Trump and tribalism

It isn’t clear what is so difficult to understand. You have the framework in some sense right. People who have been convincingly disrespected over the past 10 years or so are very unhappy; people who have insulated themselves from disrespect, either by some sort of membership in the intellectual class or by the purchase of respect, are much less so. Trump alone seems willing and able to shrug off the sneers, mockery, outrage, and accusations of the disrespectful to stand with the disrespected. The disrespectful and abusive have no way to actively disrupt Trump’s support except through additional scorn, creating a feedback loop that strengthens the support. They certainly can’t turn around and suddenly offer authentic respect… Hillary just looks silly apologizing to coal miners for trumpeting how she will destroy them to a man, for example.

the split is between pro-establishment and anti-establishment

Yes that’s how I used to see things when I was 15 years old too

Several points. I see no evidence anywhere suggesting those clustering around Trump are any less or more tribal than those clustering around other political figures in any country. If this year has taught us anything it’s that voters are behaving in ways that frighten and surprise establishment elites in government, media, and international business.

The people who appear to know least about Republican voters are self-appointed high priests of conservatism, better understood as grifters, who pump out quackery to justify shaking down the rubes and exploiting the weak.

Wall St., Big-Pharma, and international sweat-shop owners, such as Apple do what they always do – pay to play and, as such, have already poured 50 million into the coffers of the Clintons, betting sensibly that the fix was in. Others just as happily funneled millions to Bush and the other non-Trump candidates. Both Sanders and Trump have the elites running scared.

It’s far too early to write Sanders off. I’ve seen a number of Sanders is better against Trump pieces recently and there’s always the outside chance that in a contested convention a clown like Biden might show up to ‘unify’ a party that’s far more deeply fractured than the Republicans. In short: anything might happen. It will absolutely be a change election – but how that change materializes, if real change occurs are very clearly still unknowns.

I’d prefer Sanders, but can live with Trump. No HRC under any circumstances no matter what, at this point. Had Cruz won the Republican nomination, she’d be the better choice.

But anyone who manages to alienate Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, the ne0-cons, the Bushes, and the NRO must be doing something right.

It’s far too early to write Sanders

The lack of serious interest in Sanders on this blog (posters and most commenters included) and has been thoroughly depressing.

Bruce is right that this is probably the end of something: the Republican coalition and the left as we’ve known it (whatever that is). The Democratic coalition ended a couple-few decades ago and we haven’t got a replacement yet.

Neoliberalism doesn’t exist except on the editorial pages of national publications and in academic departments. Democratic politicians appear neoliberal because they care more about those places and their ideas and make some effort not to be embarrassed by not knowing about it. Republican pundits claim “seriousness” as a “conservative” value and try to persuade themselves and their donors that they care about ideas, but they would be crushed if they ventured too far from the keyboard among those who are supposedly “their kind”. Everyone thinks, simultaneously, that the Democrats have enjoyed hegemony since WWII, and that you need to be a Republican not to be a silly revolutionary. And somehow there’s a magic set of levers and gears that will compel the existing parties to generate correct utilitarian policies.

I have come to think that this may be an unusually anti-establishment election cycle.
If the Democratic Party’s primary season had been as fractured as the Republican Party’s, we would be seeing a Sanders vs. Trump general election. The Republican establishment was divided among several contenders. Cruz and Trump were running as insurgents, but Cruz could only go so far, because he knew he would need the establisment to have a chance to win the general election. Trump felt he had no such restraint. By the time that
Cruz was the last non-Trump standing, it was too late for the establishment to pull him
through. Now they are forced to fall behind Trump or face the almost certainty of HRC.
If there had not been a dominant establishment Democrat (HRC) and instead there were several semi viable contenders, Sanders would have likely built a big lead going into the convention. The Democratic establishment has a fail-safe in the superdelegates, but if Sanders had a large enough plurality, they made have felt the need to fall in behind him to prevent a Trumpidency.
@Biance Steele #9. What do you call what we have if not neo-liberalism?

jake,

I was going to add something about “what we have”–I was talking, though, about what people believe, which I think is what JQ was talking about. I don’t think many people who have to live with “neoliberalism (as what we have)” believe “neoliberalism (as a more or less consistent set of beliefs).” Maybe, at most, bits and pieces of parts of it, and not other parts.

We have something that could be called neoliberalism (or a lot of other things), sure. I don’t know why that matters.

Let’s not forget how much of Trump’s craziness is just normal Republican politics. Cruz and the rest already brought the US to the brink of default. Trump’s threat to restructure debt through a kind of bankruptcy is just Republican politics at this point. They were already upsetting the normal flow of neoliberalism. He may have created the birther movement but the Republicans ran with it to make the President illegitimate so that they did not have to compromise with him, making him an ineffective president. The noncooperation on the budge and Court appointments was all justified by not treating the President as legitimate, i.e. as if he were a Muslim socialist interloper. Trump is just a normal Republican in this way.

me @ 15

Obviously Marx helps you out there a little bit, but unfortunately it’s the part of Marx (where some of the people are on the right but some, namely those closest to bad capitalism, are on the left) that no one but left-liberal me seems interested in, for some reason. Instead the popular part seems to be the part that says everything associated with capitalism, and everything capitalism introduced, except machinery and efficiency-thinking, is bad, and the people (being conservative and numerous) can take over the machinery and the computers and run them on conservative principles and everything will be happy and nice.

We’ll have a much better idea about the shape of the race when the parallel consolidation on the Democratic side has occurred. I think that prospects for Trump are poor, with rich backers refusing to write him checks; he actually doesn’t appear to either have the money or the inclination to truly self-fund.

Why aren’t politicians refusing to back a catastrophic candidate? The basic problem is that Republican voters prefer Trump and they have a well-documented record of ditching politicians in primaries when they cross the primary voters.

I actually hope that Trump is crushed and drags the party down, in large part because it will make the utterly untenable nature of the current situation clear. My biggest fear is that Clinton is a sufficiently poor candidate that she may not be able to capitalize on what should be a huge opportunity.

RNB,

I assume JQ means “soft neoliberal” to mean something like “willing to consider Keynesian demand policies, not an austerity politician.” The force of “neoliberal” is, economically speaking, “not committed to a Tobin tax,” “not committed to destroying the power of the financial industry,” etc. (Though if a Tobin tax were widely enough accepted by mainstream economists, a soft neoliberal would probably consider it, and then would be attacked from the left again, quite reasonably, after the tax had passed.)

“Neoliberal” also seems to be a measure of her personality. She gets along with people who make high salaries. She isn’t someone who’s always questioning the status quo. She puts pragmatics ahead of “values” an awful lot of the time.

Where Trump seems to be an old-fashioned strongman who moves people (or, actually, claims to move people) by the strength of his will and self-assurance. He can’t justify what he says in a way that’s consistent with neoliberalism (as an idea). But he seems to thrive in the world as it is, and he moves in that same economic atmosphere of rich, generally successful Americans–and, although maybe he’s not as “inside” in as many ways as he claims, he is “inside” that world in a way the Clintons never were and never will be.

Whereas Sanders and Stein (I think) live in the country and only do activities that can be justified morally. So they’re obviously opposed to “the status quo,” living in the (neoliberal) world only uncomfortably, in a way establishment candidates can’t claim.

The hot weather sure do bring out the skeeters.

Why would a Trump presidency be a disaster for neoliberals? Maybe he isn’t a “hard neoliberal”, but I guess he’s at least a soft one. If Republicans like his policies on non-economic issues, it’s not obvious why they should prefer Clinton to Trump.

@NG

Why would a Trump presidency be a disaster for neoliberals?

His positions on continued mass immigration and trade treaties, if implemented, would have a devastating effect on GDP growth and the global financial system would certainly implode and, with it, Western hegemony.

@20: By a poor candidate I mean one in the classical sense, namely that she just isn’t very charismatic. She’s frankly admitted that this is true, by the way. She steps over her own applause lines in speeches, rattles off long dull laundry lists, and comes across as evasive even when she hasn’t done anything wrong (e.g. on the emails). She has trouble connecting with voters in general because of these traits as much as because of her long history of negative attacks from Republicans. She also doesn’t have very strong political instincts, as witnessed by things like the Iraq War vote and her performance in the 2008 primary season. And the tendency to brush all critiques of her off as “because she’s woman” doesn’t convince anyone who is not already in her corner, quite apart from whether or not it’s true.

I’ve always viewed her as being very much in the Democratic party mainstream on economic issues and more liberal on social issues. She would only appear to be conservative relative to people who are quite far to the left in the US political spectrum (which, to be fair, would include most people here). She does appear to be pretty hawkish on foreign policy, unfortunately, and doesn’t appear to have learned much from Iraq except the need to use more soldiers and more force.

I disagree about Hillary’s hawkishness. I think she did learn from Iraq and that she would be extremely reticent to open up a large scale boots-on-the-ground invasion (carefully distinguishing this from what she is likely to inherit from Obama – small scale boots-on-the-ground operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, etc). She would be an interventionist and I would expect her to continue drone strikes in aforementioned countries (and I guess Pakistan now) and if NATO asked the US to participate in toppling a genocidal dictator I think she’d participate. But notably this would be no different from President Obama’s level of hawkishness (the ‘deadly consequences’ of her suggested no fly zone in Syria are imo a bit hysterical) and I suspect not notably different from a theoretical President Sanders foreign policy. If anything, I imagine she has the wherewithal to make unpopular w/ the military choices whereas Sanders seems likely to pull an LBJ and sign off on whatever the generals put in front of him so he could concentrate on domestic. Most importantly, the parts of the left that believe President Trump would be less bellicose & less disastrous in foreign affairs than Hillary are totally psychotic. I would anticipate new wars with President Trump, and pray that he doesn’t decide this is an excellent time to use those nuclear codes and see what we can shake loose.

JQ links to an earlier post as RP helpfully reminds: “the central theme is the inevitability and desirability of a globalised capitalism, dominated by the financial sector. The difference between the two versions turns essentially on whether this requires destruction of the welfare state or merely “reform”, along the lines undertaken by the Clinton Administration.”
But it’s Trump who wants to repeal Dodd-Frank, so he’s the neo-liberal here. And there are people on the left who think that Sanders’ breaking up the banks is actually neo-liberal in form and will do little to solve the problems of shadow banking and derivatives and that Clinton’s regulations will do more to regulate the banks than even Sanders would, much less Trump.
So that leaves globalization. Well everyone is flailing away here. We’re not going back from global supply chains. People can beat up the poorest of immigrants and they thump their chests about currency manipulation. But the tribalists will not reverse global capitalism.
So I think there is an argument that Trump even by this limited definition of neo-liberalism (see David Kotz for an alternative definition) would turn out to be more neo-liberal than Clinton would.

NAFTA is unusual since it has special withdrawal language in it, but in general, this is an untested area of politics in that no one is entirely sure what happens if the President says “Trade Agreement X no longer applies” and Congress says “Oh yes it does” or possibly even “We can’t vote to say that it doesn’t apply because we’ve been blocked procedurally.” No is entirely sure what happens because, as far as I know, this has never happened. If elites actually don’t like it, there’s sure a lot that could happen within normal American political routines.

Presidents have in recent terms been doing more and more by executive order because they can. They can because no one cares to use the levers of power against them. If elites wanted to use these levers, they are still there.

I certainly would not claim that ideology and the public policy dictated by ideology is irrelevant to US politics today. But I think that the dominant force in both US parties is institutional inertia, and that’s how you understand this cycle’s events.

Of course the Rs are consolidating around Trump. After a scare caused by the prospect that this serial discarder of their dog whistles was going to run away with their nomination, the fears of the conventional Rs have been almost completely allayed. The entire reason for being of the R establishment’s office-holder wing and its media wing is the supposed need for dog whistles, that the various fears and hatreds the party uses to win elections need to be expressed to get the base to the polls, but the expression has to be done very artfully, so as not to scare off moderate voters. Not just any amateur can do this, it takes art. Well, that whole pleasant arrangement was threatened by Trump, who just expressed the most extreme racism openly, and then failed to be slapped down by the R electorate.

Having secured the nomination through this disintermediation of the dog-whistlers, Trump’s success at that then posed this dilemma for conventional Rs. Either their entire approach to politics was right, and their candidate, however successful at securing the R nomination with the R electorate, would go down in flames when he played his shtick to the general electorate; or their entire approach to politics was obsolete, and just openly owning all the prejudice and nativism they had long used to win elections was all an R candidate needed. No need for the art of dog-whistling. Thus, no need for conventional R office-holders or media figures.

But now, in precisely the time frame expected, just after securing the nomination, Trump has changed course. The course change is not the traditional move to the ideological center, rather, it’s a shift towards the conventional approach to winning a general election. He’s announced that he will take money from the usual suspect donors. He thereby is basically renouncing his former radical method of being heard by just saying things he means, and accepted conventional messaging, which is the avoidance of saying what you mean. He’s had his people walk back the most radical of his proposals, the wall and the deportation of 11 million, and with an explanation, that’s everything he’s said has been sort of symbolic, that can cover everything he’s ever said. Trump has, at least for now, unless this is just a head fake, reverted to conventional methods of winning the general election, and thereby removed the threat to conventional Rs. Of course they’re falling in line. Ideology has nothing to do with any of it, at least not for the professionals among them.

The Sanders-Clinton divide is similar, but much less stark. Sanders has leaned towards saying radical things, but his entire career as a basically predictable and conventional D politician argues against any worry on the part of professional Ds that he will disintermediate them. They still pretty solidly back Clinton, but Sanders has never really been ahead in the horse race, so there has been much less reason for them to abandon the more conventional Clinton, even if their underlying preference is not nearly so strong as conventional Rs had against the apparently actually radical Trump. It would not have nearly so traumatic for them to switch to Sanders, had the D electorate chosen him instead of the more conventional Clinton.

@Rich Puchalsky

So let’s assume that Trump gets into office. Does he suddenly get dictatorial powers? No.

A president, Trump in this case, has considerable power in blocking, or simply not negotiating, new trade agreements. Since the system is predicated on continued growth and expansion, this alone could break the system. The same goes for the continued strengthening and expansion of NATO. Add to that Brexit, nationalist parties all over Europe, Russia, China, and imponderables such as natural and human disasters and, while Trump may not be The One, he could easily play a decisive part in bringing about the implosion of a system that is already teetering on its own.

@ Dipper

the big risk for the rest of the world (apart from mad person with finger on the button) is disengagement from the rest of the world by an isolationist US president. That will be bad news for the US and everyone else. Once the responsible adult is out of the room, the children will start to fight amongst themselves

Civilized people no longer invoke the white man’s burden (Half devil and half child) to justify empire. Nowadays, we talk about growth, econometrics, confidence in markets, and independent central banks. Other popular dog whistles would be responsibility to protect, humanitarian aid, freedom and democracy. Please keep up with the times!

There are two prospective empires that have already demonstrated a desire to increase their footprint (in the South China Sea and Crimea respectively). Withdrawing from NATO and our Pacific alliances would likely elicit more such behavior unless we have decided that eg Putin is not as ambitious as advertised and has no designs on, say, Ukraine, Georgia, other former Eastern Europe bloc states.

Back to the alleged topic of the OP: The Republican establishment is falling in line behind Trump because that’s what the primary voters want, and they will defeat any candidate in the next primary if they argue otherwise. Cowardice explains a lot of politics, and this relatively simple explanation is easier than elaborate theories of neoliberalism.

Luckily we have options that fall between extreme bellicosity and isolationism. Anyway the most important question that your snark slides is whether it’s better to invite those aggressions and then try to figure out how to deal with them or keep the current mostly successful structures in place and cut down on those events from the get-go. Or just wish Poland good luck and get busy building walls on our borders.

Luckily we have options that fall between extreme bellicosity and isolationism.

The imperial “we”, it never fails.

there is also the supreme court. I am sure that works the same way for repubs as dems. “just support the nominee or else”

Scenario A: President Trump. We withdraw from NATO. Putin gets hot for Georgia and invades. Republicans go insane, generals tell Trump we mean business, Trump doesn’t need to be convinced and calls for a nuclear strike on South Ossetia to scare Putin off.

Scenario B: President Clinton. We do not withdraw from NATO. Putin continues his more slow-moving annexation, Democratic party does not call for an outrageous response, and we end up with what we pretty much have now with slow Putin encroachment and no hot war.

To look at these and say, well actually the US is an Empire and the Iraq War was evil therefore fuck the Democrats vote Trump for nukes is some kind of accelerationism but more the kind that leads to a cockroach society than communism.

The iniquities of the US under GWB (or even Obama) do not tell us anything about a world where countries learn the wrong lesson from the Budapest Memorandum.

