The Political Theory of Trumpism

What a wonderful satire of Trumpism. Brilliant post.

Congratulations Corey! I gave the excerpt a good skim. Thank you for the generous offering. I’ve one question:

“Trump is a window onto the dissolution of the conservative whole, a whole that can allow itself to collapse because it has achieved so much.”

You made this argument about the conservative whole before Trump came to power, did you not? I apologize if I missed a specific connection in the piece.

I’m not convinced Trump is a conservative and neither are many self-styled conservatives. But I think a great many of your observations are extremely sharp.

I completely disagree as Trump is NOT a cannibal!

I agree, of course, that Trump’s bullying persona is a delight to the authoritarian peasantry. Interesting that you begin by noticing Trump’s earlier delight in contradiction. What Trump has in common here with earlier reactionaries is clear: public, unapologetic contradiction (& obscurity) is a display of power: contradictions and multiple interpretations are resolved by “which is to be master -that is all”, to quote the Egg.

Anyway, what is missing from this analysis is liberal capitalism as an independent force to which both the left and right react to. As this force dissolves communal bonds and erects a society of individuals and markets in its place, authoritarian reactionaries and egalitarian revolutionaries alike attempt to resolve -in opposite directions- the status anxieties thus created.

There was and is no settled victory for the right. Or rather, each rightist victory reminds authoritarians of their impotence: the marriage between the peasantry and their master can never be consummated so long as liberal capitalism continues to deny the possibility of communal stasis. Only a settled nobility can perform their majestic tyranny on behalf of a settled peasantry to the resolution of status anxiety. (The left is even weaker: at its strongest it merely has the opportunity to frame liberal capitalist revolutions as its own.)

The current weakness of reactionaries isn’t primarily a result of their former ascent. Rather, it’s a built-in fact of liberal capitalism. All the more necessary, then, for symbolic displays of Alpha-ness.

I think this political typology is more accurate. For example, post-60’s increasing racial segregation and inequality is a side effect of (liberal) capitalist development: it is neither a cause for concern among elite white liberals nor a cause for rejoyce among the right. The right needs itself to be the agent of oppression rather than the happenstance beneficiaries of a privelege gained through historical circumstance. “Law and order”, “voter fraud”, immigration, patriarchy…these are the issues which arrouse the reactionary mind because they are performances of oppression, not merely observed. The whole point of the show is to demonstrate who the alpha is. Inexorable faceless social developments won’t do.

Trumpism is what you get when you have ostensibly (id est, you dominate the discussion) won the argument, but the other side just doesn’t want to accept the outcome. Many Trump voters think he is the only thing keeping them from being wiped out culturally. Just watch at how desperately they cling to him.

Your ‘surfaces’ point is very well made. In fact, I wonder if this (weirdly enough, very postmodern) point isn’t the core truth about Trump. He doesn’t care how things are (so, lying is nothing at all to him: he genuinely doesn’t see the problem); he cares about how things look. Think how angry he gets when unflattering images of him are published in the news: he thinks so long as he looks Presidential he is Presidential, and that’s all there is to it. He’s pure surface. His only identity is what his mirror says to him. He has no core identity and its incomprehensible to him that anybody else has.

Although, having said that, I’d have to concede that it’s not actually postmodernism, since Trump’s flatness doesn’t float entirely free of signification, since what he thinks looks good is egregiously ideoligically determined. What he thinks ‘looks good’ is (a) monstrously kitsch and (b) racist and sexist. In Trump’s view Obama didn’t present a Presidential surface, or face, to the world; ergo he not only wasn’t Presidential, he wasn’t even American. Hillary can’t be President, because she doesn’t look like a President, since everybody knows a President looks like an old white guy in a suit. America is the flag in a weirdly literal way for Trump, and many of his supporters; which is to say, America isn’t anything ‘behind’ that flat surface (anything like, say, freedom of speech, if you’re Black and a professional footballer; or welcoming the world’s huddled masses). America just is that surface pattern, and everything else is making sure you, personally, feel good.

As has been said many times on this site and its comments threads, Trump is only a symptom: millions think in exactly the same way. The current Weinstein scandal seems to me to index this. Why don’t Republicans feel any shame, or sense of hypocrisy, energetically condemning Weinstein for exactly the things Trump literally admitted on tape he did? We might say this is just Tribalism, it’s only bad when the other side do it. But I think there’s something more: Trump is,or at least when he was younger was, handsome and Aryan. Weinstein is ugly and Jewish. Given that disparity in appearance how can we possible equate their behaviours? (Obviously I say so not in mitigation of Weinstein: he should be in jail. I say so in an attempt at cultural pre-diagnosis. Of course in reality it goes without saying that to someone raped or harrassed, it matters not a jot whether the rapist was handsome or not).

Frant and I are conservative language users (Maybe in few, if any, other respects :-))

P. S. He may have got up on the wrong side of the bed.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/flaunt

Flaunt and flout may sound similar but they have different meanings. Flaunt means ‘display ostentatiously’, as in visitors who liked to flaunt their wealth, while flout means ‘openly disregard a rule or convention’, as in new recruits growing their hair and flouting convention. It is a common error, recorded since around the 1940s, to use flaunt when flout is intended, as in the young woman had been flaunting the rules and regulations. In the Oxford English Corpus the second and third commonest objects of flaunt, after wealth, are law and rules

Since last November we’ve had what seems like an endless stream of heroic attempts to dissect and explain the Trump phenomenon, and us none the wiser for having suffered through them all. If we must read any more of them — and who isn’t up for a little horror over the morning coffee — It’s nice to see a little wit mixed in with the pearl-clutching. Well done, Corey.

I’d be hard pressed to count up all the hundreds of hours I’ve spent sitting on hard chairs listening to braying assholes simply because they had me by the paycheck. In every such case it was the display, not the content, that was the real message. The preening, the insensitivity, the fatuousness, the performance of relative importances are what I was intended to remember, and what in fact I have remembered. When it comes to that sort of forceable mental imprinting, there’s little discernible difference between, say, Steve Ballmer, and the Donald himself. The anger is different, of course, but as you’ve said, that’s more a symptom of impending failure than of recognizable triumph.

And so it goes. Road rage, internet trollery, walking into traffic or into walls while tweeting, the clamor, the urgency, etc. In the darkest of our prophecies, the ignorant, self-important swine we’ve put in the White House actually does nuke North Korea, and we all die. It doesn’t help much to reflect that this wasn’t really the destination we had in mind when we began our journey.

Kiddiestories@15
He may very well simplify the tax code. . .

Absurd refrain, the party standard happy talk for huuuuge tax cuts for plutocracy.

There’s more, but I have to eat my supper.

kidneystones:

Trump voters are anti-faction? Post-ideology? Beyond R & D?

Like yourself? Who then goes on to claim that Great Society programs yield Black “failure rates” and “family unit” disintegration?

Untenable and self-refuting. How would you explain the empirical data on the ’16 election, seeing as it suggests that Trump voters were simply Republicans and not some novel assemblage of demographics? And are you possibly unaware that the whole “Great Society entrenched Black poverty” claim is a standard “factional” talking point?

By the way, your post follows an often-observed formula I’ve observed for how White America talk about race:

Step 1) Racism was a thing but race hustlers and victimologists won’t acknowledge that we fixed all that (“Liberals are all out of answers”)

Step 2) What is it with those Black people, anyway? (“failure rates among African American youth”)

White America imaginatively “gerrymanders” social dysfunction into communities of color and implicitly exonerates itself.

kidneystones @15
That Trump lacks much knowledge of public policy was clear during the campaign, and since being inaugurated he has remained uninterested in and ignorant of (sometimes amazingly so) the details of policy. One wonders if he even reads the exec orders he has been signing. Your support of someone so manifestly unsuited to be president, by virtue of his vast ignorance if nothing else, was puzzling during the campaign and remains so. Btw, what “great society experiments” are you talking about? Have you heard of the ’96 welfare ‘reform’ law?

Personally, I’m sticking with pushing the idea that Trump has dementia with behavioral disturbance, and that’s it, no embellishments, no attempt to link that with public policy content.

It does, though. Trump — I have long argued all right-wingers, but it’s obvious with Trump — is plainly empathy/theory-of-mind impaired, and that means the “randomness” is going to be systemically biased:
+ towards approaches that attribute too much agency to others
+ towards approaches that neglect systemic effects
+ towards approaches that neglect second-order effects
+ towards approaches that treat members of classes as

So. The solution to gun violence is more guns: neglecting second-order effects. The solution to poverty is for the unemployed to get more work at higher wages: too much agency. The solution to sexism and racism is to ignore race in your personal dealings: ignoring systemic effects. Autism — but not IIUC sociopathy — also involves stereotype thinking, where every member of a class is assumed/presumed/demanded-to-be typical of its class: the impact this might have on personal sexism and racism is fairly straightforward.

These are all related to empathy impairment because understanding the non-erroneous approach involves understanding how the circumstances others find themselves in shapes the options open to them.

[see also the Brexit negotiations, and the handling of the Catalan constitutional crisis from Rajoy. Also the greece debt crisis and the actions of the german finance minister at the time; meetings until dawn for days in a row are a product of irrational intransigence, not calm discussion. And if Cicero with his “also I think carthage should be destroyed” didn’t have autism I’ll eat my conjectural hat.]

and @24
”[see also the Brexit negotiations, and the handling of the Catalan constitutional crisis from Rajoy. Also the greece debt crisis and the actions of the german finance minister at the time”

No let’s NOT ”see” that AS – what does the bible say:
”You should NOT dare to classify or compare Trump with some are any – as when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without any comparison to the Orang Orang Utan!

Collin Street:

It does, though. Trump — I have long argued all right-wingers, but it’s obvious with Trump — is plainly empathy/theory-of-mind impaired, […]

Your theory does not fit the available data. Trump got elected. Trump trampled over his own party before trampling over the Democrats. All the time under heavy fire from basically all of the media. It’s impossible to have such an effective campaign, and to perform in such a way in debates (unprepared!) and other venues, where he basically made a killing, without having a damn. good. theory of mind. It’s a theory with different goal than the ones you like, but a powerful theory of mind it must be, certainly!

