one female and one male, and the same 50/50 in the Senate.

For Indigenous people I would add seats in the Upper House and they can be held by Indigeonus people only.

I’m not sure about how to have more other cultural groups, unless you use the census, and have some cultural groups based on census data.

Uh, I just thought of something that probably colors the debate around here, though I didn’t see anyone mention it. (only skimmed lightly, though.)

We CT commenters probably skew old, right? The kids, they don’t really blog, do they?

I bring this up because age is a huge part of the identity politics story surrounding this race. Among older voters, Clinton does much better among women than men. Both older women being inspired by Hillary and older men being sexist against her are real parts of that story (also having a daughter makes you much more likely to back Clinton.)

But that’s far less true among younger voters. In (very white) NH Sanders actually won woman of all age groups by more than he won men. The white kids were all crazy for Sanders, but young women seemed to support him a bit more than young men did. Among young people, the only place he seems to have a problem is African-Americans. (Sanders probably even does okay among young Latinos.)

Obviously, young African Americans are not looking Clinton and being inspired by someone like them. I’m not even sure it makes sense to call what’s going on there, or among African Americans generally, a matter of “identity politics”. Part of it is that Sanders isn’t focusing on some issues as much as they might like. But I think it’s it’s at least as much a matter of retail politics–Clinton has a lot of allies among black elected officials. Now, obviously I’m deeply skeptical of Clinton, but retail politics is a perfectly rational approach to voting–you ask which candidate is trusted by the people you trust. The results can be dirty sometimes, but it’s infinitely more rational than picking Cruz or Trump because they look angry enough to satisfy your rage. Heck, you don’t even have to worry about arguments fitting on a bumper sticker (313)–it could very well be that prominent elected officials are backing Clinton because they suspect that if Sanders wins that he would end up being sabotaged by intraparty antagonists. Ultimately, retail politics is not what broke America, and it is not a bad thing that the black establishment is a powerful force in Democratic presidential politics, even though I’ve seen some black voices get really mad about it.

Women supporting Clinton have every right to be inspired by her victory, and they’re absolutely right that sexism is a major problem both in their own lives and in Clinton’s career (including the upcoming general election), and sexism in CT comment threads is definitely not unheard of. But, generally speaking (read: out in real life, not in this comment thread) gender isn’t as big a factor in the apparent voting patterns as race and age. I understand CRW’s frustration fatigue at 263, but it should be resisted–if you reflexively assume that Clinton opposition is sexist, you end up tarring young women supporting Sanders for class reasons with an unfair brush.

Don’t think there’s any point arguing with Bob, since he suggests I would be happy if Trump won, he has obviously left reasoned argument behind and gone ‘all personal insults, all the time’.

If I were able to vote in the US elections I might well vote for Bernie Sanders, but I would be sad not to see a woman President. Some CT commenters need to accept that complexity is a thing I think.

I have seen a recent campaign as for Bernie Sanders that shows everybody coming together (the one where the faces join) to oppose the 1%, and while I understand the sentiment, it does come uncomfortably close to eluding race and gender as politically relevant categories. To anyone who thinks ‘why isn’t electing a feminist man just as good as electing a feminist woman?’ I should tell you that within my political career, less than twenty years ago, I heard men in the Australian Labor Party claiming that it was not really important to select female candidates because Labor men understood women’s views and were able to represent them. Sounds a bit different when you put it that way, doesn’t it?

(Using Bob’s reasoning, women don’t even need the vote, because women is an essentialist category and there is no real difference between men and women, so why shouldn’t men be able to represent these so called ‘women’ just as well as the so-called ‘women’ can?)

@js 356, I’m not saying that it’s illegitimate for you to consider guns a higher priority, but not all leftists and liberals share that prioritization. (I’m pretty sure there are far more pro-gun single issue voters than anti-gun, even now, but maybe that could change)

By “not intrinsic”, I just mean that my support for gun control is based on an empirical belief–if someone convinced me that private armed self-defense was actually fantastically good at saving lives then I’d change that belief. Asking me whether a particular kind of gun should be banned is like asking me whether a particular intersection should have a stop light. I guess some people out there take that “monopoly of violence” thing seriously and actually would believe that private firearm ownership is intrinsically immoral. That latter rationale is one I find problematic–all too often I see anti-gun arguments start to shade into pro-police/pro-military enthusiasm.

“Similarly, I think in the context of a modern, developed state, armed self-defense on the part of the private citizens is at least not good.”

Let’s be careful here–no politician is promising to legalize wanton gun violence (well, okay, I grant you that SYG is intrinsically bad) or criminalize self-defense. We’re just talking about whether people should be allowed to maintain the capacity to do those things. And you’re saying that in our particular context, only state actors should have guns. Right?

That’s reasonable, but compare that to a lot of the other things I listed. Most of them are wrong in any context. (Pollution and censorship might be the only exceptions.) We wouldn’t say “in the context of the modern state, racism is bad.”

It might be possible that we could contrive some strange social context in which “entrenched social and economic inequality” was a good thing, but I don’t believe that’s ever been true in any actually existing past or present social context (I could be wrong.)

mcmanus, do fuck off. I was not and have no plans to be Bruce Wilder’s victim.

@359: Australia provides an example of a pro-gun country that experienced a sea change in opinion once the butcher’s bill got high enough. There are also salient differences to be accounted for, of course. Yes, President Obama spoke out on the subject and tried to get Congress to do something. He failed and spent valuable political capital doing so, a risk he took because presumably he thought it needed to be taken regardless of the fact that he might be weakened politically. But he was right to make the attempt.

As for Wall Street – what I meant was something along the lines of what I heard Michael Lewis say on the Charlie Rose show some years ago. He noted that when Obama came into office, the financial industry was literally on its knees, more or less asking to be told what to do. That moment passed, and now it’s a fight just to make sure that we hang on to Dodd-Frank. But no, I am not suggesting that we throw in the towel just because the circumstances have changed – any more than we throw in the towel on guns.

I’m not saying that it’s illegitimate for you to consider guns a higher priority

Wait, what? I don’t consider guns to be a higher priority. I was just laying out what I’ve experienced to be a significant dynamic in significant portions of the American liberal-left. Speaking of myself: about five years ago, I was pretty much in the “give up on the issue of guns entirely” camp; I’ve since moved a fair bit, but not all the way to thinking that gun control should be a higher priority than economic justice.

LFC at 304,

I was being ironic. The Kelsen episode shows that the theory that Law can be based on universal norms justified by reason is problematic when Fascists who do not share the jurists idea of norms seize power. How do you enforce a norm when enough people are willing to fight to oppose it? Dred Scot raised the same problem. Judicial review by a court only works if certain norms are accepted in society. And have a political base. As Poland is demonstrating now with the new Government stripping the Constitutional court of its powers. It is one weakness with the whole idea of judicial review and legal norms.

