Trump and Political Correctness

Seeing as both candidates have historically high unfavorables, the likely scenarios is that each will run as ‘not the other’ with as little positive ideological content as necessary.

For what positive content we may be presented: I don’t foresee ‘PC culture’ being as big of a target for the Trump campaign as ‘globalism’ will be.* I anticipate a lot of the messaging is going to focus on the economy: blaming trade, Dem corruption, and maybe even taxes/debt & deficits. The people concerned about the PC stuff are going to have a louder voice, however – which makes sense given the relevant groups and their concerns.
(ie- lower skill workers hurt by trade deals vs the set of people like the couple in the article who live in SF and are concerned about the finer points of admissions processes at elite colleges).

Additionally, liberals will exercise their own negative partisanship, and focus on the anti-PC types among Trump supporters while generally disregarding the economic angle. The former reinforces the liberal’s self-assurance in them being part of the moral elect, whereas the latter calls attention to their own political failures.

The reaction against identity politics (not equivalent to anti-PC, but overlapping in significant ways) is going to be a much longer game, as the causes are more diverse on a much longer term.

* bracketing of course the significance of this aspect of Trump among the Stormfront set.

The important thing is that while PC is usually an attack on the left, Trump’s using it against the right. The conservative movement has been very heavily policed, certain views will get you purged. When Trump is against PC he means only being able to speak within the pro free-market, limited government, cultural traditionalist, hawkish consensus which has defined the parameters of debate on the right, as much as anything on the left.

Have you read Hawley’s Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism?

That guy in the Atlantic is scary. Took me back to arguments which I thought had been won years, possibly decades, ago. At least, I say arguments – it was more a matter of stating the obvious over and over again…
Our immigration/policing policy isn’t racist, we just want to crack down on illegal immigrants/Black criminals!
“Yes, it is. It is racist.”
I’m shocked you should even say such a thing! We just want to crack down on illegal immigrants/Black criminals!
“No, it’s racist.”
…and repeat.

Mind you, the guy’s not exactly a random apolitical white guy – I particularly liked the way he referred to himself as a Libertarian while also expressing “support for law and order, and an intense dislike of disruptive protests”, not to mention advocating dealing with illegal immigration through the biggest and most intrusive policing operation since the Stasi. I guess those Men. With. Guns! aren’t as scary when they’re only coercing the other guys.

I’m no fan of Trump, but it does seem to me that various commenters so far have nailed it. Trump is going to run on a (hypocritical) anti-trade, anti-globalism platform.
It also dovetails neatly with his messianic (“Only I could negotiate us a better deal”) instincts. The Republicans will swing behind this. Few of them were all that committed to the free-trade malarky in the first place.

Anti-PC functions more as a convenient firebreak regarding his tendency to improvise when speaking and end up saying racist and sexist things.

It’s going to be a negative campaign and, while Hillary has her negatives, Trump has many more – and of a kind that resonates with a large-ish chunk of the right constituency. He’s a construction/casino/hotel magnate -lots of short-changed staff, customers, contractors out there, lots of dodgy tax deals, corruption. USA Today just ran one piece like this, and there will be more. So I’d agree with Lee that the GOP will try to save the furniture, but let the Trump burn. Be interesting to see what they grab at, and how the base reacts.

This seems to go along with what you’re suggesting (although I can’t get myself to believe the headline):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2016/03/21/donald-trump-will-win-in-a-landslide-the-mind-behind-dilbert-explains-why/

What I’ve had confirmed by the 2016 Republican primary.

– 1/3 of the Republican base are racist.
– 1/3 of the Republican base while they may not be personally racist will willing support a racist (does that make them semi-racist).
– 1/3 of the Republican base is shitting their pants because it is now public knowledge that 2/3 of their party are racist or will willing support a racist.

Is that non-PC enough for you.

Clinton is gonna be indicted after the convention. Obama will call for Party Unity behind Biden/Kerry/VP. Sanders voters will feel cheated and stay home, because it will be obvious that Obama et al knew it was coming. Trump will be elected President. Clintonites will put 100% of the blame on Sanders voters.

@Loviator #14
slight correction
1/3 of Republican voters are white supremacists
1/3 of Republican voters are white-christian nationalists
1/3 of Republican voters want lower taxes and cheap labor

A couple of months ago, I played around with Christina Bicchieri’s writings on norms, and wrote something like this.

A lot of people don’t have moral norms against prejudice against non-Americans and American minorities; they could see that other people were empirically conforming to the norms, and many had the belief that others believed that they should be conforming to these norms.

So what Trump does is bring them out of their epistemic ignorance and allows them to discover that so many others, like themselves, were just complying to these norms only because they thought others would comply with them out of a normative commitment.

Trump is a coming out party–Americans again can be confident not to comply with the norms they never valued in the first place.

Trump also holds the “promise” of breaking norms about gender as well.

Is this a big part of his campaign? Yes, I think so.

“But this bubble is going expand, massively, in the vacuum of Trump’s lack of any agenda.”

His agenda consists of two and a half bullet points. One: cutting down on mass immigration from certain parts of the world. Two: doing something about unrestricted free trade. Two and a half: everything else, subject to change.

A helpful guide would be Edward Luttwak, starting from his 1990s books. You can begin with “Why Fascism is the Way of the Future” in the LRB if you haven’t already.

You might want to read Trump’s Playboy interview from 1991. The (anti-)global(ist) trade agenda is already there. On Bullet Point Two, the man’s feelings have been pretty consistent. Even the import tariff proposal is already there.

One could add that these 2.5 points are clouded/shrouded in some vague, semi-mystical “greatness” meta-agenda but I’m not going there.

OK google is turning up a lot on Brimelow in support of Trump. I think this connection will reveal a lot about the nature of Trump’s racist, white nationalist candidacy.

Mark Schmitt (I think) once said: “It’s not what you say about the issues; it’s what the issues say about you.” Trump’s political commitments, to the extent that he has any, are all meant to reflect his racist core. Even among his supporters, I doubt that many think Mexico is going to pay for a wall.

There’s a chance the wheels come off the Trump Train in a spectacular, generally-acknowledged way between now and the election. But probably not. And if not, negative partisanship means that, by November, almost all Republicans will be solidly pro-Trump.

Not sure I buy this. Republicans are politicians after all, and plenty of them see him (right now anyway) as a drag on the ticket. They have votes to earn, and proximity to Trump hurts.

It’s an age of wonders.

A lot of derp in the comment section today…

What do you think? Trump won the nomination because a solid plurality of Republican voters liked him best.

I would point out here that primary turnout is pretty crappy. A solid plurality of Republican voters didn’t bother choosing between Trump or the other denizens of the clown car.

