Robert Kagan, Donald Trump, and the Liberal Imagination

One might almost believe Kagan thinks of himself as playing a long game here. Best to inquire into what he imagines comes next, and next after that.

St. Reagan was never a phony, he was as real as an actor could be.

I remember what I have read of the way that actually existing fascism came to Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Romania … need I go on? .. and failed to come to the UK and Ireland. So, I have looked round in vain in the contemporary USA for equivalents of the Squadristi, the Sturmabteilung, the Ditadura National, the Falange, the Arrow Cross, the Iron Guard, the Blackshirts, the Blueshirts … when you write of Trump bringing fascism to the USA, am I missing something?

NB before I am myself denounced as a proto-fascist, please note that I regard Trump with distaste and alarm, and if I were a US citizen I would support Sanders.

1 – I refuse to give either WaPost or Robert Kagan a click, so I did not read the article.

2 – If you asked me a few days ago who among the Washington chattering class is most sympathetic to fascism, I would have included Robert Kagan in that list. His vision of war as a source for meaning and/or civic renewal is, as I understand it, not just compatible with but intrinsic to the fascist ethos.

3 – The best argument in favor of Trump continues to be the list of elites that he pisses off; this just adds the name of another contemptible hack to that proverbial list. *sigh*

Please correct me if am wrong, though Patrick @4 nails it.

We haven’t had a Republican front-runner for the Presidency invent lies about American Muslims that would incite exterminatory hatred against them all, accuse illegal Mexican immigrants of being rapists and criminals, brag that he’s going to humiliate the Mexican nation into building a wall against itself, say that women should suffer a criminal penalty if they have an abortion, joke about dipping bullets meant for Muslim’s in pig’s blood, advocate the use of torture for punitive purposes alone, accuse China of raping the US, refuse to disavow the Klan rallying behind him (well not since Wallace and Reagan, I think) and seemingly contemplate having sex with his own daughter.

I think there has been qualitative worsening of the discussion in the US.

I think much of this is beside the point.

Squadristi and all those various fancy dress fascist orgs are, I think, unlikely to find much appeal in the US. Some of the teahadists do that tricorn hat (or camouflage) costume thing, but I think the vast bulk of even that crowd (let alone those who have managed joined-up writing) find it absurd. To borrow a line from Sinclair Lewis “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” – you can add on “..and not dressed up like a bunch of cretins (1)”

But Mr.Kagan’s objection is, I believe, rooted in Trump not paying court – or even lip service – to that crowd, which I believe, vexeth them mightily.

(1) Really, cretin is the wrong word – far right cosplayers? I dunno, I’m pulling a blank for what to call the kind of people who do like dressing up like the SA

@13 What about the agenda of those who want to want to pull out all the stops for Sanders? Would they have an interest in insisting that actually Trump is not worse than what we have seen before? @10, I give examples of where I think Trump has crossed lines that recent Republican front-runners have not. Now those lines may have been crossed by another front runner in recent election cycles, but then show us that to be true.

@16: my @10 was not advocacy for Clinton. I would be interested in a response to it. Or even to Patrick’s @4.

CR: “that you take your cheers”

He really does smears, not cheers.

Back to the OP. The difference between Kagan’s appeal to violence and Trump’s seems to me to be basically one of control. The warriors from Mars are supposed to take orders from the duly elected leader and that leader is supposed to take orders from the people who have his ear.

It does make you wonder what exactly about fascism he dislikes.

Maybe it’s a mechanistic, there are some lines you do not cross, kind of thing, and once you cross them, you’ve swallowed the fascist red pill or whatever, and you know what that means . . . ?

But there are so many things about fascism he (like the rest of that crowd) does seem pretty okay with, as long as you don’t use the word.

@19 the goal of hitting a thousand comments on a trolling thread reminds me of George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air” organizing his life around getting 10 million frequent flyer miles only to have no sense of why that was important to him when he achieves it. But I assume that was your point!

@ 11

“The point here is that once you realize how horrific Trump is, you are going to have a hard time justifying Sanders saying or doing things that would weaken Secty Clinton in the general election.”

Trump is horrific but the situation is kind of odd. Kagan isn’t the best arbiter of horrific. It’s odd that Hillary’s foreign policy will likely be more Trumptastic in a way then Trump’s, which is why Kagan likes Hillary better.

Given the way Trump has criticized the Iraq war, it’s not a big surprise Kagan doesn’t like him. I wonder how much Trump will talk about Iraq during the general election and in the debates.

Granted I hope we don’t have to find out exactly what Trump’s foreign policy would be like, espeically given his pro-torture comments – I’d like to find out what Sanders’s is like – but it’s safe to say that the more anti-war liberals applauding Kagan’s denunciation of Trump won’t be that happy with President Hillary’s foreign policy.

Wait! Am I going to be banned from Crooked Timber if I advocate for Clinton over Sanders?

My guess would be that Kagan is not critical of Trump due to his domestic agenda but for the reason that Air Force Pilot turned Congressman is: he will turn the world against the US. For example, the US may not even get the eight soldiers from Poland and South Korea that joined the American troops in a new Iraqi-style occupation. The US won’t get as much Arab elite support in hitting those terrorist networks that pose the greatest threat to the US. Latin American elites won’t help in drug interdiction. No one will join in a new round of sanctions against Iran. Wouldn’t that be the kind of thing Kagan would be interested in? Maybe additionally on the domestic front the immigrants with the most so-called human capital won’t see the US as desirable destination. A big % of the start-ups in Silicon Valley have foreign born people among their founders.

Just to clarify for you, Jeffrey G: I did not lie about what Sanders’ Senate Resolution said and the fact that he has supported humanitarian bombing just like Clinton in the past; “shameless” does not mean willingness to take a minority position in the face of determined and abusive opposition; and “spam” would not include the details I give in my post. And your comrade Rich P writes a heck of a lot too, just not very convincing stuff except in the odd instance.

No disagreement on this one.

Kagan is more fundamentally a fascist in his ideology than Trump is. Kagan firmly believes that war is the health of the state, and that ordinary civil society–the civil society of raising children, meeting some friends, seeing a show, and so on–is not only trivial and unserious, but weak, contemptible, and effeminate. (The militarism and the misogyny always go together).

What Kagan fears in Trump is that Trump will give fascism a bad name. Kagan complaining about Trump’s fascism is like Charles Murray complaining about Trump’s racism–how are we sophisticated, Ivy League racists and fascists going to attain our ultimate ends, if you low vulgarians say out loud what we only say in private?

If you read them carefully — hell, if you read them not so carefully — it’s clear that they often see foreign policy as a cure for what ails the populace, domestically.

Strauss lives!

Is this crowd old enough to remember the discussions around Wolfowitz and the Dark Master? We need an exoteric reading of Kagan. Or maybe esoteric, I forget.

“We fight over there so we don’t have to fight here” is about domestic policy.