The lesson is that the US has lost its mojo and a multi-polar world is on its way.

vote Trump for nukes

Dios mío…

What’s unreasonable in imagining the Republicans going insane if Putin invades Georgia and a totally overwhelmed Trump threatening nuclear retaliation to win the favor of his rattled Party? The only question here is just how crazy enough people have had to be to put Trump this close to the American Presidency.

I think that it may be time for a new New Deal. That’s a New Square(d) Deal.

Why? Because the accelerating rates of both 1. material innovation and 2. ownership inequality are likely to continue, due to the application of proprietary infotech to production and distribution (e.g. automated assembly and artificial intelligence).

The infotech era brings two new questions:

a.) Where can labor move next, to be useful, and to get ahead in the marketplace? Roughly 200 years ago, agriculture gave way to cities & factories, in ways both geographic and occupational. The current hope is that people might move again, from factory industrialization into careers that are more purely intellectual, yet still economically productive.

But infotech itself rather defeats that. Infotech (particularly AI) promises to obviate most of the human input into the ratiocinative processes of production and distribution — within ANY economic sector — right after a creative idea for a marketable good or service has arisen. Combined with material automation, it solves many more problems automatically. “Ratiocinative” as opposed to purely “creative”. In other words, once any person has a creative idea, the getting-to-market will be increasingly easy.

So, can 7 billion people each have a creative idea that all the others want? The standard economics’ response to this is that they will still find work opportunities, creatively, at the many links in the long chains of production and distribution. But, wait — infotech eliminates these opportunities, too. Even medicine and healthcare now promise to find awesome cures, and to become far less labor-intensive in the near future.

b.) The other question arising from infotech is also important. Some of the recent “productivity-increase” of infotech appears to be in Social Media, outside of economic production and distribution. This brings in a fundamental psychological question about our reasons for living. Our work efforts — beyond food, clothing, shelter, child-rearing, security, etc. — have always been to increase social intercourse. Now, we are replete with the means. Indeed our cognitive budgets are finally fully saturated.

Thus, infotech is accomplishing two things at once: removing the POSSIBILITIES for mass participation in the economic process, and simultaneously, reducing the NEEDS to participate in the economic process — by reducing the need to make the money to find the time to be social animals.

Therefore, the needs of all people, and the wants of all but a tiny percentage of people, will be satisfiable with ever-reducing labor input.

Then the question arises, why do new policy proposals still impose the false psychology of scarcity, via the artificial scarcity of money?

The answers appear to be at least two:
i.) We are afraid that people will be “lazy”.
ii.) There are a few significant scarcities remaining, notably desirable real estate — and a small percentage of the population retains the Trumpian psychology of lust for those scarcities, and vanity to prance upon a stage for ego status.

I think the way out of this is to take a middle path that is comprehensive and comprehensible.

Provide the necessities of life: guaranteed income, universal healthcare, free schooling, retirement security, etc. Without individual debt financing. Do NOT do much more than this; avoid enablement of “laziness”.

Indeed, we should look particularly to New-Dealish programs within which individuals can find local excellence: arts, sports, parks, music, festivals, etc.

Whether this is to be accomplished by upper-incomes taxation or by money-printing, may be a less important question. Insofar as all countries in the world are going to force themselves into these arrangements, the deciding factor may be avoiding arbitrage of interest rates.

Then, see where our social psychology goes.

I think that if we don’t do something like this, then imposing the psychology of artificial scarcity will become the same sort of “social engineering” which the capitalists decried of the communists.

Your analytical framework cannot explain empirical reality so you are at a loss. But the problem is the whole “neoliberal” line of analysis is ridiculous nonsense. The most obvious problem is that the motor of the Republican party is RACISM and it has been since Nixon’s Southern strategy. Once you admit that, Trump’s effectiveness is explained as a powerful showman dropping the clumsy euphemisms of the old respectable Republicans and going for the visceral pleasures of raw racism and authority.

The left’s sad effort to explain Trump success in terms of trade theories is tragic. Hillary Clinton supports action to stop global warming, civil rights, reducing economic inequality, rights for women, and not torturing people, but she’s unacceptable to the “left” which clings to its simplistic neoliberalism line and will probably keep clinging to it while Blackwater starts disappearing people if they are successful in tripping up the hated Democrats.

@ Lupita – 43.

Many apologies. I was thinking for a moment that Richard Overy’s Origins of the Second World War ,which basically says Germany embarked on its wars because it thought an isolationist USA would not intervene, might still have some relevance to the modern day. Thank you for pointing out to me that the world moves to new rules and the old ones are redundant.

#67

Parts of the Manifesto read like a Tom Friedman article.

Parts of the Manifesto read like a Tom Friedman article.

Never heard it put quite that way before, but yes…

Read Schumpeter on the Communist Manifesto. It’s in his collected essays. Schumpeter rightly says that no bourgeois apologist wrote as great a paean to capitalism as Marx did. Not John Stuart Mill, not Jevons, no one.

Ah Marx’s Tribune writings on India which according to Heinz Lubasz may have been a veiled critique of Carey. But Marx’ s views on India go through an evolution so that by the end he understands the whole imperial system as a bleeding with a vengeance. Now on to that dubious theory the Asiatic mode production, the cul-de-sac into which Asia putatively got itself caught after having made the first historical steps out tribal-hunter society.

Lupita 41: “blocking, or simply not negotiating, new trade agreements” is not going to break the economic system. But thanks for making the argument of the neoliberals.

I also would like to know on what account Trump could be seen as a danger to neoliberalism. Yes, he employs anti-trade rhetoric (which, as we are reminded, Obama did also in 2008 albeit in much more measured language), but what else in his “platform” is a danger to neoliberalism? I don’t know whether it’s necessarily wrong but I would like an argument rather than a load of unsubstantiated claims.

@TM

“blocking, or simply not negotiating, new trade agreements” is not going to break the economic system. But thanks for making the argument of the neoliberals.

Of course blocking a new trade agreement will not bring the whole system down, I said that something like this in the context of everything else that is happening, ie, a possible Brexit, nationalist parties coming to power in Europe, the Greek crisis, growing debt in the West, growing inequality in the world, the infotech revolution Lee A. Arnold @64 wrote about, climate change, demographic transition, opposition from Russia, China, and most of the world, plus imponderables, may be one more factor in bringing down a global system that is already showing clear signs of decomposition.

Placeholder #65, Yes, it is not likely that Clinton can pick up all of Sanders’ voters. But it will likely be a small number of holdouts.

West Virginia appears to be an outlier in the huge percentage of primary voters for Sanders who intend to vote for Trump in the general. I haven’t read much evidence of this beyond WV, where a majority of the Dems just do not like Obama, in particular because coal policy is going against them.

Nationwide, however,aren’t most of the Democrats who remain discontented with Clinton, concerned more about her policies and her “trustworthiness” (this latter concern being largely the result of two decades of Fox News falsely maligning her), than about she being an insider? (I think that “incumbent” is the wrong word, here.) These appear to be the main reasons given in the exit polls, for example.

I guess the question is really, What proportion of the 33% of Sanders voters (outside of WV) who don’t want Clinton now, will turn to accept Sanders’ coming endorsement of her?

@ JOHN QUIGGIN

> Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council background is that of the stereotypical soft neoliberal.

Except Clinton has been outright condemning many of the neo-liberal things that her husband did. Now, you can claim that she’ll tack back that direction once in office, but she’s not running as the triangulator her husband was.

@RNB

>But Wall Street may like Trump’s pledge to repeal Dodd-Frank.

Only if they trust him.

>A lot of business is domestic and may like his promise to end socialized medicine.

why on earth would they care?

@MILX

>I disagree about Hillary’s hawkishness.

there’s not a single conflict of the last 25 years she didn’t support. She even rattled sabers over Georgia along with John McCain.

>I think she did learn from Iraq and that she would be extremely reticent to open up a large scale boots-on-the-ground invasion (carefully distinguishing this from what she is likely to inherit from Obama – small scale boots-on-the-ground operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, etc).

Because the lack of boots on the ground has been such a success in those places? Her reluctance is precisely the problem with her foreign policy instincts. If you’re going to fight a war, you don’t want to half-ass it. Clinton is quick to get the US involved in situations, but is incredibly stingy with about hte means she wants to provide to accomplish US objectives. And that works fine, as long as everything goes according to plan. When things don’t go according to plan, it results in either disaster(libya), creeping incrementalism (Syria), or embarrassing failure (Somalia). And the world being what it is, things don’t go according to plan more often than not. Worse, the more important the objective in question is to the enemy, the more likely they are to either figure out this minimalism and respond accordingly (something I think putin did in crimea) or simply call our bet and raise the stakes.

On a less philosophical level, one of the biggest hurdles the US Government faces is the limits on the time and attention of senior leadership. For good or ill, the US has global responsibilities and commitments, and there are only 24 hours a day. On virtually every issue the US is involved in, the local leadership will care more, have more time, and devote more effort to the problem than US leadership will. To take syria as an example, the leaders of the Turks, iraqis, iranians, etc. know more about the issue than the US president will, spend more time on it than he will, and care more about it. Aggressive minimalism makes this problem worse. It multiplies american commitments and increases the size of those commitments in a way that minimizes the time and attention leadership will devote to them.

There’s no better example of how this happens than Libya. Hillary’s summation of “we came, we saw, he died” perfectly sums up her attitude towards the effort. A bombing campaign that the US didn’t even officially lead (unofficially, of course, we were indispensable) removed gaddafi, prevented a massacre, and put a bunch of “freedom loving” rebels in charge of the country. The sole casualty was a british airman slain not by libyan air defenses but italian traffic. We celebrated victory, and assumed that libya was solved forever. Of course it wasn’t, and I won’t take the time here to elucidate how things have continually gotten worse. I will simply point out that the low level of american investment meant that this decline has been continually ignored.

US policy should be based around a strategy of overcommitment. We should carefully choose where we decide to invest time and attention. When we do commit (or, 9 time out of 10, where we decide to increase our commitment) we should commit much more effort than strictly necessary, for a couple reasons. First, it increases the odds of success. There is a story told of planning the invasion of grenada that might not be true but illustrates the point well. At the end of the planning brief, Reagan says “everything looks good, just send twice as many troops.” When asked why he said “because if you’d sent 12 helicopters instead of 6, Jimmy Carter would still be president.” the US’ greatest advantage over all rivals is its massively greater resources. We should take advantage of this as much as possible. Second, and this is perhaps more important, overcommitment so forces a highly distractible political system to pay more attention to the issue in question. Churchill once quipped that all he needed to ensure the defense of europe was “one american soldier, preferably dead.”

I am trying to figure out why if Sanders is the sole leftist opponent of neoliberalism in the US election Clinton is the one to have invited a labor organizer Paul Booth to write the Democratic Party platform. From what I am seeing in the Washington Post article Sanders did not use his power to invite a labor activist.

Clinton is to the left of Sanders except in terms of yelling.

Sperber persuasively shows the influence of Wilhelm Schulz on the development of Marx’s critique of political economy. Not the place here to get into a discussion of Sperber’s attempt to read Marx as a nineteenth century thinking about problems that the nineteenth century was already leaving behind; plus we could talk about Sperber’s dismissiveness towards Marx’s theory of value and crisis theory in the form of a falling rate of profit.

The one who means it seriously that Marx really should be read as an apologist for global capitalism, it advancing the global productive forces and all, is Meghnad Desai, The Revenge of Marx. The book does have a lot of thought-provoking material about the mess that Marx left his crisis theory is, the battles in the Second International, the meaning of Hayekian economics and the troubles of the Keynesian project (and here he sounds like an ordinary right-winger).

Umm have I been blocked from the entire site as a consequence of Bordeaugate? If this wasn’t intentional, could somebody please remove the block?

Of course Marx was an apologist for capitalism.

Yes indeed! Eg.:

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.

Kevin Drum and Paul Krugman did not seem very surprised by these findings reported in the NYT. I think root-e here too would not be surprised, but I was.

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels write today that Sanders supporters don’t actually support his left social democratic politics:

“In a survey conducted for the American National Election Studies in late January, supporters of Mr. Sanders…were less likely than Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to favor concrete policies that Mr. Sanders has offered…including a higher minimum wage, increasing government spending on health care and an expansion of government services financed by higher taxes.

….Mr. Sanders has drawn enthusiastic support from young people, a common pattern for outsider candidates. But here, too…the generational difference in ideology seems not to have translated into more liberal positions on concrete policy issues — even on the specific issues championed by Mr. Sanders. For example, young Democrats were less likely than older Democrats to support increased government funding of health care, substantially less likely to favor a higher minimum wage and less likely to support expanding government services. Their distinctive liberalism is mostly a matter of adopting campaign labels, not policy preferences.”

@101 (RNB) wrote “Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels write today that Sanders supporters don’t actually support his left social democratic politics.”

Interestingly, while the rest of their column is thoroughly linked they provide no sources to support the claims made in the paragraphs you quoted. (I spot-checked some of the results at their “Exit Polls” link and found nothing re specific policy preferences of respondents.) Perhaps the lack of references was just sloppiness on their part and not an attempt to pass off misleading statements but it sure strikes me as odd.

Anarcissie @ 104: Their statements may well be true. What bugs me is that they’re implying their conclusion are data-based when they present no evidence that they are. Gut feeling about what’s true can be accurate but it’s not appropriate to present gut feelings as data-based conclusions. Again, perhaps they have the data and just declined to share the source. That happens, but the combination of their vague language and lack of references for key point leaves me with the feeling they’re trying to pick my pocket.

It’s also interesting how HRC’s association with Goldwater, DLC, crime bill, and Iraq War (not to mention Flag Burning etc) are so prominent in some people’s minds while e.g. her volunteering for MocGovern, long long time work with CDF, CHIP, women’s rights, child mortality, etc. work is apparently as invisible as most of the Obama Administration’s record to the left.

Lupita @83

It is quite incorrect to say that global inequality is rising as that has actually been falling. Paradoxically in country inequality has mostly risen at the same time.

The explanation is that poor people in poor countries have gained faster than rich people in rich countries. Rich people in poor countries have gained even more but are still a lot poorer than poor people in rich countries.

@108 Thanks Nick.

‘pissed off with the government’, which, translated from Prole, amounts to the same thing as being “deeply offended by plutocracy

No it doesn’t, that’s nuts (leaving aside how patronising it is)

That is, since there are probably more Sanders supporters who are independents and don’t lean Democratic and may well not be more liberal on policy, you may have skewed the results by restricting Sanders supporters to only those who also lean Democrat. I would not be so quick to call bullshit out on them.

@46 Using updated words does make it sound better. But in the end, people will use whatever words work to get what they want.

#113

Nope. Hating immigrants and black people is not the same as being deeply offended by plutocracy. People supporting a billionaire who is openly racist and advocates cutting taxes on the rich are not offended by plutocracy, no matter how weak their vocabulary.
This is obvious. The mystery is why US leftists cling so bitterly to their illusions about the populist groundswell that doesn’t exist.

RNB @ 115: “@108 do the results change if you don’t specify for “leaning Democrat” and just specify support for Sanders or Clinton?”

If we include everybody else as well, which is Republican “supporters” of Clinton and Sanders + people who answered “Neither” to which party they lean towards, it comes out as:

Clinton – minwage: 1.31, healthcare: 2.44
Sanders – minwage: 1.34, healthcare: 2.56

Which is a marginal difference at best. Two things to note however:

1) I requoted at the end of @108 so we’re clear on what Achen and Bartels stated in their article:

“More detailed evidence casts further doubt on the notion that support for Mr. Sanders reflects a shift to the left in the policy preferences of Democrats […]”

Earlier, they also stated: “Thus many analysts have argued that Mr. Sanders’s surprising support signals a momentous shift to the left among Democrats. But wishing does not make it so.”

2) In any case, the results still show “Sanders supporters” across the board favor a raise to the minimum wage, and an increase in government spending on health.

So they are wrong in any case.

RNB: “Nope, Nick. The article was about the nature of Sanders’ supporters, and they are not more progressive than Clinton’s!”

Nope. The claims I’ve addressed above referred very specifically to the “policy preferences of Democrats”.

The results show the opposite of what the authors claim.

As to the broader premise of the article: “Do Sanders Supporters Favor His Policies?”

The answer is a resounding yes.