Everyone knows that an emphasis on polite, civil communication, on not deliberately trying to offend others, is the single greatest danger to America. The PC pen is mightier than any sword but Trump’s. His is a short sword, so it’s mightier than short pens, by definition.

Everyone also knows that when we are forced, at gun point, which happens every day in America, to use certain phrases and not others — like “misunderstood freedom fighters” instead of “Godless Islamic terrorist infidels” — we’re giving them nukes to drop on us and kill us all.

Everyone also knows that by calling undocumented workers “undocumented workers,” instead of “killer bee rapists,” we’re just cutting and running and letting those mad terrorist rapists drop nukes on us and kill us all. Even the roaches.

Everyone also knows that Trump will single-handedly put a stop to all of that, because he can fire everyone who does it. And he will. And that’s how to protect our democracy from tyrants and killer hordes of racist Mexican judges, too.

Glen Tomkins @ 19

I thought that was a really insightful comment.

I disagree a bit in regard to your analysis of immigration policy (which made your example distracting for me) and its relation to the rhetoric of controlled messaging, but not what I take to be your main point: the scheme of controlled messaging is to keep policy choice as far away from voters as possible. Most people do not know anything about policy or its relation to politics, and things are kept this way by design.

Trump has not thought about immigration policy nor is he some deeply serious white supremacist racist. He doesn’t care about that stuff. He gets in front of an audience and he goes with what will get him the emotional reaction he wants.

My own judgment is that Trump is the greatest gift the Clinton campaign could hope for. She can organize her electoral coalition around Trump’s repulsiveness and get a comfortable majority of the popular and electoral college vote. That’s my null hypothesis that things are as they have been.

My alternative hypothesis is more along the lines of Scott Adams. (Link provided by Eszter Hargittai @ 12)

Glen Tomkins @ 19 actually has a pretty good analysis of why Trump is unlikely to be able to manage the pivots Scott Adams thinks he’s capable of. As Glen says, the Scottish Play is a tough one and Trump may not grasp the dagger with sufficient style or confidence.

There are two parts to Scott Adams’ thesis though. He thinks Trump is a great conman and communicator. He also thinks Clinton has bad judgement about communication tropes — that she and her team have absolutely terrible instincts.

|-|> is completely understandable in this moment, but it would be a terrible Democratic campaign strategy, and I think Clinton and her campaign may not quite understand all the reasons how and why.

Not to rain on Sanders’ campaign after the big fail, but, objectively, he wasn’t particularly effective as a movement builder — he did get a response that was apparently a big surprise to the political class.

Sanders, not Clinton, got the votes of young women. Here’s why:

If that embed code doesn’t work, here’s a link.
http://www.epi.org/files/charts/img/720.png

The Democratic Party apparatus did a lot to handicap Sanders. Early on, they made sure there were many fewer debates than the Republicans were having, and the debates were deliberately scheduled with an eye to minimizing voter attention. Where they could, as in New York State and in my own California, they got in the way. (Sometimes, as in Puerto Rico, where bad conduct does not affect general election prospects, they went way over the top, cutting turnout by a factor of 10) California’s vote totals as reported this week only modestly topped the 2000 primary where Al Gore was the presumptive nominee before the vote happened. (Honestly, I don’t know how accurate that vote total is, or even how accurate the result — counting takes so long in California, that it is quite possible, Clinton will turn out to have lost the State, which would be a hell of a headline, but I’m presuming the fix is in, and there’s no chance that provisional ballots will be counted or that mail-in ballots will be allowed to affect the outcome.)

@41
Thanks. So there’s no evidence for bruce wilder’s claim that Hillary Clinton “depressed turnout pretty markedly”, then?

As an observer, I often wonder how many of the negative claims by Clinton’s opponents at CT are actually evidence based.

Richard III seems like a better fit.

@ 31 Colin Danby writes: “But opposition to “PC” is functioning rhetorically, in the US at the moment, as simple code for defending racism. More fully it’s a theory that (a) there is no structural racism so (b) all claims of racism are just people getting needlessly offended.”

No, opposition to PC is not a theory of the absence of racism and the misguided nature of anti-racism; opposition to PC is a vigorous assertion of rights to express and act on spontaneous racial prejudice without having to reflect on and justify one’s beliefs and actions.

@47
You can’t have it both ways – if turnout for Sanders was good, then turnout for Clinton must have been better, since she beat him.

Also if you look at the graph that TTN linked to, you can see that 2008 was very high compared with preceding years. In that context, it seems clearly more realistic to say there was a relatively high turnout in 2016, though not as high as 2008.

Bianca Steele,

I don’t know. I can’t see Trump making public appearances deep in consult with holy anchorites, so there goes my favorite scene in that play.

Richard III, the play, it seems to me, is mostly about Richard projecting an image as a conventional, model leader of his era, when he is far from that in every way. It doesn’t get into what this imaging, and the reality that diverges more and more from the projection, does to the protagonist as deeply as Macbeth does. Macbeth has to project normality as well, so those parts of the play make it clear that my analogy doesn’t really cover the imaging that Trump displays.

Trump isn’t trying to appear to be our era’s equivalent of a wise, pious and chivalrous ruler. He’s trying to poke an elbow in the eye of that equivalent model, so he’s an anti-Richard in that sense. I’m not sure what the tragic conflict would be in a play about Trump. Let’s hope such a tragedy is never written, that it stays farce.

The Temporary Name @ 45

By what standard of anemia?

Sure, as your linked chart showed, it was “good” by the standard of post-Clinton — 1996, 2000, 2004 — but it was not as good as even the Reagan years — 1984, 1988.

It is a big deal, because the politics of the Clinton machine has long been to corrupt and destroy the independent Party apparatus while eating the brand for lunch. And, because the success of Clinton in the general election could well turn out to be a contest for turnout, particularly in states where the Party apparatus (and capacity for GOTV) is weak.

Both Clinton and Trump are widely despised and for good reason. Going in, their priors are going to depress turnout over all. Where Obama could count on a huge surge in the minority vote, Clinton isn’t going to get the same kind of net surge out of being female, in the States most needed for Electoral College reasons. She will get strong support from blacks and latinos, I have no doubt, but not quite the numbers that put Obama across in two elections. If Trump cooperates and continues to be repulsive to women and racial minorities, that will certainly help a lot, but it remains a contest of handicapped turnout, with Democrats coming to voter depression and its remedies, late.

Val @ 50: if turnout for Sanders was good, then turnout for Clinton must have been better, since she beat him.

But, Clinton 2016 couldn’t beat Clinton 2008 and that is an indication of some things moving in the wrong direction.

I wouldn’t take “Bernie or Bust” much more seriously statistically than those who claimed to be bitterly disappointed in 2008, but not because the fissure opening in the Democratic coalition isn’t a potentially much more serious divide.