Just watched the conservative press assessment of the S.C. results, including some after the news broke that Jeb is out. Only an establishment hack clung to the notion that Trumps 50/50 favorable unfavorable ratings among Republicans will ensure that Trump loses to Rubio. The majority see Trump running the table. The desperate believe Rubio can beat Trump once Cruz drops out. Indeed, one went so far as to argue that Cruz is finished, with another predicting Cruz withdraws within two weeks. So, the quality of punditry hasn’t improved much.

The assumption that Trump can be stopped hinges on a single idea: head to head the establishment candidate Rubio (new speak: Mainstream candidate) will beat Trump in winner take all primaries from March because the field will be winnowed to two. See?

Should the bright bulbs elect to pull their heads from their butts, they’d see the critical flaw in this strategy. Carson is going to continue to compete for the social conservative vote and won’t quit right away, especially after that stunt Cruz pulled in Iowa. Kasich isn’t going to quit because he is now the sole remaining governor in the race. And while the ‘Trump can be beaten’ theorists might wish that Carson and Kasich drop out very soon, their entire theory rests principally on the common sense and party loyalty of one Ted Cruz, the single most divisive Republican in modern electoral politics.

All those who figure that Cruz drops out to make way for Rubio for the good of the GOP, raise your hands.

In other words Trump just secured the GOP nomination.

engels – I think I am beginning to get this. You use the term “identity politics” to refer to a politics that uses appeals to a supposed common identity (based eg on ethnicity or sexuality) to disguise actual material inequalities or power differentials and maintain the neoliberal status quo, right?

However Bruce Wilder it seems goes beyond this (at least in regard to Hilary Clinton) and suggests that anyone who talks about her track record on race or gender issues, is using “identity politics” for the sole reason of maintaining the neoliberal and warmongering status quo. He seems to suggest this even if the people raising the issues are themselves women or people of colour; indeed he seems at times to suggest that anyone who raises issues of race, gender or minorities in any context (even in terms say of who participates in CT discussions) is doing so because of this form of “identity politics” which has the primary motivation not of ensuring fair representation of women, people of colour or other minority groups, but of maintaining the neoliberal status quo. That’s the position that I call stupid.

If this isn’t Bruce Wilder’s position, then I’m doing him an injustice, but that is how he sounds to me at times. (It possibly is Bob’s position, but who knows, and I am really beginning to think it’s not worth even thinking about Bob’s position any more, after some of the stuff he’s said on this thread)

@ 408 Please provide a concrete list of ways that Britain became less liberal, less progressive towards immigrants, less understanding of the concerns of women from 1846, etc on. I can easily provide a very long list of ways that Britain has improved steadily, for the most part, until fairly recently. And even now the problem is income inequality. In most other respects Britain is infinitely more just and egalitarian than it was even 1oo years ago. That’s fault-riven baseline for your dire forecast about the imminent destruction of civil liberties in the US by a Republican candidate who just defended planned parenthood, another who is himself Latino and came second in South Carolina – deeply evangelical state that for some reason elected a female governor of Indian descent, and who celebrated his election victory with an African-American elected official.

In the world the rest of us inhabit, Republican presidents have been elected more often than Democrats and the U.S. constitution is still functioning, gay marriage just passed, crime is generally down, and Democrats aided and abetting all of the wars of the current century in addition to those they actually started or accelerated. The Democratic front-runner has supported every US war of this century, as best as I can tell, is far from a firm friend of anyone, especially women, and is at least as likely to repeat the errors of past presidents as any of the GOP candidates. Having survived Nixon, Reagan, and 2 Bush’s I’m certain the US government and the US constitution will still be functioning whether a Dem, or a Republican is in office. On the question of civil liberties, Democrats in the WH have worked hand-in-hand with their GOP House colleagues to set up the data-bases you fear lie somewhere in the future.

Magari, sorry again, I think l may have misunderstood you in my comment @ 410. In my defence though, what you were saying isn’t particularly clear, even when I re-read it. So can we ground this discussion a bit?

Your country (I presume it’s the USA, sorry if that’s not right) has a very low representation of women in your legislature, and you’ve never had a female President. You rank 75th in the world in terms of female representation (http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm) – interestingly, well below countries like Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates. Think on that!

My country, Australia, is pretty bad at 46th, but yours is truly awful. Now by your reasoning that doesn’t really matter, but I think it does. If I were a woman in America, I might even vote for Sanders, as I said earlier, but I would be truly disappointed that I couldn’t vote for the female candidate.

kidneystones

I was not positing that the construction of an imperial identity led to every bad thing – just noting that it changed the ways Britain interacted with the world and within itself. Nor do I think a Democrat victory will lead to paradise. But, given that the strongest power of the US president is to stop things happening rather than make them happen, and given the evident desire of many Republicans to make a great many bad things happen, I don’t think opening that gate will lead anywhere good. The example was of how a change in identity can be very hard to unwind – it defines the field on which the battles are fought.

@418

It seems to me that Obama has changed US foreign policy quite successfully in some areas – the Iran deal being the obvious example, along with the disengagement from Iraq. Just two little things, I know, but worth putting on the credit side of the ledger.

As for Trump heightening the contradictions, I suspect that the ongoing disintegration of America’s infrastructure due to chronic short-termism and rightwing economic crankery will do more to cause collapse and in a rather shorter space of time.

@ 416 Hi Peter, thanks for the very civil reply. Whilst we disagree on issues here and there (arming rebels in Syria stands out) you add a great deal of sober, informed commentary. I’ve no problem (for what it’s worth) with your assessment here. I disagree generally on the cosmetic distinctions on foreign policy in particular ‘separating’ the GOP and the Democrats. I’m not in the least concerned by Trump. Indeed, I fully expect him to race back to the center once he’s confirmed as the GOP nominee. I supported HRC vs. O in 2008, just as I supported Gore vs. Bush. The last 8 years have caused me to rethink my former tribal loyalty to team blue. I don’t see how Clinton transforms herself into someone new. Sanders remains my first choice, despite my reservations about some of his skills. I recall listening to Paul Glastris and ? discussing the GOP field last summer. Both interlocutors argued that Trump would be the easiest to live with. I concur.

Neville Morley @413:
isn’t the thing about Clinton and the female vote at least partly about the fact that she has (at least in the past, at least partially) espoused feminist ideas, so the argument for women voting for her is not (or not only) ‘mere’ identity politics or the symbolism of a female president, but objective grounds for believing that she is committed to doing things that will be good for women? Which would clearly distinguish her from Thatcher, for a start.

Me @387 (emphasis added):

HRC, whatever her faults (and she does have serious ones), has actually been concerned about and active on women’s issues (access to justice, equal pay, domestic abuse, reproductive rights) during her career, afaik. An HRC presidency wd represent an important symbolic, and possibly in some ways substantive, milestone for feminism. The Thatcher analogy, I think, is quite inapt.

@400: Sanders likely did not help himself with the African-American community by accusing Clinton of pandering to black voters, whose loyalty to Obama has been unshakable, with her praise of her old boss. (He said this on the BET channel, no less.)