Remember that he also kept a large team running in a very effective way. He may be a monster, but an idiot he is not!

So. The solution to gun violence is more guns: neglecting second-order effects.

That’s a complete misunderstanding of the thrust of the argument. The argument is there so that guns don’t get outlawed. Plain and simple. I mean – do you understand that? They are not trying to solve gun violence. They are trying to solve a different problem, and for some reason they managed to confuse you. Also: did they manage to confuse gun owners?

Who’s got the better theory of whose mind?

The solution to poverty is for the unemployed to get more work at higher wages: too much agency.

Again, the argument is not there to ‘solve’ poverty.

The solution to sexism and racism is to ignore race in your personal dealings: ignoring systemic effects.

Again, the argument is there so that – ah, what is it?

You mention autism. I would like to mention autism, too. But I don’t seem to find an elegant way to do it.

A sociopath can be very good at reading and manipulating others. Having a theory of mind is quite distinct from having empathy, and having empathy is quite distinct from using it pervasively to guide personal/social/political life.

RE: campaigning, I’ve seen no evidence that he was particularly effective. & the media did far more to enable his campaign vs. Hillary than not. (EMAILS!!! But also, the media is structurally complicit in producing a mass politics that misleads, distracts, and disempowers citizens -while entertaining us, to be sure.)

As far as I can tell, your claim so far (in this and other posts) is that Trump should be seen first of all as a conservative: those who see him as a radical break from US conservatism have an idealized version of what the GOP and the right have actually been throughout their history.* I tend to agree with this (e.g. the GOP has been very racist since many decades) but with two important qualifications that I have never seen you make:

a) Trump has defended an isolationist foreign policy, attacking Nafta, Nato, the WTO etc. Given his erratic behavior, he has not followed through on this (yet?) but the departure with the previous mainstream consensus is radical. The mainstream left and right, at least since two decades, had been very much internationalist.

b) During the campaign Trump has defended some form of social welfare state and more government intervention in the economy: e.g. his defense of Social Security, or even maternity leave, and his support for infrastructure. I do not think he really cares about this stuff and so he is probably not going to follow through. Given his general cluelessness, he is also captured by the various randians who populate the GOP ranks. But, differently from many politicians on the right, in primis the randians, Trump has some sense for what people want. And in the campaign he said it, possibly opening up the field for future Keynesians republicans.

*You hedge this view a bit in this post, by considering Trump’s view of the market.

Collin Street thinks that conservatism is some kind of organic affliction, that conservatives all have something wrong with their brain chemistry or biology, that they are all cognitively abnormal. This is absurd.

It’s also very anti-historical. Inasmuch as conservatism is, among other things, a defense of hierarchy, it can (and did, at one time) appeal to millennia of precedent. Were the believers in the divine right of monarchs mentally abnormal? Were those who believed (and continue to believe) that employers have a right to exploit their workers mentally ill? Were, to take an even starker example, proponents of slavery psychologically impaired? If so, how to account for the fact that slavery was close to universal among human societies until fairly recently in the history of the species? Were the vast majority of humans all psychologically impaired until some date of enlightenment (pick your date or century)?

Something can be deeply wrong, i.e. immoral, without being the product of a cognitive abnormality, and people can commit evil acts and hold evil beliefs without being mentally or psychologically impaired. To attribute all retrograde political acts and beliefs to an individual’s deficient “theory of mind” (whatever that means exactly) is sociologically naive, psychologically untenable, and historically invalid.

Believing one has the power to read minds belongs in the realm of quackery, and if internalized with real conviction can be grounds for sectioning. I have no problem with Trump equals Hitler in the realm of internet banter, but if one truly believes that 60 million believe we no longer need elections, why do we go to such lengths to conceal our ‘secret’ agenda. Declaring for Trump invites accusations of racism, authoritarianism, etc. all of which we wear with considerable good humor, for the most part.

The great society solutions which I long supported and still do, in some respects, have failed the people who need them most. Here’s a story that Trump Hitler and Melania’s dress pushed right out of the national press.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/05/75-of-black-california-boys-dont-meet-state-reading-standards/

A million years, long, long ago BT (Before Trump), the NYT published stories such as this:
– The NYT on October, 11th, 1969 “Imagine, if you can, what your life would be like if you could not read, or if your reading skill were so meager as to limit you to the simplest of writings, and if for you the door to the whole world of knowledge and inspiration available through the printed word had never opened.”

Or this: “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunities of an education.  Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right that must be made available on equal terms.”
–  Chief Justice Earl Warren, Brown v. Board of Education (1954

The failure of great society programs to meet the educational needs of minorities has become a feature of the liberal landscape, a deep aching scream of anguish as deafening as a thundering waterfall, or roaring freight train, and one we have become so inured to that the deadly cycle of minority illiteracy and the misery that goes with it passes without comment. None.No comment on the 2016 illiteracy rates in California, America’s most populous state in the national press, nothing in the NYT or Wapo, nothing in TNR, the Nation, Salon, the American Prospect, NPR, PBS, not a frigging peep from any of the media outlets that once believed minority literacy mattered.

http://www.theroot.com/report-75-percent-of-black-boys-in-calif-don-t-meet-1795743180 “The most recent round of testing in the state of California has revealed a disturbing statistic: Three out of 4 black boys failed to meet the reading and writing requirements, and more than half of them scored in the lowest category on the English portion of the test.” That’s about it.

One of the reasons I was confident that Trump would pull it out was the indifference displayed here to commentary from African-American Democrats, such as Van Jones, who warned that life for African Americans under Obama and the Democrats wasn’t quite as rosy as the national press (see above) and the DNC would have us believe. Jones warned specifically that Michigan and the other blue wall rust belt states were especially vulnerable. Were I playing the same sort of games some here do, I’d accuse those who mocked and ignored Jones of racism. The reaction then mirror the comments on this thread, suggesting that some/many in CT community have learned nothing from 2016.

The great society programs aren’t working, African-American youth is in crisis, 3 out of 4 African-American males in California of high school age can’t read, or write. And that ongoing catastrophe doesn’t merit a mention in the NYT, or even the ‘left-wing’ press, because many here and elsewhere are more concerned, frankly, with bombast, 21st century phrenology, and Melania’s heels.

kidneystones @36.

Here is your argument as I understand it:

a) Liberals have abandoned the issue of black education and are proposing no solutions except a reflexive, spineless defense of The Great Society.

b) ???

c) Therefore I support Trump.

Can I play?

a) None of the liberal institutions are calling out the EPA’s failure to remove carcinogens from the environment. (Here we feign resentment that a single aspect of American governance fails to conclusively solve a systemic, complex problem that’s literally never been solved anywhere.)

b) Trump and the Republicans aren’t liberal instutions.

c). I vote for Trump. (Here we whitewash and ignore any documented evidence of a candidate’s positions.)

You know who else cares about Black people, perhaps even as much as Trump and the Republicans? Yeah, me neither. I don’t know and I can’t imagine where I’d look… it’s a real stumper. But I’m sure when i find them, they’ll be preoccupied with an urban agenda that starts and ends with “give law enforcement the support and deference it deserves” and “liberals stay away from our communities with your welfare state paternalism”.

Again, if you don’t like Trumpists being associated with White Supremacy and authoritarianism, you have every opportunity to make an argument on their behalf that is intellectually coherent and willing to acknowledge what the imagined victims of 60’s liberals have to say about their own lives.

Or you can continue to make frankly bizarre claims about Trumps “effectiveness” and gesture towards nonexistent novel solutions to racial inequality while demonstrating absolutely zero engagement with the people who live in and represent Black communities.

To chose the second approach and be able to gaslight those who see your choice as a (subtle, to be sure) manifestation of White identity politics…well, that’s what Privilege looks like.

@
”Declaring for Trump invites accusations of racism, authoritarianism, etc. all of which we wear with considerable good humor, for the most part.”

That’s good – as we will need a lot more ”good humor” after Trump has finished what he was elected for -(destroying the US ”gubernment”) – and as we now all have proof that he is ”at war” with the American people – or let’s say there aren’t any ”American People” he isn’t at war with -(so glad you mentioned ”any child”) – let me predict ”we the people” ultimately will win this war – we just had to get ”the Orange” out of our system!

One fairly obvious point — in response to your original post, not the article itself — is surely that the general consensus which united conservatives and liberals, that neoliberal economics works, that war against weak countries can be waged on the cheap, and that the local working class will always eat whatever excrement is put on their plates, has started to break down.

The alternatives seem to be to change the consensus, or spread bullshit that the consensus is OK but just needs to be tweaked a bit. Trump is a right-wing bullshitter, Clinton is a liberal bullshitter; there’s nothing really new about that (much the same sort of thing happened with those who continued to support the consensus during the Great Depression).

Ever since Trump started campaigning, we have seen two prevailing tendencies (on the left, center left and also center right): underestimating his capability, and underestimating his dangerousness. Most debate on CT has been abysmal on both counts. Corey Robin has from the beginning been a proponent of trivializing the threat posed by Trump in the White House and it seems he has learned nothing, even after we have seen Nazi marches carried out openly in American cities with Trump’s support, leading to the murder of an antifascist in broad daylight. I won’t bore you with an enumeration of all the other appalling things Trump has done in his short time in office, y’all know them very well. Maybe this game of “how conservative is Trump” you insist on playing is just whistling in the dark, in any case it’s political and intellectual bankruptcy disguised as witty analysis.