RNB 05.25.16 at 2:42 am @ 125 —
I think what Sanders fans are probably looking at are not policy proposals, which are cheap and easily discarded, but connections. Clinton is: Goldman Sachs, the Democratic Party machine, the house warmongers. Perhaps the configuration of the Medical Industry (especially its insurance system) and its enormous handle do not completely escape their notice. If Sanders says ‘Single Payer’ he’ll seriously try to make it happen (they think) however quixotic the effort. If Clinton says ‘Single Payer’ it will somehow not happen, another abominable Lieberman will conveniently step out of the wings, and the great leader will be distracted elsewhere, etc. You might call this kind of thinking a form of tribalism, a consciousness about kinship and loyalty — so I am not completely OT here.

Well thanks for clarifying the survey questions, and I think you are right that Sanders’ “progressive scores” may have been brought down by those who said they preferred him to Clinton but would not actually become a supporter.

Still the independents and cross-over voters which has been crucial to his success are coming from this group that does not lean Democratic and they are most probably far to his right in terms of policy, and are not attracted to his campaign due to his having the more progressive policy proposals than Clinton is proposing.

They seem to be typically disgruntled white males who are far from the left on crucial policy questions.

So overall this survey gives us reason to believe that the Sanders campaign does not seem to represent overall an active social democratic insurgency to the left of Clinton’s supporters, though there are doubtless those who support Sanders out of a commitment to an activist social democracy beyond the traditional Democratic Party. It’s just not what only or even mostly attracts people to the Sanders campaign.

For example, there could be those who are not Democratic leaning and are not particularly progressive in terms of policy preferences that vote for Sanders just due to the trade issue; or as Anarcisse suggests simply because they don’t like special interest money even though they are not particularly progressive in terms of policy. For example, they could simply not wanted to have the banks bailed out (a really irresponsible vote by Sanders in my opinion) but don’t support higher wages or socialized medicine.

The Bernie Bros phenomenon is largely understood to be a white male thing, so it already includes a racial component. Now these survey results suggest that it may just be a white thing. But did you really get white women leaning Democratic favoring Sanders over Clinton by that margin? I doubt that that’s right.

At any rate, do note that I did not explain support for Sanders in terms of racism or sexism but in terms of the issues I mentioned @130 which is perfectly compatible with these Sanders supporters not being particularly or relatively progressive on a whole host of so-called social democratic issues.

Marx had some interesting ideas about the development of societies up to early capitalism, where he could look at concrete examples of the systems he was discussing. What he didn’t have was any basis for his utopian speculation about a post capitalist system.

It turned out that the industrial working class in the UK at the time was an exceptional peak, technology made manufacturing much less labour intensive and services became overwhelmingly the main employer in rich countries. So as his speculation was based on a large revolutionary industrial working class it just didn’t correspond with the way economies developed.

Capitalism combined with democracy proved pretty good at incorporating people into the system and providing scope for making any change that has sufficient support.

It isn’t perfect, nothing is it is however better than any of the other economic systems we have tried.

RNB 05.25.16 at 3:55 am@ 128:
‘So overall this survey gives us reason to believe that the Sanders campaign does not seem to represent overall an active social democratic insurgency to the left of Clinton’s supporters…’

However, according to what I read and personally observe, most people do not vote on the basis of reasoned analysis of candidates’ policy proposals, characters, or records, nor are they easy to fully characterize across a spectrum-like space of Right versus Left. More important influences on voting are tribalism-identity-kinship (whether the candidate is like them or favors people like them), tradition, habit, immediate material self-interest and perceptions of mutual obligation likely to satisfy those interests, attractiveness of image, and the like. Some of these influences and attachments are likely to be in conflict with others, and having to choose between them can break the voter loose to consider what was formerly unthinkable. In 2008, enough people were broken loose from ‘the President must be an old White man’ to elect Obama, a sort of revolutionary act even if the person elected was in reality cautious, conservative, and well-connected with the established order. Some residue of that energy resulted in a lot of people voting for a ‘socialist’ this year. I don’t think that energy is just going to disappear — but it is not necessarily a leftist energy. If it is blocked in one place — say, some area of politics we fancifully call ‘the Left’ — I think it will flow elsewhere.

In which case one might not want to fling around terms like ‘fascist’ too freely just yet. We may be need them for their original meaning.

#137 is a good comment

137 & 140: I’m not entirely clear on how we’re defining “well-connected” in this context, but Obama was certainly well-connected enough to enlist a number of high-profile Democratic bundlers in his cause early on. One of the earliest, a former bagman, I mean fundraiser, for Bill Bradley, was eventually rewarded with the ambassadorship to Japan. Obama’s campaign liked to trumpet the number of his small donors, which was impressive, but he proved equally proficient at attracting big money (by Democratic standards).

Obama’s evident cautiousness and cool, “conservative” manner were probably key to his ability to reassure doubtful voters. Unlike many African-American men raised on the mainland, like for example his former pastor and patron Jeremiah Wright, Obama had no angry edge. Had his affect been angrier, louder, or hotter, he would likely have scared people. His policies were not far from Clinton’s and he was no crazy lefty. (Neither, of course, is Sanders.)

The financial crisis of September was probably what really cooked McCain’s goose and made voters realize that, whatever reservations they might have about Obama, it was time for a change from Republican rule.

@132: The Bernie Bros ‘sexist component’ you’re espousing on the other hand appears to be largely imaginary.

Not if you were paying any attention. Myself, I don’t judge a candidate by his or her most unpleasant supporters as long as the candidate does not encourage such attitudes, but there were websites who had to tell their commenters to cut it out.

The survey data are not definitive, but they point in the direction of Sanders supporters not being to the left overall of Clinton’s on social democratic issues and the reason for this being the large number of independents attracted to him due to–and I guess here on the basis of what Sanders himself has most loudly emphasized– his positions on trade and the bailouts, not the policy issues of higher minimum wages, government involvement in health care, paid leave, early childhood education, reproductive rights, even free public college, etc.

It surely seems that given how left Sanders’ Democratic-leaning supporters are, the reason why his supporters are overall not more left is that he is attracting a lot of disgruntled white men who are not particularly progressive on actual policy issues.

At the very least, we in fact do not have the data to conclude, as many supporters of Sanders here believe, that his surprising success is the result of breakthrough levels of support for social democracy.

RNB @ 143: “The survey data are not definitive, but they point in the direction of Sanders supporters not being to the left overall of Clinton’s on social democratic issues”

See 108. The survey data most definitely points in the direction of Sanders supporters being to the left overall of Clinton’s on social democratic issues.

For every 100 Democrat leaning Sanders supporters surveyed, 92 of them believed the minimum wage should be raised, 8 of them believed it should stay the same. Quite literally *none of them* in the entire survey believed it should be lowered or scrapped.

For every 100 Democrat leaning Clinton supporters surveyed, 68 of them believed the minimum wage should be raised, 20 believed it should stay the same, 5 believed it should be lowered, and 5 believed it should be scrapped.

The survey data does not say what you want it to say.

RNB, sorry I should have read your entire comment, not just the first sentence…

Free-trade agreements

1 Favor a great deal
2 Favor moderately
3 Favor a little
4 Neither favor nor oppose
5 Oppose a little
6 Oppose moderately
7 Oppose a great deal

Clinton 39% support, 45% neutral, 12% oppose
Sanders 22% support, 48% neutral, 27% oppose

Those are the figures for *independents* who lean neither Democrat nor Republican.

So ~15% more independents who prefer Sanders oppose free-trade agreements, compared to independents who prefer Clinton, and vice versa.

If independents make up 20-40% of Sanders vote, then 15% of independents represents 3-6% of his total vote – not 20-40%.

“this is why I said from the outset that you are just defining the problem away.”

With respect, RNB, you are just exaggerating it.

RNB: Yes then you add to that how much more opposed Sanders’ Democratic leaning supporters are to free trade agreements than are Clinton’s supporters […]

Why would you do that? We’ve already established that Sanders’ Democrat leaning supporters are well to the left of Clinton’s Democrat leaning supporters. They are not the ones you can accuse of ‘not being socially democratic enough’.

FWIW though:

Clinton 44% support, 31% neutral, 21% oppose
Sanders 39% support, 23% neutral, 34% oppose

So, say 13% * 60-80% (percentage of his total vote who are Democrat leaning) + our 3-6% for independents

= 8-10% + 3-6%

= 11-16% of his total supporters

RNB: […] it becomes clear that much of Sanders support is not due to his social democratic agenda but rather his anti-trade positions

Once again, the data just does not say what you want it to say.

“16% of Sanders’ supporters being more anti-trade than Clinton is not insignificant! It suggests quite a bit about the nature of his campaign.”

16% is miles away from “typical” – and can you explain why it is you think they’re all men? Do women not have views on free-trade agreements?

I’ve seen this kind of interaction with Nick before, because I was in Nick’s position in another recent thread. No amount of facts or of running SQL against a publicly available dataset is going to prevail against a simple obfuscate, deny, and repeat strategy. If the thread is run out for long enough then clueless people will start to say “Why are you arguing about this, Nick?” “Why is it important?” “You’re taking up so much of the thread with these computer programs or whatever.” And if Nick consistently did this here it’d be an opportunity for every sore grudge holder who ever disagreed with Nick in the past to jump in too.

What Nick’s careful work has shown is that Sanders’ supporters may not be slightly to the right of Clinton’s if those independents who prefer him to Clinton are very atypical of the independents who would actually vote for him. But a lot of independents do vote for him, and it is reasonable to suppose that on social democratic policy issues they tend to be more right than Democratic leaning voters. And so they are likely going to bring his social democratic scores to the right, perhaps even more right than Clinton’s supporters. This is why Achen and Bartels raises the question of whether overall Sanders’ supporters or voters agree with him on policy.

RNB: “Yes but a huge chunk of people who have voted for Sanders–independents have been between 20-40% in some primaries–do not identify as Democratic-leaning but independent.”

This doesn’t mean what you think it means. Most people who identify as independent, it turns out, are consistently voting in the same direction; which is to say, they’re as reliably partisan as those who identify with one party or another.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sanders-isnt-doing-well-with-true-independents/

The reality underlying the statistics is that most people do not have a sophisticated enough understanding of politics or policy to have anything that should be dignified by the label of a political philosophy or program package, such as “socialism”.

People get their politics from slogans and thirty-second spots and from the shallow depths of their own psychological attitudes, which attitudes are a chaotic, largely unexamined mess. From a social science distance, sure, you can sometimes make out the vague outlines of socio-economic class and racism and economic geography. In this election, you can make a case for a big generational divide related as much to the internet revolution as the economic plight experienced and supposedly shared by the young.

The hypotheses offered are part of conducting and organizing the competing campaigns. If you can come up with a convincing explanation for why people support Clinton, Trump or Sanders, you can use it to herd people, either by identifying the like-minded or on a principle of repulsion to herd the “opposite” groups. If Trump’s support is racist, then the economic discontent can be discounted. If Trump’s support is “working class” (as if there’s a working class!) then the economic discontent has a certain implied character. If Trump’s support takes Trump “seriously” then their psychology is “mysterious” as is the stubborn refusal of the “poor” to vote their economic interests in Hillary Clinton, who has always thought of the interests of the children.

The big picture takeaway is not the supposed contours of voter identification by income or race or sex, but that in a country ruled by and for an ineffectively opposed oligarchic kleptocracy, politics as a public display must be confusing and polarizing — a divisive distraction that motivates those who pay attention into irrelevant motion and demotivates the rest from paying attention.

Politics as a democratic ritual must be largely irrelevant with regard to the main tendencies of policy. In regard to the main tendency of policy and even in regard to the cast of characters in key posts in the state apparatus, there must be no alternative. So, there can be no reversal, no change of course.

Any actual public policy designed to have positive net effects will involve sufficient elements of paradox and subtlety that it will require more than 30 seconds to understand the pluses and minuses, the costs and benefits. To get mass public support for good policy requires getting people to commit themselves long enough to pay attention and get over that minimal threshold, past which they can effectively distinguish, say, Trump from Sanders as more than a protest vote against a system that is fu and bs.

But, there isn’t enough in the way of genuine mass-membership political organization where people could pay attention for more than 30 seconds or form a persistent commitment.

Both the Right and the neoliberal “left” will use the attention-deficit to subvert decent policy. The Right will push simplistic nonsense — flat tax proposals and “guns don’t kill people” and so — and both the Right and the neoliberal “left” will attach good intentions to monstrous policy. Meanwhile, almost no one will understand what TPP is.

BW: “What I object to is the moral hectoring and the reality distortion field that some (RNB apparently, or my personal favorite object for one-minute hate, Scott Lemieux) committed to going along insist must envelop all political discussion and observation.”

One of these days I’m just going to put some comments and posts by the people mentioned above into a time-delay archive during the primary and quote them again a couple of weeks before the general. “Vote for Hillary you scum!” I never do it because I just can’t bring myself to care enough, but it would be amusing.

Scott Lemieux got his whole site told off by Glenn Greenwald, which is an achievement that should stand among his lifetime accomplishments. When political dissidents stood against governmental surveillance, the “left” bravely rushed in to defend the status quo.

bruce wilder @164

‘One can feel that the right thing to do is to hold one’s nose and vote for the lesser-evil-du-jour. I get that. Still stinks, though. Holding your nose doesn’t change that or reverse it or anything really. So, let’s not pretend otherwise.’

There is one thing that nose-holding does — it makes people feel better. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You’re right, though, that we shouldn’t pretend that it helps to change the system or to produce better options in the future.

In the same way, making a public declaration about not voting at all can make people feel better, but we shouldn’t pretend that it helps to change the system or to produce better options in the future.

“What I object to is the moral hectoring…”

Yes, me too.

“Holding your nose doesn’t change that or reverse it or anything really.”

1) What J-D said.

2) On the other hand, refusing to play – avoiding the smell – enables the greater evil. That’s not nothing. Ask some Iraqis.

. . . refusing to play – avoiding the smell – enables the greater evil.

Couldn’t stop yourself, could you?

Is it your part in enabling evil or the opportunity to blame me for something I had nothing to do with that constitutes the greater temptation?

Ask some Iraqis. [Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans, Libyans, Syrians . . . ]

About Bush or Obama?

Bianca Steele@24

If it seems confusing, it’s because the entire concept of “neoliberal” is incoherent. It conflates two terms. 1. an American one, in which “liberal” meant what it means in American politics and “neo-” meant new and improved (as in “neo-conservative”), and 2. a British one, in which “liberal” meant pro-free-market and “neo-” meant revived (as in “neoclassical” or “neo-Nazi”). People have struggling since then to explain how these two terms, invented by different people in different places to describe different things, are really two variants of the same thing, a left or soft one and a right or hard one. But this is actually just a confusion of words. It’s mainly useful for invective (as when Sen. Boxer was called a “neolib bitch” at the recent Nevada convention).

bruce wilder @168

It’s been nearly three years since she was buried, so I imagine her remains are past the point where they can keep footwear on.

bruce wilder: “About Bush or Obama?”

Either one. If you think Obama was the greater evil vs McCain, or Romney, I hope you voted for them. It’s not my impression that you do think that.

If people who refused to vote, also refused to offer their opinions, it would make more sense.

“all the more reason to blab publicly.”

If you are 12 years old, maybe. Otherwise, one-half the eligible voters (or thereabouts) in the US don’t vote. Many more than that, tell each other constantly that there really is no choice. So, what don’t we already know?

We don’t already know that somebody is discontent? Duh?!

If your candidate is Sanders, well then, he got enough votes to have significant input into his party’s platform. So, if Clinton wins the Presidency, then she has to acknowledge that his planks should be put into policy. Why? Because some of her voters came out in Novmeber, to vote for his planks. If she doesn’t do that, well then, something else has to happen in the future. So what.

Permanent lines aren’t drawn at an election. If your person loses, that isn’t the end of the game.

But this idea that mature adults, with the ability to write in language, are taking their marbles and going home because their ideal candidate didn’t run, or didn’t win, and that they are telling us something new or worth hearing, is infantile, fatuous, boring.

“If you feel you must go along, I’m fine with that choice, though I, personally, choose not to go along.”

Not going along means exactly what?

“The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it.” – Zizek

If the secret police kick down people’s doors in the middle of the night and drag them away for torture and indefinite incommunicado detention, it’s not boring. There is nothing whatever to be said in defence of the conduct of people who want to vote for something interesting to happen, so long as they do not themselves become the victims. People who actually are eager to become the victims of dramatic pain themselves should investigate the possibility of making commercial arrangements for that purpose without trying to involve the rest of us who have different tastes.

RNB: “For example, a Sanders supporter like this may not be on the social democratic left.”

It was predictable that, having lost the argument based on the data, you’d start throwing up anecdotes.

RNB #187: “The data that we have now shows that those who prefer Sanders to Clinton are actually to the right in terms of policy preferences of those who prefer Clinton over Sanders.”