@425, very true, Sanders has kicked quite a few own goals with regards to that population. At least in that instance it was a gaffe rather than a falsehood–it is in fact true that Clinton is criticizing Obama a lot less now than she was in late 2014 (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/ ) and I strongly suspect that once this primary is settled she’ll start criticizing Obama a lot more. Still pretty tasteless and stupid of Sanders to put it that way or really even to draw attention to it at all.

I’m skeptical that that sort of thing is the biggest obstacle between Sanders and African Americans. HRC said and did much worse in 2008. I think it’s much more likely to be a combination of Clinton’s institutional support and black suspicion of white economic populism. But I’m just guessing.

Bruce, your commentary is a light in the dark. Thank you. Ignore the gnats.

@428 I still don’t get how he takes over the party when so few people in the Congress and no in the Senate really supports any of his agenda. He does not want to compromise with them, and I can understand that. But that would make him more effective with us here kvetching than he would be in the Presidency. For example, he had good reasons to see the Paris Accords as limited but he simply criticized them; he did not go to Paris to negotiate as part of the Senate team. I don’t see what he actually gets done.

But enough Sanders criticism. Almost everyone I know does not support Clinton, and is favorable to Sanders.

I understand that many people have the same reaction to Hillary Clinton that they have to Tom Friedman as a mindless techno-optimistic booster of entrepreneurialism in a pluralistic country in a globalized economy. It’s not just that Clinton is a neo-liberal; she is a neo-liberal who sounds like Thomas Friedman. She supports inclusive institutions insofar as they are inclusive as Acemoglu and Robinson define them though unlike them she puts emphasis on how inclusive they are for women. Acemoglu and Robinson have almost nothing to say about gender. This is where Clinton is indeed progressive.

Still as almost all my friends feel, Clinton has an unsupportable faith that entrepreneurs will solve the most pressing problems; she wants tolerance mostly because it will allow venture capital to draw from a broader pool of talent; she judges the ultimate worth of an economic activity by the private profit that it generates whatever the negative externality (fracking, Keystone pipeline); she is blind to the devastation that trade has visited upon communities; she does not feel in her bones the moral outrage of widening wealth and income inequality in the US; she has never reflected on the costs of humanitarian imperialism or the sanctions that her husband imposed, and in fact has supported every war that the deep national security apparatus has wanted, as Jeffrey Sachs has argued.

Clinton is not a leftist. She does not want to be associated with the left. Almost everyone I know backs Sanders rather than Clinton. Can people on the left support Clinton both in the nomination process and in the general election? I think that we should!

@RNB

“I still don’t get how he takes over the party when so few people in the Congress and no in the Senate really supports any of his agenda.”

Just like the Tea Party took over the Republican Party. First, you form a faction and then expand it by getting your people into political office high and low, all around the country. The Tea Party accomplished this with rich donors. Sanders and Trump could do it by changing the way their parties fund themselves. Both have made a big issue of not receiving donations from the rich and I think this is a big part of their appeal. I think both are using their non-super pac campaigns as dress rehearsals for what they intend to do to their parties.

It seems to me that Obama has changed US foreign policy quite successfully in some areas – the Iran deal being the obvious example, along with the disengagement from Iraq.

Given you view disengagement and 1/3 of Iraq being taken over by Jihadis bent on genocide, reviving slavery, reviving hudud, sponsoring international terrorism, wmd use, suppression of disbelief, etc. etc. etc. as an obvious success – I would be very interested to hear what you think would have been a failure.

Ecrasez @434
Obama had little choice but to disengage, at least substantially, from Iraq, as it was a key campaign pledge. Ideally, esp in hindsight, there prob should have been a status-of-forces agreement formally allowing for some continued US mil. presence at a level that cd still be called ‘disengagement’, but the Maliki govt did not make it easy to negotiate, and the admin had to eventually say ‘**** it’ and announce a disengagement date. That’s my reading, roughly, of what happened. (McCain and Lindsey Graham obvs have a different one.)

RNB,
What are our opinions on HRC’s stated, published attitudes about African
Americans – super predator kids, work-shy mums for example? What are our
opinions on the prison-industrial complex and HRC’s connections to it? What do
we have to say about the structural causes of poverty and destitution among
minorities and the HRC touted Welfare Reform role in entrenching and enforcing
these – especially given the scholarship showing the link between this present
day practice and long ago slavery? What are our opinions on HRC’s connections,
and loyalties to the corporations that so enervated and impoverished African
Americans through predatory lending?

What do we think people descended from IndoChina think of HRC’s tin-eared boast about
Kissinger’s approval of their conduct of international affairs?

What are our opinions on using little migrant Latin@ children to ‘send a
message’? What kind of mind speaks such words, on a national stage, in the glare of cameras?

What are our opinions on obliterating Iran? Or causing such unbelievable anguish
and destruction in Libya, and finding it a source of irrepressible mirth? What
are our opinions on HRC’s – to borrow from js’s formulation – ‘terrifying
hawkishness’ and their indulgence of present-day Netanyahu? Are we not reading
all the revelations on cash to their foundation from monstrous regimes, in return for weapons whose devastating work we see on television every night?

Why don’t THESE minority opinions and experiences matter? Why is the doer’s ardent articulation of these noxious positions, pursuit of these monstrous goals not as, or more scary, than a clown’s bluster, especially given that compared to Trump the doer has
experience of the consequences of pronouncing such opinion, knowledge of how dog whistling works and had even very recently to be restrained in their urge to do more, and do worse?

I agree with you that this space and many others could do with an injection of alternative perspectives, but before we go about accusing people of ignoring minority perspectives, before we conduct these identity headcounts, you and those like you might want to make clear why they are ignoring these minority perspectives.

RNB@430

Is it possible that for the many of your friends who are Bernie supporters, Bernie is in fact seen as the right-most candidate they could vote for while still maintaining the feeling that they haven’t abandoned their actual beliefs? That Bernie himself already represents something of a compromise? I mean I know people that, at least when it comes to Wall Street and ‘big money’ stuff, you’d have to be nominating someone to the left of Robespierre to give them pause.

Everyone that I talk to in my general age group – 30 and under, let’s say – that isn’t set on voting for Bernie is set on voting for Trump (this group is smaller, to be sure; and I should also mention the two Born-again types I know for whom Cruz and Carson are the only ‘true Christian’ options), and I suspect that for many of those, if their candidate preference isn’t the nominee, their next choice is simply not voting at all.

Oh yes Clinton is clearly better on immigration than Sanders who opposed the Kennedy compromise that would have given a path to citizenship for 10 plus million people. Sanders hypocritically opposed due to guest worker provision for just 200,000 temporary workers whom he mislabels slaves; as Matt Yglesias has pointed out Sanders has supported guest workers for the dairy industry in VT. The more people learn about the Sanders, the more he is going to look like an ordinary politician.

An observation. As with the example of Corbyn before, many find it difficult to understand politics outside of the electoral pageant, control of the offices of the executive or of parliament and the judiciary. We have difficulty grappling with anti-leaders with poor hair and bent backs who don’t carry themselves with assured confidence or speak with the craft of princes. We want our heroic queens.