Voting matters so very little to policy in America now that not-voting is an increasingly popular candidate in any election and Hillary Clinton is running against not-voting even more than she is running against Trump. Trump’s repulsiveness is just leverage to use against not-voting. It is a dubious stratagem when her own repulsiveness is a large factor.

An inspiration for all sorts of drama: http://www.eschatonblog.com/2016/06/not-going-to-be-delegates.html

What if a campaign existed only to take the party as hostage? Maybe Trump could be a real billionaire again if they bought him out.

“But, Clinton 2016 couldn’t beat Clinton 2008 and that is an indication of some things moving in the wrong direction.”

Or it’s an indication that fewer people felt the outcome was in doubt. In any event, I’ve read (can’t say where) that turnout in the primaries is not at all predictive of turnout in the general election. With the Dem’s structural advantage, and the GOP nominating a buffoon most of them can’t stand, I’m guessing it will be a bit of a cakewalk.

I think you could say in a statistical sense, that Hillary mostly got people who normally vote in a Democratic primary, and Bernie got a lot of first time primary voters. If the former category declined in numbers, while the later increased, but still the Hillary voters outnumbered the Bernie voters, then the paradox is solved. (No I don’t have any data to back that up.)

Trump has won every race whilst inviting the hostility of the media. Indeed, it’s extremely rare for Trump to opine on any topic without a planned, focused attack on the media, particularly the political media class as – really bad people, the most dishonest of the dishonest, sleazy, etc. etc. etc. So, if Trump is making media bias an essential part of his narrative of victory, only the true idiots would expect him to change his narrative for any reason over the course of his path to victory. Expect regular media bashing to be a feature of his presidency.

Pissing off the media is clearly a feature of campaigning Trump loves. And his crowds roar every time he ‘calls the media out.’ Trump is second only, perhaps, to Obama in understanding how easily the media can be spun and they’ve been playing his tunes since the ‘famous escalator ride.’ When Trump called out ‘Pocahontas’ twas a reporter who provided the PC counter-point ‘offensive’, Trump doubled down ‘Pocahontas?’ The nameless reporter shrieked right on cue ‘very offensive!!‘ The dunce in the press corps didn’t even realize she was being played. Trump got the three-fer: Get in the news, remind Americans that Warren spent a substantial part of her career claiming to be a native American, and elicit a PC attempt to suppress a legitimate criticism of a key member of team blue. Trump’s entire press strategy is built around outraging the PC dunces who shriek on command whilst Trump grins, shrugs, and builds brand.

The reason why Trump will win is that a/this is a change election; b/ Trump is a much better campaigner; c/ the entire election cycle is developing in a way that makes a Trump victory far more likely than an HRC victory.

Trump=Hitler, and “Let them eat confetti” is all HRC can offer. That’s it. Trump offers something very different. Fill in the blanks, but if all you come up with is “Trump=Hitler” you’re back where you started.

Trump himself, case you aren’t paying attention, is the principal architect of the “Trump=Hitler” meme that so drives the media cycles and allows Trump to grab hold of the news cycle anytime he likes. Anytime he needs to regain control of the news cycle Trump just drops a little Pocahontas reference, the judge is biased against me turd for the media to gobble-up and right on cue that’s just what they do. These words are not going to affect the outcome of the election.

Because Trump isn’t claiming to be polite, he’s claiming to be honest. Get it? And like it or not, many many people are sick to death of PC culture for any number of reasons.

Trumps Crooked Hillary meme has already defined HRC for large sections of the electorate. She’s a terrible liar and she’s surrounded by absolute morons. Here’s what a sizeable portion of the internet audience is reading right now.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3635981/Hillary-deletes-emails-latest-edition-memoir-removes-cheerleading-controversial-Trans-Pacific-Partnership-trade-deal.html

“Hillary Clinton’s publisher removed a section of her memoir dealing with the Trans-Pacific Partnership from the book’s paperback version. The controversial trade deal makes regular appearances in Donald Trump’s speeches, and Hillary Clinton was for it before she was against it. She changed course last October when Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley clobbered her about the Obama administration’s position
Clinton boasted in her 2014 book ‘Hard Choices’ that she had encouraged nations in the Americas to join the TPP agreement, but a paragraph about that cheerleading has disappeared from the paperback edition. Simon & Schuster included a brief but vague acknowledgement that part of the book were zapped ‘to accommodate a shorter length.’

The media was intensely invested in electing Obama in 2008. That’s not the case in 2016. HRC doesn’t give press conferences, she gives speeches on inequality whilst wearing $12, 000 Armani jackets, and Trump is about to spend the next six months linking her decades long career of lying on every topic from Bill’s infidelities, to ‘landing under sniper-fire’ to ‘wiping down’ the server, TPP support to the millions HRC has received from foreign governments. She’s already been condemned by Human Rights Groups for influence peddling. A very long list of 225k a pop speeches she’s given both inside and outside the US is very available and now, today, HRC is getting bounced for deleting her support for the TPP from her own memoirs.

Trump=Hitler is a provably false meme, and one that Trump relies on to get his message out. Crooked Hillary is a provable true meme, and one that put Trump in the WH.

Have a nice weekend!

k-stones: It’s too bad you’re not interested in Holbo’s questions about the nature of conservatism in the era of Trump. I think you’d shed an interesting light.

I think you’re absolutely right that the media has worked in Trump’s favor and will continue to do so. So what is your explanation going to be when he loses? How are you going to accommodate that in your worldview?

I mean, I guess you’re not able at this stage to acknowledge the near-inevitability of his defeat, but what set of circumstances to you think might possibly lead to his defeat? Or do you think that victory is inevitable?

@67 Sorry, I missed the part about conservatism. I’m not sure. One of us clearly is struggling with the prospect of defeat and I suspect it’s not me.

66@ With all due respect – you’re a fucking idiot.Do I actually need to explain to you, again

Obviously!

Eszter Hargitti@12: It’s important to consider the source, though. Scott Adams “reasoned” his way into being a creationist, and is convinced that Clinton partisans would assassinate him if he didn’t declare support for her. He believes in the validity of Pascal’s wager as formulated with only the Christian God in mind, and is dancing on the edges of Holocaust denial rather than being willing to do any research into how the death tolls were established. And he’s a full-bore misogynistic men’s rights activist.

In short, he is not to be trusted on any subject whatsoever. If anything, he’s one of those pundits whose endorsement of anything or anyone should be treated as reason to doubt it.