It is an interesting juxtaposition. Kagan is super hawkish about foreign policy, but not very interested in domestic. And Trump is a kind of mirror image (at least the Trump on the stump, we’ve seen this election cycle). So obviously attacking Bush and the neocons on Iraq, is gonna make them enemies.

But, I’m a bit like Patrick, and a bit tactical too, “got to welcome all those who would fight on your side in the current struggle”, regardless of the fact that you and they can agree on nothing else.

Re: Kagan, it’s pure misdirection. “Fascism” as used in this piece is nothing more than agitprop, scare language that is meant to move a certain % of the population in a particular direction. (Why? Because Trump is an unknown quantity at this point for Kagan and his neocon ilk. Clinton, they know they can work with–they already have for years. But Trump? They don’t know if they can “work” with him. He might not be amenable to Beltway Foreign Policy “reason”)

Patrick’s bemused response @4 is actually a perfect illustration of its effect.

“Ok, let’s say that Kagan is a super duper hypocrite who sits with the wrong people at lunch and we all hate him and he should realize that what’s happening today that bothers him is substantially the same as the stuff he liked a few years ago.

But let’s also say that I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of which WaPo pundit said what across the past twenty five years. Let’s say I barely remember that this Kagan guy exists. Let’s say I just open my newspaper or browser or whatever and there’s this article saying that it’s troubling that we have a candidate tapping into an apparent yearning for a candidate who sells himself on belligerence and machismo.

Why exactly does it not make sense to applaud? ”

Simply put, you don’t know anything about Kagan, but he says Trump is a fascist, you think Trump comes off a bit like a fascist, so hey, good on Kagan because you agree about Trump.

What is bothering Kagan, Patrick, is not that he no longer likes the “stuff” he liked 5,10,15,20 years. He still very much likes all the same stuff (fyi: he had a piece in the ws journal about a year ago detailing his fervent desire for a nice little confrontation with Russia). No, what’s bothering Kagan is a potential loss of power and influence and a potential disruption to our neocon-dominated foreign policy which sees force, conflict, and violence as the most effective means for defending and distributing American “values” around the world. Kagan and his ilk are a menace.

I dislike the way the term “sociopath” has been applied so liberally to governing and corporate elites over the last several years in public (internet) discourse. I think it’s analytically lazy and mystifying. However, the policies and actions advocated by Kagan and the crowd he runs with have been legitimately sociopathic in their effects–imo. They show a lack of even the most minimal respect for the self-determination or free will of other peoples and display a genuine disregard for the actual, real, lived, lives of people around the world.

So, applaud away at Kagan’s “reasonable” response to Trump. But know that you’re being played, b/c Kagan doesn’t give a damn about the dangers of (Trump’s) belligerence and machismo. He does care, however, deeply, passionately, intensely about retaining some influence over “projected” American power and its application through the use of force and violence.

What’s missing here is any account of politics as a path of prudence. Kagan thinks Trump’s policies are reckless and bellicose, but in the past he’s said America was too timid and pacifist. That’s only a contradiction if you think there’s no such thing as excess timidity, that any belligerence is always bad. But if you think that foreign policy requires charting a careful course between opposing dangers, then it makes perfect sense.

I’m not an American, so maybe my views don’t count, but I think US foreign policy should not be so cowardly as to allow genocide to be committed while UN peacekeepers look on helpless. Is that such a controversial view, and was Kagan wrong to fulminate against such a policy in those terms? Equally, it should not be so reckless, unprincipled and unhinged as to threaten war with China. The idea that it should lie somewhere in that (huge!) possibility space strikes me as obvious good sense. That Kagan supported the Iraq War suggests that he’s not infallible as to where that line should be drawn, but it’s a bit much to say that his (just) condemnation of Trump is somehow suspect because he (equally justly) condemned early-to-mid 90s US foreign policy. You don’t need to be the world’s finest judge of temperature to realise that the Sahara is too hot, and the Arctic is a bit nippy.

To my mind, US foreign policy was at its peak in the Kosovo intervention. They learned the right lessons from Bosnia; when the war started, they accepted that they couldn’t simply talk the Russians around or rely on the UN, and acted firmly and decisively through NATO to rescue the situation, and prevented the worst of the atrocities against the Kosovar population. As such I share Kagan’s suspicion of those who were only hedgingly in favour of that intervention. Unfortunately, every successful policy contains the seeds of its own destruction, because the fiercest partisans for a good idea will take it well beyond its principle of applicability. If the lesson you learned from Kosovo was that a little unilateral boldness is good, so a lot of it must be even better, then you get Iraq.

Kagan: “In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military.”

Since we can’t guarantee that these immense powers will never be under the control of a demagogue, we need to reduce them and restrain them. That is, after all, one of the chief concerns of the Framers. No doubt Kagan’s piece goes on to a general criticism of how unchecked Executive power has dangerously grown in this way and suggests that something be done other than merely keeping Trump out of office.

No it doesn’t.

Sebastian H @49
I’d say Trump’s appeal has to do w *both* economic ‘anxieties’ and xenophobia/racism. On the former, it may suffice to take a look at the opening graph/curve (global dist. of household income 1988-2008) in Milanovic’s new bk on global inequality, reviewed recently in The American Prospect. (No time to put in link, sorry.)

“That “not with jackboots and salutes” is convenient. . . Likewise the would-be leaders and citizens of those great powers.”

Love that paragraph. Quite an indictment of those who aspire to something, but when that “something wicked this way [actually] comes”, are too ready to distance themselves from it, because they only ever aspired to the asymptote of the horror anyway, so long as it served their almost equally horrible purposes.

Kagan can be construed as making sense. He is defining militarism as distinct from fascism. The former preaches blut und eisen when “necessary”. Trump on the other hand presents a complete lack of definition, for his own ends (i.e. to be elected)– a final blotting-out or erasure of any meaningful discourse.

It is possible to argue that this is happening for different reasons. 1. The fracture of the intellectually decrepit GOP has allowed an opportunist to insert himself. Or, 2. democracy itself is going to head in this direction everywhere, because the cognitive budget of individual voters is too small, is not adequate to comprehend the complications of society.

Meanwhile Trump, troll triumphant, has revealed a game plan.

Trump is going to be, whatever you want him to be. He is going to be “you”. Your hopes, your dreams, be the empty vessel of aspiration into which you can fit.

He is going to be you, by being himself. Because you want to be yourself, too. Observe:

To win the GOP primaries, 1. he won the vote of the intellectually-atomized, bauble-zonked gawkers.

Now, to ease the debt-fears — and to placate the plutocrats — 2. he immediately calls in the intellectual trashmen to dump a pile of budget rubbish that only pedantic economists will want to wade through.

To win the social conservatives, 3. he just released a list of people whom he would nominate to the Supreme Court. Whether it is a good — or safe — idea to do this, even for those nominees themselves, is not something he thinks much about, obviously.

To move toward the center and pick-up Latinos, 4. his surrogates are now reneging on the promises for the Great Mexican Wall and mass deportation.

Pretty soon Trump is going to be out there in blue jeans, to counsel pregnant women, and to nail boards in houses for the homeless. He’s going to look like a moderate Democrat.