What are the numbers?

Nick very helpfully gave the #s at 122. I shall say again that I am surprised by this and would not be surprised if a better survey gave us a different result. But it’s the data on policy preferences that we have now. Again one problem may be that our sense of Sanders’ supporters is being determined by those who support him here, and the very leftist social democratic policy preferences here may not be widely shared among Sanders’ supporters (in fact as I pointed out it would seem that Sanders’ supporters are polarized with some being very left and some being pretty conservative, leading to averages slightly to the right of Clinton’s supporters). Again I am surprised by this. I would be happy to revise this conclusion but I don’t see how Nick or layman have given us any empirical reason to reject what Achen and Bartels wrote.

Sanders supporters are disgruntled, white males who may belong in the Klan, even if they’re unaware of their prejudices. True!

Sciency proves it!

RNB #190: “policy preferences here may not be widely shared among Sanders’ supporters”

I rather doubt that anyone who supports a candidate who wants free healthcare & schooling can be characterized as “very conservative”. It is more likely the case that, as always, most people don’t pay much attention to policy details and tend to support candidates for personality and group loyalty reasons. Achen and Bartels are not the first people to have argued this; political science studies of it go back decades. However, the inference that because of this, Sanders supporters will therefore abandon Clinton and vote for Trump is unwarranted.

casssander @87
Her [HRC’s] reluctance is precisely the problem with her foreign policy instincts. If you’re going to fight a war, you don’t want to half-ass it.

This comment and casssander’s subsequent remarks on ‘overcommitment’ seem to be part of the “find a crappy small country and throw it vs the wall” school of US foreign policy thinking.

The problem in Libya was not the commitment of insufficient force, which is what casssander implies, but rather the decision to help in the overthrow of Gaddafi w/o sufficient understanding of or planning for what would come after in what was going to be a divided country and polity. Here some kind of multilateral ‘stability’ or peacekeeping force might have been appropriate, esp if forces from the African Union cd have been included. Was this thought about? I don’t know. But I don’t think cassssander’s approach and prescriptions are very helpful.

197 I stated clearly the last time you asked me a ‘question’ that I’m not at all interested in your empty vessel verbosity. That stands. I’ve yet to see you engage in any good faith discussions on any topic with anyone.

You’re still full of shit.

Have a nice day. Really.

Yes, I would suspect quite a bit of prejudice in a Sanders supporter who refused to vote for Clinton to stop Trump from ascending to the White House, though there is an ultra leftist here and there who may want Trump in to engender the street fighting that they think necessary for the revolution only by means of which certain pressing problems can be solved.

I also question the sanity of those who will vote for Trump so we can have an exciting reality show shot from the White House.

If Sanders was coming to my home state of California with a commanding 3 million vote lead and a huge lead in pledged delegates, I would suspect a Clinton supporter who said s/he would not vote for Sanders in the general of, first, red-baiting and, second, of anti-Semitism.

kidneystones @198

So I see you’ve got no answer to my question.

199 This isn’t going to work this year. We’ve been through this movie too many times and my guess is that you’ve no idea what people are yelling at Trump rallies.

Let me put it this way – every time one of you clowns claims that your belly-button lint has opened up a line of insight into the hearts and minds of people you assiduously avoid, another dozen independents ignore you and become willing, at least, to listen to other arguments.

You very clearly have convinced yourself that the tens of thousands of Klan members and fellow-travelers who attend Trump rallies spend their time their chanting and screaming racial epithets. Yes?

Why aren’t there hundreds and hundreds of videos online of Trump supporters actually, you know, doing what you believe they do? Is it because you believe that people like you RNB aren’t looking hard enough? Do think that Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, the DNC, HRC, and the Obama WH, not to mention media matters, Yglesias, and TPM believe that nobody should be looking at hundreds, or better yet, thousands of Trump supporters screaming racial epithets?

So, when independents go online looking for these racial epithet screaming Trump supporters you describe (who wouldn’t want to see un-sheeted Klan people?) they encounter instead raucous politically incorrect theater of the Bill Maher variety.

Go find us some links featuring clear footage of hundreds and thousands of racial epithet screaming Trump supporters. Should be easy, right?

And because you can’t, you invalidate the legitimate criticism that could and should be made against Trump – (because you’re too fucking lazy to do the work of refuting his crackpot economic arguments).

The politics of fear and defamation you deploy are going to fail against a candidate who’s ready to bring every well-documented Dem hypocrisy to the fore. HRC is a deeply-flawed candidate who’s lamentable track record of lying, bad judgment, regime-change, indifference to the poor, and sucking up to Wall St. is going to send Trump into the WH.

The GOP establishment convinced themselves that 65,000 attack ads and a couple of hundred million spent would destroy Trump. You’re evidently every bit as dense. The NYT shot themselves in the face by digging up stories of Trump and bathing suits, effectively making Trump into a feminist advocate for equal pay at the same time as Bill was banging women Clinton insiders later called ‘slutty’ and ‘nutty.’

Van Jones and others have already warned that African-Americans are tired of being lied to by Dems and that in this climate, with an anti-establishment Dem turning established wisdom upside down, Dems can no longer expect fear and defamation alone to get them over.

This is a change election. Some Sanders supporters and many independents are going to vote for change even if the candidate is named Trump. Arguing that the only reason people reject HRC and choose Trump is because they are racist, misogynistic, or both isn’t going to convince workers who want to work that Trump represents a threat.

Make America Great again sounds pretty good to those Dems and Republicans have taken for granted and ignored for decades. Like it or not.

So kidneystones are you encouraging my family–an Indo-American, a black woman and their two daughters–to show up to a Trump rally even if there is some chance that the eleven-year-old will freak out if the crowd chants “Build the Wall” or applauds when the ban on Muslims, the celebration of the dropping of atomic weapons, and the joussaince of torture are discussed. Can you guarantee our safety? Or do you think it would be a good idea for our girls to hear a Presidential candidate introduce his own daughter as “hot”? You can take your creepy self to the rallies and join with your creepy friends; we will be assiduously avoiding you, as you put it.

Yup people who would likely beat up a eleven year old responding to a call to ban Muslims. Of course we would not take her. Minorities would stop us from going in because they would fear our getting beaten up by someone talking about carrying out people on stretchers in the good old days. Seriously kidneystones you are a creep.

@ 209 Calling people you disagree with you racist, xenophobes, misogynist, etc, etc, etc is a poor substitute for dialogue. But we’ve already established that you’ve no interest in dialogue. You defend a candidate who would be branded a war-criminal should she be running as a Republican.

You’re ability to ignore and downplay a record of lies and criminality on the part of Wall St.’s candidate and instead level accusations of fantasy-people wanting to beat an 11-year old child is delusional, at best, and truly disturbing at worst.

Where are your videos of racial epithet chanting Trump supporters? Why aren’t there several channels of anti-Trump websites running this hate-speech?

Hiding behind your own children, and then claiming to be concerned about an 11-year old you’ve never met is as cynical as claiming all people who go to Trump rallies belong in the Klan.

You’re not stupid, but you are dishonest and malevolent. I sincerely hope you understand you’re defending state terrorism, drone strikes, regime-change, globalization, and increasing the disparity between the rich and poor.

Call me all the names you like, but please try to get your head out of your ass.

kidneystones @211

Accusing everybody who disagrees with you of inappropriate use of terms such as ‘racist’, ‘xenophobe’, and ‘misogynist’, even when they didn’t actually use those terms, is a poor substitute for dialogue.

Ze K, wasn’t that some hair metal band?

Here’s a fun google tip: type in the phrase “for Trump” (with quotation marks), and a high proportion of your results will consist of actual Trump supporters. Now add your racist expletive of choice and the result will be… well, and extremely large quantity of extremely nasty stuff. As you’d expect.

Kidneystones is gonna kidneystones, of course, but still.

Jeez, Kidneystones, you really know how to make a persuasive argument.

#219

“American liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and therefore superior and the one true way”

Straight out of the right-wing focus group tested slogan book.

Here’s my idea: Not torturing people is morally superior to torturing them and people who try to muddy the difference are evil.

Ze K @219

Every ideology sees itself as superior and the one true way. It probably wouldn’t be right to say that they all see themselves as modern and therefore superior and the one true way; some see themselves as traditional and therefore superior and the one true way.

Ze K @227

Traditionalists have a much longer, broader, and deeper record of unleashing violence than liberals do.

TM,
“It would be fun if you could give us a few examples, or maybe even just a single example of a “traditionalist ideology” that “advocates freedom, equality, and self-determination of all cultures””

From Yarra Healing in Melbourne:

“In November 1998 the National Catholic Education Commission (NCEC) launched a statement entitled Educating for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation: A New Partnership with Indigenous Peoples of Australia.

The Commission articulated a vision for Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples of Australia.

We call upon the Church – her people, her leaders and her children, to listen with new ears, to see with new eyes, what always was and what always will be – to be awakened to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders lifeways, cultures and spiritualities.”

From the Archdiocese of Melbourne Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission

“Under the mandate of the Archbishop, the Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission serves the Archdiocese and our partners in dialogue by promoting ecumenism and interfaith relations in the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
…
In Interfaith relations, we implement the decisions of the Archbishop and the teaching and directives of the Second Vatican Council on interfaith dialogue; maintain relations through the Commission with the Australian Bishops’ Conference Committee on Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations, and with the Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue
foster a spirituality which welcomes and appreciates what is positive in others as a gift from God; provide a high level of support and advice, service and information to the Archdiocese assist and encourage Melbourne Catholics in interfaith dialogue by offering workshops and seminars for interfaith formation; initiate local interfaith dialogues and conversations in Melbourne ; network with other interfaith groups and organisations working in Melbourne ; promote joint witness to the importance of religious faith in society

VISION STATEMENT

“The unity of all divided humanity is the will of God. For this reason he sent his Son, so that by dying and rising for us he might bestow on us the Spirit of love.” (John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint §6)
Since “the restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council” (UR §1), this is therefore also the ecumenical vision of our Commission.

Furthermore, urged on by the Second Vatican Council, it is our vision that in Interfaith relations the Commission may “through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, …recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these people”. (cf. Nostra Aetate §2)”

http://www.yarrahealing.catholic.edu.au/vision-process/index.cfm?loadref=2
http://www.cam.org.au/eic/About-Us/Mission-and-Vision

@223. Please do not put words into my mouth.

Very few people would hide behind their children. You clearly see them as pawns in some sense. Please leave them out of any interaction you have with me.

After watching countless Trump rallies I’d say that virtually nobody has anything to fear inside the arena, including the people standing up to hurl profanities at the candidate. Outside, it’s a different question as we witnessed in San Diego.

Again, I challenge you to watch some Trump rallies (not attend) and count the punches thrown inside the rally and the racial epithets screamed.

The rock and bottle throwers are outside screaming ‘uncle Tom’ and other choice phrases at attendees. Kind of messes with the narrative, doesn’t it. Explain that to your kids.

ZM @232

Those principles do not represent the traditional ideology of the Catholic Church.

RNB #223: “you seem to have very little clue as to how people not like you experience life in this country. But that does not stop you from passing judgment on my intellectual baggage.”

Sorry, not directed at you. I think that your comments are right on the mark (except for putting too much weight on the assumption that voters choose candidates for their policy positions. Not even true independents do much of that). I think that Trump is a big danger to foreign relations, domestic programs, and domestic tranquility.

Ze K @238

‘Fine, forget ‘traditionalism’ then, that’s not the point, what’s in the name. See this:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/jqadams.htm , and call it whatever you like.’

What if I like to call it American liberalism?

Ze K @242

‘All I was saying is that an ideology doesn’t have to be universalist. It could be based on respect for diversity of world’s ideologies and political cultures. If ‘traditionalism’ doesn’t fit, you’re welcome to suggest any other label.’

Didn’t you notice that suggest another label — once again, ‘liberalism’ — is exactly what TM just did?

Multiculturalism and pluralism are bad words, according to many Republicans here in the USA, used in name-calling by people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (and probably Donald Trump, now). As is liberalism, which associates itself with those words (here). It came as a slight shock and disappointment to me to learn at CT that elsewhere in the world liberalism seems to have a different meaning, as I like to think of myself as a liberal. Long before Limbaugh there was a TV personality, Morton Downey Jr., whose stock in trade was calling us “pablum-puking liberals”. (I welcomed his hatred.)

No one I’ve ever met or read about, of any ideology, is perfect (certainly not me), but most are not quite as bad as they are painted by their ideological enemies. It seems to me (naturally) that in the case of USA “liberals”, the difference between painting and reality is extreme.

Separate is never equal.

Separate is never equal.

Separate is never equal.

What I tell you three times is true.

No political theory is valid that denies this. In my judgment, facts garnered from the widest perspectives of history and natural science conclusively demonstrate that every claim for the superiority/inferiority of one group of people against another is flawed, not least because of the difficulty of defining the group. Inevitably time refutes them all. Thus any political theory that rests on the claim a separate group is superior/inferior is false, ideological in the pejorative sense.

@234 I think it’s ridiculous that it would not be safe to bring my colored children to a political rally and we would not. Consider Trump attacking and whipping up hatred against Judge born in the Midwest as a Mexican (growing up, many people thought I was Latino). Trump jumps to the conclusion that a Judge’s ethnicity is the reason for an unfavorable ruling in the Trump University case and he’s thereby stoking blind deepened ethnic hatred in the crowd. He is making his crowd feel at war with people they think are Mexicans. He does not have to use a racial epithet against the Judge to make his already hateful and seething crowd even more hateful and seething and create a dangerous environment for a minority there who may do more than groan about one of his bombastic statements.
At any rate, minorities are not going to take this lying down. If the racist Republican electorate who are so ensconsed in their lily-white worlds goes through with this nomination that they have no understanding of what minorities think of Trump, they will face a non-violent backlash that will make this country ungovernable. Romney and McCain who went as far as challenging the prejudice of Republicans against Obama did not create the visceral reaction that Trump will.

“Now, that is a curious judgement, given your fondness for candidate Clinton. Clinton has supported several wars ‘of choice’, most famously Iraq 2002. In modern war torture — both deliberately exact and coincidental — along with the murder of noncombatants, terror, mutilation, starvation, epidemic disease, and so on — are certain and of course were observed in Iraq on a scale involving hundreds of thousands of people. ”

That argument style is called “sleight of hand”. Clinton indeed has supported several wars of choice – in fact, she has a terrible record on foreign policy. However, she opposes torture while, as you note, George W. Bush engaged in it and as I note every Republican candidate effusively and enthusiastically endorses torture. The difference between a candidate for office who condemns torture and one who vows to expand its use is meaningful to me and the use of dishonest rhetorical tricks to muddy the difference is morally repugnant.

By the way, “modern war” definitely kills many civilians, if by “modern” you mean “post-hunter-gatherer”.

@251 I welcome the debate about US foreign policy that Stephen F. Cohen (as quoted in the John Pilger piece above) is raising. But one question I have is that when Cohen tries to deescalate the rhetoric against Putin by pointing to the role he played in having Assad destroy his chemical weapons and the role Putin played in the deal with Iran to cease their nuclear weapons ambition, he leaves unanswered for me the question whether Putin would have played these roles unless NATO was in a position to threaten or induce him into doing these things. Again though I think Cohen is right to say that we should have a debate about US foreign policy towards Russia. Cohen thinks Obama has put NATO on a warpath with Russia and that Clinton would follow this foreign policy. Cohen praises Trump for raising questions about US foreign policy in regards to Russia.

Being against torture means bringing torturers, covert assassins, and extraordinary renditioners to justice, that is, Bush, Obama, and their cabinets. Anything else is electoral rhetoric.

Trump may not be able to put John Yoo in charge because he is, on record, as opposed to rectal feeding.

But the torture already happened. We are not just talking about future possibilities here. The law has been repeatedly broken and there has been no justice. As long as Bush and Obama are not brought to justice, it means that torture will continue. A candidate saying s/he is against torture while turning the blind eye to the torture and covert assassinations and renditions that have already taken place, means that torture will continue.

“But the torture already happened. ”

What do you think? They ran out of electrical clamps and sadists? It happened, it’s over, nothing like that can happen again or worse? Forgive me, but that seems insane.

““Being against torture means bringing torturers, covert assassins, and extraordinary renditioners to justice, that is, Bush, Obama, and their cabinets. Anything else is electoral rhetoric.”

I keep imagining someone in some hellhole, perhaps in a Navy Brig, feeling the icepick in the eyeball and thinking: “Stopping this without show trials would have just been electoral rhetoric.”