I kinda want more of the Macbeth angle? (I haven’t read Richard III. I know, I know, I’m a fucking philistine, what can I do?) Anyway, Duncan’s obviously the Republican Party, gored and served and all that. But who’s Lady Macbeth? Or wait! The party’s actually Lady M.!? But then who’s Duncan? Help me out here.

kidneystones @65
‘And like it or not, many many people are sick to death of PC culture for any number of reasons.’

That’s true. That’s plainly true.

However, none of those reasons are good reasons.

@68 Trump is not strategizing, manipulating or dissimulating. He’s just responding to whatever he sees on cable news. Cable news made him listen to the Trump Univ fraud charges. And he erupted in racism.

His racism is not an act. It’s who he is. His family was in the Klan, his family got busted for racism in one of its housing projects, he called for the death penalty for black kids who were later shown to be innocent and never reconsidered, he has talked about how much it easier it would be to succeed as black than as a white man in America, he wants to create a secret police force to deport 12 million Mexicans, he favors wanton torture and the violation of international when it comes to Muslims whom he wants to register one and all and ban as well.

He can’t walk all this back. His racism isn’t a suit he can take off when he wants. It’s who he is. He can’t use his racism strategically. He can only express it.

Additionally, he has two roles for women: a small one for some managerial work and a big one for sex objects who are here on earth to visually please him. He’s not sure where his daughter fits here.

This is who he is; this is what comes out when he talks. He just erupts and babbles. He can’t finish a complex line of thought. He can’t stay on message unless he reads from a teleprompter and then is immediately drugged.

He is not playing anyone; he is just talking and for some time he seem more surprised than anyone that people would actually vote for him in these numbers.

TTN @ 66: Hitler made it to power, Trump won’t.

politicalfootball @ 67: So what is your explanation going to be when he loses? How are you going to accommodate that in your worldview?

The early smugness fascinates me. I usually find the “anything could happen crowd” harder to take, as I usually think political campaigns don’t really matter very much and the outcome is pretty predictable far in advance. If Obama had not won the general election in 2008 or 2012, I would have been really shocked. I used a slight variation on Ray Fair’s method to make a bet on Obama’s popular vote margin in 2008 and hit the target right on, several weeks in advance — and I could have done so months in advance.

Trump looks like a weak candidate and a fat target. There are enough idiots and habitual Republicans that he will manage a respectable enough vote total — respectable enough that people will wonder if there really are that many complete idiots in the country. (“More” is the simple answer to that one: consider how many voted for Clinton.)

Trump only wins, on kidneystones’ theory or Scott Adams’, if the campaign really does matter: that is that persuasiveness matters. That would overturn my long held view that there really are not very many persuadables voting, and the ones who are, are mostly ill-informed idiots who vote pretty much at random in Pavlovian response to well-designed acts of campaign advertising and messaging and dirty tricks. So professionally-run political campaigns cancel each other out, and you are left in November with the economics and sociodemographics you had in February.

You’d have to have an unusually high number of undecideds and young people with no established party loyalties and a lot of skepticism and/or cynicism about the nature and efficacy of politics and the trustworthiness of elites and the establishment.

If Trump flames out early, my view of American Presidential electoral politics will remain undisturbed. I will be seriously distressed to see Clinton win the Presidency, because I see many indications that her Administration would be a series of disasters. I think Trump will contribute to the weakness of her Presidency, because he will be effective in undermining her legitimacy even if he cannot manage to win enough votes, but that’s the limit of his power as a celebrity-model spokesperson candidate.

kidneystones @78
‘I’m not convinced that even with Bush’s appalling record and Obama’s immense appeal, O could have won without an extremely large amount of voter fatigue with a GOP presidency. That’s what virtually guarantees the Dem candidate’s defeat in 2016. Only partisans are naturally happy with successive 8 year periods of rule by the same party.’

There have been fifteen occasions in US history where a party which has held the Presidency for eight years has contested a third consecutive Presidential election; the incumbent party has won eight of them (although sometimes only narrowly) and lost seven (although sometimes only narrowly).

“I kind of like the Robert Downey Jr. film of RIII. Can’t remember if I’ve seen the McKellan version.”

I’m pretty sure Downey is IN the McKellan version…?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114279/

Is there another version with Downey?

@84 Don’t really want to reflect on what Trump’s impulsive, outrageous and racist attack on Curiel is revealing. You do know that it’s not only minority lefty types like me who are done with him. But not you. Got it.

kidneystones, while I think your argument has a lot of merit when it comes to non-college educated white people, the current demographic trends strongly suggest that Trump will lose college-educated whites, women, blacks, and latinos in droves to Hillary. This coalition is largely what got Obama into office (and has only grown since then) and it’s unclear to me that Trump has anything to offer them that could a. make them forget about the things he said that were bigoted, b. make them prefer his platform to Hillary’s.

You argue that Hillary’s past policies had negative impacts on these groups but Trump is not promising better results. Some of these people will be concerned by his new-found wish to end abortion rights, some will be concerned by the idea that their families will suffer from discrimination and possible deportation in Trump’s America, and others will notice that while Hillary has devoted large portions of her campaign to issues like criminal reform, Donald Trump is running on a campaign that explicitly dismisses the concerns of minorities.

This doesn’t even get into the major infrastructural issues I see for Trump. His inability to run a professional, national election campaign. His inability to unify the Republican Party behind him. The fact that extremely popular Democratic figures like Obama, Biden, Warren, and potentially Sanders will be stumping for Hillary. His very poor command of electoral strategy (cf his wasting resources trying to win NY and CA — even if you believed he could win those states they are the least efficient place for him to compete since any election where he won NY + CA he would surely have won enough electoral votes from places like OH, VA, and FL to have won without them). On and on.

He has some unconventional skills that may be hard to gauge such as his ability to command lots of media attention and generating free press. Much of it is negative but you may believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Other than that though everything about his profile indicates weakness. For instance his biggest strength – his success as a businessman – is contradicted by the numerous bankruptcies his companies went into, that he is a lousy vendor who doesn’t pay his bills, that he believes in taking lines of credit and as a strategy paying them back pennies on the dollar (such that almost no banks in America will continue to do business with him), and that many financial reporters believe he won’t release his tax returns because they indicate that he is worth significantly less than reported (a millionaire and not a billionaire).

So personally speaking I’m not worried about President Trump (though admittedly even if he had a 20% chance of winning that should mean that 1 out of every 5 universes he does beat Hillary). I think from a personal, institutional, and demographic perspective he is a huge underdog. The only possible reason I can think of that someone might think he’s a sure thing despite all these issues is that he did so well in the Republican primaries despite all of these deficiencies. I would suggest that his success in the Republican primaries was due to a few reasons: 1. a split field where the ‘establishment’ Republicans failed until the very end to coalesce around one non-Trump figure, 2. a winner-take-all delegate system that gave the winner of a plurality many, many more votes than they would get in a proportional system, 3. a Republican party that has been using covert racism and social issue wedges to sneak the very free market, tax breaks for the wealthy platform that Trump’s base most decries – aka a party that really agreed on very few important policies and disagreed strongly about the most important ones, 4. a polity that is primarily white. None of these things suggest that he will be able to repeat his success in the general election.