Like Corbyn’s faction, Sanders’ one can lose, and yet win by shifting the terrain on which future battles are fought. That’s exactly what the New Democrats and New Labour did. Perhaps it is difficult to see this because we don’t much respect people’s movements, and imagine that the anti-GMO/Occupy/UK-Uncut/StopTheWar/OnineFeminism/the counter globalization movements were failures.

—
As an example, Hillary’s failure with young women of all kinds, and the spread of intersectional analyses is a direct consequence of black women organising, learning and teaching on Twitter. I don’t foresee a kissing and making up for the general election. The lines have been drawn, the distinctions are too stark to ignore.

Also, what Lupita said.

“Sanders voted for the crime bill”

Because it was attached to stuff like the Violence Against Women Act. He spoke out against all the stuff like mandatory minimums and more money for prisons. Clinton spoke out in favor of those portions of the bill. “We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets…. We will be able to say, loudly and clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal offenders — three strikes and you’re out. We are tired of putting you back in through the revolving door.”

The crime bill made things worse, but, sure, the real problem was in the states. But that statement indicates that Clinton approved of what was happening in the states as well. Here is an interesting account of her criminal justice record: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/01/a-more-or-less-definitive-guide-to-hillary-clinton-s-record-on-law-and-order It’s not all bad, but it doesn’t really reflect great judgment on her part.

Discount all this you want–it’s obvious what conclusion you want to reach–but it’s simply the case that Clinton in the 1990s believed in a lot of deeply evil things that Sanders rejected. Sanders deserves credit for that. Characterizing the difference as “Sanders voted for the crime bill” is misleading. Support Clinton if you like, but you should ask yourself what kind of centrist liberal groupthink she’ll go long with next.

Neville, fair enough. In asking Val about Thatcher I hadn’t meant to imply she was similar to Clinton but test her principle (of feminists supporting female candidates because of the historical exclusion of women) on a (to me) more clearly unfavourable case.

I think the primary thing that needs to be understood when it comes to supporters of both Sanders and Trump is that there’s an already large (but still, I think, rapidly growing) number of people for whom the #1 qualification is something along the lines of “how credibly can you claim to not be bought?” and that coming up short on that makes you a non-starter, to the point that an issues-based discussion only comes after that.

“Sanders hypocritically opposed due to guest worker provision for just 200,000 temporary workers whom he mislabels slaves”

Agricultural migrant workers, almost all undocumented Mexican and Central American semi-literate peasants, are indeed treated like slaves. Or animals, perhaps. Definitely like garbage. Furthermore, we are not talking about 200,000 living in undignified conditions; it’s closer to two million.

Many agricultural workers are not provided with housing and actually sleep under the stars and have to find streams to bathe in and wash their clothes. They are alone, without their families. Many of these labor camps receive the visit of prostitutes once a week, for which the men line up to receive their services. Many of the prostitutes, needless to say, are HIV positive heroin addicts which has led to the statistical fact that most AIDS cases in Mexico are not in urban areas, but in isolated rural communities. Most cases are transmitted from migrant workers who have worked in the US to their wives. Quite sordid, no?

If Sanders believes that there are workers who are being treated as slaves, I wonder if he would make a little campaign stop in Imperial Valley to see what is happening with his own eyes. Not voting for an immigration bill is not enough.

Mike Konczal yesterday weighed in on the Friedman/CEA dustup and Sanders’ policy proposals more generally. The piece is very much worth reading.

“How did liberals let this happen? Again?”

Many liberals aren’t.

Hillary Clinton received more money from weapons makers than all other candidate, including Republicans https://t.co/D848UqRkXH
(https://twitter.com/RaniaKhalek/status/701526694683926528?s=02)

Maybe, Hillary in her post-election career as a mortgage broker at Goldman Sachs, can get us a favorable rate on a loan.

“I expect a whole generation, just as in the 70s and 80s, to move to the Republicans, where they will have to hold their noses to make a deal, but a worthwhile deal is still possible and better than nothing.” mcmanus @455

Come on, Bob. You say you’re a Marxist. Where’s the dialectical materialism in that prognostication? Things may get worse, but it won’t look like the 70’s/80’s. The ground is shifting. That the snakes, con-men, and useful idiots that comprise the Repub. field are getting their collective ass handed to them by Trump is but one indication. Less and less of the public is willing to accept the consensus rhetoric on a number of issues. Like I said, a status quo candidate may well win this election but in the end that will only serve to further highlight the mendacity of said consensus rhetoric. The disconnect between the political programs (and propaganda) of most, if not all, of the candidates and actually existing socioeconomic reality is growing too large.

Several people have noted that it doesn’t matter too much who gets elected in the grand scheme of things; that whoever it is, good or bad, can only make changes on the margins. That’s probably accurate as far as it goes. And if it is, it is probably best to read this election as merely a symptom or sign of other larger and more nebulous forces at work. The ground is shifting. The direction and shape of the shift will be up for grabs. But at least it will be up for grabs.

It’s, you know, the lesser of two evils.

How about a head honcha?

Lupita, you miss one critical point about ag “guest workers”. They are only permitted to work on the farm that brings them over. If they are mistreated, they cannot “shop” for another job like a regular worker. Hence, the farmer that contracts their labor has huge leverage over them. The worker worries that complaints will lead to termination and deportation. This permits abuses.

capital letters are mine, give the back!

magari @ 415
The identity-based justification — women will help look after women is — is however, a highly dubious assertion.

*(Women in Australia, particularly professional women, tend to breastfeed more and for longer than in the US. It’s one of a few areas where our culture is a bit more like the Scandinavian countries than the UK or USA)

phenomenal cat @462
The ground is shifting. That the snakes, con-men, and useful idiots that comprise the Repub. field are getting their collective ass handed to them by Trump is but one indication.

Trump is himself a con man. I heard part of an interview w him today in which he said, among other things, that he favors repeal of Obamacare but he didn’t specify what it wd be replaced with. He did say repeatedly, however, that “we will have great health care” (in a Trump administration). Also repeatedly said that “people will not die on the streets” for lack of money or medical care. He wants it all ways: repeal Obamacare, no coverage mandate (he disowned a tossed-off previous remark in a forum in which he’d said “I like the mandate”), yet health care will be “great” and, by implication, no one will lack for it. His speech after the SC primary was repulsive in its demagoguery and xenophobia.

He is either an idiot or he thinks the electorate is composed of idiots, or both. Completely unfit to be president.

Ronan
I would give it a week before McManus [sic] is declaring the island government illegitimate

mcmanus must be one of the relatively few residents of Texas who reads gobs of postmodernism, watches recondite Japanese films, and writes comments about revolution being “immanent” and “non-ergodic.”

I don’t know offhand what ‘non-ergodic’ means but I do know what the word “immanent” means. To say that revolution is “immanent” sounds profound and all that, but it was implausible when Charles Reich said it in 1970, implausible when [fill in the blank to your taste] said in the C19, and to say it in 2016 is — I can’t find the right word.