We should remember that the practice of extraordinary rendition–sending someone to be tortured outside of the US, began under Clinton.

root_e @246

The Pilger piece was not published by the Guardian.

Anarcissie @252

‘All right, suppose I am in Iraq and an American weapon, ultimately directed by the President of the United States, blows my leg off. As I am lying around waiting to die, in considerable pain — torture — will it make a difference to me whether that president ‘endorses’ or ‘opposes’ torture?’

That’s not a difficult question to answer: the answer is, obviously, ‘No, it would make no difference to you’.

Now, here’s another question: Does it make any difference to anybody whether the US President authorises torture or forbids torture?

Lupita @255

‘Being against torture means bringing torturers, covert assassins, and extraordinary renditioners to justice, that is, Bush, Obama, and their cabinets. Anything else is electoral rhetoric.’

And here’s another question: suppose I’m being held in US detention and I’m being tortured; and suppose the torture stops because the US President has given orders for it to stop. In that situation, would I conclude that the halting of the torture was only electoral rhetoric because nobody had been put on trial?

@root_e

Pinochet was indicted and charged, he died before sentencing. Argentina’s last dictator together with 16 others have been sentenced. Why is this system of justice inferior to a candidate saying she does not believe in torture and letting bygones be bygones? I find it very suspicious that you are so against torture, imagining the morbid details of the tools used and what goes through the victim’s mind while being tortured, and yet, the only logical outcome you see is blanket amnesty. Do you really think that the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo were wrong in demanding justice for decades while your amnesty plan for Westeners is unquestionably superior?

J-D, saying that if something happens without criminal trials that that’s only electoral rhetoric is, itself, rhetoric. This is a blog and a comment thread and taking every use of rhetoric as making a literal claim is not very helpful.

What did Amnesty literally write? It wrote about requirements under international law:

“The U.S. government is required by international law to respect and ensure human rights, to thoroughly investigate every violation of those rights, and to bring perpetrators to justice, no matter their level of office or former level of office.
[…]
Accountability also requires that the United States provides redress to those individuals who have suffered abuses at the hands of the US government, including those unlawfully detained, unlawfully rendered to torture, and those tortured and abused in US custody. The Obama administration continues to rely on the same legal formulas as the Bush administration to block civil suits brought against those responsible for those abuses.”

That is more than saying that “people who have committed crimes should be treated as criminals” in some rhetorical sense. It’s talking about requirements of international law.

Layman: “it has the effect of making torture in practice a question of policy rather than a matter of law.”

Which is exactly why Obama’s declaration that “America does not torture” is itself only rhetorical. If it’s a policy that he’s instituting, it’s a policy that can just be reversed under the next President.

Meanwhile, did Obama really “order no torture”? Not really. It also didn’t really repudiate extraordinary rendition.

You made a rhetorical claim, I disproved it with a citation. That’s “trolling” or “silly” I guess. I notice that the other people here who like to talk about how obviously right their feelings about what is silly and what isn’t are have cited nothing.

Star Spangled 2016 – as I predicted, patriotism is in. The new star-spangled Coke can declaims: “I’m proud to be an American!” and is part of a sea-change in advertising and branding.

Proud to be an American, again fits better for many, I suppose. However, for a whole nother group of Tribalists, including many here, No American has any business feeling proud about anything, which is going to make things complicated.

Corey has a good post re: CUNY. The rot, however, is intellectual imho much more than it has to do with broken windows. All Americans, surely, have much to be proud about, even slave owners. Yes, slave owners are a key part of the American myth and Americans proudly celebrate slave owners such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington, not to mention a host of others.

And whilst British readers are sneering and sniffing at the hypocrisy, they can explain, perhaps, why Elizabeth I is celebrated rather than being roundly condemned and her image erased from all national institutions because of her role as founder of the British Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Jon Stewart stepped in it with his “Harry Truman was a war-criminal” comment, which he quickly withdrew. Judged by today’s standards some of Truman’s actions would be considered war crimes. Another Dem president interred American citizens and deprives them of their constitutional rights on the basis of ethnicity.

Patriotism probably offends many here. But wrapping oneself in the flag has proven a highly successful formula for winning support, and as the Coca-Cola is betting, selling product.

Being proud of one’s country, one’s family, and one’s heritage is back in vogue. My guess is that people are either going to get onside, or be swept away by a resurgence of national pride in the coming years.

Here’s the longish link
http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/coke-joins-patriotic-branding-boom-flag/304186/?utm_source=daily_email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage&ttl=1464996909

@275 But your citations do not provide evidence for the thesis that the human rights situation did not improve under Obama compared to the Bush administration. It’s silly to boast that you provide evidence and citations without clarifying the thesis for which they are support. For example, you cite on piece that says a new manual allows for some forms of punishment that still violate the Geneva Conventions. That seems to true, but does not provide evidence for said thesis. You also link a piece that Obama intends to carry out extraordinary renditions without the use of torture, so that piece does not provide evidence for said thesis; on the contrary. So how could layman not think s/he is being trolled?

Layman: “If you want to dispute them, then point out which such illegal detainee treatment is still in practice under the Obama administration.”

Did I ever claim that Obama’s continuing use of torture was illegal under U.S. law? No, I didn’t. I wonder what I did claim? It’s so hard to figure that out! The thread is so long.

Did I ever claim that there was no difference between Obama’s approved methods of torture and Bush’s? No, I didn’t. I wonder what I did claim? It’s so hard to figure that out! Etc.

I wonder what you claimed? Its so hard to figure that out! The thread’s so long.

“I wonder what you claimed?”

Yes, this is why I said you were trolling.

Well, you can say whatever you like. But your comments are increasingly stupid and uninteresting.

Here’s the relevant part of what you wrote:
“That said, there’s a difference between ‘ordering torture’ and ‘ordering no torture’, and it’s foolish to pretend there isn’t.”

I replied:
“Meanwhile, did Obama really “order no torture”? Not really. It also didn’t really repudiate extraordinary rendition.”

In other words, the difference that you claimed was between “ordering torture” and “ordering no torture” was actually between “ordering torture” and “ordering different and probably lesser forms of torture”. Although with extraordinary rendition, as should be obvious to anyone who actually reads the cites, there really is no policy difference — both the Bush and Obama administration sought and received assurances that the people who they shipped off would not be tortured, and both sets of reassurances are valueless.

But that’s “trolling”. You’re a jerk.

“But your comments are increasingly stupid and uninteresting.”

Then, by all means, feel free to ignore them.

Layman 05.29.16 at 10:16 pm @ 272:
‘Surely this question doesn’t go far enough. Suppose you’re run over by a drunk driver, who is in turn driving a car made in America? As you lie there waiting to die, in considerable pain – torture! – will it make a difference to you whether the American President ‘endorses’ or ‘opposes’ torture? (Or, you know, it could be that ‘torture’ has a specific meaning, one your own question seeks to muddle.)’

I’m not muddling anything. Torture, exact and coincidental, is an inevitable concomitant of at least modern war, as are extensive murder of noncombatants, terror, and the other things I mentioned previously. Saying that one is ‘against torture’ means nothing unless you do something to prevent it, like at least trying to stop the war in the first place. If you think you can have wars of any size without torture, you need to study what happens to people under conditions of combat.

The essence of torture is the same as the essence of aggressive war in general: it’s not caring what happens to people who get in your way, and destroying them. I don’t think there is all that great a difference between those who celebrate it and those who weasel about it.

“Torture, exact and coincidental, is an inevitable concomitant of at least modern war”

Torture is a word with a defined meaning.

Wasn’t quite sure where best to post this but in view of the many arguments that commenters (particularly US commenters) have about the affordable care scheme on CT, I though an editorial in the latest Lancet might be of interest: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: 5 year review (Volume 387, No. 10034, p2164, 28 May 2016)

Here is the Lancet summary for those interested:

“The USA can proudly claim the most technologically advanced health-care capabilities in the world. Yet the lack of universal health insurance means that expertise is not translated into better health outcomes at a population level, and that out-of-pocket expenses are a common cause of impoverishment. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 aimed to address the above shortcomings by increasing the availability of insurance for quality health care. The effectiveness of the Act is shown by estimates released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on May 17, in which the proportion of people in the USA without health insurance in 2015 was 9·1%. This is the first time that the number of uninsured, which stood at 16% in 2010, has fallen below 10%.

Behind this great achievement are an additional 20 million insured people across all demographic groups. Importantly, uptake has been strong in disenfranchised populations. Among people living below the federal poverty line, 17·2% were uninsured, compared with 29·5% in 2010. Likewise, the proportion of uninsured Hispanic or Latino people decreased from 31·9% to 20·8%. Particularly welcome is the finding that more than 95% of children under the age of 17 years now have some form of insurance cover. But gains have been patchy, with greater improvement in states that chose to expand Medicaid than in those those [sic] that did not.

Despite slow accrual, imperfect mechanisms, and an emphasis on numbers, rather than quality, the ACA has nonetheless reduced health disparity in the USA over the past 5 years. It has also increased use of preventive services, which points to better health outcomes for individuals and improved economic performance for the country as a result. This feat should surely arouse pride for what has been accomplished and strengthen efforts until all individuals in the USA have affordable, equitable, health insurance. The November elections will test the country’s resolve to do this and will determine whether access to good health care is part of the American dream or the American fantasy.”

My brief comment on this bit:
The USA can proudly claim the most technologically advanced health-care capabilities in the world. Yet the lack of universal health insurance means that expertise is not translated into better health outcomes at a population level

Given that the causes of health or ill-health generally lie outside the health care sector, one would not necessarily expect technologically advanced systems to translate directly into better health outcomes, though they can help. Better health outcomes also strongly relate to social and economic conditions (the Social Determinants of Health) particularly inequality. The discussion of “preventive measures” seems similarly somewhat limited and uses some common neoliberal assumptions about the importance of a healthy population for the reified ‘economy’. Other than that it seems like a reasonable statement – suggesting it’s by no means perfect but still an advance on what the US had before.

Ze K @298

Torture is a structural phenomenon, and the suffering of its victims is not hypothetical.

The argument that torture isn’t such a big deal in the grand scheme of things as long as so many people die of drone strikes or bombs and so on at least requires some serious reflection from liberals and imho the back-and-forth in this thread has been rather unsatisfactory from both sides. However, in the context of debating Trump and the presidential election, if you wish to argue that Trump’s foreign policy would be less barbaric than Clinton’s, you’d have to provide some evidence for that. Isn’t it likely that the candidate who advocates torture is the more reckless, aggressive and barbaric overall?

Anarcissie @ 291: “If you think you can have wars of any size without torture, you need to study what happens to people under conditions of combat.”

Yet it is not the case that every participant in a war is/was also a torturer, at least not for any reasonable definition of the word. So, one may prosecute one’s role in war and still oppose and deplore torture. You may not make any moral distinction between the soldier or general or political leader who advocates and employs torture, and the one who opposes and deplores it, but I do.

The best evidence that Trump wants nothing to do with Democratic and Republican Neoconservatives and that Hillary Clinton does is the fact that Max Boo, and Robert Kagan are laboring tirelessly to defeat Trump and elect Hillary.

As usual, we have a partial quote – ‘if they’re going to go into Iraq/Libya at least take their oil.

When Kagan, Boot, and Kristol start supporting Trump, that’s when there’s cause for alarm on that front. There are still plenty of ways for Trump to step in it. Anyone sincerely interested in keeping the Neoconservatives out of the WH need to line up behind Bernie, now, or face the unhappy prospect of pulling the lever for Trump.

I mean, if keeping the Neoconservatives out of the WH really matters. I suspect that partisan blinders and rationalization will allow a great many here to help make Max Boot’s preferred candidate the next war president.

People do understand that, I hope. O has already set a new record for US presidents. The nation has been at war for his entire presidency and the people who voted for him thought they were getting the guy who closed Gitmo. Rubes.

Elect Hillary and get endless war. No wonder Kagan and Boot are cheering for her!

kidneystones: “As usual, we have a partial quote…”

Van Susteren asked Trump what he would do if he was president, considering it has been some two months since Obama said Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafi must go.

“I would go in and take the oil — I would just go in and take the oil,” Trump replied. “We don’t know who the rebels are, we hear they come from Iran, we hear they’re influenced by Iran or al-Qaida, and, frankly I would go in, I would take the oil — and stop this baby stuff.

Breaking News at Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/donaldtrump-karlrove-gop-birther/2011/04/22/id/393742/#ixzz4A8YEMITE
Urgent: Rate Obama on His Job Performance. Vote Here Now!

“But it’s amazing how often it can be defended in the name of ‘security’, particularly by those who tend to project their foreign policy on a broad scale.”

Some people defend it, some don’t. It matters who does which.

@ Rich P, to play your silly game,

No one is arguing “…that in order to support HRC people now need to aggressively polish up her record…”

and no one is “…claiming that Amnesty International said that torture stopped under Obama.”

Are you sure you like this game?

Yes, Rich, that’s the silly game you’re playing. Someone highlights that Amnesty explicitly recognized Obama’s action to reject the Bush torture regime, and backs it up with a citation to that of effect, and you quibble over the language they used to describe it.

root_e 05.30.16 at 1:27 pm @ 316:
‘This is why I have concluded that the only actual principle underlying “leftism” as currently practiced in the USA is that it is always important to facilitate Republican/Right hold on power.’

I disagree — I don’t think actual leftists have any significant near-term influence on US politics one way or the other — but, anyway, what practices would you suggest as a substitute?

Layman 05.30.16 at 10:32 am @ 305 —
Maybe you should watch The Battle of Algiers again. You especially want the part where Colonel Mathieu, responding to some journalists complaining about torture and other atrocities, gives an elegant little speech which ends, ‘Therefore, to be precise, I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer “yes,” then you must accept all the necessary consequences.’ Mathieu is of course a composite, but not an inaccurate one. The movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-7j4WVTgWc ; the script: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Battle-of-Algiers,-The.html

One of the things that disturbs me about this subject is that so many people do not seem to take military operations seriously, including especially certain candidates for high office who might actually — indeed, who have — set them in motion.

Layman @ 311: Some people defend it, some don’t.

Remind me again which are you?

root_e: “I’m struck by the relentless pessimism and commitment to powerlessness combined with an insistence that any gains are illusory.”

root_e seems to have just grabbed a sentence out of the end of the Amnesty letter that root_e cited without reading it. Here. I’ll quote from that letter at length:

“Your strong affirmation of the prohibition of torture is crucial because this country is at an inflection point. We are witnessing a dangerous shift in U.S. public discourse on torture, even compared to the previous decade. Whereas, under the administration of former president George W. Bush, top U.S. officials claimed to reject torture as morally abhorrent (even while ordering and encouraging it), some public figures now openly celebrate torture. In a perverse effort to win public approval, they trivialize the horror and inhumanity of torture and signal they would support a return to its systematic use.”

“Poll results, while limited by multiple factors, suggest an alarming increase in U.S. approval of torture. In March 2016, a Reuters poll reported that nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed believed torture can be justified to extract information from “suspected terrorists.” In contrast, in 2007, a Pew poll showed that only about forty percent of Americans surveyed believed torture could be justified to get key information. According to the same polls, while in 2007 a majority of 54 percent said torture was never or rarely justifiable, in 2016 only fifteen percent of those polled said it should never be used.”

“This current situation underscores that, since you took office, proponents of torture have in some ways succeeded in rewriting recent history. In late 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a summary of its report on torture that included graphic, disturbing details of abuse. This should have led to a national moment of reckoning, and in some ways it did. Yet, instead of responding with regret and reflection, former administration officials touted their role in the CIA torture program as proof of their commitment to protecting U.S. security. Now, a new generation of public figures is doing the same: they promote torture in an effort to prove their national security bona fides. They are priming the U.S. public for a return to systematic torture in the name of national security.”

Pessimism, commitment to powerlessness, insistence that gains are illusory, etc. Note that the letter mentions something happening “in late 2014”. Gee, do you think Amnesty is blaming Trump for that? “Since you took office”. Hmm. No, it’s not annoying at all for people to cite Amnesty as showing that they are right while misrepresenting what Amnesty actually says.