The game plan? Trump, troll triumphant, is going to pick-off the constituencies, one at a time.

He’s got 6 months until the election: 6 months of forgetfulness to depend upon. That will work just fine!

Overall, Trump has two prongs. He is promising “Change” to an unhappy country. And he is presenting enough vacuous space in his rhetorical vision, for you to imagine how you will fit in. A very insightful statement of this thesis is here, on New England Cable News: http://www.necn.com/on-air/as-seen-on/NECN_051616_thetakeA_6p_NECN-379717891.html

Promising Change. With narrative space for You. Both, without bothersome facts and figures: The perfect brew for the United States!

Thus, Trump is basically re-engineering Reagan. (People forget that Reagan bowed repeatedly to racists, early on his way to the Oval Office.) But instead of, “Get gov’t off your back” (+ “start sending the jobs overseas”) now it is, “Get gov’t to stop sending your job overseas.”

Meanwhile, unfortunately for the Dems, Hillary is basically re-engineering Carter.

Neither Trump’s nor Clinton’s Middle Eastern policies make any kind of sense, because both are based on assumptions that have very little correspondence to the facts on the ground. But it’s been a long time since the US foreign policy consensus regarded any but the most obvious facts (“China is big, Russia has nuclear weapons” is about where it stops).

The various fascisms that came to the fore in the 20s and 30s had some particular ideological roots that are lacking in the US (nationalism and class anxieties; also worries about international status, comparative decay, cultural loss, class conflict, a narrative that put “struggle” and the supposed virtues of violence at the centre…). What Trump – and his Republican fore-runners – look more like to me are outgrowths of the political paralysis amid social and economic transition that marked the powers pre World War I (Germany, but also Russia, Spain and, to lesser but considerable extent, the UK and France).

Js

On a re-read of what I wrote, I left out that fascism brought all these together in a particular way – struggle and violence at the top, along with international status, as a way of submerging class conflict, with an odd twist that juxtaposed re-invented “ancient” cultural traditions with a glorification of modernity.

The Republicans are more like the increasingly desperate conservative coalitions that tried to keep control of Wilhelmine Germany – a blend of reaction, obstinate opposition, entrenched interests, religious conservatism, naked opportunism and more. That had a more militaristic flavour throughout, though.

Aren’t Robert Kagan and his wife (Victoria Nuland) personal friends of Hillary Clinton?
Isn’t this a reason to be very wary of Hillary Clinton?

“That Stacey piece is utterly delusional – do the sort of people who publish and read “Foreign Affairs” really think like that? If so, it is genuinely frightening.

If indeed HRC believed what Stacey claims then I really think her presidency would be even more disastrous than a Trump one. But I’m confident that, even as overly fond of US “engagement” (ie bombing brown people) as she is, she is simply not that stupid.” Derrida Derider @59

Yeah, it’s conventional, cocktail party, WaPo, Acela class. insider wisdom. And it needs to be flushed out to sea for the good of the planet.

I wrote my earlier response whilst preparing for work, so apologies for the update now. As fine a job as Corey does, he omits Kagan’s endorsement of HRC in the house organ for Amazon owner and international multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, also known as the WAPO.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-the-gops-frankenstein-monster-now-hes-strong-enough-to-destroy-the-party/2016/02/25/3e443f28-dbc1-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html

Two months ago Kagan called Trump Frankenstein’s monster, that trope has evidently failed so now Kagan goes full Godwin with his Trump=Hitler meme, and it’s still May.

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the fact that the WAPO has always served to advance the cause of the neocons such as Kagan, http://www.thenation.com/article/eleven-years-how-washington-post-helped-give-us-iraq-war/ , even going so far as to bury the coverage of top reporters like Walter Pincus whose well-researched reporting the WAPO buried to keep the drum beating.

With friends like Kagan, the NYT, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who needs enemies? Glen Greenwald noted in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/20/wasserman-schultz-kill-list that the NYT and a host of other outlets discussed the Democratic government’s kill list at length, only for Wasserman-Schultz to claim utter ignorance of the topic. It’s worth clicking through to watch her lying on camera, again, and again, and again.

After work I caught up on the NYT hit piece “Crossing the Line” and it’s fall-out. Talk about shooting oneself in the face. Since the story blew up a day or so after it was published, the NYT has spent the time since effectively calling the main character in their own account a ‘liar’. Camille Paglia has an excellent take down of the debacle in Salon. http://www.salon.com/2016/05/19/camille_paglia_pc_feminists_misfire_again_as_fossilized_fearful_media_cant_touch_donald_trump/

Politically, however, the NYT hit piece may hand Trump the election. The NYT devoted six weeks to uncovering every negative story they could about the former beauty-pageant owner who surrounded himself with young, attractive women. The result: Trump treated them with respect. Oops! Well, what about Trump’s sexist daddy Fred? How bad was Fred?

Well, according to the NYT hit piece, Fred scolded young Donald for promoting a woman to a position of real power in the male-dominated construction industry in the 80s, light-years before others. Equal pay and equal opportunity for women against industry norms and the personal interference of a dominating father. Young Donald withstood the pressure and continues to promote and pay women equally. That’s the NYT’s idea of confirming Trump hates women. But, wait, it gets worse.

As savvy pundits have noted, the NYT piece could not have served HRC more poorly. By peering decades into Donald’s past looking for stories of Trump abusing his authority over susceptible young women, the NYT has both insulated Trump from additional attacks and legitimized similar investigations and discussions of sexist abuse by the candidate’s husband, which in case folks don’t know is a key part of Donald’s strategy to drive down HRC’s negatives. HRC with her usual inept timing announced almost the same week that a vote for her is a vote for Bill, and that Bill would be ‘taking care’ of the white trash problems with alienated voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. With Bill on his way back to the WH his own tawdry record of sexist behavior and HRC’s role as enabler and persecutor of Bill’s victims is going to go right onto the front burner, thanks to the NYT.

Indeed, Mika Brzezinski, a NY Dem leaning to HRC, simulated retching on camera when confronted with the contrast between Bill’s predatory persecutions of his victims and that of Donald.

It’s going to be a blood bath.

Ze K@61: thanks for a very interesting link, which gives useful insights into what influential Russians think, or more accurately would like us to believe they think.

I make the distinction because it is very unlikely that any Russians concerned with the defence of their country will not know better than the misrepresentations contained here.

There have been two arguments advanced against US ABM systems being deployed in eastern Europe, as was originally proposed by the Bush II administrations. Originally, it was held that these ABMs would prevent Russia launching a second strike after an American attack. The US argued that, since missiles once launched travel on great-circle courses that are often very different from straight lines on Mercator maps, ABMs in Poland would offer some protection against missiles from Iran heading for the US but would be completely powerless to block missiles from Russia travelling over the polar regions. That seemed to be true, even though George W Bush said it was true.