@bianca steele & Layman — I’ve never been a giant fan of Branagh adaptations of Shakespeare I guess (Hamlet was particularly awful but even the other ones I’ve seen I didn’t love). But I have an odd liking of RD Jr. so maybe I’ll check it out. (I do really hope I’m remembering correctly that the film in question was a Branagh film.)

Nope! I was completely wrong.

“As for Trump – think of a lizard, a very particular kind of lizard – one with a highly intelligent brain and a long, blue tail. You keep attacking the tail and the lizard just gets stronger and stronger.”

On the other hand, Trump is the weakest Republican candidate in 50 years; a gift to Clinton. Election narrative continues to be Trump’s theatrics, and “aren’t the white working-class he enthuses repulsive?” Fending off Sanders, Clintonoids now merely stand still through October and intone of Trump’s scariness. Clinton rides demographics to WH without articulating or defending an agenda. Heck, she could be for fracking, or staging another Syria in Libya, or propping up unlikeable aggressor types in the Knesset. However, we’ll not much know or inquire about it, because it’s more fascinating to have takes about the lost cause of Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos’s “anti-pc strategy” (haha, they’re so trifling amirite?).

@ 87 You do know that it’s not only minority lefty types like me who are done with him. [Trump].

So, you too were once a member of the Klan? [Trump supporter] At what point precisely in the last year did you ‘decide’ you were done with the Klan, and why?

Meanwhile. Gay? Good; young Hispanic? Better; registered Republican? Huh? Trump-supporter?. WTF? !!!!!! — Run for your fucking life fagg#t.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/10/im-voting-for-donald-trump-so-i-went-to-see-him-speak-protesters-broke-my-nose/?tid=sm_fb

@ 95 You’re quite right. The US is a foreign country.

Given that I recognized and predicted Trump’s appeal (thx to the link to a Trump speech provided by Lee Arnold last September) long before most others here (Lee Arnold excepted), I’d suggest that perhaps a measure of distance from bubble-land has some merit. Certainly, we have a far greater number of ass-hats on the left, right, and here with prediction records far worse than my own, both on US politics and those in the UK. Demonizing an EU referendum deformed Labor into Conservative light, provided Cameron with a win, and decimated Labor in Scotland.

Ignoring the concerns of working-class Americans has made HRC into the candidate of the establishment whether she and her supporters embrace that role, or not.

I confess I find the majority of your comments a fantastic waste of time. You’re endless complaints of victimization at the hands of a select number of commenters ‘…you said, did not, did so…’ add nothing to discussions already too frequently free of fact and nuance.

kidneystones: “I confess I find the majority of your comments a fantastic waste of time. ”

If you want to be that way about it, then I’ll mention that I think that you’re busily giving an illustration of exactly what attracted people to fascism before they knew where it led. But they didn’t know better, and you supposedly do. All of your nonsense about how Trump is going to really show those elites would be sad if it wasn’t also the kind of thing that a complete creep writes. Your judgement is horrible and I don’t expect you to apologize or learn anything from your mistakes after Trump loses.

milx @97 — you mean McGovern, not McCarthy. (I don’t want to get into the substance of the pt mostly b.c it’s been discussed here before.)

@ 101 Your comments are illuminating, frank, and most welcome. I’m sure many hawks find a great deal more to like and trust in HRC, than in Trump.

@ 100. Please don’t pout. I’m well aware that many morons conflate accurate analysis with endorsement. I’ve made it clear, repeatedly, that I favor Sanders and his policies by far over those of Trump and Clinton.

As for what I’ve written about a Trump presidency’s impact on conservatism, I replied to a direct question on this thread with: “I don’t know.”

I’m equally uncertain about how Trump will govern. However, I’m openly skeptical that Trump will do much/anything to rein in the power of elites at I stated explicitly on this thread: “I very much doubt Trump will be able to wave his magic wand and make America’s problems disappear, especially when the powers-that-be, do so well from the status-quo.”

You may have missed that part whilst wiping away your tears. I’m inclined, however, to put your error down to your usual inability read simple English, you translate this skepticism into Rich-speak: “All of your nonsense about how Trump is going to really show those elites…”

Indeed, Trump’s victories are very likely to end the day he’s inaugurated. His treatment at the hands of Ryan and the GOP elite, following Trump securing the nomination is an excellent preview of what his relations with the RNC will be. As to what Trump will actually do in power, I seriously doubt even he knows, or cares.

Trump’ll be better, of that much he is sure. Many already agree.

You’re a dunce. I make no other claims at all about what Trump will do once elected, except those you discover in your belly-button lint. I fully expect him to come away considerably richer in the purest material sense of the word, whether he wins the WH, or not. I hope that doesn’t surprise, or shock you too much.

Now, which part of “I don’t know” would you like me to apologize for?

For those interested in the challenge facing any Democrat candidate in 2016, see this: http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/04/history-is-not-on-the-democrats-side-in-2016/

Unfortunately for Dan MacLaughlin, the GOP got Trump, making any opponent’s job so much easier.

js., I hope you’ve seen the Ralph Fiennes Coriolanus. It’s terrific.

TTN — Yes, I really liked that!

@bruce wilder

Ill informed idiots might not be persuaded in any meaningful philosophical sense, but can still moved to coming out to vote or not. about 5 fewer people voted in 2012 vs 2008, 20 million more in 2004 compared to to 2000. It’s perfectly possible to accept that most campaigns don’t move the needle much, but some clearly do, whether that’s because of candidates, their campaigns, or circumstances.

Kidneystones a new poll out today shows sanders supporters prefer Clinton over trump by a huge margin – this before sanders concedes and turns all his campaign energy to supporting Clinton (which he will). Trumps endorsement bounce is fading fast – and we haven’t begun to see the dirt that’s going to be dug up. Meanwhile there are multiple reports that his campaign has no money and no plan, or even staff. Unless he can completely get the never trumpers to enthusiastically support him he faces a big turnout problem which he apparently doesn’t have the organization to address. Check the GOP website – no mention of him at all. Why do you think that is? Meanwhile his campaign director and chief of staff are at each other’s throats and he doesn’t have a strategy.

Of course he could be just being really wily, but the more likely explanation is that he’s an income person racist fool.