Of course what “Mathieu” said was dangerous bullshit on the order of Scalia citing 24.

root_e @ 321: open advocacy of Trumpian racism draws less indignation than advocacy of the Democratic Party that passed the civil rights bills

that Democratic Party — the one that passed landmark Civil Rights legislation –disappeared a generation ago

a commitment to telling the truth — something you apparently need additional practice to master — does lead in the present moment to an acknowledgement of powerlessness in a political system that is unresponsive to common interests and highly manipulative of mass sentiments

the stubborn insistence on the importance of difference that rests on credulousness in defiance of experience, of endorsing the “lesser evil” of pious and legalistic claims abjuring torture, which are given no force in law, practice or policy — this is quietism . . . and I think my soul prefers an honest despair

meanwhile, in other news, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who never identified a torturer or a bankster who he thought should be punished for the damage they did, says fugitive leaker Edward Snowden performed a “public service” but still deserves to be punished

but, by all means, the absolutely most important thing is to shut up and vote for more of the same

“but, by all means, the absolutely most important thing is to shut up and vote for more of the same”

Wilder, your voting for Clinton to defeat Trump does not mean that you have shut up about how powerless the Democrats make you feel.

RNB: Do you really think Rich Puchalsky cares about the people whose human rights have been abused?

I know you don’t care.

RNB: Wilder, your voting for Clinton to defeat Trump does not mean that you have shut up about how powerless the Democrats make you feel.

I am not going to vote for Clinton. (Or, Trump.)

I also am not going to comment relentlessly and tendentiously.

DWS has lost the power that a Chair has recently had to choose who writes the Party platform. The comment about ‘wimmin’ is gratuitous and revealing.

“That would be the progressive force for wimmin whose chairman champions states rights protections for payday lenders”

Raymond Williams: To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

Well, at least I can credit you with absurdly unconvincing arguments for despair.

@336

“Raymond Williams: To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”

I don’t think Raymond Williams thought ‘making hope possible’ required people to put all their faith in Harold Wilson.

@339

At a certain level the likes of C.L.R. James were ‘culturally conservative’, but in some circumstances demanding that the standards and ethos of late-19th century public schools be extended to all is extremely radical politically.

“I don’t think Raymond Williams thought ‘making hope possible’ required people to put all their faith in Harold Wilson.”

Has anyone suggested putting all faith in Harold Wilson or Hillary Clinton?

I’m sure Raymond Williams didn’t put all his faith in Winston Churchill, yet he enlisted in Churchills army to fight Hitler. That’s because he was a grownup who didn’t think sulking when the choices are suboptimal was a sensible path.

That’s because he was a grownup who didn’t think sulking when the choices are suboptimal was a sensible path.

Nevertheless, as a politician you want everyone voting for you, even the childish. Woe to Hillary, who does not apply honey to the soother.

“Lastly we’re told that actually opposing torture no matter who is in office is facilitating the Republican / Right hold on power, when we’re not being told that being careful about these claims is silly quibbling. You people really suck in every way.”

Poor Rich! Life can be hard for an arrogant prig! Perhaps it would help to acknowledge that some choices we’re offered are better than others, without being at the same time perfect; and that when people agree with you on the principle, it’s poor tactics to shit on them for not measuring up entirely to your exacting standards; and that if you want to spend your energy on uncharitable reading, you should expect that people won’t have much charity for your own scribblings.

“So Trump equals Hitler. I guess it’s a wrap.”

How do you distinguish Hitler from Churchill or FDR? They all prosecuted “modern war”, which according to you necessarily involves torture. All of them had internment camps. All had secret police and vast armies and killed masses of civilians from the skies. All the same, eh?

Ze K @318

In your hypothetical example, where you’re hypothetically a contract killer, you should be thinking about whether that’s a good occupation to be in. It would seem, hypothetically, important to know why the hypothetical version of you who has taken up that occupation has done so and is not abandoning it. In the hypothetical scenario, it seems massively unlikely to me that the reason you are not reflecting on the merits (or lack of them) of your choice of occupation is that you are being distracted from it by your hypothetical associates disagreeing with you about methods of hypothetical body disposal.

Similarly, I agree that it would be a good thing if the US reconsidered the merits of its whole approach to foreign policy; but the reason this is not happening is not because people are being distracted from the issue by arguments about torture.

Also, it’s rude to barge into an existing discussion to announce that the participants are wrong to be discussing their topic because it’s not as important as the topic you propose for discussion, and it’s still rude even if your topic definitely is more important.

Anarcissie @320

The choice faced by France was not a choice between two courses of action, one of which was likely to be followed by atrocities while the other was unlikely to be followed by atrocities. The choice was between two courses of action, both of which were likely to be followed by atrocities. As a matter of fact, what happened was that first France tried to retain control of Algeria, and atrocities followed, and then France ceased trying to retain control of Algeria, and atrocities followed.

If you argue that France should never have tried to retain control of Algeria and should have renounced control as soon as violence began there, I am inclined to agree with you. However, if you base your argument on the contention that any choice which is followed by atrocities must be wrong, I think that line of reasoning is dubious.

J-D 05.31.16 at 2:02 am @ 352 —
‘Mathieu’ was speaking in a context where some of his countrymen, believing that France was a rational and civilized country, had taken exception to the methods used to suppress the revolt in Algeria. In his succinct, elegant little speech (scene 133 in the script) he points out that almost everyone in France, including the Left, had supported the war, and that the war had certain consequences. However, he could have been speaking to Americans, except that the French just wanted to control Algeria, the Americans (most of them, apparently) want to control the world, and seem to care a lot less about being rational and civilized.

I vainly dragged in ‘Mathieu’ because Layman @ 305 said there was a way of conducting a war without the use of torture. This is part of a system of delusions that help perpetuate the violent sociopathy of our great leaders, which I hope you will not require me to expand upon.

Matheiu’s speech has all the persuasive force one might expect of a glib excuse presented by a fictional character in a horrible propaganda movie, but I confess to being unpersuaded still.

I’m not a Ennio Morricone fan, sue me.

It’s actually a good film as cinema, but lame history. Too romantic.

—The army resorted to torture on a systematic scale to extract information that included the ‘disappearance’ of some 3,024 prisoners. Yet, there is no doubt that this repression strengthened support for the FLN. Out of the Casbah’s total population of 80,000, between thirty and forty per cent of its active male population was arrested at one stage or another, and in truth this had always been part of the FLN’s strategy. In pulling the trigger and letting the French react, it was unleashing a process of violence that would force the Algerian population full-square behind the FLN. — https://www.opendemocracy.net/martin-evans/battle-of-algiers-historical-truth-and-filmic-representation

Perhaps Matheiu was – gasp – wrong!

Ze K @361

Would it have been better if I had written ‘Your opinion weighed and found wanting’?

Ze K @363

Your intriguingly cryptic reference to peculiarities of my online persona causes me to reflect that I will never have your kind of online persona — but that’s a good thing, isn’t it? nobody would want more than one.

Anarcissie @366

Firstly, there are many things that have been done in the course of prosecuting wars which have not been necessary to carry on the war and which have not been inevitable concomitants of war. To take a specific example, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War was neither necessary to carry on the war nor an inevitable concomitant of war. To endorse the US prosecution of the Second World War and yet to object to the internment of Japanese Americans was (or would have been) neither naïve nor hypocritical. A little more generally, the use of nuclear weapons is in the same category.

Secondly, there are more general categories of negative consequences which cannot be eliminated from warfare but which it is sometimes feasible to reduce. Very generally, this is true of all kinds of death, injury, and damage. Generals make plans which they know are certain to result in some fatalities among their own troops, yet (if they’re any good at their job) they aim to minimise the number, and this is, again, neither naïve nor hypocritical. It is also neither neither naïve nor hypocritical to seek to minimise non-combatant casualties (although it isn’t always done, and not everybody would agree that minimising non-combatant casualties is more important than minimising combatant casualties). More specifically, there are rules which either prohibit or restrict particular kinds of conduct in war. Breaches of this kind of rule are a typical part of the charges in war crimes trials. Where there are rules, it is always to be expected that there will be breaches of rules. Yet this does not mean that it is naïve or hypocritical to make rules, to give instructions for compliance, to attempt to enforce them, or to seek to minimise breaches.

I don’t know how you arrive at your conclusion that both Trump and Clinton are very likely to start or seriously exacerbate at least one war. If you could explain that it might suggest some basis for comparing the probabilities. However, even if it were somehow demonstrated that those specific probabilities are equal, that would not be sufficient to establish the more general conclusion that there will be no significant difference between the experience of people of the US (and of the world) under a Republican President for the next four years and their experience under a Democratic President.

“Hmm. How about this: a continuation of the current trajectory (i.e. Clinton) leads, predictably, to a global disaster, while any attempt to break the trajectory (e.g. Trump) is stochastic in nature.”

As noted before: the only way to find a logical cohesion in the US “left” is to recognize that the organizing principle is “Republicans/Right should be in power”.

J-D 06.01.16 at 1:45 am @ 367 —
Yes, wars sometimes have to be fought. Yes, some of the unpleasant aspects of a war (‘shock and awe’) might be reduced, if anybody wanted to reduce them. These assertions don’t change the fact that warfare inevitably brings about murder, mutilation, terror, torture, gross destruction of livelihood and infrastructure, disease, famine, degradation, etc. etc. etc. and for this reason a moral, rational person would struggle mightily to avoid starting a war, not start one or support starting one for no good reason other than political advancement — and then crow about it. Right?

‘I don’t know how you arrive at your conclusion that both Trump and Clinton are very likely to start or seriously exacerbate at least one war. If you could explain that it might suggest some basis for comparing the probabilities.’

We already know about Clinton’s record and connections. Clearly, a vote for Clinton is a vote to start a war or ramp up one of those currently running. In the case of Trump, we have no record and a set of contradictory statements and associations. Voting for Trump might seem to be like flipping a coin. But Trump’s style of bullying and blustering, if continued in presidential office, will encounter far tougher people than weaselly American politicians and real estate moguls, people who may not ‘make a deal’ but tell him to put up or shut up, like the leaders of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, and several other states and groups. In this context ‘put up’ means play war, and play war often means actually go to war, with the consequences I have so tediously and uselessly described already. A Trump victory is also likely to set aside the cool thuggery of our present leadership with some sort of stupid febrile nationalism, tempting to exploit, difficult to manage.

I think the idea that Trump would be an isolationist, or start fewer wars than HRC, is wishful thinking. If your primary concern is anti-imperialism then I understand the need for fantasy in light of your choices but we all have to face reality at some point; he is a bellicose buffoon with a hair-trigger temper. It is hard for me to understand how anyone could look at his disposition and conclude otherwise. The only silver lining of a Trump presidency is that the American public will learn a whole lot more geography.

First of all I don’t think much stock should be put in the opinions of neoconservative leaders. Second of all, I’m not sure which neocons specifically you’re referring to. The last I checked they did not express any warmth towards Hillary. Bill Kristol for example said that Hillary would “be a dutiful chaperone of further American decline.” Cheney says he’ll vote for Trump. Kagan says he’ll vote for Hillary but in the context of an article where he doesn’t mention foreign policy at all and instead condemns the Republican party for bigotry + know-nothingness at home. Which I think leads naturally into point three which is that smart projection of American power is inconsistent with the kind of thoughtless, uneducated lashing out that I would anticipate from Trump. This is a nuanced point but important enough to pay attention I think: you can be a neoconservative and not be in favor of the candidate destined to start the most wars. That is because you are not just a blind warmonger but someone who believes might can be used to push American interests. Smart foreign policy takes precedence over bellicosity.

Just look at Trump’s constituency. There is zero concern for foreign lives. These people who want to deport millions of people are the same people who hate the Iran deal and want to drop bombs all over the Middle East. More war is one of the few Republican tenants that the base agrees upon. I don’t believe that the entire party has suddenly converted to a policy of careful restraint or smart isolationism. The moment there’s an opportunity they will be braying for foreign blood. Say what you will about Hillary, the Democratic base is at least split on the question and she will not face the same single-minded push to war that POTUS Trump would.

(I kinda secretly suspect that a lot of leftist cautious approval of Trump’s foreign policy has to do w/ a fantasy about his Israel policy. Much like the white supremacist right they have taken his claims of supposedly neutrality to mean that he would stick it to the Jews, and ignored statements to the contrary (like above about the settlements, or in his AIPAC speech). Any amount of new US entanglements may be justified as long as he shames Bibi. I think this is confusion, though, predicated on wishful thinking – Trump will get along great with Bibi much as he’ll get along great with Putin. They’re all of a type.) (Sorry if this does not describe you – I admit that this is a very tendentious argument based mostly on my gut feeling and maybe half a dozen conversations with hardcore Israel critics who seem to surprisingly approve of Trump up until I show them that he’s more pro-settlements than even that she-devil Hillary.)

Ze K 06.01.16 at 4:51 pm
‘That was before the neocons seized control of the government…’

If we’re talking about war, imperialism, foreign affairs in general, interest in leading or dominating the world goes back at least to Wilson, and actual practice began not later than the World War 2 era. There’s not much neo in the con. Like the plutocracy, it’s politically and culturally institutionalized, another ‘vampire squid’ which will be very difficult to get rid of. This consideration adds to my doubt that Trump will be less warlike than Clinton, because trillions of dollars, great estates, and the very highest seats and tools of power are at stake, and a mere president is not going to be allowed to turn over the table from which so many feast. It seems obvious that whoever tries to do so will almost certainly be neutralized or removed.

I don’t see any way to rationally predict which candidate will cause more deaths due to war. HRC has a worse record (since Trump has none); Trump has worse rhetoric. HRC is more predictable, but she’s predictably bad.

As I’ve written elsewhere in these threads HRC is better from a left point of view because Presidents are constrained to some extent by their bases, and the Democratic base is further to the left in America than the GOP base. That really has nothing to do with who HRC or Trump are as individuals. If we have to consider their individual impact on policy, HRC is better if only because she’s not a global warming denier, Trump is, and that’s the most important problem we have right now. But this really comes down to the coalition/base again.

The focus on individual voting is meaningless. No individual vote matters, and the people who pretend that it does matter are just looking for cheap moral indignation. Here’s that link again.

I really do hope that the anonymous pro-HRC people here are paid professional trolls for David Brock, because the alternative is that they are a liability to the cause that they profess to support in a way that adds yet another annoyance to their already annoying qualities.

RP: No individual vote matters, and the people who pretend that it does matter are just looking for cheap moral indignation.

There is a legitimizing function too, where people are herded into identifying tribally with one half of a dichotomy by the two-party system*. The “cheap moral indignation” is just a means to an end — an emotionally resonant moral handle to pull. That’s related to controlling mass behaviors, including but hardly limited to voting. I like the “herding” metaphor not just for its pejorative flavor, but because the cowboys cannot really control the movement of the herd with precise assurance in all circumstances and they are always stuck by serial autocorrelation in starting from wherever the herd is at the beginning of this particular cattle drive.

On the global warming front, HRC’s base (herd) is starting from a better place, but it is certainly possible to argue that Trump is better positioned to act, if he chooses to, as Nixon was in a better position to go to China. That’s the kind of argument that makes these kinds of projections such existential black holes. And, no I am not fantasizing that Trump will have an epiphany — what I do recognize is that Trump is not particularly attached to anything that he says. That’s part of what makes him an effective con man and demagogue; it frees him to say things that people respond to.

My working hypothesis is that Clinton will win the general election rather easily, because Trump, who can barely garner the support of a plurality of one Party will not be able to shed the animosities he generated saying provocative and offensive things to attract Republican support and because the buffoonish aspects of his self-presentation will seem too risky for many voters.

But, I am willing to entertain the possibility that Clinton really is the terrible candidate she appears to be and that of the two of them, Trump’s . . . flexibility . . . will mean that he is better able to “pivot” as they say. My working hypothesis was reinforced in 2012 by the evidence that Obama could run a low-risk campaign on small margins — among the smallest winning popular vote margins ever in a Presidential election. That was a remarkable tribute to campaign technologies of manipulation; of course, Romney was a suspiciously well-suited opponent. But, Obama has skills and self-discipline, both personal and organizational, that Clinton seems to lack. My working hypothesis is that Trump is an even worse general election candidate than Romney, so Clinton does not have nearly the challenge Obama faced, but maybe I’m wrong.

Clinton could win, but be so damaged by Trump’s power to ridicule and her own campaign’s ham-handed efforts to corral Sanders’ supporters that her effectiveness as President will be less than zero. The voting could matter less than the other, cultural effects of campaign tactics on political tribal identifications, legitimacy, participation, expectations and so on, in determining the ultimate “outcome” of the election in terms of how the country is governed and the U.S. makes its way on the global stage. And, again, projecting consequences runs into one of those existential blackholes.

* Too much to go into in a comment, but strictly speaking, two-party systems tend to produce not a two-way division, but a three-way division that is resolved by excluding or subordinating one part from political power. At the moment, in U.S. politics, that means what we here at CT laughably call “the left” are subordinated to the conservative neoliberal politics of Clinton.