Now we have another argument: that though the proposed missile sites are only intended to house ABMs, they could be modified to launch Tomahawk missiles instead, which would make a US first strike much easier. The article says “Tomahawks … were deployed in the 1980’s in Western Europe, their flying time to targets in the then European part of the USSR (Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic States and Russia up to the Urals) was 5-8 minutes.” From Eastern Europe they would obviously be an even greater danger, if the article were true.

But it isn’t. Tomahawk missiles are subsonic, with a speed believed to be around 550 mph. At that rate, they can in 5-8 minutes fly for about 45-80 miles. Unless the Urals are very much closer to Western Europe than I had supposed, the Tomahawk first-strike threat to Russia was not and is not as the article makes out.

Furthermore, the Russians are generally believed to have some missile bases well east of the Urals, way out of Tomahawk range and capable of sending missiles on trajectories inaccessible to ABMs in Poland. Have a look at the great-circle routes from Novosibirsk to Washington or San Francisco:
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=OVB-IAD
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=OVB-SFO

I hope this will persuade you that ABM bases in Eastern Europe do not make nuclear war almost inevitable, since a first strike by NATO (or the US on its own) would still be suicidal, as the bases would leave Russia as capable as before of devastating retaliation. It is probably true that the bases will offer some protection against future possible Iranian missiles, or a Russian attack directly at Western Europe. Those are not obviously bad things.

Need I add that I dread nuclear war at least as much as you do?

Lee Arnold @54: “Trump on the other hand presents a complete lack of definition… a final blotting-out or erasure of any meaningful discourse.” If you had hung around, if virtually, with the more articulate Trump supporters, the discourse would have taken on a clear meaning, centered on immigration and trade.

Josh Jasper @66: Trump does not need to call a Minutemen army to deport aliens: there’s the Department of Homeland Security with its Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are actually deporting people on a daily basis, so it’s all a matter of more funding and staffing. As for the hypothetical libel laws, they would take quite an effort to pass because libel is mostly state law and there’s the First Amendment standing in the way.

Ebenezer Scrooge @47: For Babel as well as the narrator in Red Cavalry, the distance was tiny to non-existent. The former was a supply officer, the latter a war correspondent with the Red Army.

@Ze K and Stephen.
I remember this from 10-15 years ago. The Americans were concerned (genuinely I think) about attacks from Iran or North Korea and thought that basing missiles in Europe would protect against this. The Russians, reasonably enough, objected that neither of these countries had missiles capable of attacking the US (they still don’t) or warheads and guidance systems for them (they still don’t, though NK has managed to make a few small bangs) and were deeply suspicious. That said, I had a pretty good technical explanation of why ABMs in Eastern Europe were pretty useless against an attack from Russia – too close, wrong angles of flight etc – though I can’t remember the details now.
I think the Russian concern, although partly that at some stage in the future the US might develop anti-missile technologies that could be operated from closer in, was really based on two other things. One was indeed based on US missile deployments in the 1980s, but it was the Pershing (an IRBM) not the Tomahawk which was the problem. The ABM system around Moscow has presumably been upgraded, but still requires an absolute minimum of 20 minutes warning to launch, whereas an IRBM launched from eastern Europe would need less time than that to reach its target. So theoretically an IRBM force based in Poland could launch a successful first strike on Moscow. The other worry (shared by some in the West as well) was that the Poles wanted the missiles to strengthen their political hand with the Russians, so they could deliberately provoke them, knowing that they were protected by the US. It has to be said that some Polish governments, at least, have looked as though they might behave this way.

@65 Actually the most powerful woman who ever worked for Trump, the structural engineer Barbara Res, has been scathing in her comments on her former boss. It is true that the model he introduced as a “Trump girl”, as reported in the New York Times, says she actually loved being flown around in his jet. I think it’s obvious whose assessment of Trump will matter more.

In short, we don’t know what Clinton’s Syria policy is in the face of the collapse of the Free Syrian Army; and we don’t know how Trump is going to square his previous call for Putin to shore up Assad with his major donor’s wish that Assad be overthrown to send Iran back. I would imagine that Sanders would proceed as Obama who seems to have pivoted to Asia and turned his back on a bloodbath with occasional strikes against ISIS.

I agree with Jim. Arguing about hyper-technical definitions of ‘fascism’ is an academic’s game. Trump may or may not be ‘fascist’, but he is definitely dangerous.

Sorry I had just remembered your referring us to Jeffrey Stacey, looked him up and found both the blog post and the FA article which seemed to be making similar points. You also referred us to Charli Carpenter. I want to thank you for the names, but you seem upset with me for reasons I am not quite understanding.

I want to thank you for the names, but you seem upset with me for reasons I am not quite understanding.

I’m in a bad mood now. That will have to do as an explanation. Pls carry on w whatever you all are doing here.

Ze K 05.20.16 at 3:44 pm @ 78 —
I think one might want to consider the possibility that the ‘build-up’ of NATO forces in the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania is largely theatrical. The Drang nach Osten has suffered some serious defeats in recent years and the locals along the ramparts may be thought to require reassurance.

Ze K@74: quite right, you didn’t mention Obama, for whatever reason. You only challenged me to justify the action of the US government, Obama being President, in breaking a treaty that could not be broken since it did not exist. I don’t see how that needed much justification.

As per the terms of the 1972 ABM treaty, it automatically expired after 30 years unless it was renewed, which it wasn’t. I don’t see how you can fail to see that.

If you’re making authoritative statements about military matters, you do have an obligation to be at least marginally informed about them. Even the sort of knowledge derived from Wikipedia should show you, if combined with basic arithmetic and a quick look at a map, that Ischenko’s claim that subsonic Tomahawk missiles launched from western Europe could hit all Russian targets west of the Urals in 5-8 minutes is irredeemable nonsense. I don’t see how you can fail to understand that.

As for the supersonic Tomahawk development: well, if it is ever built (which it hasn’t been), and if it works (don’t count on that), and if it is installed in sites in eastern Europe (which nobody has suggested), and if it can reach the Russian missile sites directed against the US in Siberia (which may not be possible given the vast distances), and if it is more of a threat to them than existing ballistic missiles (but why should that be so?), then putting such supersonic Tomahawks in Poland might very well be a threat to Russian security. That is enormously different from the non-existent threat caused by installing ABM missiles, about which Ischenko is so unreliably voluble.

Much virtue in your if: much weakness in such a concatenation of ifs. I don’t see how you can deny that you’re defending a flimsy, completely unreasonable hypothesis here. For some reason.

And if you honestly believe that elements in the US government reckon that a nuclear exchange with Russia might be desirable because it would leave the US only partly destroyed …

ZeK @78

The fact that Stephen Cohen’s views are currently available exclusively in a magazine edited by his wife should tell you something about how well thought out and informed they generally are.

Anarcissie @86

It’s not entirely theatrical, though it is woefully insufficient. More to the point it’s less a symptom of Drang nach osten than Krym Nash.