I think it’s quite hard to argue that Trump isn’t trying to govern as a conservative / reactionary. The Republicans argued that Obama was a radical, that his policies were socialism, that he was sympathetic to terrorists, that he surrendered to the demands of
Iran, North Korea, etc, that he governed as a dictator. Trump’s entire agenda seems to be informed by little more than reversing everything Obama. Attempts to reverse or destroy the ACA? Check. Repudiation of the Iran deal specifically and reasoned diplomacy generally? Check. Doubling down on endless war on terror and militarism? Check. Reversing attempts restrain police excesses? Check. Repudiation of diplomacy with North Korea? Check. Reversing Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy? Check. Is there anything he’s done, or tried to do, that can’t be viewed as a violent reaction to the Obama presidency?

I’m super glad that CT provides a forum for people like kidneystones to come peddle their racist shit about how the problem is that the Great Society somehow destroyed African-American families. Surely it’s not the inadequate resources devoted to the task nor the persistence of centuries of de jure and de facto discrimination that is responsible! No, it’s the bad liberals who thought that poor people would be made better off if they had more money.

Trump supporters disgust me in general, but ks is revolting in all particulars. It’s amazing to me that he’s tolerated here.

In that, Trump actually does reflect a wider reality, but not conservatism.

Conservatism is the wider reality. Trump was made possible by decades of conservatives laying the groundwork to make him happen; everything of value that could be undermined, they undermined, and now the few of them who have some dim awareness of what they’ve wrought are outraged! sir! at the impropriety of it all. They’d much prefer the robotic ghoulishness of a Paul Ryan, grimly dismantling what little remains of our welfare state while speaking in a clipped monotone. Trump is just so gauche, but he’s taking them to the promised land. None of these utterly contemptible garbage people is against anything of Trump’s substance, or they wouldn’t be conservatives in the first place, and few things rankle me so much as the lavish attention heaped on so-called conservative “apostates” like David Frum. All of these people should be in sackcloth and ashes, begging for absolution in the streets, and until they are, I don’t want to hear from them.

@b9n10nt 10.12.17 at 11:57 pm

A sociopath can be very good at reading and manipulating others. Having a theory of mind is quite distinct from having empathy, and having empathy is quite distinct from using it pervasively to guide personal/social/political life.

There’s a few simple… tricks, is the only word that works, I think, that you can do without needing any insight into how people work. Stuff like being silent and letting people run their mouth out, or being vague so that you can redefine what you meant post-facto and claiming success, or the gish-gallop technique or a few other rhetorical tricks that can be used to confuse/blindside people in various ways.

Power-sales techniques and what-have-you.

“Tricks”, because if they work they work by mechanical rule-following and if people know enough to recognise them they don’t work at all. You don’t need particular insight to use any of these, you just need an audience that doesn’t recognise them and isn’t told about them. A lot of the communication ones, in particular, rely on abuse of normal discourse structures/pragmatics, which means that they’re actually things that people with autism-spectrum conditions — that severely disrupt normal pragmatic structures — might stumble into by, literally, accident.

With a drive to succeed and a handful of these tricks you can — with luck, and we only hear about the successes: there’s an old technique for building a reputation that starts by sending out 1024 letters that A will happen, and another 1024 saying the exact opposite — build a small fortune. But if you run into more-experienced players who can recognise the tricks you’re using, then you’re not going to succeed against them, and it might go badly for you. Or they might give you a half-million in fuck-off money just to get you out of their way, and you’d probably think yourself awesome for getting it.

You heard it here in the CT comments, folks. It’s the teachers’ unions who are the root of all evil, the ones who are keeping black students “chained”, the ones who invented redlining and enforced school segregation, the ones that blew up the already-inadequate safety net, the ones who pass laws to restrict access to reproductive rights and to continually underfund minority schools. The teachers’ unions did all that, sure, and I’m the queen of England.

It takes a real special kind of rotten intellect and soul to look at the devastation that the conservative movement has wreaked upon this country and to conclude that the blame then lies on the teachers. At least this nicely puts the lie to the bizarre idea that Trump is some sort of upender of the normal order which ks has repeatedly tried to sell people on before and after the election. Trump is the normal order! This is the natural and predictable culmination of the conservative project, and if that project exhibits weakness at the moment of its greatest triumph, as Corey has argued, that’s only because when you lay bare the naked class viciousness and the unadulterated racial animus that underlies it, even some of the people that were willing to sign on to it when it was just all fun and games begin having second thoughts.

@54 The teachers’ unions, for the most part, have persistently opposed charter schools. That is their position and that is the problem. As teachers’ unions tend to at least espouse left-wing positions, you’ll need to provide some clear evidence that confirms that is conservatives in general, and republicans in particular, who are making it more difficult for the poor to gain access to charter schools. As I detailed earlier, the illiteracy of African-American youth in California in 2016 doesn’t merit an inch of copy in a single major ‘left’ leaning publication, or organ of the Democratic party. African-American voters are expected to show up at the polls on command and as Van Jones and others pointed out, the DNC and Hillary did far too little that the concerns of the African-American community mattered as much to a woman who would travel anywhere and talk to anyone if the price is right. That’s the Democratic party today, and that’s the Democratic press. Are the Republicans every bit as appalling and hypocritical? Absolutely, and perhaps more so. Calling 60 million Trump voters racist and/or fascist might feel good, but as Mark Lilla sensibly observes, identity politics is Reagan’s trickle-down economics for liberals, self-delusion for folks out of answers. The ‘solutions’ for poor, black families in crisis on this thread illustrate clearly why so many black voters in Michigan and elsewhere stayed home. Folks without work, safe schools, and much hope want solutions – not ‘this study says’ or ‘but, Republicans.’
America’s cities are under Democratic control, for the most part, and the studies, the plans, and the programs, and the teachers’ unions haven’t got the job done, unless creating a cycle of failure and illiteracy qualifies as some form of progress, or success.

Donald Trump is president because the Democratic party abandoned the poorest, white and black, not because 60 million Americans are actually fascists.

If Democrats can’t provide solutions for ordinary people at the state, local and national level the party is going to continue to keep losing elections.

kidneystones: “Calling 60 million Trump voters racist and/or fascist might feel good, but as Mark Lilla sensibly observes, identity politics is Reagan’s trickle-down economics for liberals, self-delusion for folks out of answers.”

This is prefect. Lilla foolishly writes as if identity politics were invented in 2008, and kidneystones applauds. Why compare modern identity politics to Reagan’s trickle-down economics when you can instead compare them to Reagan’s own identity politics, you young buck?

“if one truly believes that 60 million believe we no longer need elections, why do we go to such lengths to conceal our ‘secret’ agenda.”

You don’t. In fact you (more precisely, a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners) say they would support postponing the 2020 elections to stop voter fraud if Trump proposed it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/?utm_term=.cafdfbb7b356

kidneystones: Your arguments are so poorly made!

Yes, desegregating schools (by class and race) is increasingly one liberal-left popular idea. I did not claim it was a sufficient or even a necessary condition for equality. I only offer it as an example that actual Black people overwhelmingly pursue solutions that do not include “destroy the Democratic Party establishment by voting for Trump” and “raise awareness about the [supposed] failure of the Great Society.” What do you make of the fact? No pause? No humility? It’s too gratifying being the White guy with Answers?

No, rather than listen and respond intelligently, you criticize school desegregation as the ONLY locus of liberal-left activism. That’s would be a particularly easy-to-spot non sequitor were you interested in contributing to reasoned debate. Rather, your passion for educating poor black folks doesn’t make it past your desire to misstate my argument and get a zinger in on the internet.

What do you call it when a college professor is self-satisfied with glaring non-sequitors and passionately simplistic denunciations? Privilege. The privilege of walking to 3rd base between innings and standing there like you’ve hit a triple.

But please, go on….What’s the next installment of hot-takes I read in Marty Peretz’s rag 30 years ago?

Or, rather, could you demonstrate some of the work you’ve done around understanding the charter school movement: What do you make of the scholarly findings around the Milwaukee “experiment”? What is your understanding of the argument against charter schools as a solution and your response? Use all that passion and intelligence to help us move forward, eh.

But also, listen. Listen to what the supposed victims have to say for themselves. In the spirit of democracy and respect for your equals, charitably listen.

On the general notion of crazy, there are crazy people, and there are crazy ideas.
Racism is a crazy idea, but racism serves a social function/dysfunction in a contradictory society. Therefore it can be instrumentally rational for an individual to accede to the conventional ideology, crazy as it is, because the systemic consequences are not visited upon them personally.

Trump is a break because an owner who wants to break with small d democratic politics has weaseled in, thanks to the idiocy of the Founding Fathers. So far as continuity with other Republicans is concerned, there is an extremely tiny range of acceptable policies, period. Obama had a lot of continuity with Republicans, too.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnhudson/trumps-boldest-move-today-wasnt-decertifying-the-iran-deal?utm_term=.pb5YARWbz#.svmyK02Lz

Ah yes, the neocons have been expelled and our wonderful noninterventionist president is definitely not putting us on a collision course with war!

[aeiou] You fucking dunce.

So much appreciation for that, Jerry and (earlier) Layman. I’m more than willing to play at high theory on this blog and use pseudonomytry to give myself license, but as a suburban white dude it’s perhaps a little much for me to call out White privelege. So…I appreciate hearing other voices.