Meanwhile we are treated to dogmatic prognostications of the “Clinton’s gonna lose big variety” which might turn out to be correct (though I doubt it), but I suspect you’d have better luck in the betting market grabbing a random person off the street and asking what they think. (There are reasons to think Clinton wd be effective against Trump; someone elsewhere was citing her experience running vs Lazio, who was apparently given to blustering etc.)

LFC,

I never said he wasn’t. He is running a different con. One that has the virtue of exposing the Washington Consensus verities and “benevolent hegemon” platitudes for the horseshit that it is. It’s only working because a critical mass of the public is no longer willing to swallow said horseshit. That it is a bonafide cartoon figure/carnival barker doing this only goes to show how degenerate the current political economic order has become.

Trump is a symptom of the situation we are in, or at least most of us. He is a sign of the times. I’m not endorsing the goofball.

“…stage a tactical retreat because, in the end, you want to be moving forward not back.””

The implication that nominating and confirming a conservative judge who will stay for a decade or longer on the Supreme Court and complete via judicial edicts the dismantling of any progressive political program is a ‘tactical’ retreat is fairly ludicrous.
I cannot even begin to understand how the effect on such a strategy on progressive voters are completely overlooked by the OP. Only Repubs are considered. This seems much closer to the “punch a hippy” dem “strategy” than the OP is willing to accept.

I’ll be so proud when my daughter is president and runs a corrupt oligarchy Kiese Laymon

Populism explained:

From Kant:
<blockquoteAus so krummen Holz, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann kein ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no (wholly) straight thing was (can) ever be made.</blockquote

German folk saying:

Krummes Holz gibt auch gerades Feuer. Even a crooked log (can) make a straight fire.

Like it or not, we are now living in interesting times.

@engels
fyi: your links are 404’ing (as BW implied) b/c you are putting the CT post link in front of the Guardian (etc.) links. (Not, in all honesty, that I’m rushing to click on ’em myself, but some people might be interested.)

@486. First, Smith does not really address what raised eyebrows. Upon reading the NYT article I immediately posted here and at Corey Robin’s website that I could not believe a Sanders’ economist thought a 5% growth rate per annum over a decade was a reasonable projection. We had a long discussion of Piketty’s book, and given slowing population growth and even under the most optimistic assumptions of rising productivity growth, I did not see how that number was reasonable. Now to come back and say that under certain assumptions models enable that projection means that you take models over historical evidence over the last fifty years. Obviously what it means is that the model is likely wrong. Just look at Krugman’s graph on the growth rates per annum over the last fifty years and the flat line high above those points indicating a 5% growth rate per annum. It’s ridiculous. Anyone who had read Piketty or Robert J. Gordon would fear that Sanders was selling snake oil.
The second problem was how the Sanders’ backers responded to concerns that it would not be a good idea to back Sanders’ economics as being able to deliver 5% growth per annum over an entire decade. It was basically an ad hominem response. There was no careful discussion of what was reasonable and not reasonable to project. Look Sanders is vying for our vote. He is being tested now. People are taking him seriously. I take him seriously. Maybe his not taking super PAC money means that he can challenge the drug companies and Wall Street in a way that Clinton cannot. But his team has to strike the right tone in response to reasonable criticism and skepticism. Just calling opponents a sell-out is childish.
The third and related problem was the assumption that the multiplier could remain as high as Friedman had it not over a few years on infrastructure spending (as Larry Summers would argue) but over 10 years with 5% growth. I immediately said here that I could understand why the multiplier would be this high coming out of a downturn but I did not think that there is any theory or empirical evidence that would justify such high multipliers over ten years in an economy growing at 5% per annum.

490: The NC link in 487 is recommended, it includes a link to pieces defending Friedman by Jamie Galbraith and JW Mason, who comments here a bit. There is quite a bit of pushback against the Gang of Four and Krugman, some at Econospeak for instance.

The discussion of the limits of growth and the possibilities of reverse hysteresis are important, and not at all limited to this primary campaign. There are subtle ideologies at work in the Rogoff and Reinhardt work, Christie Romer’s analysis of the depression, the “secular stagnation” hypothesis, Scott Sumners NGDP.

LFC – if I copy/paste URLs from my phone there’s no ‘http’ prefix. As Ze says, CT interprets this as a relative link to a nonexistent page. People can still view the correct page by deleting the CT domain from the address bar of the 404 page but I’ll try to remember to add it manually in future.

RNB, some of the links at the Smith site do in fact tackle the 5 percent claim. I don’t think the Sanders camp should use it, but as some commenter said somewhere (or maybe it was in a post), it was more like a two sigma deviation from the norm, not a six sigma figure the way Krugman was implying. Which is a metaphor for saying it might be unlikely but not totally insane. Krugman and cohorts are making this the equivalent of climate denialism, which is borderline dishonest in itself.

Also, if I recall correctly Obama did the same thing–his administration claimed their inadequate stimulus package was enough to bring ponies and unicorns (those being the preferred outcomes of all economic policies these days). Now it wasn’t politically possible to have a bigger stimulus, but it should not have been said to have been adequate when it wasn’t. I remember Krugman complaining about that. He didn’t say that this proved Obama wasn’t ready for prime time, for some reason. And Krugman consistently argued for a much larger stimulus. Sanders proposes one and rather than praise him for it, Krugman prefers to focus on the shocking fact that yet another economist has given us a rosy scenario. Sorry, but the claim of hurt wonkishness doesn’t fly. Krugman has been throwing every conceivable argument he could against Sanders, including some that seem hard to reconcile with his own earlier positions and this coincided precisely with the time when Sanders seemed to pose a real threat to Clinton. Now that she seems in a much stronger position, he will probably calm down and content himself with some occasional hippy punching just to keep his reflexes sharp.

So are we gonna make it to the half millenium?

Moving on to another issue… Trump may be able to win crucial swing states in the general election posing as a neo-mercantilist who will use US power to write trade and currency policies in the interest of US workers.

He is surely promising his followers that he will constitute them as a society in which they all belong, thereby creating a sense of ontological security, by establishing sovereign control over American territory by controlling the people and goods that can move over the border. Trump appeals not first and foremost to the pocketbook but to a sense of alienation and the loss of relative power.

The wall that others will be humiliated into paying for is symbol of the sovereign control through which Trump will make America America again.

Here’s rejoinder to Trump’s call to make America great again.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/let-america-be-america-again

At any rate, Clinton and Sanders better figure out how they are going to respond to this call for the reconstitution of society through the assertion of sovereign control over territory. They have to understand that Trump is unleashing a deep and complex emotion in his demagogic bid for the presidency.

Trump will say that Clinton’s emails show that she worked secretly for free trade deals that she was opposing in public. This will also reinforce doubts about her trustworthiness. It would be best if Clinton and Sanders challenge each other on trade so that they can figured out how they are going to handle the issue.

There is a sad truth that can’t be addressed in national politics; it could be that certain protectionist policies may bring some overall gain to American workers at the expense of much bigger welfare losses in poorer countries.