While we’re on the topic of predictions, how about this one: after the election is over we discover that trump has no money and this whole thing was a desperate attempt to save himself from personal bankruptcy. Similar to Clive Palmer in Australia …

@ 114. The last poll I saw indicated a greater number of Nevertrump supporters willing to cross over for HRC, than Sanders supporters willing to vote for Trump. I expect the number of Sanders supporters willing to vote for HRC to rise, not fall.

You make sense about half the time. I find it utterly implausible that Bill and Hillary would attend the wedding of a racist fool, but anything is possible in politics. If there were any evidence to support your claim – the Bush campaign and the Never Trumps would have unearthed the proof 65,000 attack adds and 200 million dollars ago.

The Wapo and the NYT have committed similar resources to the same task and nothing. Trump engages in dog whistle politics and appeals to xenophobia. So what? The current Democratic president has assassination lists for US citizens, has expanded the Cheney-Bush security/secrecy apparatus, and maintains close ties with regimes that regularly torture and kill ‘enemies of the state.’

I’m pleased to read the rhetorical excesses, however. I think it quite unlikely we’ll discover Trump is broke. Stories of campaign dissent and of Trump’s racist views and hatred of women are fixtures in the narrative. As I said, up thread, Trump understands exactly what he wants to say, when, and why for the most part. Trump is in charge of a great deal of the media narrative.

If you want to understand the logic, consider this – would Trump have defeated the entire GOP field and won over large numbers of Democratic and independent primary voters by running any other kind of campaign. Twas the same in 2007. At a certain point, one had to concede that O was an unusually-gifted political actor.

In your scenario, Trump won because the entire GOP establishment and all other candidates wanted to lose. Trump beat them all, including Christie, Bush, Walker, Perry, Graham, and Cruz, to name a few. Trump did what it took to win. Bill Clinton did the same. Is Trump a racist? At this point, I’m not sure if it even matters. He’s going to be called a racist in precisely the same terms as HRC, Bill, and their supporters were and for exactly the same reasons.

Just ask Geraldine Ferraro, the last historic Democratic female candidate. If winning means your opponent must be racist, then that’s exactly what the racist HRC must be.

Because in US politics it’s about facts and honesty, not spin and lies.

118 Nope.

Wrong about patterns, wrong about public office, (see http://www.stripes.com/news/new-rules-for-military-on-running-for-office-1.77558 ), and wrong about the nature of this election. You demonstrate precisely why dunces like you have been wrong about Trump from the beginning, and wrong about so much else.

Trump is not a politician. Should we applaud for noticing that much? Nor has he ever been an employee of government in any capacity, which summarizes more accurately the most distinctive features of his candidacy without erroneously conflating military service with employment in government as ‘public office,’ as you do.

That’s pretty much Trump’s entire platform – and explains, in part, why Trump is doing so well.

You were saying?

js. @99

Sam Wang has also written that any projected probability (from his model) between 20% and 80% should be interpreted as a toss-up.

MAKE AMERICA SANE AGAIN

Poll Numbers on issues that matter most to Americans, especially to those looking for work, such as the enormous numbers of African-Americans Democrats take for granted, for example.

Trump enjoys a 10 point advantage over HRC on the economy 53 to 43
Trump enjoys a 7 point advantage over HRC on jobs 52 to 45
Trump enjoys a 4 point advantage over HRC on national security 50 to 46

Why Trump will win. Trump is already ahead on economic issues. Trump can absolutely improve his standing on national security and on trade. Clinton can keep education, but right now I don’t see Clinton’s numbers rising much.

With all due respect to @123, Trump’s loopy comments regarding Trump U. are probably sufficient to obscure the details of the case, except to partisans. Corrupt Hillary selling out American interests to foreign powers in return for Clinton foundation cash? That’s a problem of a whole different order, especially as Sanders had cemented Crooked Hillary’s standing as the candidate of Wall St. in the minds of independents and many younger Dems. Bernie is making it quite clear he’s not abandoning the young, or their idealism. So, don’t expect HRC to be able to walk away from her six-figure speeches, or 12,000 dollar Armani jackets anytime soon.

My guess is that we’ll see an ‘unexpected’ rise in new job numbers after the last two dismal months.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/192104/trump-leads-clinton-top-ranking-economic-issues.aspx

kidneystones: “As I pointed out to my students, the key problem most pollsters have with Trump is that they treat Trump as a politician…”

This image is priceless. Are you paid to teach politics, or is your hectoring something they get as a bonus?

bob mcm, one can agree — and I have — that HRC is running on “vote for me or you’re racist or sexist” and “there is no alternative, because Trump” to people to her left and agree that it’s a pretty bad campaign tactic but still have an understanding of what Sanders voters’ basic political commitments are. Appeals to “dislike of PC” aren’t going to work, even as the HRC campaign and her supporters make jerks out of themselves. Political identity doesn’t change that quickly.

The problem for HRC is not that people could get angry and switch sides. The problem is, as I’ve always said, that they could stay home. I’ve seen no sign that her campaign is responding to obvious red flags any more than Trump’s is.

“The problem is, as I’ve always said, that they could stay home.”

Maybe, but I think the larger concern is what seems to me to be a very large number of undecideds – for polling in June once the nominees are known. Some 10% don’t know what to do with these nominees, and that’s on top of the 5% saying they’ll vote for someone else. I checked the poll averages for 2008 and 2012, and there was nothing like this large an undecided pool in June of those years.

Maybe, but I think the larger concern is what seems to me to be a very large number of undecideds

My impression is that many studies have concluded that the whole “independents” and “undecideds” thing is mostly a mirage. People like to self-identify as independents and respond to polls by saying that they’re still making up their minds because they think that makes them sound thoughtful. But in fact when you look at the voting records of self-styled independents, the vast majority vote a straight partisan ticket every time.

Maybe that’s different this year because a lot of things seem to be different this year, but it’s what most studies have concluded in the past.

‘My impression is that many studies have concluded that the whole “independents” and “undecideds” thing is mostly a mirage. ‘

I’ve read the same thing, but the ‘undecided’ number in e.g. 2008 at this point in the cycle was very low single digits, vs 10+ now. It means something.

With all due respect to @123, Trump’s loopy comments regarding Trump U. are probably sufficient to obscure the details of the case, except to partisans.

The thing is it’s not going to be Trump talking about Trump U, and right now “partisans” are a majority of those polled who will defeat Trump. It’s easy to believe the guy’s a bullshit artist, because he demonstrates it as often as possible.

@ 136 So, according to you, voters, including the millions of unemployed, will suddenly stop regarding Trump as 1o points better on the economy, 7 points better on jobs, and 4 points better on national security than HRC and vote for the weaker candidate cause Trump U.

Yes. Giving you the benefit of the doubt that the numbers are what you say they are, Trump is ready willing and able to sabotage all that. And brag about it. And he’s down in the polls as it is. If he can’t top Hillary with these massive advantages you describe, he loses.