Clinton could win, but be so damaged by Trump’s power to ridicule and her own campaign’s ham-handed efforts to corral Sanders’ supporters

I’d keep in mind that the blowhards in the Sanders camp will likely have as much effect on the general election as the blowhards in the Clinton camp did when they were upended by Obama. That is, none. What’s to be hoped is that they have an effect on the platform.

If competing campaigns so perfectly neutralize each other’s efforts in pursuit of the legendary median voter, then it all comes down to GOTV. But, then don’t competing GOTV efforts just neutralize each other as well?

Why would they? Voter participation sucks.

The Temporary Name: “And yet get-out-the-vote efforts are meaningful.”

If you look at the linked post in #390 at “Here’s that link again,” that’s pretty much what it says.

BW: “Clinton could win, but . . . be . . . damaged by . . . her own campaign’s ham-handed efforts to corral Sanders’ supporters . . .[in] her effectiveness as President”

TN: I’d keep in mind that the blowhards in the Sanders camp will likely have as much effect on the general election as the blowhards in the Clinton camp did when they were upended by Obama.

awy: this reflexive need to blame the clinton campaign for the behavior of sanders people is hilarious.

It is the Clinton campaign’s job to get Sanders’ supporters to vote for her in the general election and to be inclined to support her Presidency after. Expressing hostility and condescension toward Sanders’ supporters is not a wise course. How Sanders’ supporters behave should never be an issue, since they have no power; everything they do should be greeted with understanding, forgiveness and love, sweet love by the Clinton people — anything else is political malpractice.

“I seem to recall that in 2000, Gore was supposed to be the interventionist and Bush the isolationist.”

Only the “left” Nader apologists made that claim.

root_e: “Which is why the right has spent so much money on voter suppression.”

Yes, voter suppression is all about individual voting. There’s this one person, and the GOP plots out how to suppress that person’s vote. It’s not at all something that affects a whole class of people, enough of them to make a difference.

You can’t read, can’t think, can’t argue, can’t do much of anything apparently.

bruce wilder 06.02.16 at 12:07 am @ 401:
‘It is the Clinton campaign’s job to get Sanders’ supporters to vote for her in the general election and to be inclined to support her Presidency after.’

From what I’ve been reading lately, the Clinton campaign’s current concept of its job is to identify Sanders and his supporters as the reason they’re going to lose in November. Now, I realize that all that is available to me is outer-darkness pundit puffballery, but there is a lot of that stuff around and it might have some vague connection with reality. In that case no effort need be made to draw in the aforesaid supporters or their heresiarch.

Romney’s whole campaign was a forlorn hope.

I think so and thought so at the time, given that he was the only one in a field of clowns who were barely sane. Then this year happened!

In any case, the popular vote was won by six million on voter turnout of 54.9% of lazy-ass voters.

I don’t think it’s realistic that your GOTV effort could put an extra six million votes into play, but it seems to be an age of miracles.

And “blowhards in the Sanders camp” aren’t the issue.

Yes, I think they’re an outsized Thing On The Internet, like libertarians, and with less clout. Most people who voted for Sanders in primaries aren’t weirdos like us who hash all this crap out endlessly, and they’ve moved on and will vote for the Democrat against the obviously more odious Trump.

On the platform, though, that stuff is supposed to represent votes. Cynical politicians (and maybe the fantasy good politician, wherever that person might be) want those votes and might actually cater to the constituencies the platform represents.

steven johnson (@371) quotes me and responds, as follows:

‘J-D@369 “We’re not on a trajectory…” No, none of the candidates, not Trump, not Clinton and not Sanders will address the trajectory’

No, the reason no candidate will ‘address’ (whatever that means) the alleged trajectory is that there is no trajectory.

In the same comment, steven johnson quotes and respond to Ze K as follows:

‘Ze K@368 “How about this: a continuation of the current trajectory (i.e. Clinton) leads, predictably, to a global disaster, while any attempt to break the trajectory (e.g. Trump) is stochastic in nature.”

‘If you took yourself seriously, wouldn’t you at some point say what the trajectory led to?’

If either of you took what you’re writing seriously, wouldn’t you chart the series of points on this alleged trajectory?

bruce wilder @389
‘The past has imparted great momentum to a system that is moving rapidly forward even as it is falling unimpeded and unguided to ground.’

If that’s an apt metaphor for the current state of the world, it’s an equally apt metaphor for every period in human history; it tells us nothing specific to the present.

J-D 06.02.16 at 5:50 am @ 412 —
I tried — vainly, I see — to avoid quibbles about marginal cases, like the US invasion of Grenada, by mentioning size and duration. Large, serious wars like the invasion of Iraq in 2002 are inevitably going to result in numerous atrocities, as I said. Choosing to embark on such a war, other than in last-resort extremity, is freely choosing to commit those atrocities. That is why the charter of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials defined starting a war as a war crime independent of the particular, specific atrocities committed. Voluntarily supporting those who do such things is making oneself an accomplice. If someone in your neighborhood went around killing, mutilating, torturing, terrorizing, robbing, raping, and looting other people, you would probably think something ought to be done to restrain them. But if they do their thing in Washington, D.C., or some hapless foreign country, many of my fellow citizens seem to think they should be celebrated and elected.

H. R. Clinton did not start any wars I know about because she did not have the power. However, she has been an enthusiastic and sometimes crucial supporter of those that came along in recent decades. It seems very likely, then, that given the power, she will start new ones, or expand existing ones. Why not?

The Temporary Name 06.02.16 at 2:39 pm @ 417 —
I don’t believe Bush II could have gotten Iraq 2003 started without getting a lot of important Democrats on board. Clinton was one of those people. She was also said to have strongly pushed Libya 2011. (Conceded, the story appeared in The New York Times, but a lot of people seem to believe it.)

Do I really have to recite these items? I thought they were common knowledge. Or do you think they are fables?

What Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders did support was the sanctions on Iraq after the first war; neither reckoned with the human costs on the Iraqi people. Sanders voted for the first Iraq Regime Change Act, and Clinton clearly warned Bush not to misuse the authority the Senate gave him to go to War. If I had to guess, I would guess that HRC as President would not have made the decision to occupy Iraq but continued the murderous sanctions that her husband imposed and that had bipartisan support.

Bernie Sanders who supported the bombing in Serbia as had the Clintons sponsored a Senate resolution that expressed support for what the Security Council had and would authorize in Libya. Trump called for bombing in Libya too.

Where perhaps Clinton was different is in the military support she wanted to provide the Free Syrian Army through a no-fly zone. Obama ruled against this. This was not a call for troops on the ground. But it is where Clinton seemed more hawkish than Obama and probably Sanders, and it is here where she could be challenged. Mind you, it is a challenge she would most happily accept, given what she perceives as the consequences of having left Assad in power. It has been a distraction to focus on Libya as where her foreign policy proved more hawkish than Sander’s or Trump’s. It wasn’t in this case. But her preference for supporting the Free Syrian army does seem to distinguish her as more hawkish. For reasons I do not understand Sanders never made this an issue in the nomination race.

Perhaps except in the case of Afghanistan, Clinton has ruled out putting a lot of troops on the ground except for a few hundred advisers. Sanders seems to have the same position on Afghanistan as Clinton; at least he has done nothing to distinguish himself here. He too supports the drone warfare that Obama has carried out against the Taliban.

Trump has called for seizing the oil in Iraq after a bombing campaign. As Col. Mansoor has pointed out that oil is in southern Iraq where ISIS does not have a strong hold. Trump’s plan would be a declaration of war on the Iraqi people.

She was opposed to the surge in Iraq as a Senator, and worked with Gates to withdraw troops from Iraq. She did not recognize the coup in Honduras such because she made the calculation that the sanctions she would be duty-bound to put in place would be worse for the Honduran people. It seems however that she just did not want to bothered with the problem given the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan and turned a blind eye to what had happened in Honduras. She has been hostile to the Assad regime, more hostile than Obama. And she will argue that Obama was not hostile enough, though the opportunity for supporting the Free Syrian Army has now disappeared. And it’s not clear what she proposes to do in Syria today. Her main foreign policy adviser is the person who seems to have done most of the heavy lifting in the Iran deal, Jake Sullivan.

My biggest concern is that Clinton will be willing to willing fight a proxy war for US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, such as the one against Assad, without such military action being in the interest of the Syrians or Americans.

Anarcissie 06.02.16 at 3:10 pm
Do I really have to recite these items?

Yes, because you haven’t made a case that she was crucial to any of it. Nor has anyone else of course. I’m happy to be on board with fearing her foreign policy – I fear it! – but bullshit doesn’t help.

The Temporary Name 06.02.16 at 4:31 pm @ 427 —
Well, of course, all politics is ‘bullshit’ in that mathematical proofs about it are not available to us, but it seems we have to deal with it anyway. Obviously, anything I say about cruciality is merely an opinion, and you know what they say about opinions.

No, Sanders voters aren’t more conservative than Clinton voters. Here’s the data.
By Christopher Hare and Robert Lupton

I would think that one of the reasons Sanders does better than Clinton in head-to-head polls with Trump is that he is attracting more Republican cross-over votes who thinks he sounds like he wants to cut off trade with poor countries, is more conservative on immigration, and wants to let a reckless financial sector go bankrupt. I don’t consider these progressive positions, but others may disagree. So I think it distorts things to completely exclude those Republican leaners who would vote for him over Clinton; some of them would vote for him over Trump too, and probably already have.

. . . you haven’t made a case that she was crucial to any of it.

Was anyone crucial to any of it?

You can lose all sense of the pattern, if you move in closely enough to see the dots in a newspaper photo. There are literally tens of thousands of people involved in making U.S. foreign policy in Congress, in the military, in various “think tanks” and lobbying groups, at State, Defense and the Intelligence agencies, at New York investment banks and corporate headquarters. The scale of the thing is something we do not have adequate language or literary templates for, which is why some of us use labels like neoliberal and neocon. But, then, we get called out for the use of labels or the pedantry, say, of recalling the role of the Project for a New American Century in gestating the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq when someone else wants to explain that it wasn’t about oil, it was about the younger Bush’s Oedipal issues or some other fatuous thesis.

So, yeah, Hillary Clinton has been only a face in a very large crowd of mostly faceless people and if she has sometimes made an effort to place herself near the front of the moving mass, it is more a mark of her ambition for a leadership role than that she was ever conducting the orchestra let alone orchestrating the symphony.

I once made my way thru the Senate speech where she explained her Iraq War vote before casting it, and she said a lot of sensible things and articulated reasons for caution; a cynic would say she was apparently hedging her bet. Like most politicians, I suppose, she hedges her bets — no surprise there. She wasn’t the crucial vote on Iraq and she knew that, and she may well have feared that if the Iraq reconstruction had gone well, a history of opposition to a successful and popular program would cast a dark shadow on her aspirations. George H. W. Bush’s brief period of popular acclaim must have been a vivid memory. It didn’t turn out that way, of course, which suggests both her policy and political judgment was poor. She now admits she made a mistake, but isn’t too clear on the nature of that mistake; her enthusiasm for Libya suggests her judgment has not improved with experience.

I embraced the metaphor, “trajectory”, above. Behind that metaphor is the sense that policy emerges from politics with tens and hundreds of thousands of hands coordinated into a kind of machine that moves forward doing what it does. How people near the top of the governing mechanisms, in the White House, the Departments, in the communities of policy entrepreneurs and political operatives understand their options and the consequences of their interventions in the working of the machinery can be crucial, but the machinery will mostly move of its own accord on established patterns of thought and habits of operational doctrine.

The more sophisticated critiques of U.S. foreign policy are usually focused on the inertia of the machine, its habits and structure and design, not the particular wilful acts of its civilian political leadership — though, of course, those interact. Both the dramatic gestures from the top and the doctrines and habits of the machine interact most critically with an understanding of how political societies work, since ultimately the interventions depend for strategic effect on the dynamics of the societies they disrupt.

George W Bush and his Administration was rightly criticized, in my opinion, for lying their way into the Iraq invasion, for absurdly inadequate planning for the aftermath and reconstruction, for rampant corruption in reconstruction efforts, for abusing the system of military reserves and the use of private military contractors to supply personnel, and so on. Hillary Clinton has had ample opportunity to articulate detailed criticisms and distance herself from this kind of malfeasance, to propose military reforms and so on. She has done very little that I can see, beyond sound-bite statements: “It was a mistake.” and the like. She opposed to GWB’s Surge, but then conceded that “it worked” and was part of Obama’s decision to repeat that pseudo-strategy in Afganistan, ramping up the American death toll.

I am not personally a fan of laissez faire in economics or foreign policy, though embracing some principle of non-intervention is a common response of people who are rightly and correctly dismayed by the complexity of political societies or the complexity of the massive U.S. military and international corporate economic system, which becomes the instrument of intervention.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment showed its moral bankruptcy in the 1980s and 1990s in the evolving doctrine of imposing international economic sanctions. Clinton has been tagged by Madeleine Albright affirming the cost-benefits of Iraq sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands during her husband’s administration. The palsy of the U.S. military and intelligence establishments, which equip, train, and advise on autopilot and repeatedly to no good effect is apparent; Clinton has only to take notice publicly, but she doesn’t. It is as much these sins of omission as finding her fingerprints on a particular pistol that lead me to think she does not intend to try to do things much differently, despite the grudging concession of particular mistakes.

The U.S. is in its 15th year in Afghanistan and has been nearly that long in Iraq and now pretends to have withdrawn from both those benighted countries while continuing massive military operations. If Clinton is promising to deviate from this pattern of draining away American prestige and resources in futile, costly and destructive interventions, I am sorry I have missed it.

Was anyone crucial to any of it?

Well yeah.

Q: Was anyone crucial to any of it?

TNN: Well yeah.

Then, let’s hang ’em.

“My biggest concern is that Clinton will be willing to willing fight a proxy war for US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, such as the one against Assad, without such military action being in the interest of the Syrians or Americans.”

If it makes you feel better I think neither the Israelis or the Saudis want the US to fight a proxy war for them in Syria because the status quo is their ideal circumstance (Hezbollah, Assad and Iran all bleeding resources and manpower with no end in sight) and US involvement could only hasten the end of the war.

Clinton, alongside Robert Gates, played a key role in the “boxing in” of Obama during the 2009 debate on troop deployment into Afghanistan (the so called ‘surge’). Her hawkishness on this decision is noted in the (sparse) academic literature on this as being out of character for a Secretary of State.

See:

‘Obama’s Surge: A Bureaucratic Politics Analysis of the Decision to Order a Troop Surge in the Afghanistan War’ – Kevin Marsh; 2014

also-

How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/world/asia/06reconstruct.html
[With Mr. Biden leading the skeptics, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen increasingly aligned behind a more robust force. Mrs. Clinton wanted to make sure she was a formidable player in the process.

…

“There was no consensus yet on troop numbers, however, so Mr. Obama called a smaller group of advisers together on Oct. 26 to finally press Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates. Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she was comfortable with General McChrystal’s request for 40,000 troops or something close to it; Mr. Gates also favored a big force.
Mr. Obama was leery.”]

—

In addition, when Obama is contemplating drawing-down that same surge (in 2011), he notably excludes not just the generals from the decision making, but also largely excludes Clinton and Gates. By my reading, this is strong evidence for the contention that HRC exerted significant pressure on Obama in the initial decision, to the point that he would exclude her from much of the decision making process in the future.

Charting Obama’s Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/us/obamas-journey-to-reshape-afghanistan-war.html

[“By early 2011, Mr. Obama had seen enough. He told his staff to arrange a speedy, orderly exit from Afghanistan. This time there would be no announced national security meetings, no debates with the generals. ” …
“Even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were left out until the final six weeks.”]

—

We all know that HRC is a hawk – arguably among the most hawkish of our current crop of Democratic politicians. Yet the eagerness with which certain liberals jump to defend that hawkishness is nearly as disconcerting as her foreign policy record itself (note: hyperbole). The whole argument for #teamBlue is that the left will be better positioned to pressure a Dem president rather than a Republican one. But if the majority of her base is so willing to forget and/or apologize for HRC’s past errors, this whole argument collapses. (If you want to make a point about pragmatism, it helps if one is not so obviously tribal about it).

HRC has sold herself on the campaign trail as a continuation of Obama’s policies, but behind closed doors as Sec. of State, her most consistent ally in Obama’s cabinet was Robert Gates, a republican Defense Secretary. The two of them frequently clashed with Obama, and even more often with Biden, on issues of foreign affairs. At times, HRC was even more hawkish than Gates himself, as in the case of Libya, and (arguably) with respect to Syria as well.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/ex-defense-secretary-gates-hillary-clinton-more-hawkish-president-obama

When excluding Republican voters, Sanders supporters seem to think more than Clinton supporters that it’s harder to climb the economic ladder. Compared to when? Eight years ago? How can one say that there is less economic opportunity now than there was before the Obama Administration?