There’s a certain species of ‘progressive’ that has jumped up and down to condemn states freely joining a military alliance on the basis of popular choice while bending over backwards to justify the annexation of Crimea. At some point, I suspect it’s more about finding the latest stick with which to beat the USA so that one can appear a morally sophisticated foreign policy thinker without actually having to go to the effort of thinking in a morally sophisticated fashion.

Alex K— #69: ” If you had hung around, if virtually, with the more articulate Trump supporters, the discourse would have taken on a clear meaning, centered on immigration and trade.”

It’s in their heads though, not in Trump’s head. Trump is retracting and/or hedging everything he said on those issues. He will say anything at all.

Two things about Trump little mentioned in all these comments:

1. From the beginning of his campaign, Trump has appealed to nativism. Absent anti-immigration sentiment, he would have gone no where. Defining America in ethnic terms as a white Christian nation is not a feature of the neocon outlook, but it is central to Trump’s appeal and probably his own world view. Even a more-or-less decent oligarch has reason to worry about that.

2. Trump travels light. He’s like a barbarian army that lives off the land; but if he was able to prevail in the primary campaign without spending much money or building up a political infrastructure, he did so by piling one provocation on another to keep himself in the news. I don’t think this pattern will change if’ he becomes president. He will only be able to keep control by orchestrating an endless series of alarms and excursions because he has no real base. Like the shark in the Woody Allen bit, he has to keep moving forward or he’s dead in the water. I expect that would mean he would “busy giddy minds with foreign wars.”

‘I’m not an expert.’ At last Ze K says something reasonably accurate! Though to be scrupulously fair the Russian worry is that European ABM sites would be used to intercept the remnants of a severely degraded Russian missile force after an initial massive counterforce strike by the Americans. This remains an absurd scenario, and one that also requires us to ignore and troublesome aspects of geography (or that the US proposed joint ABM sites for years before deployment) but it’s at least possible.

Ze K@97: well, if you honestly regard the Guardian as a “crypto-fascist, pro-American neo-conservative rag” –yes, I was being ironic – there isn’t much I can say. I can only advise you to post messages in Comment is Free and see how many, or rather how few readers agree with you about their crypto-fascism, etc. Mind you, I can see how the paucity of actual informed readers agreeing with you might not make much impression.

I’m not asking you to “analyze a bunch of MAD scenarios”. I’m just asking you to look at a globe (one of those useful spherical things) and to explain how “placing stationary powerful radars (let alone missiles) closer to the opponent’s silos changes the equation” when the radars and missiles are in Poland and the silos are somewhere far away, well to the east of the Urals, beyond the curvature of the earth.

I won’t hold my breath.

As for the Cuban crisis, of which I have vivid memories and occasionally nightmares: the situation, as I now understand it, was that in 1962 the USSR had very few and rather inaccurate ICBMs capable of hitting the USA (yes, JFK lied about that, him being a politician and all) while the USA had several more capable of hitting the USSR: but putting short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, only 70 miles away from the US, would have changed the balance remarkably. If there is a comparison with putting anti-ballistic-missile missiles in Poland, I would be interested to hear it. Over to you.

Have you yet had leisure to look at the great circle maps I posted, and to understand their implications?

Biance Steele@99:

There is much I do not understand about American politics, but would you agree that “defining America as a non-white non-Christian nation is very much a feature of the progressive (or whatever the term is) outlook”?

If so, what do you think would be the probable consequences?

I write from the UK, where defining us as a non-white non-Christian nation seems to have some attractions for some people but is not obviously a good idea.

Bianca,

can you expand on this: “Pretty sure I disagree with Corey about this, especially if he sees neoconservatism as more about foreign policy.”

It’s pretty well established that the neocons’ (Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al) primary influence and power revolves around IR, Foreign Policy, and the use of American force abroad. In the early to mid-2000’s the term came to be associated with conservative ideologies in general public discourse b/c of the Bush administration, but that was a blurring of the term. For example, Tom Delay wasn’t properly a neocon at all but he was often referred to as such by outraged liberals on HuffPo. In any case, I’m just wondering why you don’t agree with Corey’s formulation.

Also, you write, ” The primacy of traditional Christianity, seen as a bulwark to “traditional values” and order (and with the incorporation of aspects that permit a certain kind of rapprochement with Judaism), is absolutely part of the neocon outlook.”

I mean this is right so far as it goes, but the neocons don’t really invoke Jesus and Sunday School too often. They’re pretty secular and are allies of more traditionally conservative forces out of domestic political convenience (eg. see Bush the Lesser and his evangelical support; see also the neocons presently jumping the GOP ship and swimming for the SS Clinton). As for the rapprochement with Judaism, since many of the self-identified and influential neocons are jewish it’s not really a rapprochement. Even more to the point, the neocons have openly and relentlessly attacked even the appearance of daylight between the interests of American and Israeli foreign policy for two decades now.

Daragh 05.20.16 at 5:03 pm
‘It’s not entirely theatrical, though it is woefully insufficient. More to the point it’s less a symptom of Drang nach osten than Krym Nash.’

I wasn’t thinking of the ABMs etc. as part of the Drang nach Osten, whose current phase has peaked after a series of disasters, but rather as a minimal response to the effective Russian response (‘Krym nash’) to the coup in Ukraine and its aftermath, the present lack of unanimity in the EU, and the combined disasters of Syria and Iraq. In other words it seems not only theatrical but defensive, and I would think regardless of showbiz huffing and puffing Putin and company would also think it so. Of course it’s dangerous and stupid anyway, but that’s Realpolitik for you.

Bianca@ 103

I expect there is, as you suggest, a “lack of connection on vocabulary” between us. Up to you to decide whether that should cause us to cease any discussion, or to try and explore matters to see if our vocabularies can be reciprocally adjusted to allow for more adequate communication. Personally, I would prefer the latter, but I would not try to impose my preference.

When I wrote “progressive (or whatever the term is)” I was trying to indicate that I’m not at all certain what, in an American leave alone a general context, might be the opposite of “neocon”. I suspect it is probably not “neo-liberal”. Actually, I’m not at all certain what, outside the US, corresponds to “neocon”. In the UK, in Germany, France, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia?

But you were writing about US attitudes, of course. Please could you define what, in the US, is the opposite of neocon, and what the corresponding attitude to the US as a white (or otherwise) and Christian (or otherwise) nation might be? “Neither white nor Christian” might be a logical, if not an empirically accurate, answer.

I don’t understand why you think I might regard non-white people as by definition second-class citizens. I don’t. Please explain.

The part in the US constitution about Congress not passing a law, etc, doesn’t seem to me to contradict the observation that the US is at present, and has been for some time, a largely Christian nation of various denominations. Again, could you please explain?

RNB @ 75 Barbara Res gets the break of her life from teh Donald and now treats Trump like dirt. Simply put: without Trump she’d have no career (in construction), no story to tell, and no book to promote.

Here’s the bio that appears in her book-promoting ‘hit-piece’ in the New York Daily News. “Res is an engineer and attorney living in New Jersey. She is the author of “All Alone on the 68th Floor: How One Woman Changed the Face of Construction,” a memoir about her experiences in the construction business.”