My read of ks on this blog over the years is that he gets classism, but fetishizes the concerns of the white working class and has made zero attempts to educate himself and familiarize himself with the concerns & perspectives of Black Americans.

ks, I’ll grant you Earl Warren and raise you

When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

TM @67

A sense of history

“We have seen that the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on… This social function is already losing importance and is bound to lose it at an accelerating rate in the future even if the economic process itself of which entrepreneurship was the prime mover went on unabated. …economic progress tends to become depersonalized and automatized. (p.132)

“Of old, roughly up to and including the Napoleonic Wars, generalship meant leadership and success meant the personal success of the man in command who earned corresponding “profits” in terms of social prestige… This is no longer so. Rationalized and specialized office work will eventually blot out personality, the calculable result, the “vision.” The leading man no longer has the opportunity to fling himself into the fray. He is becoming just another office worker—and one who is not always difficult to replace. …in the last analysis the same social process—undermines the role and, along with the role, the social position of the capitalist entrepreneur. His role, though less glamorous than that of medieval warlords, great or small, also is or was just another form of individual leadership acting by virtue of personal force and personal responsibility for success… (p.133)

“…contrasting the figure of the industrialist or merchant with that of the medieval lord. The latter’s “profession” not only qualified him admirably for the defense of his own class interest—he was not only able to fight for it physically—but it also cast a halo around him and made of him a ruler of men… Of the industrialist and merchant the opposite is true. There is surely no trace of any mystic glamour about him which is what counts in the ruling of men. The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail. We have seen that the industrialist and merchant, as far as they are entrepreneurs, also fill a function of leadership. But economic leadership of this type does not readily expand, like the medieval lord’s military leadership, into the leadership of nations. On the contrary, the ledger and the cost calculation absorb and confine… He can only use rationalist and unheroic means to defend his position or to bend a nation to his will. He can impress by what people may expect from his economic performance, he can argue his case, he can promise to pay out money or threaten to withhold it, he can hire the treacherous services of a condottiere or politician or journalist. But that is all and all of it is greatly overrated as to its political value… the bourgeois class is ill equipped to face the problems, both domestic and international, that have normally to be faced by a country of any importance. (pp.137-8)

“…capitalist policies wrought destruction much beyond what was unavoidable. They attacked the artisan in reservations in which he could have survived for an indefinite time. They forced upon the peasant all the blessings of early liberalism—the free and unsheltered holding and all the individualist rope he needed in order to hang himself… In breaking down the pre-capitalist framework of society, capitalism thus broke not only barriers that impeded its progress but also flying buttresses that prevented its collapse. That process, impressive in its relentless necessity, was not merely a matter of removing institutional deadwood, but of removing partners of the capitalist stratum, symbiosis with whom was an essential element of the capitalist schema. Having discovered this fact which so many slogans obscure, we might well wonder whether it is quite correct to look upon capitalism as a social form sui generis or, in fact, as anything else but the last stage of the decomposition of what we have called feudalism.” (p.139)

Schumpeter, from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, ch. 7

Jerry’s link at @71 is very important:

nobody seems to notice that Trump has just designated the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization – this is completely insane and incredibly dangerous.

Trump took two steps today that the right might come to hate. First, his moves on the ACA put all eyes on the GOP for the costs of health care. It is no longer Obamacare, it is Trumpcare. Or TrumpNoCare. Second, his moves on Iran look bad for U.S. military policy, not just diplomacy.

OP: “conservatives have breached norms, flouted decorum, assailed elites, and shattered orthodoxy throughout the ages.” But is that not also exactly what anti-conservatives – progressives, revolutionaries – have done? Or is it the wrong sort of breaching, flouting, assailing, shattering when conservatives, not your friends, do it; but SOP when your friends do it?

Or are you maintaining that respectable norm-adhering, decorum-maintaining, elite-sustaining, deeply orthodox left-wingers have always been the vast majority of anti-conservatives?

On further thought: elite-sustaining, yes, maybe, if you regard the nomenklatura as elite. Orthodox also, for their own kind of orthodoxy.

None of this is intended to imply support for the remarkable Trump.

stephen t johnson @77

I wouldn’t read low black turnout as “normalizing” Trump. I would read it as a more advanced case of a general disconnection from politics specifically and from communal concerns generally, along with it being the result of systemic disenfranchisement and disempowerment in. Apparently many of us have to be “inspired” (entertained?) into voting.

Kidneystones provides no support for the claim that charter schools are any real solution. He also makes the ludicrous claim that the poorest somehow turned the election to Trump. Data indicates that the poorest vote Democratic when they do vote.

Surely no one here needs a history of the politicization of the religious right.
Primary factor segregation, secondary factors: school prayer, abortion (it began as something to rile up the troop, but took on a life if its own) LGBT rights ate just the latest
motivator.
DeVos is at the heart of the continuation of the first two.
Undermining teachers unions and profiteering from charter schools id
just a bonus.

Collin Street @55

Yes, I suppose that a work of political thought might also in certain cases be a manifestation of a psychological abnormality. A few such works might be read usefully through that lens, but probably not most.

After several tries just now (i.e., typing stuff and deleting it), I’ve come to the conclusion that for the time being I probably can’t state my position any more persuasively than I already have. There is a longer discussion to be had about these particular questions, but I don’t think this thread is the place for it. So I’ll leave it at that.

“I wouldn’t read low black turnout as “normalizing” Trump. I would read it as a more advanced case of a general disconnection from politics specifically and from communal concerns generally, along with it being the result of systemic disenfranchisement and disempowerment in. Apparently many of us have to be “inspired” (entertained?) into voting.” @80

This reading doesn’t contradict steven johnson’s @77. If anything, it reinforces his point and gives it a bit of explanatory depth. In fact, your reading can be plausibly applied to vast swathes of the American public. The dynamics that make this so are precisely what has normalized a creature like Trump tweet-shitting his way across the Rose Garden.

Coates is a good writer, but that’s about it. His analyses have no force and don’t amount to anything that could be construed as effective. It’s just distant seminar-room inflected high priest moralizing.

and how… ”fascinating”? – Finally read the:
”Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry (Updated)” and the
WOW!! – 881 comments!
And there were this two comments –

Nr.1 by Mr.Robin
”Or put it this way: why the need to feel that this villain is the worst villain ever? Why not, shit, he’s pretty terrible, he can’t get elected.”

and Nr.2 by a commenter called ”Faustusnotes”:
”This thread is ridiculous. What is wrong with the American left that you can look on trump and see anything except a disaster? Yes, he is part of a trend, the result of thirty years of republican insanity, but he is clearly worse than anyone who came before him. Yes, bush invaded Iraq but what do you think trump will do if some terrorist blows up trump tower with a plane? Are you people completely stupid?!”

And when I was sitting in this plane flying from Atlanta to Stuttgart just a while ago that actually was the major question – coming from all around me – if they -(especially NOT Americans on the Left) have completely ”lost they mind” and there was an agreement -(which by the way seems to be VERY widely shared in the world?) that ”we have a ‘sitwation’ here and ”a F… face” – who is at the same time ”the worst villain ever” AND – the ultimate idiotic F… Moron.

And about ”foreign policy” – we all hope that he (ultimately) will unite the world -(against him) but NOT against ”America”.

If anyone asks me (what’s that? No one did? Oh well, it’s a (relatively) free country)) Trump’s major innovations, apart from his desire to control the courts (which Corey has written about passim) is the more or less unprecedented freedom he has given the military to, essentially, do what they want.

‘Perhaps no president in recent memory has so empowered the military—and disempowered himself—as Donald Trump. Whereas Barack Obama famously “signed off” on nearly every drone target, Trump has taken a deliberately hands-off approach. While he claimed on the campaign trail to “know more” than U.S. generals, since taking office the commander in chief has mostly relinquished responsibility for matters of war, preferring to shout suggestions from the sideline on Twitter. He has given the U.S. military the authority to set its own troop levels in Afghanistan and the Pentagon the flexibility to set troop levels in Iraq and Syria, although he has reportedly tired of this position of late, blaming his secretary of defense for “losing” in Afghanistan. The result has been a sometimes weaker-than-usual chain of command: when Trump announced on Twitter that transgender people would be barred from serving in “any capacity” in the United States military, with no clarification from the White House, the Defense Department effectively chose to ignore the order, pending more information.’

Needless to say, the liberals have been more or less openly in favour of this.* They haven’t (on the whole) paused to reflect that Trump, awful though he is, has at least some form of democratic legitimacy whereas The Generals have none, and that a democratically elected President giving the military what amounts to de jure (as opposed to de facto, which was always the case) control over American foreign policy is an extraordinary innovation, and represents a serious weakening of the United States’ democratic traditions, such as they are.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/donald-trump-military-white-supremacism-response

* cf for example this doozy: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-afghanistan-speech-military-troops-taliban-isis-president-military-coup-a7906741.html

Oh wait?

Somebody (”American”) just told me – that some of our fellow Americans –
(NOT only on the Left) – are now really ashamed that they always were bringing up this ”Clinton” person – instead of TOTALLY and ABSOLUTELY focusing on NOT having a F… Moron erected?

I don’t believe that conservatives or Trumpkins suffer, for the most part, from some empathy disorder. But I do think that there is a difference in the way distance is interpreted. There’s a famous essay by Carlos Ginzburg, Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance, in which he explores the background to a famous scene in Pere Goriot – the one in which Vautrin proposes a sort of colonialist koan to Rastignac. http://elplandehiram.org/documentos/JoustingNYC/Mandarin_Distance.pdf Ginzburg In brief form, the question Vautrin poses is: if you could gain a fortune just by wishing the death (a wish that would be effective) of a Chinese mandarin half way around the world, would you do it? The point is that distance – and the way we make distances, geographically, ethnically, economically, sexually, etc. – has a global effect on our moral sentiments. I would say that the distance making in the Trumpian era of conservatism is going back to an earlier form of it, at least in the U.S., which last became this virulent after WWI. Interestingly, the symbol that Trump wrapped his campaign around is the “wall”, this mythical distance fixer that would forever separate white “authentic” America from Mexico (the brown mixed America, I guess).
It isn’t as if liberal culture doesn’t deal in distance as well. When HRC (and I voted for her, in spite of this) ran as a vaguely feminist politician, she never spoke at all about why, then, she would have ended her days in the state department signing off on appallingly large arm sales to the Saudis. Imagine a politician in the 80s running as a civil rights candidate and at the same time offering major support for the Apartheid South African state. But I think this was another case of distance – both geographical and cultural – that simply excluded Saudi women from the moral consideration that one would give American women.
I’m not sure anybody is a master of the moral distances we exist among. I’m not. So I am not saying I understand how to counter distance effects. I’m just saying that they have to be read into the narrative of our political ideologies in order to understand them.