So are we gonna make it to the half millenium?

No. Two decades at the outside.

Last week when the January numbers were released, extrapolating from the recent unexplained accelerating spike in global temperatures, I was seriously wondering if the human race would go extinct in 2016. I lowered that to a 10% chance, awaiting the February records.

15 of 17 months all time records, November + 0.1, December +0.2, January +0.3 (F)

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2030, we’ll need two entire earths to meet resource demands, and if everyone lived like middle class Americans, we’d need four.

In the last 40 years, we’ve lost half of our wildlife and roughly 90% of our fish stocks. It’s not just climate change we need to worry about. It’s mass extinction and natural resource depletion — which, of course, aren’t helped by climate change, either.

Here’s the January NOAA report.

The January 2016 globally-averaged temperature across land and ocean surfaces was 1.04°C (1.87°F) above the 20th century average of 12.0°C (53.6°F), the highest for January in the 137-year period of record, breaking the previous record of 2007 by 0.16°C (0.29°F). This departure from average is the second highest among all months in the historical record, second only to December 2015, which was 1.11°C (2.00°F) above average. These two months are the only two to-date to surpass a monthly temperature departure of 1°C. January 2016 also marks the ninth consecutive month that the monthly temperature record has been broken and the 14th consecutive month (since December 2014) that the monthly global temperature ranked among the three warmest for its respective month.

Lots of graphs;the last few months are a remarkably consistent steep rise.

An Arctic methane release has always been probable; just a matter of when.

1) At first I though it was in Centigrade. Even assuming no acceleration, 0.3 degrees C per month for a year = 3.6 degrees C = extinction event. In F, it would be 1.8 C rise in 2016, this would be newsworthy. LOL.

2) If we are very lucky, we would get a nice 0.1 per month for the rest of 2016 = 1.7 or around a degree C in a little over a year. This would be news, going over 2.0 degrees faster than expected or prepared

3) If we are very unlucky it continues to accelerate. After 0.4 in February and 0.6 in March, Morgan Freeman will get on tv and send George Clooney and Matt Damon up in a rocket.

@505. Thanks! I taught Brown’s book a few years back, and forgot to make the connection. I recently responded to her on theme of visibility and invisibility in Marx’s work (people who thought I was sympathetic to Marx are giving me a very hard time for supporting Clinton, but that may well be the effect Trump is having on a lot of us). A lot of students here have found a stunningly accurate description of their lives in Brown’s critique of human capital as a model of neo-liberal subjectivity.

When I wrote my comment above, I had Maurice Godelier’s chapter on “What is a Society” in his Virginia lectures on anthropology. Here he emphasizes sovereignty, territory and the role of the imagination of a people constituting themselves and understanding themselves as a society with sovereign control of territory. But I am excited to look at Brown’s book again. Thanks for reminding me!

On a previous thread I tried to underline the fantastic nature of this wall–net immigration from Mexico is presently very low, and we know from Douglas Massey’s work that the effect of trying to close the border with Mexico has to be increase the number of illegal immigrants in the US as once people overstay their visas or get here illegally they are reluctant to leave due to the increased difficulty of getting back in. So the wall is not effective, it may well be counterproductive; it has value as a symbol…but of what? This we could try to better specify.

@508 Another example of Trump’s destabilization of mental coordinates is Danielle Allen’s calling for Democrats to register as Republicans to ensure Rubio’s triumph over Trump. But see Krugman today on Rubio.

Maybe Trump is planning to destroy neoliberalism in exchange for a monument to himself in the form of a wall. I would consider that fair trade.

¡Viva el subcomandante Trump!

The Danielle Allen thing (actually a WaPo column but this gives the gist):
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/02/22/harvard-professors-want-democrats-to-follow-her-controversial-plan-to-defeat-trump-in-gop-primaries/

Rubio is quite revolting in his own way, so this is problematic, imo.

@512! OK, but what should be the nature of trade and human movement between Mexico and the US? Open border? End agricultural subsidies in the US? Should multinational companies be taxed in terms of where they make their revenues or where they employ their workers? Where should disputes be adjudicated? Should regional trade agreements for global trade agreements? Should globalization not involve the ability stronger countries exercising extra-territorial authority, e.g the DEA making autonomous decisions in Mexico or the INS dictating actions within Mexico?

Trump is looking to use access to the US market as a bargaining chip to get Mexico to pay for a wall, to behead those who cross a border to sell drugs, and to give authorization for gambling activities within Mexico to an agency located in Trump Tower.

Bah, –should read “grading on a curve though.”

521: See 82 above:

He [trump] is the frontrunner among a discredited field, in part (and I repeat myself from another thread) because our dumb-ass celebrity-maniac news-is-entertainment media have given him more exposure than probably any candidate in history ever got, vastly more by orders of magnitude than Sanders received although he actually got the most votes cast to date. Nothing suggests that Trump has the superior political skills some people here impute to him (and Kasich again gets touted as the strongest candidate ever, really folks???) .

SC has confirmed this. His share among right wing voters stagnates at 32%. (Btw Bush’s exit is great news but who in their right mind ever thought a spent politician with that discredited name was a splendid candidate?) I stick to it, Trump is a godsend for Democrats.

@522. Yes you’re right about Trump as a media creation, but I think that people are working out that the delegate math is very favorable for him at this point. The Republicans have winner-take-all primaries and don’t use super-delegates. Trump may not require a serious economic downturn or terrorist attack to win, but either of those would, I think, increase the probability. So once Trump is nominated–and this seems likely–we are on the precipice of disaster. That’s what I was saying: this is really happening.

Now I am not sure Trump will really be able to hurt the Democrats on trade. He has said that he’ll stop China from manipulating its currency, but here we would have to look at the econometric evidence of how responsive US net exports are to changes in the value of the yuan and estimates of how undervalued the yuan actually is. Trump is, I believe, over-hyping this or scapegoating China, but Clinton should ready herself.

What can a President do about surges in the value of the dollar due to global panics and uncertainty? This does seem to hurt US exporters of medical equipment, construction equipment, and other manufacturers. Trump will make promises here, though he has no idea what he would do. Could he hammer out another Plaza Accord? Of course not; he’s a bullshitter. And if Plaza II leads to the collapse of the Japanese economy, is the US immune from that?

By taking sovereign control of the border, Trump also wants to stop the export of productive capital in the form of factories (he also wants to regulate the inflow of people and goods). He has not said anything about regulating the outflow of money capital. But it could be that the US government could use tax policy to discourage the export of US productive capital. The US government has done a lot to ‘encourage’ the Japanese and Germans to invest productive capital in the US through disguised protectionism. Is Trump ready to give those jobs up by breaking up the global system?

I am not sure protectionism is a winning issue. Free trade can create big losers but they seem to be concentrated while the majority does not seem hostile to globalization. Yes a surging dollar can hurt, but at the same time the US derives benefits from the inflow of cheap capital and goods; the US imports goods that are low value-added and exports one that are high value- added . Surely the US government should do more to disincentivze the closing of factories that are relocated and provide compensation for those living in areas suffering de-industrialization.