“All Alone on the 68th Floor: How One Woman Changed the Face of Construction” Great title – except, of course, Res wasn’t alone and she certainly didn’t change the face of construction alone. The person who changed the face of construction is the person who gave her the chance to prove herself in that position. According to Res, actually hired several women, refuting her own grandiose and factually inaccurate boast about ‘one woman’ busting her way into the construction industry. Res, of course, recognizes that she’d never have gotten the chance to trash Trump now were it not for the opportunity Trump, alone, provided back in the eighties.”He would always hire the person he thought was best without regard to gender. I know I never got a break like the one I got from Donald.” Think that over for a moment: “He would always hire the person he thought was best without regard to gender.”

Res is an extremely hostile former employee of Trump. Her voice, nonetheless, deserves to be heard and her opinions noted. Res does her best to paint her former employer in the worst possible light.

As to her character and credibility? Nowhere in this sterling character’s self-promoting, book-promoting, hit piece is any warmth, or expression of gratitude to the individual who made it all possible, not just for Res, but for other talented people who happened to be treated as different because of their genitals.

What Res confirms beyond any doubt is that one individual, Donald Trump, took a hammer to the glass ceiling in the construction industry in the eighties, and ‘always’ puts women on an equal footing with men. So, of course, her story matters.

As to your own dismal dismissal of the credibility of women based on physical beauty, the less said the better.

If you want to get a clear taste of just how feeble the attacks on Trump’s sexism ( which Res herself openly refutes) read her recent hit piece here: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/barbara-res-donald-trump-boss-article-1.2525669

I find the Russia-related part of this discussion a bit odd. My impression is that there’s been a sort of rapprochement between Russia and Nato, and that relations are less strained than they were a year or two ago. Lifting of sanctions against Russia are under discussion in several countries, both in Eastern and Western Europe.

@114 RNB freaks out! Unlike you, I don’t dismiss people’s opinions based on their physical appearance or professional qualifications. Res herself repeatedly stresses that Trump hired all kinds of people – the only requirements being ability and a thick skin.

You’re clearly a sexist cream-puff who knows practically nothing about 80s and 90s work places, especially construction sites. I’ve been screamed at in a variety of business settings including sales meetings by female managers, as well as male. To get a sense of what I’m talking about try Mamet.

Your candidate is to the right of just about every normal person in America on FP, a serial liar, and one who continues to play the victim for decades to a man who uses/used young women under his sway like tissues.

Your sexist dismissal of Trump’s former employees because they are physically attractive is both loathsome and revealing.

kidneystones @37
Liberals and others need to sharpen their thinking about what we/they really want and how were going to get there. As a former supporter of pretty much all Great Society projects, such as HUD, I’ve had to change my own views based on the results. I hope others have, too. Corey’s post is call to do just that.

What? Corey’s post has nothing to do with the Great Society, or even all that much to do with liberals (except insofar as it criticizes liberals for saying nice things about Kagan’s op-ed, which btw I haven’t brought myself to read).

I’ve got to hand it to you though kidneystones, your capacity to churn this stuff out is pretty impressive.

@ Lee A. Arnold 93: “Trump is retracting and/or hedging everything he said on those issues. He will say anything at all.”

No, not “anything.” He understands his voters and they understand him. Considering Trump’s background, it’s no wonder he has a big mouth, talks in hyperbole and seems to contradict himself. That’s how people from certain cultures/backgrounds talk about business and/or politics. They seem to be throwing crazy ideas around, flip-flop immediately, then flip-flop again, yell at each other and so on. However to a well-informed observer – or to one coming from the same (sub)culture – it’s clear that there’s a negotiating/thinking process going on, and she won’t be surprised by a deal coming out of that verbal mess.

When Trump said he was going to build the Great Mexican wall and ban all Muslims from entering, he was obviously exaggerating. However, if he says there’s going to be no wall but, say, a dense network of checkpoints, and if he settles on a strict background checking system for Muslim visitors, that won’t mean he has flip-flopped or backpedaled. He has merely narrowed the focus from a big picture to a workable solution.

116. @ RNB. Simple question – did you/have you listened to what Ms. Lane actually about Trump and the NYT piece before you judged her views to be worthless?

@ 122. Once more without my own typo – Did you/have listened to what Ms. Lane actually said about Trump and the NYT piece before you judged her [Ms. Lane’s] views to be worthless?

I’m not watching this again. Good bye.

@ Ze K (61, 70): You’re saying the linked piece is by a Ukrainian diplomat who was forced to flee Ukraine after the 2014 revolution. The reader gets the impression that the author was in the diplomatic corps during the 2014 events. It’s not true, judging by his bio, which I have checked up (it’s in Russian). Rostislav Ischenko graduated from the Kiev State University in 1992 with a major in history. He entered diplomatic service but transferred to the presidential administration in 1994. It means he worked for the moderately pro-Russian president Kuchma in 1994-98. Then, in 1998-03, Ischenko was a foreign affairs adviser and spokesperson for a “charity fund” known to be close to Kuchma’s administration. To sum up, a Kuchma team player in 1994-2003. I couldn’t figure out what Ischenko was doing in 2003-06, but from 2006-14 he worked for Dmytro Tabachnyk, a Yanukovych ally, in various capacities, none of them diplomatic.

All in all, Ischenko spent 20 years as a middling political consultant and/or operative, including eight years working for a senior member of a pro-Russian block. When Yanukovych fled in 2014, quite a few members of his government fled as well, mostly to Russia – including Tabachnyk, Ischenko’s patron. No wonder Ischenko felt he would be safer in Russia than in Ukraine. He was rewarded with a nice job at RIA Novosti, part of the same propaganda holding as Russia Today.

Hardly an unbiased source, and hardly qualified to write on the risks of a US-Russia nuclear conflict. Not that famous, either.

Just to wrap up this ABM thing, the US have been trying to put radar sites and missile silos as far East as possible for around fifteen years now, and the current state of NATO/Russia relations is not related to that decision, though the actual introduction of the missiles hasn’t helped. These radars and missiles are intended, according to US officials, for warning and defence against Iran and N Korea, and unless the same officials are deluding themselves, this is true. There are too few of them, and they are in the wrong place, to have any worthwhile capability against Russian ballistic missiles. On the other hand, the US could theoretically station its own offensive missiles on the same sites, which could reach Moscow before the Russian command system knew what was happening and before the Russian ABM system around Moscow could react. This is known as the “Moscow criterion” and was regarded as the minimum level of capability necessary to disable the (old) Soviet state. Given the likely centralised nature of Russian decision-making even today, such a strike could theoretically paralyze it while enabling other missiles launched from the US to finish the destruction of the country. This isn’t what any US government I can think of would actually do, but if you are a Russian you think of all of the possibilities, no matter how remote.
And that’s it.