I mean, anyone who thinks that a President Hillary Clinton, presented with the arguments of her entire cabinet, the intelligence community, and the Joint Chiefs to the effect that Iran was complying with the agreement; and told the same thing by every other signatory to the agreement; would have declined to certify compliance and instead invited Congress to blow up the agreement, is just talking nonsense.

bruce wilder: “The actual Trump seems to me to be a bit of a personal mess and an authoritarian in the same mode as the blowhards who hang out at the barbershop; the Trump constructed by, say, Maddow’s televised narratives is something else, something more imagined than real.”

Why not illustrate this point with some examples? Which Trump narrative is the imagined one, and how is it different than the real one?

novakant: “…that Clinton is a militarist who strongly believes in force and the threat of force…”

See what I mean? You’re like a broken record.

“Clinton’s stance towards Iran and the nuclear deal is a matter of record.”

Indeed, it is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/us/politics/hillary-clinton-backs-iran-nuclear-deal.html

I mean, there are literally dozens of media stories quoting Clinton endorsing the deal. They even accused her of trying to take credit for it.

There is no “real” Trump narrative; narratives are imagined stories, constructed according to principles of dramatic art to create meaning and morality. With effort, it is possible to anchor a narrative to facts, and to do so by methods that limit violence to the objectivity of facts. Whether a well-anchored narrative is persuasive may be important to such enterprises as the operation of law or even the progress of science.

In politics, the absence of the restraints imposed by institutions of law or science (which often fail their purposes even in those domains) invite the practice of dark arts of propaganda and mass manipulation. Our famously free press (spoken sarcastically) is thought to provide a check; fact-check columns proliferate at times, but mostly prove how weak an instrument of the public interest, a Media run by massive corporations and financially dependent on corporate business advertising is.

A common practice now is to lead with counterfactuals: narratives in which the place of facts is taken by theory and theory’s constructions. “Because the whole thing is basically a fantasy, nothing will disprove it.”

Last week’s New Yorker has a profile of Rachel Maddow.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/rachel-maddow-trumps-tv-nemesis
Janet Malcolm is full of praise for Maddow. For what she identifies, correctly, as entertainment. She does not comment on whether political comment as entertainment makes for a healthy politics. I think not.

My political theory of Trumpism is that this is what conservative politics unchecked, unopposed and not responsible to any mass constituency produces. Trump says anything. But, it has been twenty years since anyone in politics has been held to account for anything said, except for “gotcha” moments of mostly fake outrage. Not that we would have a gotcha moment for Bush’s war crimes. But that is my point. Holding Clinton up as a standard of normalcy in politics runs into exactly this same problem: she talks in the political code words, takes no responsibility for policy consequences and shows every sign of greed and irresponsibility, but the counterfactual of her normalcy is still set forward, with no awareness that it is a groundless narrative. This is not a point about Clinton or Trump, but it is a point about a political process that produces a lot of stupid and Trump is a bonus.

LFC@83: what the OP wrote was “In other words, conservatives have breached norms, flouted decorum, assailed elites, and shattered orthodoxy throughout the ages. Still, Trump does represent something new”. If that had been accompanied by a statement to the effect that “of course, anti-conservatives have very often done exactly the same throughout the ages” followed by ” so we can’t complain when conservatives also do it, if we were right to do so so are they”, then my reaction would have been very different. It wasn’t, was it?

That Trump is doing something new, I agree. Something I don’t like at all. Do I have to stress that?

As for CR’s original reference to “the weaponization of racism and nativism under Trump”, well, I’m not happy about that either. Weaponization, in a strict sense, refers to converting civilian technology, like nuclear power, into weapons including nstruments of mass destruction. With regard to Trump’s policies, is there a term that goes beyond hyper-hyperbole?

In a looser sense, it means inciting people to take up and use lethal weapons in pursuit of a cause. I have had the misfortune to see that happen. Is Trump doing it?

Stephen
The original context for mentioning breaching of norms, shattering of orthodoxy, and so on, was an analysis something like the following.

Some people (or so it is being alleged) say that Trump is different from past conservatives in that he engages in this kind of behaviour. This might be a valid point if past conservatives had not engaged in that kind of behaviour. But past conservatives did engage in that kind of behaviour. So Trump is like other conservatives in that respect, although he may differ from them in others.

Structurally, it’s like this:

‘A is unlike Bs, because A is X.’
‘No, Bs are also X, so that does not make A unlike Bs.’

In the context of that analysis and that discussion, it is irrelevant whether Cs are also X, since no comparison with Cs is being implied.
If the original point had been to use description X to suggest a negative evalution of A and other Bs, it might have been relevant to object that description X also applies to Cs. But that wasn’t the original point. More specifically, if the original point had been that the behaviour of Trump and other conservatives justified a negative evaluation of them, then it might have been relevant to object with a reference to the similar behaviour of their political opponents. But that was not the original point. The original reference to breaching of norms, shattering of orthodoxy, and so on, was not for evaluative purposes (no suggestion was made that shattering orthodoxy is a bad thing, or that it is a good thing), but to discuss whether it was a point of similarity or a point of difference between Trump and other conservatives. Reference to the behaviour of their political opponents is irrelevant in that context. I think I’m starting to repeat myself.

AND isn’t it awesome on how much better ”Hollywood” deals with ”the Political Theory of Trumpism”?

”The academy threw such a ”Political Theory” -(okay – ”finally”) OUT!
These ”artists” don’t want to have ”anything” to do anymore with such ”anything” while in ”the world of entertainment” – Washington still ”Anything” is doing ”anything” IT wants.

So if you go on this ”book trip” could you do all of US the favor and tell the people that your wasn’t written with the blood which came out of your eyes…
or somewhere else?
It was written with the mind of ”a man of academia” whose fault it isn’t – that he can’t identify or let’s better say the ”Real Political Theory of Trumpism” because only women can smell the ”rancid anything of dirty old F…faces” a mile away – If you know what I mean.

And as you mentioned ”If you can’t keep it civil”… perhaps we shouldn’t have – from the beginning with these ”Anything-Dudes”? and we just should have kicked them in the… you know what?

bruce wilder

JQ @60, J-D @ 79

I wonder if that qualifies as push-polling?

Is asking the question propaganda?

I’m not sure how much you read of the articles I linked to (personally I skimmed a bit). The first three seemed to be straight descriptive repetitions. The fourth suggested some good reasons to doubt the poll’s findings, or at least to doubt the straightforward on-the-face interpretation (it does tend to confirm, the author argues, that many Trump supporters are very deeply committed, but that’s not the same thing). The fifth argued that it was a bad thing that the poll was conducted and a bad thing that it was reported: if there was a serious suggestion that the 2020 election be postponed, the author contends, it would be important to find out what people thought about that, but since there is no such serious suggestion, the author contends, it’s mischievous to introduce the speculation into general discussion as if it was a serious suggestion. I didn’t notice the words ‘push-polling’ or ‘propaganda’, but they did suggest it was clickbait (they didn’t use the word ‘clickbait’, but they referred directly to the encouragement to click). Useful correctives to the original report, I thought, worth considering even by those who don’t fully accept the arguments. Personally, my answer to you is ‘Yes, after reading the GQ article I do feel this was push-polling, or at least something very like it, although I suppose I might revise that conclusion given more information about the investigators’ intentions.’

On another point, I’m a little confused about the relationship between the comment ‘The actual Trump seems to me to be a bit of a personal mess and an authoritarian in the same mode as the blowhards who hang out at the barbershop; the Trump constructed by, say, Maddow’s televised narratives is something else, something more imagined than real’ and the comment ‘There is no “real” Trump narrative; narratives are imagined stories, constructed according to principles of dramatic art to create meaning and morality’. What does it mean to suggest that there is an actual Trump, about whom factual assertions can be made, and that these can be contrasted with narratives which are more imagined than real, but also that there is no real Trump narrative? Is a distinction being made between ‘actual’ and ‘real’? If the statement ‘The actual Trump seems to be a bit of a personal mess and an authoritarian in the same mode as the blowhards who hang out at the barbershop’ does not count as a real Trump narrative, why not?

novakant: “So Layman, you believe Clinton is not a militarist, not a hawk who strongly believes in force?”

So novakant, have you abandoned this claim?
“The scary thing is that Clinton would have acted very similarly towards Iran and NK, in fact all the evidence suggests she might have been even more bellicose.”

Just re-read the longish article linked above. Corey, it’s a must read, especially for those in your field and for anyone interested in how information is being manufactured, filtered, distributed, and internalized.

Hint: we don’t know whattf others are reading and thinking, and won’t be finding out anytime soon.

One of the things I’ve noticed/worked out is that… a person who asks questions rather than making statements… well, they have nothing to say, do they? I mean, obviously: asking a question doesn’t actually act to increase the availability of knowledge, only statements do that.

Asking questions helps you, but not anybody else, really. A certain degree of selfishness is needed to make full use of what’s around you… but if _all_ you’re doing is asking questions there’s no payoff to others in going to the effort of answering them. If the only reward for answering a question is getting asked another question…

and as I wrote already – we need @113

”I think everyone here agrees we have problems to address.”

”given the choice between the devil I know and the one I don’t”

”a race-baiting, loudmouth buffoon”

”Studying the buffoon tells us practically nothing”

and so ”the problem to be addressed” has become how to get rid of the buffoon in the fastest way?

Could we make him the new CEO of the ex-Weinstein company?

novakant: “No Layman, why should I ?”

Because it’s foolish. Trivially foolish because it is no better than a guess; and substantially foolish because it’s a guess that entirely ignores the nature of the person in question. But of course you won’t retreat from it; saying it is an expression of support for your tribe, and you can’t recant it for that reason. Go ahead, surprise me. Admit that it was silly hyperbole.

kidneystones: “Their daughter Chelsea is/was a good friend of Ivanka Trump (a convert to Judaism) and her husband.”