But ultimately this white nationalist project to reconstitute America as a great society again through assertion of sovereignty over its territory may not be as popular as Trump thinks, given that many people are enmeshed in and don’t think there is turning back from globalization.

But still all it takes is a serious downturn or terrorist attack, and Trump could ascend to the Presidency.

Well yes. I actually began the conversation here a month ago thinking that I would support Sanders due to his having better foreign policy ideas in regards to Syria, Israel/Palestine and Iran. After all, I opposed HRC in 2008 because I thought it was important to reject in the loudest terms the thinking that had led to the occupation of Iraq. But after I heard one of their first debates it was clear to me that Sanders did not think it was worth his time to develop any coherent differences with Clinton. This shouted insularity to me and I became alienated from him. He still does not have regular foreign policy advisers.
All that said, I read Paul Starr’s attack on Sanders for his socialism in Politico. Starr has been recommended to us here at CT. I think much of his criticism was irrelevant. Starr is very upset at the unprecedented capital gains taxes Sanders is proposing, but don’t they apply only to those making millions in capital gains? Starr did not clarify. I also did not understand his point about health care. US spends over 17% of GDP on health care. Then Starr raises the bogey of bigger govt, but one could have more govt in health care and a smaller percentage of GDP being spent on health care. I did not think his point was clear at all. Or made contact with Sanders.

Good laugh:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/02/18/1486329/-Cartoon-The-inevitable-President-Trump-reality-TV-show

To go back to the theme of the OP: What Clinton has to prove is that she can win the number of independents that she likely has to win to win the general election. But from the national polls collected at Huffington Post she is already beating Trump by 5 points. This gap will widen just as George W. Bush lost his 13 point lead over Gore in the months coming up to the election. One of the stronger arguments for Sanders is that since any Democrat is likely to beat Trump as long as there is no economic crash or terrorist attack in which case Trump beats either Democrat, then we might as well vote for the Democrat that we actually prefer.

It’s hard for us all to understand, but $600K in highly taxable income from speaking fees does not buy Hillary Clinton who is sitting on tens of millions dollars of wealth, I am sure the Clinton’s have good money managers. Those speaking fees are basically vacuum pennies for her.

$153 million in Bill and Hillary Clinton speaking fees

Hillary alone made 21 million between 2013-2015.

The Clintons are corrupt, there’s no question about it. You really seem to think we’re all idiots here.

It seems to me that the Republicans are giving the rest of us a free pass on electability. If Trump is their nominee — a man who cannot muster majority support even among Republicans — the Democrats could nominate anyone, and it matters less who is “electable” than what their election would mean. Better the anti-establishment Sanders, who is speaking to some of the same dissatisfaction and economic unrest as Trump than the corrupt establishmentarian Clinton.

Either Sanders or Clinton could beat Trump readily enough, but Sanders’ winning could restore some credibility to the Democratic Party and go in the direction of defusing the fascist energy the Republicans have been nurturing over the last 20 years and Trump has mobilized. Sanders, however archaic his New Deal socialism, recognizes that the Democrats need to mobilize a mass movement to counter Trump, but also to govern effectively. Clinton thinks she can raise the funds to buy effective 30 second spots from Wall Street and the military-industrial complex and the globalized corporate sectors, and she’s almost certainly right. About the 2016 election. About governance in 2017 and about the 2018 election, Clinton does not seem like a good bet.

Clinton is a ripe target for Trump and arguably a much riskier candidate than Sanders, not because of her electability (which I guess is roughly the same in gross probability terms), but because of the interpretation of her Presidency and any disasters or developments that ensue. Once elected, Clinton would attract the same old, same old, and have no better defense than her husband. She wouldn’t have any more effective mass support than the relicts, MoveOn.org and Media Matters, elite efforts that have never had much traction.

Like it or not, Clinton is a continuation of the past, and not in an altogether good way in many people’s minds. And, she doesn’t do much to dispel that. She’s not Jeb! walking onto the minefield of his brother’s legacy deaf and dumb, but she comes pretty close sometimes to a similar deafness and a similar inability to admit to mistakes and their consequences.

Sanders might be more vulnerable to the motivated hostility of the plutocracy than Clinton. That’s a fair enough expectation, though it doesn’t to my mind tell in Clinton’s favor that the corporate and financial and foreign policy establishments would be so comfortable with her. Trump as the Republican candidate may serve to neutralize some of that plutocratic hostility, by being perceived as dangerous to the stability of the country and difficult for the plutocracy to control. That’s the gift of Trump’s candidacy to the Left. Not only is he difficult to elect, because his bombastic and juvenile style provokes a negative reaction from most people, but the plutocracy almost certainly doesn’t want him, might even regard either Democrat as a safer bet.

Sanders probably wouldn’t be able to get much done with a Republican House in 2017. He is certainly no 75 year old Messiah, able to bowl them over with his animal energy and charisma in a miraculous 100 days — his promises are about who he is, not what he could immediately accomplish in most (but not all) cases. Clinton might be better at getting the small bore things thru — I cannot say, of course. Her husband got things done in his second term by adopting the Republican agenda — not what I would prefer to stalemate in our times. But, Sanders might have a shot at winning the election in 2018; at least he would understand the value and necessity of doing so, in a way that Obama never did and that it is hard to credit Clinton with understanding or having the means and skills to organize.

* I get that the various Establishments are made of a different class from the actual billionaire plutocrats. I know I am eliding the not-always-subtle differences in interest between the Plantation Owners and their Overseers.

Clinton’s big advantage in wonkery is a big disadvantage if you are worried about the growing distrust of elite wonks and technocrats generally among the general population. Not so much between now and the election — it doesn’t matter that much to electability I think, which is a contest of often nearly mindless soundbites anyway — but after the election, it could be a serious problem in the struggle to govern effectively.

There are deep questions here about the direction of policy, in the differences between Clinton and Sanders, as they relate to the technocrats who follow in their respective wakes. That Clinton is backed by the foreign policy establishment, which has performed so incompetently and corruptly for the last 15 years at least, is not an endorsement. Maybe Sanders’s foreign policy bench is empty at the moment; that’s at least a faint reason to hope for change. (mark for irony, of course)

Economics is even more fraught. The incomes of the great middle part of the population have been declining in real terms and the risk of poverty or debt peonage has been increasing. That’s a consequence of policy, but these are policies that have benefitted — or at least not hurt — the top twenty percent or so. And, they are consequences that are indirect and subtle, remote from direct observation, following sometimes long chains of obscure policy discretion.

The vast majority of voters do not even begin to understand these issues. They experience their dissatisfactions directly as economic symptoms — the price of gas, the price of groceries, the difficulty of getting a job, the difficulty of getting a job, high rents, taxes — and they respond rather blindly with a “throw the bums out” sentiment. Whether the resulting rotation in office allows the government to adapt semi-intelligently to changing circumstances and to solve problems in political economy in a way that benefits the public depends on how those who are elected, govern. With whom, by whom, and for whom.