And yet Trump has never led in the polls. Mysterious!

Trump isn’t going to start up anti PC messaging to get votes. He already has the constituency that would actually turn out for that.

Trump is going to use this line of argument defensively.

His biggest weakness as a candidate is a (broadly speaking, justified) popular conception that anyone who actually supports Trump is an idiot. A potentially violent, crackpot nutcase who supports a joke candidate who shouldn’t be taken seriously. People who like to think of themselves as part of serious, mature society are staying away from because their peers have made it clear that supporting Trump disqualifies you from truly being one of them.

Using “just look at the loony left!” style attacks addresses this. If people can be persuaded that Trumps opposition contains equal numbers of yahoos, then Trumps supporters look less like the idiots in the room, and more like a faction that happens to contain some idiots. In fact, he’ll probably argue that the media has unfairly focused on the (allegedly and in his likely words) rare misdeeds of his supporters, and unfairly neglected the (similarly allegedly) widespread nature of his opponents misdeeds.

I don’t think this will win him an election. But he’ll have some success with it, because what for lack of a better term we might call social justice culture really is filled with shallow, self righteous buffoons who are so full of themselves that they feel entitled to do and say things to which their targets can justifiably object. This blog has a few such persons, for example. You may recall previous conversations in which I argued that the best response to Trump was to protest politely but consistently, and others argued that it was perfectly valid to attempt to use civil disobedience to stop his rallies from going forward, then to publicly crow with pride at having achieved that goal when successful.

Trump has 4+ months to poison American culture.

If only he started sooner or had more help, heh?

Yes on the clown point by that logic we should vote in Chip Baskets for President because the neocons and banksters would rather have HRC than Chip or even his brother Dale.

Actually it’s Dale, not Chip, who runs the equivalent of Trump U. So, Ze K, are you saying that you would vote for Dale Baskets over HRC?

BW: “If only he started sooner or had more help, heh?”

Hey, David Brock was helping out as much as he could.

Contrary to the claims of enthusiasts on both sides, I don’t see how negative campaigning is going to be the deciding factor. Both candidates have huge negatives, both are so well-known that they’re pretty much immunized against their negatives for anyone who’d let those negatives decide their vote. I don’t believe that Corrupt Hillary or Dangerous Donald is going to be a new, surprising image that’s going to sway a lot of people. Sure, the negative ads will run, but so what. Nor do I think that anyone really cares about Hillary’s Email server or Trump’s “university” or think that any new and exciting legal scandal is going to substantially change things.

I think it’s going to come down to demographics. Trump isn’t going to get any large group of people that he doesn’t already have. He doesn’t have enough. As the article linked upthread points out, if he gets more poorly educated white people, he tends to lose more highly educated white people who have more money and are more likely to vote.

So it’s Hillary’s to lose. The most likely reason for an upset is some kind of unforced error on her campaign’s part, or perhaps just the accumulative effect of a horrible campaign. The fact that HRC’s victory celebration here was 1/3 “isn’t it great that a woman won even though I don’t actually support her policies” and 2/3 about those horrible Bernie Bros was a tiny reflection of the messaging coming out of her campaign, which appears to be putting her well along the possible path for this upset.

I know Holbo isn’t deleting them – it’s a techinical thing. But why? I don’t get the moderation message, they just completely disappear.

A remarkably useless and angel-counting thread. Of course Clinton is going to win. The polls say so, and they include all her negatives. Far more things that might happen before November favour her than Trump. These include the spectacular incompetence of the Trump campaign, money troubles, distancing by GOP insiders, and the end of the honeymoon with the media.

For the record, the OP sets up a false dichotomy at the end. There is a third possibility for Trump, IMHO likelier than winning or flaming out: fading into irrelevance. In October, Trump will still be campaigning, like Raith Rovers playing out the end of the football season. The press will have given up on the horse-race narrative, and will be covering more interesting races like McCain’s fight to keep his Senate seat.

I don’t think my comment was immoderate at all. At the most, it was a bit sarcastic but then, RNB pinned Trump’s future victory on innocent Zapatistas.

@ 140 The entire poll can be downloaded. It’s particularly useful in that it differs from other polls by avoiding emotionally loaded words and simply asks participants to rank issues as ‘extremely important’ etc. and then asks which candidate can be trusted to do a better job on these issues. Selected highlights.

HRC much higher on climate change, treatment of minorities, education: +38 + 38 +26.
Trump ahead on Wall st. reform., taxes, efficiency gov., deficit +11 + 18 + 8 + 14 + 18

Check for yourself. There may be errors in this cribbed transcription. There are some interesting tidbits. Wealth inequality and income distribution. Clinton over Trump by 8, 51-43, yet with 2 same and 4 undecided. Cue the predictable: Trump has hit his ceiling.

No, he hasn’t. Indeed, his numbers are already very respectable for a GOP candidate (comparison needed) and a key indicator of an area where Trump will try to get some cross-over from Sanders voters. HRC, on the other hand, may have hit her ceiling. Her barely over 50 number coupled with Trump’s double-digit lead on Wall st. reform, plus Trump’s lead on jobs and the economy suggest possible contours of the coming campaigns.

Climate change and social issues, two of HRC’s strongest advantages, are ranked as extremely important, or very important by less than 50 percent of those polled. Employment and jobs are the two most important issues at 92 and 87.

Nobody should underestimate the competence of the Clinton campaign to micro-target key constituencies and turn out that vote.

All in all it looks to be close, to me at least, right up to the vote. HRC may well win.

Those convinced that either candidate has to lose are whistling past the graveyard.

Alright I’ll say something potentially controversial.

Trump is clear about what he represents; he’s not appealing to people on the basis of his Wall Street reform package or a plan to control federal budget deficits. So kidneystones, please keep a minimal relationship to reality. He wants to repeal Dodd-Frank, and his fiscal policy would explode the federal budget deficits.

Trump wants to bully people. Trump is selling real Americans the promise of dominance, i.e. he’ll use gunboat diplomacy for a neo-mercantilist trade policy, he’ll run a protection racket on US allies, he’ll shock and awe terrorists with threats of wanton torture and even atomic weapons, he’ll seize valuable natural resources abroad, and he’ll fill with fear anyone who may think of migrating from a poor country to the US.

As Joseph Henrich pointed out months ago in the Washington Post, Trump sees the world in zero sum terms–so others can’t have an advantage that is not cancelled by a disadvantage on our side. The foreign country gets export revenue or military protection from the US and we get only deficits; the migrant benefits from coming to the US and Americans suffer job losses; enemies benefit from US recognizing human rights and the US gets weakened security.

For Trump none of this could also benefit the US. So the US must dominate in a zero-sum world.