Collin Street will accuse me of asking meaningless questions, but here goes:

What on earth is the purpose or meaning of the parenthetical clause in the sentence above?

steven t johnson: “Obama set up exemptions in ACA that allowed Republican governors to sabotage the program in their states (opting out of parts…”

Not disputing your broader premise, but this part is wrong. The ACA as written did not permit Republican governors to opt out of the Medicaid expansion. That particular bit of legislation was written by Chief Justice John Roberts; and it has to be said that virtually everyone was surprised when Roberts and his cronies in the Court quite suddenly found that the Federal government could not create a new program and compel states to execute it if doing so would cost the states 10% of the cost of the program.

Before someone objects to irrelevant Clinton bashing, there is a larger point. Trump is awful and I favor removing him via the 25th Amendment because I think he might start a war with N Korea. But a great many of Trump’s opponents are opposed to him because he is an incompetent boob and not because they oppose American warmongering. They favor it, but don’t trust Trump to do it correctly.

Donald Johnson: “For instance, her supporter Michael Morell told Charlie Rose we should be covertly killing Iranians and Russians in Syria so that they would know we did it.”

This is quite a bizarre construction. Suppose I followed the model, saying “Donald Johnson’s supporter Joe Blogs thinks we should be drowning baby kittens.” Would that be a good reason to infer that you wanted to drown baby kittens?

J-D @ 115

I do not have in my possession the one true narrative of Trump. Scott Adams predicted the media’s narrative arc would eventually go to, “Trump is effective, but we don’t like it.” I am there already. I think his Administration has been scarily effective on a broad agenda. And, I do not like it.

Layman @ 115: “bruce can’t really point to any widespread media fantasy about Trump, he just likes to say that there is one.”

I wish there was only one. I wish there was anything else! You only have to turn on CNN or MSNBC or read the Washington Post to be inundated with media fantasies about Trump.

There is the on-going Russiagate script. There was the now fading Trump-is-Hitler theme. There is the Trump is crazy / senile and all is chaos in the White House script. Those are just over-arching concepts though — you really have to see the relentless tendentious interpretation of every tiny detail of what he says and does to appreciate the craziness. Trump can mispronounce a word and Seth Meyers will turn it into a ten minute segment. I visited a sick friend during a G-20? Summit a while back and was treated to several hours of mindless speculation on MSNBC on the meaning of where Trump stood in the photo and what the lapel pins were about. If you can spare a few brain cells, watch Washington Week in Review on PBS: confident recitations of empty spin.

I keep misspelling his name. Morell. Forgot to mention he was working for a Clinton aide.

http://gawker.com/i-ran-the-c-i-a-now-i-work-for-a-longtime-clinton-ally-1784871887

Asking questions helps you, but not anybody else, really.

How so?

Donald Johnson: “But you also ignored my other points.”

I didn’t even ignore them. They’re irrelevant to what I said, which is that no reasonable person can believe that Clinton would have refused to certify Iran’s compliance with the agreement under the current circumstances.

@
”Unlike you, and probably many others, I don’t take anything any politician says seriously, especially Trump.”

Hey!! me too –
I only take seriously what A… holes say – as when a… holes says something they nearly all the time do what they say -(no second thoughts or anything like that) – so AGAIN I have to agree with the kidney man 110 percent.

(sorry guys!!)

Collin Street@116:
The Socratic Method would like to have a word with you.

—

Layman@136:
Layman@95 would like to have a word with you. Though if your response to your earlier self is that you only implied a broader claim while leaving yourself wiggle room to point out that you never quite stated it, I suspect none of us would particularly like to have a word with you.

phenomenal cat @139

Thanks.

faustusnotes@141 rewrites Layman’s correction on the Supreme Court allowing states to refuse to expand MedicAid, rather than Obama by executive order. Layman was right on the MedicAid expansion, but that wasn’t the only thing I was thinking of, which is why I didn’t simply write “MedicAid expansion” in the first place. Delaying the requirement for the insurance plans to cover contraception, sterilization and abortion, for one. And delaying requirements for employers to report health insurance costs to employees, for another. And eliminating caps on deductibles for small businesses (though on review I see he was cooperating with Congress on that one.)

The review by the way I found here: http://galen.org/2016/changes-to-obamacare-so-far/ This is dated January 28, 2016. Galen Institute notes that the list was republished at National Review Online. Surely this is non-Russian a source enough to satisfy faustusnotes. Of the seventy changes listed, sixty seven are by the administration alone or by Congress and the President.

Although I can’t get Facebook at all, thus have been saved from dastardly Russian operatives despite myself, it is sadly obvious that my memory has been contaminated with right-wing charges about Obama’s unilateral changes. I know perfectly well that you can’t trust conservatives but false impressions are hard to dislodge.
“The GOP says Obama’s decision to postpone implementing the “employer mandate” stomps all over the Constitution.” (This from Atlantic in 2013, which I didn’t read then. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/delaying-parts-of-obamacare-blatantly-illegal-or-routine-adjustment/277873/)

Nor did I read this, from the New England Journal of Medicine: “As the Obama administration has over the past several months postponed implementation of various parts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the President’s political opponents have charged that his decisions are ‘blatantly illegal,’ that his administration is acting “as though it were not bound by law,” and that his decisions ‘raise grave concerns about [his] understanding’ that, unlike medieval British monarchs, American presidents have under our Constitution a ‘duty, not a discretionary power’ to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’1 Indeed, the House of Representatives has enacted, on a party-line vote, H.R. 4138, the ‘Enforce the Law Act,’ purporting to create jurisdiction in the federal courts to allow a house of Congress to sue to force the President to enforce requirements of a federal law. “(https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/delaying-parts-of-obamacare-blatantly-illegal-or-routine-adjustment/277873/)

So, yes, a right-wing talking point lodged in my brain and led me to incorrectly attribute one of the many changes in ACA to Obama when, as Layman said, it was the Supreme Court. The babble about Russian Facebook operatives is a much bigger mistake than forgetting that the Republicans were lying about how Obama was doing everything unilaterally, I think. But then, I would think so, wouldn’t I?

The funny part is that I can’t get on Facebook. (My email address is pre-empted, so I can’t sign up.) And, shamelessly, I still think that list of changes bears out Obama’s willingness to compromise, whereas Trump doesn’t just want to roll back the New Deal, Trump wants to go back to the Gilded Age and a renewed Lochner era.

There is a larger point. Despite having made a mistake, I still think that no health insurance plan that leaves such a large role for private insurance companies, that leaves pharmaceutical companies with barely regulated monopolies, that is so much like a law compelling people to buy liability insurance for their cars can possibly be construed as left-wing, in any but a special CT sense.

In that special CT sense, where the Left begins with mainstream Democrats during the Eisenhower administration, with the ADA and Adlai Stevenson and the ACLU after it got read of Gurley Flynn, market production (aka production for profit) is prerequisite to human freedom, and just needs tweaking. In the CT world, totalitarianism is a thing, not propaganda. By these lights I am not a leftist at all, because I fall off the planet.

Layman

kidneystones: “I’m going to respectfully leave that for you to figure out on your own.”

Well, that’s not a good idea. It’s a simple, fair question, and your unwillingness to answer it leaves one to believe the worst.

‘I’m going to leave that for you to figure out on on your own’ would have been obviously true; so obviously, in fact, that there would have been no point in making the statement except deliberate rudeness.
‘I’m going to respectfully leave that for you to figure out on your own’ is equally rude; and equally obviously a lie. As in Yes Minister, this is a context where explicit mention of respect is a coded indicator of the exact opposite.

Layman@145:

To take the first one that rises to mind, which is also relevant to the points you implicitly challenge while that you never address them: it’s been about a month since I completed my Reserves contract, and prior to the election I took a long, hard look at both candidates’ foreign policy stances with that recently-passed date in mind. Based on the information available at the time, I concluded that while neither presidency was likely to result in a foreseeable major military action during their first year that could prevent my scheduled return to civilian life, a Clinton presidency was much more likely to do so. As I expect you had no skin in the game, you may have had little reason to look closely at what Clinton said about her military ambitions if it conflicted with your desire to support her over a generally noxious opponent, but she actively and consistently called for foreign policy that would sharply increase the risk of large-scale international conflict. Trump was (and is) merely reckless and unpredictable. Under Clinton, foreign adventurism was a question of when, even if it would have been politely shrouded in multilateral niceties. Trump was and is a large, threatening “if”.

So yeah. There’s a point (relevant to the topic you’re ostensibly not addressing) where Clinton was at the time clearly worse than Trump: predictability of military adventurism. On this point Trump was an unpleasant gamble, while Clinton was an unpleasant sure thing. If you didn’t (or don’t) feel any particular need to take her seriously or at her word, you can and will object to that characterization and make revisionist arguments that severe and extremely dangerous escalation could never have occurred under a Clinton presidency, but you shoot your credibility in the head.

CR 69: I certainly didn’t mean to misrepresent Corey Robin’s argument. He claimed that there was nothing remarkable about Trump’s foreign policy recklessness. Now we are not yet a year into his presidency and Trump has openly threatened a foreign country with nuclear annihilation and started to blow up the Iran deal which was internationally agreed on and signed by the US. My critique of CR’s consistent tendency to trivialize the Trumpian threat stands. In less than a year, Trump has exceeded our worst expectations and has already done what might be irreparable damage both domestically and internationally. We don’t know what else he will do but we won’t be able to counter the threat by whistling in the dark and convincing ourselves that things won’t get really bad. Some political figures and movements are really worse, more dangerous, more evil, than others. To pretend otherwise to me is reckless and irresponsible, and inexplicable from somebody who studies right wing movements.

and @
“she’s as bad or worse than Trump!”

when I was around 4 years old an even more stupid kid then I am in Kindergarten accused me of being bad or worse than any ”Deutscher” because the kid had found out that I had an American mom -(who even couldn’t really speak ”Deutsch”) and I was very much hurt by that statement and probably never got over it – and then there is this issue right now with this… may I say ”Pig”? who is currently getting compared to Trump and his ”Political Theory” and so I wonder if the ”Comparison Specialists” on CT could do us all a yuuuge favor -(as hardly any American can remember anymore who this ‘Clinton person’ was) – to compare ”the Political Theory” of the Pig to the Political Theory of Trumpism – as such comparison might be really enlightening for ALL of us -(even the dudes) –

And so I’m waiting –
and who could be better to start with an extensive ”expertise” as a commenter called ”Orange Watch”?