Alex K— #119: “NO, not “anything.” He understands his voters and they understand him… When Trump said he was going to build the Great Mexican wall and ban all Muslims from entering, he was obviously exaggerating. However, if he says there’s going to be no wall but, say, a dense network of checkpoints, and if he settles on a strict background checking system for Muslim visitors, that won’t mean he has flip-flopped or backpedaled. He has merely narrowed the focus from a big picture to a workable solution.”

Trump understands his voters. They certainly do not understand him.

There is already a network of immigration checkpoints, and a strict background checking system for Muslim visitors.

1. Muslims? Trump told Fox News Radio, three days ago, “We have a serious problem, and it’s a temporary ban — it hasn’t been called for yet, nobody’s done it, this is just a suggestion until we find out what’s going on.”

This is meaningless. We surely know “what’s going on.” U.S. security agencies and Congress have been working on this, for years.

2. Mexican immigrants? The obstacle to comprehensive U.S. immigration reform has been the issue of the status of the illegals already living and working in the country. In regard to that, two days ago, Trump’s first Congressional supporter (and now a Trump rally speaker) Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY-27th) told The Buffalo News — in re Trump’s plan — that it will be a “virtual” wall, and also, quote:

–“I call it a rhetorical deportation of 12 million people.” He then gestured toward a door in his Capitol Hill office. “They go out that door, they go in that room, they get their work papers, Social Security number, then they come in that door, and they’ve got legal work status but are not citizens of the United States,” Collins said. “So there was a virtual deportation as they left that door for processing and came in this door.” Collins added: “We’re not going to put them on a bus, and we’re not going to drive them across the border.”

Wait a minute! This is what the Congressional DEMOCRATS have wanted, for years! The obstacle to this solution has been the Republicans!

Thus, when I wrote, “Trump will say anything at all,” I suppose I should have added, “given that it is appropriate to whomever he is trying to fool, at that moment.”

When intellectuals consider “fascism”, they try to find intellectually meaningful parameters that it always follows.

But a big part of fascism’s substantive core is the obliteration of any intellectual meaning, in emotional favor of the strongman approach; saying, “It doesn’t really matter what he says, he’ll get it done.”

Kagan is wrong to think that fascism does not partly arise out of anxiety, particularly economic. I think that Karl Polanyi may have been the first person to make the correct connection.

phenomenal cat @ 105, Corey @ 109

Re. “Corey probably disagrees with me,” I think a sentence or two fell out of the comment between interruptions. I probably meant something like that Corey seemed to think that the neocons weren’t really interested in conservative domestic policy, but just use hype about foreign wars to keep people excited and engaged and supportive (and also were, maybe, happy with the same thing corporate Democrats are happy with). That was based on the sentence Corey quotes, and what I’ve read by him over the years–if I’ve read too much into that, I’ll walk it back.

As for “neoconservatives are secular,” that just plain isn’t true. As Sebastian says, they aren’t Christians, obviously. Maybe some are a little leery of some forms of evangelicalism, but if so, that’s probably either a parti pris or because they don’t understand it and think of it as a free-for-all. They’re more trusting, I’d say, of the “secular” academy as it exists today, but I think that’s because they deny it’s essentially secular (something on which an awful lot of Christians agree with them). But they are, by and large, very much in the “everything was better when religion dictated the details of people’s lives–and we can get there again” camp.

Maybe some of the crowd around Kristol these days is secular and manipulative, but I doubt it–I suspect they very much think religion is great for weak people and women. It was probably enough that Trump declares he won’t sent troops abroad for Kagan to have to dislike him. There are so many things wrong about Trump that it’s hard to keep them all in mind.

That was to Stephen @ 109.

Actually, I must have misheard the fellow as there was a lot of noise, looking at Wikipedia Athens never really recovered, there was the period of tyrants, democracy was restored by Thrasybulus but Athens never regained its glories and then Phillip II of Macedon conquered all of Greece apart from Sparta.

As for “neoconservatives are secular,” that just plain isn’t true.

It is true. Neocons and Theocons have been and are tactically allied on some issues, but they have profound differences:

This war is deeply personal. On one side are the mostly Jewish neoconservatives, a fairly small group of ex-New York leftists who have wielded influence greatly beyond their numbers through sheer intellectual energy. Since the conservative renascence began in the late 1970s, the neocons have given it much of its form and heft; building on the earlier work of William F. Buckley Jr., they provided most of the ideas and arguments that allowed conservatism to compete with (and in many areas triumph over) liberalism. As conservatism benefited from the neocons, so did the neocons benefit from conservatism. They made conservatism intellectually respectable, and conservatism made them intellectually important. Now challenging the neocons is an equally small (and equally ambitious, and equally disputatious) group of what might be called theocons–mostly Catholic intellectuals who are attempting to construct a Christian theory of politics that directly threatens the entire neoconservative philosophy. This attempt, in the eyes of at least some of the neocons, also directly threatens Jews. What makes the matter all the more painful for both sides is that, until recently, the neocons and the theocons were, for the best of political reasons, the best of friends.

And this war is fundamental. It is rooted in a battle over the identity of the American nation. The neoconservatives believe that America is special because it was founded on an idea–a commitment to the rights of man embodied in the Declaration of Independence–not in ethnic or religious affiliations. The theocons, too, argue that America is rooted in an idea, but they believe that idea is Christianity. In their view, the United States is first and foremost a Christian nation, governed ultimately by natural law. When moral law–moral law as defined by Thomas Aquinas and enunciated by John Paul II–conflicts with the laws of man, they say, the choice is clear: God’s law transcends the arbitrary and tyrannical decrees of what the theocons increasingly refer to as an American judicial “regime.”

Hint: there’s more than one religion, and “doesn’t agree with my theology of history” isn’t synonymous with “secular”.

Isn’t there a problem of anti-Semitism in Trump’s movement? Didn’t Kristol get called out as a Jewish renegade, leading someone to say that Trump had done the impossible, viz. make Kristol a sympathetic character.

And like the Iran Iraq war, one can hope that both sides lose.

For what it’s worth, I was working in government at the end of the Cold War.
Briefly, I think there were two things that frightened Europeans in those days, and to some extent do so up to the present day, and both could plausibly be described as part of the neoconservative world view. Neither, though is completely new.
One is the “because we can” philosophy – these words were actually used on a number of occasions by American officials in my hearing, usually accompanied by an ironic smile. Especially in the days when Russia was still in pieces and China was not starting to be assertive, Washington felt that it could do pretty much anything it wanted, without having to worry about the reaction of anyone else. This overweening self-confidence was not as undermined as much as it should have been by the events of September 2011, although it has been a bit attenuated by cumulative disappointments since. Critically, what it did do was to make the resolution of most international issues a question of power struggles within Washington, where the whole of the outside world is simply a lobby group, a bit like a medium-sized bank.
The second, as much a product of pure distance as of ideology, was a normative, almost Idealist concept of the world as an arena for the clash of abstract principles, and in which reality took a secondary role. So embarrassed US officials would explain that a certain view of a certain crisis, although factually wrong, was nonetheless shared by people in government, the NGO world and the media in Washington , and so had to be treated as a kind of reality in itself, even if those responsible for it had no actual knowledge of what they were talking about. Within NATO, for example, from the Balkan crises of the 90s up to Ukraine, the agenda is set less by the actual situation on the ground that by whatever happens to be the dominant, usually normative, view in Washington at the time.
The ability to force a certain erroneous understanding of the world on others is a danger for the United States ultimately, but it’s a much greater danger for the world. But the panic which people like Kagan are showing at the possibility of Clinton losing is partly explained by their desperate desire to preserve the current ideology, on which a generation of foreign policy has been built. This ideology is perfectly encapsulated by Clinton, with her insensitive, almost psychopathic promotion of mass violence, and her accompanying shallow rationalizations of it as morally virtuous. I don’t know what a Trump foreign policy would be like, but I suspect a businessman would not, on the whole, see the world through the same kind of normative ideological prism.