“How can one say that there is less economic opportunity now than there was before the Obama Administration?”

How could one say otherwise? Economic opportunity has been declining since the Reagan revolution. It’s a decades-long trend, in which income and wealth are transferred to the top, at the expense of everyone else, as a result globalization and to a great extent by design. The structural and political drivers cannot be halted without, well, a revolutionary change in income redistribution. Whatever else you think of Obama – and I think on balance he has been a good-to-great President given the context in which he’s served – he has not delivered that revolution.

BW: “Very little about what the U.S. has been doing in the Mideast has made a lick of sense in 15 years. ”

It makes sense as destabilization. If you assumed that the goal of U.S. policy was to destroy civil society in the Middle East so that no power there could resist resource extraction and raise prices a la the oil shock of the 70s, then everything kind of follows, including getting the Saudis to assist in their own way and making sure that their monarchy is beholden to the only force that can keep a ruling monarchy in existence these days. Alternatively it’s all one giant mess of imperial overreach and foolishness that isn’t so foolish because millions of people have died. I don’t think it’s really important to distinguish between one of these cases and the other because they pretty much work out the same. Pakistan and Afghanistan fit in either case.

Layman, I don’t understand how anyone can say that it has become more difficult to climb the economic ladder over the last years.

The cost of education is one such difficulty.

The possibility of having a job after you finish your education should be another consideration. And there are a lot more people in the labor market than beginning college, so overall people should find that things have improved over the last 8 years. To say otherwise I think expresses a certain level of nihilism or disgruntlement, not active support for social democracy. Achen and Bartels may be right about a significant portion of Sanders’s supporters.

RNB: “Layman, I don’t understand how anyone can say that it has become more difficult to climb the economic ladder over the last years.”

There’s a lot of information available about declining or stagnant upward economic mobility. This is Wikipedia, but it will link you to a lot of material. e.g. studies by Pew, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States

The key findings seem to be that what matters most is the income of one’s parents, and that children of lower-income parents do not themselves escape from low-income status with anything like the frequency with which they did up until the 70s.

Rich Puchalsky @ 452: It makes sense as destabilization.

What? You don’t realize that it wasn’t about the oil? It was the younger Bush’s oedipal complex! C’mon everyone knows it’s a Clash of Civilizations! Didn’t you get your program, where the differences between Shia and Sunni going back hundreds of years are pedantically explained? They hate us for our freedoms! And, Bill Cosby re-runs on satellite teevee. William Safire said Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda and there was smoking gun evidence that he was behind 9/11. Also, WMD!

And, we will win and freedom will prevail, if we just find the will to stay the course. We just need to find the moderate good guys and advise, train and equip the hell out of them. It worked with the mujahadeen — look how they drove the Soviets out and Afghanistan in the dark ages, all in less than a decade. These are proven techniques. Now enhanced with satellite imagery.

And bomb! We need to drop lots and lots of freedom bombs! “NATO aircraft dropped only about 1,000 bombs in Afghanistan in 2015, very few against the Taliban. That was a fivefold reduction from the war’s peak level of activity. So far, 2016 looks similar, with 300 bombs dropped in the first three months. These figures stand in contrast to what we are doing in Iraq and Syria. According to Pentagon data, we dropped 6,000 bombs there in 2014, almost 30,000 in 2015, and almost 7,000 in the first three months of this year.” Statistical proof of the efficacy of air power from a former CIA director convicted for disclosing classified information to his mistress — could there be a more trustworthy source for such an argument than the architect of the wildly successful Surgeâ„¢ ?

Rich Puchalsky @ 452: It makes sense as destabilization.

It makes sense in an “as if” kind of way, where we can see the outlines of someone’s purposes emerging from the chaos and dust clouds of rationalizations if we stare hard enough. And, that pattern may identify the corrupt machinations of some participants in policy-making, to the extent that the structures of policy-making give corrupt machinations sufficient scope.

I’ve always found cackling evil to be more reassuring than the level of stupidity that it would take to still actually believe in this against all evidence.

There’s consistency in it.

I tend to believe in the stupidity of the efforts, and consequently live in fear.

I for one am heartened that the Payday Loan Industry, a sector with a proven record of growth, has a seat at the table governing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And, that the Chairperson of the Democratic Party is doing all she can to ensure that the States like Florida, where payday lending is especially important, are able to protect their local industry.

This is 2016: Everyone believes in capitalism

Millennials have a higher opinion of socialism than of capitalism

I hereby award Temporary Name @443 one Twinkie in gratitude for reminding me to dig out the old Galaxie 500 records.

Why’s everybody actin’ funny?
Why’s everybody look so strange?
Why’s everybody look so nasty?
What do I want with all these things?

I love Twinkies! Yet…

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-22/billionaire-owners-twinkie-maker-hostess-reward-themselves-900-million-payday-after-

We have Sanders supporters saying at seemingly 2x the rate than Clinton’s supporters (but not a majority of them) that it’s a great deal *harder* to move up economically. No doubt, it’s very hard to move up economically, but is it getting harder? It would seem that there is a lot more opportunity in the economy for people in general than there was eight years ago. At any rate, other than this, where is the big difference between Sanders’ and Clinton’s supporters other than on the trade issue and perhaps immigration as well? Both camps overwhelmingly favor higher min wages, more govt spending on health care and paid parental leave. Sanders’ supporters are not significantly more left on policy issues than Clinton’s (and may even be to the right if we figure out a way to include those Republican leaning independents who have and would vote for him); so Achen and Bartels’ point still has validity: people are not preferring candidates primarily on policy issues but symbolism and identity.

#477
Obviously you are familiar with sarcasm, but perhaps you only get it when it’s ponderous.

RNB: “It would seem that there is a lot more opportunity in the economy for people in general than there was eight years ago.”

You keep saying this, but I don’t really know why you keep saying it. Point to the things which make you say it, please.

I cannot speak for RNB, but I see a lot of construction where I live in LA, where rent takes a higher percent of median household income than almost anywhere. So, opportunity and oppression side by side — wonder if there might be a relationship?

“Let them eat confetti!”

Worst jobs report in years. 450 k stop even looking for work with an appalling labor participation rate and his majesty from the ivory tower pronounces ‘it would seem’ the poor have every reason to be grateful.

Genius timing and fact-free spewing.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/03/jobs-report-us-election-economy-donald-trump-hillary-clinton

@481 Layman, I think that is an important data point, but so far I think this is more convincing
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/yes-cyclicalists-really-won-bet.html

@RNB, according to your data point, things are still worse than they were 8 years ago.

Of course to say that things have improved on the employment front is not to say that the economy rests on a stable foundation. And it may well be true that the effect of the lesser depression was to make some people drop out of labor market altogether, so that the unemployment rate is higher than official statistics make out. It is still lower than it was in 2009-2010. The official unemployment rate has been falling, and there has been enough tightness for some very modest wage gains, even in the last job reports. Trump of course wants everyone to believe that things are going to hell in a hand basket. But it simply is not true; it has not been getting tougher to get ahead in America in recent years. It remains tough of course.

RNB: “At any rate, it seems that you are reading the workforce participation rate the same way Trump did–as an indication that the unemployment rate in the US is like 40%.”

You should stop trying to read people’s minds, imputing things to them they haven’t said. If I thought the unemployment rate was 40%, I’d say so.

No sharp improvement? Things have been getting harder? Who believes these things? Who wants people to believe these things about the Obama years?

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/yes-cyclicalists-really-won-bet.html

RNB 06.04.16 at 3:13 pm @ 495 —
It’s only anecdotal, and may be a result of the kind of company I keep, or just the vagaries of fashion, but I don’t think I know more than a very few people who think that things have improved in the last ten or twenty years. Moreover there is a good deal of gloom and cynicism among the young about their life prospects. If you have to ask ‘Who believes these things?’ I recommend asking around, especially across the usual caste boundaries. Also I recommend trusting daily life before statistics, at least until you know exactly how the statistics and the underlying data were generated, selected, and filtered.

@RNB, indeed, your link at 496 show that things are worse now than in 2008.

You argue that they’re improving, and that workforce participation is down in part because of demographics, e.g. the retirement of boomers. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that the only cohort for whom participation rates are rising is those at 55+. Labor force participation is not rising for the young, and not rising for people in their thirties or forties.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2016/03/update-labor-force-participation.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/your-money/workers-wages-rebound-while-wall-street-squirms.html
The LFPR data you are using does not account for people going to school which of course Sanders is encouraging and more Social Security disability income checks allowing people to leave the job market.

RNB @ 498

I think you are discounting excessively the extent to which the benefits of recovery have been concentrated and so large swathes of the population have a more negative experience and also the extent to which recovery has simply returned the country to the brittle stagnation of the Bush years. It has been more than 15 years since a majority thought the country was “on the right track” for any sustained period.

That the economy is doing relatively well does shape the character of the dissenting campaigns, but not in a Tocqueville rising expectations way — not that that actually happened in pre-revolutionary France. In historical France, things actually were not getting better; the economy at the tail end of secular growth in international trade that had brought great wealth to a few cities was stagnating, held down by a failure to improve agricultural productivity; long-standing problems festered without any prospect of resolution — Paris was threatened with famine and the state was increasingly feeble, hopelessly understaffed and quick to take recourse to expedients. The absolute monarch was unable to sustain any reform or reformer; the state’s finances were crumbling even as the parasitic tax farmers were building a fantastically elaborate wall to imprison all of Paris as their hostages and the legitimacy of the state was under constant attack from various factions of the Right, jealous of privileges everyone else deeply resented.

There are some dubious analogues in the economic position of the U.S., though it would be easy to exaggerate their intensity. We are far from famine in the U.S., even if large parts of the world are on the precipice. The recent decline in life expectancy is an indication that not all boats are rising. Employment recovered more fully for the old than the young, and as I noted above wages for both the less “skilled” and for recent college graduates — most notably for women — have been declining thru the recovery.

Both Parties have been collaborating in upward redistribution of income for thirty or forty years, and the political system has been demonstrably unresponsive to the interests or concerns of any but the rich and very rich. The income gains of the rich have been the by-products of globalization and financialization of the economy, which followed from the policies of economic de-regulation begun in the Carter and Reagan years. The cash thrown off from dismantling the New Deal and from throttling public investment in infrastructure and education has gone to the top and been “reinvested” in debts and a class of peons in place of what was once the middle class to pay debt service.

Financially this scheme of controlled demolition and neglect of the country’s economic structures ran out of road in 2007 and the politicians have been struggling to preserve the gains of the rich without crashing the system. Policy interest rates were reduced to near-zero and stealth cash flows have been funneled into the financial sector to work off toxic debt and keep asset values inflated. Proposals to increase infrastructure spending or relieve debt burdens have been largely frustrated. The health care sector — one of the few that is growing and provides secure, well-paid employment for blue-collar workers — was shored up with an insurance reform that tries to preserve for-profit insurance.

All three — Clinton, Sanders & Trump — are selling lies, as politicians always must, I suppose, because there’s no way forward that doesn’t screw some group, no sensible reform that will not provoke fierce opposition. Sanders cleverly chose to bumpersticker some policy options that directly address the immediate experience of groups that have and are suffering economically: increase the minimum wage, free college, increase infrastructure spending, etc. And, he promises the positive-sum game of economic growth could pay for these goodies. A lot of billionaires would have to become millionaires to make his program and its logical extensions possible, and he does attack the billionaire class. But, I don’t think he’s likely to highlight how the efficiency of single-payer health care would devastate the bloated health care sector, or how a shrinking financial sector would have to eliminate good-paying jobs.

Clinton is the preservationist in this election and as the sole preservationist, she will get support from the ideological establishments of both Parties. Her program is cautious incrementalism economically and the continued strategy-free aggression of Imperial Collapse abroad. Neither policy has much chance in the long-run, but how far away is the long-run comeuppance I couldn’t say.

I think the vast majority of people have more of a pessimistic instinct regarding the long-term prospects of the country than any understanding. Most people are very short-sighted; they will vote the price of gas, disregarding everything they have heard about global warming. That the economic recovery has advanced as far as it has and the economy appears fairly stable just means that no bright shiny objects or immediate dire fears will dominate the dissatisfaction many people feel about their long-term prospects. There’s still no fora where people — membership organizations or media — where people could deepen their understanding enough that a politician could propose more than a bumpersticker and not immediately lose their interest.

Obama has been lately advocating increases in Social Security benefits and changes in labor law overtime rules — very concrete responses to very real economic problems and responses no doubt calculated to burnish the Democratic brand.

But, deeper problems — global resource limits, climate change and a collapsing ocean ecology — these may require a great deal more mass political education than the current configuration of American politics can sustain. And, the alternative is that the rich, under neoliberal aegis, will fashion a response to their own satisfaction — not likely to be pretty.

RNB: “…you helpfully give us data of LFPR, but you are not correcting for rising college attendance and the humane improvement that more people with serious disabilities are not being forced to work.”

Show me that correction, by age group, please. You’re clearly convinced by it, so you must know what percentage of decline in participation for each age group can be attributed to school or disability.

Also, can we agree that labor participation rates among those 55+ are increasing, not declining; thus that the overall decline can’t be attributed to natural retirement…?

“But the meme that things are getting worse just plays into the Republican handbook of discrediting a reviled black President to discredit government intervention.”

I’m most decidedly not a Republican, not seeking to discredit Obama, don’t revile him, rather admire him greatly, and am an ardent supporter of more government intervention when it comes to addressing economic wellbeing, inequality, opportunity. Yet it should not be necessary to deny the facts in order to make one’s case for more progressive policies.

“To her credit, HRC alone has pushed back against this Republican talking point.”

This is hardly down to courage or altruism. History suggests that her election prospects rest, to a great extent, on the public perception of the state of the economy, and she surely knows this.

Also, too: Agree with BW and Layman.

As you were.

Swath and swathe have a somewhat confused orthography, because two different words have fused together.

Swath can mean the path cut by a scythe. Swath can also denote a bandage. Apparently, the two different meaning reflect two etymologies, swath in the first sense descending from a word for track or trace and in the second sense from a word for wrap or bind.

Swath, in the sense of a bandage, follows the same orthographic template as cloth, clothe, clothes, where the verb ends in e and the plural nouns, cloths and clothes have evolved distinct meanings. This orthographic template has affected the word in its two distinct meanings. Where the sense is “bandage”, the verb claims the e to distinguish itself from the noun. Where the sense is a path or area and there is no related verb, the noun claims the e, in order to distinguish meaning: that is, the ending e helps to indicate that the noun refers to a path, not a bandage.

I used the word in a figurative sense for a large part or trace thru some greatly varied whole, a sense that derives presumably from denoting a path cut by a scythe. Convention calls for spelling this noun, swathe or swathes.

I hope this clears up any confusion as to who has greater mastery of the pedant’s art.

pedants’s s should be pedant’s, obviously.

pedants’s s should be pedant’s, obviously.

It’s like Highlander: there can be only one. Obviously. ;-)

> Provide evidence for your unfounded slur, or crawl back under your rock.

Not the place for this, but, look.

See that “unfounded”? Means you’ve made up your mind about the possibility of the slur’s not being unfounded. If you didn’t know either way, if you were open to being convinced, you wouldn’t think of the slur as being “unfounded” [you’d think of it as being maybe founded or maybe not], so you wouldn’t call the slur “unfounded”. So your mind’s made up. We can tell, even if you haven’t told us; if you thought differently you’d act differently.

But you’re asking for evidence, right? If you were aware that your mind was made up, asking for evidence would be timewasting, so you’d either not bother asking [polite good faith] or try and conceal that your mind is made up [and you wouldn’t be saying “unfounded”, because that gives the game away]. But you’re not doing either; proof-by-contradiction, you must not know.

So. We now know that your mind is made up on the topic — that you’re not going to be entertaining the evidence presented — and also that you don’t even know this yourself.

We now know something about you that you haven’t explicitly told us and which you weren’t even aware of. In one sentence!

Now, I don’t necessarily agree with WB’s categorisation of you as a fascist. But it’s important to realise that people can, legitimately and genuinely, work out all sorts of stuff about you that you don’t realise you’ve told them and often don’t realise is true. And that “I don’t agree with this conclusion about myself” is far from dispositive: we know things about you that you don’t.

And I’ve said all this before. I’m doing this to try and help you, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. Perhaps you’re beyond help.

Sure right. That’s what Hillary Clinton is saying.