I’ll just add that this is a hilarious misrepresentation by Obama’s critics on the left (I guess I should put that in scare quotes). If the “neoliberal”, “identity politics”-fixated, transgender-loving left coast democrats of the big cities had got their way, America would have a public option and/or single payer, and a much fairer distribution of taxes. But Obama had to compromise with the red-blooded, white working class-loving, “real issues” democrats who are much loved by the white working class whisperers and “real industrial policy” red-blooded old school leftists in the press, Jacobin and hereabouts, and it was because of his compromise with those people who are supposedly focused on “real issues” like economic policy that America has the half-arsed health policy it does. But on CT we have to constantly put up with the old left whining that all those woke hipsters and chicks who love Hilary are the real reason we didn’t get single payer.

And you wonder why your politics has gone to shit.

68: “My read of ks on this blog over the years is that he gets classism, but fetishizes the concerns of the white working class”

Sure, that’s why he supports the leader who wants to take away their health care and abolish the inheritance tax. Why do we take such obvious nonsense seriously?

Or how about this quote from CR (re 35): “Trump’s critique of plutocracy, defense of entitlements, and articulated sense of the market’s wounds” etc. This is an administration of the plutocracy, for the plutocracy, by the plutocracy. Its major domestic political projects are deregulation (finance as well as fossil fuels and just about any polluting industry), taking away health insurance from millions of Americans, and massively cutting taxes for the plutocracy and the upper class. And people seriously credit Trump of the golden toilet seat with a critique of the plutocracy? And this now counts as political science? Wow. What is amazing is that CTers suffer this folly so sheepishly.

My critique of CR’s consistent tendency to trivialize the Trumpian threat stands.

I think your critique stems from a misreading of what Corey is actually saying. That Trump is continuous with the recent (and not-so-recent) history of the Republican party is not a “trivialization.” If anything, it’s actually a lot more horrifying than thinking that Trump is a sui generis phenomenon; in the latter case, you can hope that business-as-usual will resume once he’s gone, but in the former, the problem is business as usual.

bruce wilder: “But, despite the tremendous volume of journalistic speculation structured around this narrative of collusion, there are no confirmed and unambiguous facts to support it.”

Unambiguous facts:

1) There is an FBI investigation.
2) The investigation is focused on members of Trump’s campaign; and on evidence of Russian interference in the election: and on evidence of contacts between the campaign and the Russian government.
3) Trump fired the FBI director.
4) Trump openly attributed the firing to his displeasure with the investigation and his desire that it end.

1 & 2 are not in dispute. 3 is not in dispute, and is further a violation of democratic norms. 4 is not in dispute, and is evidence of intent to obstruct. Put another way, Sean Illing appears to be reporting facts.

Donald Johnson, where is your evidence that Morell was a security adviser to Clinton? His wikipedia entry doesn’t mention it, and this article in foreign policy says she only had two staff on foreign policy, but a network of hundreds of people advising those two, and doesn’t mention him. Do you think he was one of those hundreds, and if so do you think maybe the number of people in the network might water down his importance just a little? None of his personal websites or those connected to his corporate or university employment suggests that he was her national security advisor. None of the articles about his resignation from Kennedy School of Government mentions it (they all say he was ex-CIA deputy). Could it be that this is simple fabrication?

AND about all these theories about ”the Political Theory of Trumpism” – the one which (still) makes the most sense is – that ”Trumpism” is ”mit Absicht” (on purpose) – an effort to put a completely demented A…hole in charge – as Bannon one of the ”Vordenker” of this theory AND some commenters here – stated – to ”burn the whole thing down” –

And I have to give it to them – BE-fore at least some in Europe caught on to this ”war” – the F…faces and A…holes – were tremendously successful – at least in our homeland – America!

Layman, small differences between Clinton and Trump do not dominate Clinton’s very large political defects. You had an argument for relentlessly focusing on differences to the exclusion of appreciating the whole reality, maybe, when there was a choice on an upcoming ballot. Now, we live in the shadow of Clinton’s defects: her defects gave us Trump. And, those defects are not so much the qualities of an individual person — Clinton or Trump — as they are the persistent institutional personalities of large political factions and institutional actors: the Democratic Party establishment, the Deep State intelligence agencies and military-industrial complex, the Foreign Policy Blob, the corporate Media, et cetera.

Bullying others in comments over such fine points as whether Clinton would have respected certain forms of the Iran nuclear deal is not contributing much to the discussion. We can see that Trump is hostile to that agreement and is cynically manipulating the forms in ways likely to make the agreement come apart. What relevance a counterfactual projection of Clinton’s behavior might have is not clear; asserting that acceptance of such a counterfactual as “true” should be a dispositive criteria for rationality borders on the bizarre.

The relevant fact is not some putative small differences between Trump and Clinton (and the factions and interests and institutionalized views she sought to represent as a fully paid-up member of the Foreign Policy Blob), but the near-absence in American politics of a countervailing force to the consensus of views and interests promoting a palsied, nearly mindless imperial aggression. Morell’s views are relevant to showing just how extreme and reckless is this “center” that Clinton represented, and understanding how and why the “center” is not doing much to restrain the Trump. Some powerful forces cultivated by the Democratic establishment have always been hostile to Iran, supportive of Saudi Arabia and so on.

TM, the idea that CR is minimizing Trump seems bizarre to me. If anyone understands the incoherent viciousness of conservatism as the impulse to dominate in a hierarchical polity, it is our gracious host. Trump is expressing conservative ideas and impulses that have always been there. He is not new. That bit of narrative hyperbole — that Trump is different from all those nice responsible conservatives of the past — is a dangerous deception. What is different in our political moment is the collapse of effective opposition from the left and centre-left. Trump is so scary because so little stands in his way, so little compels him (or the various factions enjoying the power associated with the authority of office under his aegis, including the practical military junta at the core of his Administration) to moderate his policies, let alone his rhetoric.

@154: We didn’t get a public option for several reasons. One of them was that the Obamaite experts didn’t put up a real fight for it because they didn’t think that one would ultimately be needed under the new health care coverage landscape created by the ACA. Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership on the issue took single-payer out of the discussion before it could even be discussed, something that Max Baucus later conceded was a mistake.

@Hidari

Lyndon Johnson’s bellicosity in Vietnam nearly brought about a (presumably) nuclear confrontation with China

Actually, one of the LBJ’s top priorities was to avoid, if at all possible, bringing China directly into the Vietnam War (as opposed to supplying N Vietnam w arms and some reserve soldiers for security duty at home so that the maximum number of NVA’s own soldiers cd be freed for combat — which China did).

LBJ’s fear of, and concern to avoid, direct Chinese intervention is one of the factors explaining why he chose the particular escalation options he did, for instance a ‘graduated’ bombing campaign starting in c. March 1965 as opposed to an all-out immediate bombing of e.g. all the North’s major oil storage facilities etc. (that came later, but not at first). LBJ never allowed U.S. forces to cross the Cambodian (or Laotian) border, unlike Nixon, and he never acceded to his advisor Rostow’s rec. for a ground invasion of the North. Fear of direct Chinese intervention was very likely a factor in all these decisions.

I’m certainly not defending LBJ’s Vietnam policy, but it is well documented that his concern about Chinese intervention played a role throughout. There is no evidence of which I’m aware that the U.S. and China came close to a *direct* confrontation, nuclear or conventional, during the Vietnam War, certainly not in the LBJ period. If you have well-sourced evidence to the contrary, I would be interested in the cite.

faustusnotes @154

Your attempt to tie “old school leftist” and politicians like Joe Lieberman, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, and Mary Laindreu (the people who foreclosed the possibility of a public option) is, I don’t even know, ridiculous?

The “old school left” has hated those “Blue Dog” Democratic legislators forever. They were the kinds of politicians who were part of the centrist Clinton/DLC machine and joined in the fight against “old school leftist” policies. But sure, pragmatic compromise is good to achieve the best politically result. Except when it’s not. Very consistent.

Just unbelievable. It almost seems like a purposeful misreading of history to impugn your political enemies. Do you think the rest of us here who actually lived through the process of passing the ACA don’t remember 8 years ago?

@Layman

what I always find grotesque about the accusations of Russian meddling is the full ticket obliviousness to all the meddling the US used to perform in Russian elections, and in fact in many other elections worldwide. It’s quite a sorry sight to see people like you make a fuss about very minor activities (if there’s even evidence of any), without as much as a shred of self awareness.

Also, too: I’ve said I think she’s bad on militarism. I’m not interested in, and don’t, defend the other side of that argument. I just don’t have any patience for the sort of nonsense that wants to paint her as an eater of babies. She’s a bog-standard, mainstream adherent of the global diplomatic, economic and military order. That’s not good, but it ain’t Satan either.

The global diplomatic, economic and military order is downright evil and full-scale babyeating. Ask around in Yemen, Syria, Lybia, etc. So yes, she has that Satan streak. That that’s bog-standard and mainstream is horrific, but I grant you that’s the world we live in.

Note, BTW, that she was directly involved in at least some of these actions. She has, even now, more blood on her hands than Trump.

Faustusnotes—

The evidence that Morell was one of Clinton’s advisors was in the link I provided, where it says Morell was one of Clinton’s advisors.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/clinton-adviser-lets-attack-iran-to-aid-saudis-in-yemen.html

This is tiresome. I provide links and people demand the evidence that is in the links.