David 05.22.16 at 3:34 pm @ 151 —
‘Businessman’ is kind of a vague category, though. We know what Clinton thinks because we’ve seen her in action and we know she could not have gotten where she is if she were not at least submissive to the neocon party. No one seems to know what Trump actually thinks. There are all kinds of businessmen.

Bianca Steele @137: if as you say “neocon in a US context indicates a group within the Republican-conservative coalition”, then indeed in the UK and elsewhere it doesn’t have an opposite, since there is not any such coalition. There are people called republicans, and people called conservatives, whose beliefs are rather different from those of Americans with the same titles.

If you can accept Ecrasez l’Infame’s definition, @143, of American neocons as “mostly Jewish neoconservatives, a fairly small group of ex-New York leftists who have wielded influence greatly beyond their numbers through sheer intellectual energy” then you will perhaps see why there may be no non-US equivalent. But you may prefer another definition.

What I actually wrote, @102, was that in the UK “defining us as a non-white non-Christian nation seems to have some attractions for some people but is not obviously a good idea”. I would base that on empirical reality; most of the UK population are in fact white, and most are, even if not practising Christians, from a more or less vaguely Christian tradition. That being so, defining the opposite as true is not a wise political move. How you get from there to supposing that non-whites should be regarded as inferior, I leave for you to explain.

The audio visual representation of Trump is consistent with the rise of virtual and social media. It has only two dimensional representation with no link to anything beyond the “device”. The flatness and emotionally laden image carries with it the simple state of a reflex action.
There is no crooked timber in Trump, only straight lines and linear connections that create a human-built construction ill-suited to the complexity of the sociality of primates, especially humans. But like one of the key features of homo sapiens, Trump is an extreme … as is the institution he arises from. The current gridlock of USA’s political system is the inevitable result of dualism, which forces the constantly wavering and highly plastic and adaptable nature of human problem-solving into a rigidity that cannot survive long term, ultimately, uncontrollable change … nor can it provide a belief system to comfort failure.

Peter T: “I think it’s possible that Clinton, Obama and Trump, each in their different ways, represent responses to end end of the “because we can” moment.”

I don’t see any sign that anyone has learned anything. Clinton, as you write above, is continuing as usual, Trump — well, who knows, and Obama just coming around to something at the end of his term is pretty irrelevant, if he really is. Respectable political opinion hasn’t changed at all as far as I can see.

David,

“For what it’s worth, I was working in government at the end of the Cold War.”

Oh, I replied to you before as if you were the David from France commenter.

I am just wondering as someone who worked for government in the end of the Cold War, presumably under Reagan or Bush Snr, if you are saying Clinton is more in favour of State violence that the governments you worked under?

You say “This [current*] ideology is perfectly encapsulated by Clinton, with her insensitive, almost psychopathic promotion of mass violence, and her accompanying shallow rationalizations of it as morally virtuous.”

And say you think Trump would be better (which I disagree with, but this has already been argued about a lot on other threads by now ) “I don’t know what a Trump foreign policy would be like, but I suspect a businessman would not, on the whole, see the world through the same kind of normative ideological prism.”

I am in Australia so it is a bit different here. I don’t know if Clinton or Sanders would be better. I actually liked one of the candidates who dropped out early, he had a really good climate change policy.

We don’t really have a politician like Hilary Clinton or one like Donald Trump (the closest to Donald Trump is Clive Palmer). And we tend to follow America to war, we don’t really initiate wars, being a smaller country.

*I am not entirely sure what you mean by current

ZM

I have no idea. Since Sanders won’t be elected, the point is moot. I don’t think David would characterise Trump’s policy approach the same way. I can’t see Trump and crew achieving much diplomatically, but easily yielding to the thought that a few air strikes will sort the natives out and, if they don’t, one can just claim victory and leave.

156: You still haven’t explained what “defining us as a non-white non-Christian nation” is even supposed to mean. Since you refuse to spell it out, we can only speculate. I suspect what you mean to say is: “insisting that people have equal rights regardless of ethnicity/skin color or religion is not obviously a good idea” . Am I getting you wrong?

167: yes, I’m afraid you have got me wrong. See my reply to Bianca@156. Basically, since the UK has a substantial white majority, and a rather vague Christian tradition, it seems to me that defining the UK as a non-white non-Christian nation would be an attempt to defy reality, and that rarely goes well. I don’t see how equal rights irrespective of colour or religion (I’m very much in favour of both) come into it, and I don’t see how you think I can be against equal rights.

“But aren’t the anxieties of the working and middle classes very closely tied to expressions of racism in a lot of cases? I’m not saying that they are the only expressions of racism, but aren’t they a very large subset of expressions of racism?”

The anxieties of the working and middle classes are indeed closely tied to expressions of racism. Might it be the opposite of what you suggest is true? Might the expressions of racism actually be a subset of the economic anxieties?

#172 addendum. The interventionists and “free” traders seem to think it vulgar to even ask if their policies serve the interests of working and middle class Americans.

How so?

@Stephen, I very much doubt you don’t understand the problem of the rightist view that America (or the UK) is of and for white Christians. Similarly, I doubt you don’t understand why and how your retort fails. That you have carried it in for multiple posts, though? That’s some trolling!

@175 Mazel tov!

LFC

I agree. Obama’s approach seems to me to leave well enough alone (alliance structure, deployments), use limited force as necessary while watching carefully for repercussions (Iraq, Syria), and close down flash points if possible (Iran, Cuba). One can quarrel with individual elements, but it’s the actions of someone who is not confident that US power is either overwhelming or invulnerable to response.

Best to learn what the people who are voting believe, i.e. what Donald Trump can do, and what Donald Trump will do – for them.

We don’t hear a lot of this — just get reports on numbers of votes cast. Not informative. Empty content.

Thank you. Pew does fine work.

Seems supporters are the extreme end of the spectrum, much like Tea Party etc. Should these positions be only slightly moderated, would we end with a fascistic leaning government, by their appeal to the more moderate voters … Republican, Independent, and Democratic? This was the platform that “elected” Hitler … an extremist one, but also one that tapped into the economic hardships of the larger population.