Reading the wonkish pundits on Sanders v Clinton, I feel I have learned less about the Democratic candidates than about the wonkish pundits themselves. RNB linked to Noah Smith and Mike Konczal upthread on financial sector reform, and mentioned Starr on health reform. There’s the voxsplaining Ezra Klein, of course. Krugman and the CEA chairs attacking U-Mass Prof Friedman.

If all I knew about Sanders and financial reform was that BloombergView column by Noah Smith, I would vote against Noah Smith in a heartbeat if I could. What an arrogant, ignorant, condescending pissant he is. Krugman, similarly, discredited himself with his arrogance and disrespect. (Krugman is back to the usual dialectic with Mankiw, I see. Hmmm.) Starr was kind of shocking really; his brilliant history of health care policy seemed to me to be an extended argument in favor of single-payer and a long lament that it has always eluded us; I guess I was mistaken.

A lot of what has gone wrong in economic policy — especially for the vast middle of America — is attributable to the arrogance, ignorance and corruption of this Late Empire technocracy, and their corresponding Deep State in the military-industrial complex. Part of it is that the cadre staffing an obsolete and decaying superstructure is just as decayed and obsolete as the structure itself.

“Sanders has no differences with Clinton over Israel.”

The differences aren’t as great as I’d like, but they exist. Clinton is actually pandering to Netanyahu, promising to have closer ties if she wins– she is to Obama’s right. Sanders has been very mildl critical at times and certainly isn’t the same suckup that she is.

Lesser of two evils vote goes to Sanders on this, though it is lesser of two evils rather than an enthusiastic endorsement from me on foreign policy.

Brett @539,

Yes, the Clintons are and were corrupt. But that doesn’t negate the fact that the GOP has conducted witch hunts too. They have. It’s all about the form of corruption. Where it is. Where it takes place, and why.

Right-wing lunatics shout Benghazi!! and email servers!!! And none of that has any legs. Just as all of the GOP witch hunts against Obama had no legs, from Fast and Furious through the IRS.

The right won’t go after the Dems where corruption actually exists, because they’re absolutely complicit in it and practice the same thing with relish and abandon. They worship the economic system that causes this corruption as well, so they can’t talk about economic apartheid (capitalism) which is at the root of it all. They can’t talk about our campaign finance system, because they’re in love with the idea of billionaires buying up the political process. They can’t talk about TPP and NAFTA and trade deals that dramatically increase the power of Capital and crush labor, because that’s exactly what they want to do. They can’t talk about rampant inequality, because they’re all for it and they actually believe it’s “natural.”

In short, the right has never, not once, not in several generations, had a legitimate critique of the Dems, much less the left. The only legit critique of the Dems has always come from its left, and since its power structure is center-right, there’s a ton of real estate to its left.

In short, both things exist at the same time. Yes, the Clintons are and were corrupt. Yes, they’ve been victims of Republican witch hunts. And, no, the Republicans will never attack the Clintons where it’s legitimate to do so — on their being parvenu capitalist piggies and supporters of economic apartheid.

Brett @544,

If Clinton is a rapist, I would definitely care a great deal about that, and would want him prosecuted to the max. But that’s not really for the GOP to decide last time I checked. And from the way you framed it, it sounds like you’ve already convicted him before he was tried in court, which is pretty much the “witch hunt” thing by definition.

And I couldn’t care less if the Republicans share my priorities. Well, let me rephrase that. I’d be shocked if they did, because they’re predominantly reactionary assholes, liars and thieves, and I’m not.

And, no. Their actions aren’t legitimate. They’re odious and monstrous on a consistent basis. Clinton witch hunts or no Clinton witch hunts.

1. Jeb Bush’s super-duper PAC got him nowhere.

2. Establishment and media revulsion towards Trump has not touched him.

3. It is the year of the outsider.

4. Political pundits are as clueless as the economic pundits were right before the 2008 crash.

5. Clinton is perfectly acceptable to the oligarchy and the oligarchy is perfectly acceptable to her.

6. The two parties and the media have lost control of the narrative.

7. The US is not a beacon of light shinning upon humanity.

Sanders would have to suffer a lot to get down to where Clinton already is. And you’re assuming that Clinton can’t go down further, which is imo unlikely to be true. The rinky dink Congressional stuff is just the start. You are assuming that the Rebuplican smear machine can be equally successful against anyone. Why?

So if Trump wins Super Tuesday big, I am pushing for a Margaret Cho-Hugo Chavez ticket.
Given this
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/donald-trump-said-a-lot-of-gross-things-about-women-on-howar?utm_term=.chzaQ94lkn#.rpMBY82Akw
they’ll have a real chance even with vicious rumors about Chavez’s death certificate suggesting that he was never a naturalized US American citizen.

Brett @552,

Yes, capitalism rewards certain kinds of efficiency. But waste has rarely been a concern. Dealing with it has also been a major cost for capitalists from the start, which is why they tended to build their factories next to rivers, creeks, streams, etc. etc. so they could dump their waste as easily as possible and pollute to their heart’s content.

It often costs far more money to deal with waste and pollution than to “innovate” to reduce it. And it’s often the case that they don’t bother to “innovate” to reduce waste and pollution at all until governments force them too. Notice how long it generally takes, and how much kicking and screaming and lobbying goes on before industry finally succumbs to changes.

And because capitalism doesn’t produce to order, but in hopes of future sales — which are created to hold exchange value, not use value — we throw away billions of tons of plastic, food and so on each year. The West throws away half of all food produced for sale, for instance.

Beyond that, governments have been assuming the vast majority of business costs for several decades now, so businesses don’t have to “price in” these things. They’ve been externalized for them. Their risks socialized; their profits privatized. And even then, if they fail, taxpayers step in over and over again with trillions to bail them out. More than 100 times worldwide just since 1970, in fact.

When all is said and done, capitalism is easily the least “efficient” economic system in history (from the point of view of society), especially when it comes to waste, pollution, and the allocation of resources, access, wealth and income for the population overall.

What luck to have heard about this blog today early in process of this year’s national elections. I am heartened that so many intelligent folks here are able to communicate with lucidity and civility, and John Holbo is remarkable in the frequency and cogency of his comments throughout the thread.

What I find most interesting, however, is that the role of the mainstream media is not raised more often here in the discussions regarding the relative electability of the eventual nominees . Even if the impact of larger PAC money turns is left aside, I’m pondering whether the Democratic Party’s ability to retain/get out its “soft vote” cohorts would benefit more from nominating Clinton who has already been widely-defined by the media as having “trust/honesty” issues or Sanders who’s only just starting to get more sharply defined by the corporate media (to a considerable degree, lead by the expert vilification propagandists in Murdoch’s media empire) as well as the attack advertisements of the Republican nominee. In the UK and Australia where I’ve resided for extensive periods, the media’s manipulation tends to be the dominant factor in a competitively close election, but hopefully American voters are way less gullible.