@174: Trump has lifted the Obama Administration’s restraints on the military, resulting in a rapid rise in civilian casualties:

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-has-already-killed-more-civilians-obama-us-fight-against-isis-653564

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/us/politics/trump-drone-strikes-commando-raids-rules.html

As the Amnesty International spokesman points out in the NYT piece, the Obama
Administration’s constraints fell far short of what is needed.

On the home front, Trump is rescinding the Obama-era limits imposed on Pentagon handouts to cops:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/politics/trump-police-military-surplus-equipment.html

‘Police departments will now have access to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, including grenade launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Monday, describing it as “lifesaving gear.”’

All of the foregoing actions could have been predicted during the campaign.

It is quite true that the U.S. has interfered in the elections of other nations, with disastrous consequences for many of those nations. Why this should tie hands now is not clear to me. Highly unlikely the Russians were engaged in righteous retribution for Mossadegh. I suspect some would be taking a less dismissive tone had, say, the Chinese interfered on behalf of Clinton the bloodthirsty.

Suzanne @178

Trump has lifted the Obama Administration’s restraints on the military [in certain important respects], resulting in a rapid rise in civilian casualties

Yes. Glad someone made this point.

I didn’t go back to see who first mentioned Clinton, but the point made by at least a few of us is that Clinton is only important at this point as a representative of a broad segment of the Beltway crowd that is constantly pushing for more military intervention, either directly or by proxy, and that some of the opposition to Trump doesn’t come from antiwar types, but from people who don’t trust him to warmonger in a competent way.

If people want a sane non- militaristic foreign policy it’s going to take more than just opposition to Trump. You are also going to have to oppose some of Trump’s opponents in both parties. The one time Trump received positive feedback and praise from many in the Beltway was when he bombed Syria.

– and there might be an excuse for this Mario-dude? – as he lives in Germany –
Right?
Probably even Berlin? –
– and there are still a lot of these old 68ger types there – who used to protest against some ”evil Americans” and then would have loved to move – or they actually moved to California – and joined some Hippie Colony – and after that didn’t work out as well as they thought they had to move back to Berlin -(or anyway else in Germany) now sitting around tables and telling everybody their ”Kriegserlebnisse” –
and for sure I’m just joking -(again!) – as these old German-(American?) dudes still dream about ”teh revolution” and write hilarious stuff like ”Satan streak” – and then have the nerve (too) to excuse – kind off – the worst F… Moron by seriously? stating ”he has less blood on his Hands” than… who…?

Dagobert Duck??!

Lee A. Arnold @ 166

If XYZ does not exist, it doesn’t exist. If it does exist, it exists. I agree that in our present state of political disorganization among the broad mass, most people do not know much about constitutes a political issue. And, they don’t know what they want politically.

nastywoman @ 175

“Such… ”thinking” is as ”Alien” as blaming the kid who was mauled by a Pit Bull the other day – ”because so little stood in the Pit Bulls way and so little did ”compel him”.

“What type of… person – what type of people can think like that?!”

The kind of person who thinks dogs should be kept on a leash. The type of person who can think like that is highly intelligent, suave and debonair.

bruce wilder: “Now, we live in the shadow of Clinton’s defects: her defects gave us Trump.”

This is rather brilliant, meaning in effect that anything a President Clinton would have done is Clinton’s fault, and that anything a President Trump does is ALSO Clinton’s fault. Bravo!

Orange Watch: “Based on this and your prior comment, you’re asking for counterfactuals, because of course Clinton-the-non-President is not capable of being even as bad as let alone worse than Trump-the-President.”

This is lazy or evasive. You had expectations of both before the election, as you’ve said. You can recall your expectations of Trump and compare them with the actual Trump to judge that the actual one is worse, as you’ve said. Why can’t you recall your expectations of Clinton and compare them with the actual Trump?

Donald Johnson: “The evidence that Morell was one of Clinton’s advisors was in the link I provided…”

Nothing in that link says Morell was ever employed by either Clinton or the Clinton campaign. Though it calls him an advisor, it says he actually works for a Podesta think tank, and that he is one of many people Clinton ‘consulted’ with. If you’ve had a meeting with anyone from the campaign, you can call yourself an advisor to the campaign.

Donald Johnson: “…this is the third time your response is frustratingly beside the point…”

WTF is wrong with you? The point, my point, the only one I was trying to make, is that comments like this one, by novakant:

“The scary thing is that Clinton would have acted very similarly towards Iran and NK, in fact all the evidence suggests she might have been even more bellicose.”

…are absolute nonsense, and can only be uttered by people who ignore her entire record. This is not even intended as a defense of her record, just an appeal to incorporate reality into one’s rhetoric. Now that I’ve agreed with you that Clinton is a hawk, and now that we’re in wild agreement that regardless of that Trump is worse, can we move on?

Donald Johnson: “I didn’t go back to see who first mentioned Clinton.”

Yes, that’s damned obvious, isn’t it?

Jerry 158: The observation that there is a great deal of continuity between Trump and the GOP mainstream is hardly a revolutionary breakthrough in political science. Somebody as centrist as Paul Krugman (sometimes maligned as a neoliberal traitor in these quarters) has pointed out many times that Trump’s economic policy priorities (see my 156) are a continuation of longstanding GOP desires. The disagreement seems to be whether it’s possible to hold two thoughts in one’s mind simultaneously – that Trump represents both continuity with and a dramatic worsening of the reactionary tendencies in place.

Once again I have to ask whether some people here have ever heard of this thing called history? Would you not agree that there was a great deal of continuity between Hitler and his predecessors? Antisemtisim, militarism and revanchism didn’t appear out of the blue in 1930s Germany. Anybody with minimum awareness of history knows this. And anybody with minimum awareness of history also knows that many contemporary observers (including the communists) understimated the threat of fascism because they saw it as just more of the same.

Let me propose a Godwin law corollary: Whenever an argument is made why Trump isn’t as dangerous as his critics claim (and that is explicitly the argument that CR and others here have made), and a similar argument could have been made about Hitler, then that argument is fallacious.

The only political theory Trump ever needed was an update to the old LBJ anecdote.

Trump (tweeting): I fucked a pig

Aide: Is that true?

Trump: maybe, maybe not. I just want that bitch to spend time accusing me of it.

Why are people still talking about Clinton? In general, because Clinton won’t shut up. She’s as hungry for a microphone and the spotlight as the conservative in question. Which is ironic considering that her aversion to the press and the public as a candidate helped cost her the election. Now, she can’t stop talking. Bannon would willingly bankroll the book tour and undoubtedly wants her to remain in the spotlight through 2018. Indeed, Bannon is banking on making Hillary a key part of Trump’s re-election in 2020, as role she looks all too eager to fill. Chew on that as you gaze into the future.

Why are people talking about Hillary here, on a thread about Trump and conservatism? Because a plausible argument can be made that Hillary is more of conservative than Trump, at least in terms of neo-conservative politics. She has, after all, two neo-con wars under her belt already and enjoys good relations with all the really wrong people. Her avarice and willingness to tell tales are at least comparable to Trump’s. But perhaps the best reason Hillary belongs here is because many believe that had a less conservative Democrat than Hillary run (Bernie, for example), Dems would have won and Donald Trump would be yesterday’s news.

To get a sense of what the Democratic future looks like, here’s a very recent interview with Hillary which I think is illustrative of the level of disconnect between supporters (like me) who felt strongly enough about her candidacy in 2008 to endure accusations of racism from Obama supporters, yet turned from her to Trump by 2015, and those who still support her for reasons that make a great deal of sense (to them).

The interview with Hillary about Hillary runs 45 minutes on Australian TV with a transcript. Take away – Trump figures bigly and in the most unflattering terms, so much for graciousness in defeat. The Access Hollywood tape is discussed in great detail, as is Comey, and the Russians. The words Wall St; Goldman Sachs, Libya, and Syria are never mentioned. In Hillary-world Michigan, Wisconsin, and Bernie Sanders merit a mention each and only in a very specific context. We get David Duke, the Klu Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists; pizzas – and pure deflection when the discussion turns to Bill, Chelsea, gifts; and cash. In short, she hasn’t much of a good word to say about anyone.

Here’s a sampling for the still faithful.

“…Russians actually paid in rubles for running ads in ah Facebook and on Twitter making all kinds of accusations against me, working to suppress voters which is a really important part of the equation…” (suppress voters, or decrease turnout? The latter fits better, imho.)

Interviewer: “Is it, is it the case that you missed the fundamentally angry sentiment in the US last year against globalisation?

HILLARY CLINTON: I didn’t miss it…”

Interviewer: “Was it in some ways your links to big money politics that made it difficult for you to be the representative of that anger ?

HILLARY CLINTON: No, not at all! … You know, when I was in the primary, Bernie Sanders couldn’t explain his programs. I was the one who was saying here’s what we’re going to do to the banks…”

One mere mention of Wisconsin: “we know is that the false information was aimed at Wisconsin and Michigan and parts of Pennsylvania…”

And folks wonder how she lost.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/hillary-clinton:-the-interview/9055256

@194
We need you more and more with such valuable information:

”Bannon would willingly bankroll the book tour and undoubtedly wants her to remain in the spotlight through 2018.” Indeed, Bannon is banking on making Hillary a key part of Trump’s re-election in 2020, as role she looks all too eager to fill.”

Really?

A friend of mine -(also ”a proud ”Leninist”) – tried to get in contact with Mr. Bannon in order to help him to overthrow the US government but somehow Bannon wouldn’t take his call – and this friend of ours was very disappointed – but as you are… might I say ”on the inside of the revolution” could you help me to help this friend of ours – as he has this De Tomaso Mangusta from 1969 and he probably would let me drive ”the beast” if I would do him the favor that he can have -just a short chat with a fellow ”Leninist”?
-(you might know how much these dudes have the hots for each other)

And then you could come with me on the joyride – and doing it on a German Autobahn – going ”Voll Stoff”- I can promise – you would completely forget all about this Clinton person…