Maybe this goes back to his business experience where people are supposed to make deals that make both parties better off, but he knows that he has been taken advantage of; and he knows that he has made others suffer losses that made them worse off before dealing with Big Fraud Don (see Trump University).

Trump knows the deal is just an opportunity to sell snake oil, to perpetrate fraud, to gain at the expense of others who had not been aware of the losses they would suffer.

For Trump it’s a vicious zero-sum world and only the dominant can take the benefits and not suffer the losses.

He’ll end what he takes to be Obama’s gambit for the US after George W. Bush to lead by making American prestigious again–a country which others want to emulate, learn from, and associate with.

He wants none of this soft power stuff and wants to revert to a strategy of dominance based overtly on fear and threat (some here would say that Trump would only disencumber a bit the use of US force in the world). But for Trump a “foreign-born” black man and a woman can’t make America great again.

Of course this world view wouldn’t make America or anyone else great, prosperous or safe. But the desire for dominance in perceived zero-sum games is powerful. It’s a simple way of looking at the world. The desire for dominance can even become an end in itself. And Trump could win.

Suzanne,

Shakespeareans love their subtext! The new BBC Scottish play seemed to be painting Mb as unlike Banquo, not a part of the inner circle, which I think is also not in the text (but may be part of stage tradition for all I know). I only saw the beginning, there was a nicely ominous mood.

Rich, Js., Ze – Thanks for the explanations. Imo the ones on Ezster’s Hillary thread were deleted along with Phil’s and Bloix’s (who’s banned) because the first one showed up then vanished and second showed as ‘in moderation’ then vanished. On this thread, it’s the thing Ze’s describing, which imo is the software.

Anyway, the substance was to inform Js. Laurence Olivier’s 1950s film of Richard III is free to watch on a streaming site (haven’t seen it myself)

I’m sure Putin will grant him full military honours

Did ISIS lead Omar Mateen to a homicidal homophobia? Or did homophobia lead Omar Mateen to homicidal religious fundamentalism? Or is it just a vicious circle? I think what will get underplayed here is how Omar Mateen’s inner violent sexual tensions may have led him into the most fundamentalist version of the religion he knew and that religion then gave him the means to justify or even strengthen his homophobia. That may not get at why he did what he did. He may have just went after an easy target of perceived Western decadence which could have just as easily been a rock concert venue as in Paris. This is horrific.

@170 To state the obvious this is Gay Pride Month, and Omar Mateen may have had a violent reaction to the assertions of gay pride and gay sexuality that he was observing with perhaps an interest that surprised and tormented him.

RNB @ 160: Trump wants to bully people.

Well, yeah. Duh.

Trump is making populist appeals to people who have the political attitudes typical of “authoritarian followers” (quotes to indicate that I am using the phrase in the sense of the term defined in the work of Robert Altemeyer, author of The Authoritarians (available as a free pdf online). He’s being a demagogue in common parlance. The political dynamic is well-understood, by which someone who is oriented toward social dominance and has few ethical or ego bounds demonstrates their ability to persuade and lead the easily led “authoritarian followers”.

I think you attribute way too much specificity to Trump. He’s not making policy proposals, not even in the Clintonian arch-indirect manner of making “serious” policy proposals (“A lot of people have said I have the most comprehensive, effective, comprehensive plan to make sure Wall Street never wrecks Main Street again . . .”)

Trump says hyperbolic things and talks like a 3rd Grader to get attention and an emotional reaction, but like all politicians since time immemorial he qualifies and equivocates and contradicts himself.

My personal judgement is that Trump has painted himself into a corner with his buffoonery and demagoguery. The push-pull of political coalition-building is such that if you make yourself appealing to certain subcultures in the society, you make yourself repulsive to others. That’s why politicians often seem to be caught in uncomfortable straddles and the stilted, formulaic ways of speaking that’s being called “PC” in the context of the OP. (Occasionally, they stage a Sister Souljah moment, as another Clinton did, to artfully bridge the gaps.)

But, let’s entertain the possibility that Trump has unexpected skills, that he can use anti-PC and anti-Media themes effectively to attract attention and shape the campaign to his advantage. Like I said, I don’t believe it, but I am willing to entertain the possibility that I am wrong, especially given that I wrongly thought the Republican Party would not let him win the nomination.

Someone who thinks Trump will win the Presidency is Scott Adams. Here’s what he told the Washington Examiner in an interview:

[Trump] has told us that he uses hyperbole for effect. It is in his book. He said it during the campaign. He has also said that if he hadn’t acted the way he has acted, he probably wouldn’t be where he is today. I think most people would agree with that. He wouldn’t have gotten the attention, he wouldn’t have gotten the emotion that brought the crowds.

He is doing a most interesting thing because he has to run for president of a country that is mostly dumb people who aren’t paying attention and maybe a few smart people who are. He has got to get all of those groups on his side because the smart people might have the money and the dumb people have the votes. So you kind of need both of them.

So what he is doing really is he is running two campaigns simultaneously and he is not hiding any of it. He is saying outrageous things because some people like to hear those and they’ll vote for him because of it. At the same time he is winking right at the camera and saying, “I say things for effect. I’ll probably be more presidential.”

Now, there is no other way to interpret that than the fact that he is being a little bit outrageous right now to suck all of the attention away from the competition, which is working. He is running as a common-sense conservative. He is basically saying, “I am going to do what makes sense, what works and I am going to do it right in front of you.”

I have serious doubts about Trump’s ability to actually put across that double-message, but something like that will have to succeed if he is to win the election. A lot of people will have to be convinced to dismiss the buffoonery and believe that Trump can be “a common-sense conservative” in whatever sense those voters conceive of it.

Now, I am calling it buffoonery and not hate-speech, so in some people’s view, maybe I am already half-way there. I think it is buffoonery and disqualifying because it indicates to me that Trump has probably never thought seriously about how to govern. (Adams doesn’t think that matters much — I disagree.) My idea of “a common-sense conservative” is a self-righteous kleptocrat who cannot distinguish grift from governance and so even if Trump convinces me he will govern as “a common-sense conservative” and not as a deranged refugee from reality teevee, he’s not getting my support. But, enough about me.

Scott Adams says something else that’s interesting. (I am using him as my source of alternative hypotheses I don’t much believe, but this is something that I think goes directly to what may be a critical distinction between Clinton and Trump in this campaign.) The syntax is a little fractured here, but I want to quote Adams directly [I added the emphasis though]:

[Clinton has been harping] on her “risky-risky-risky” play, which is probably going to backfire because risk is exactly why people like [Trump]. People are trying to hire a hand grenade. And Clinton saying, “Watch out for the hand grenade. It might explode.” And the voters are saying, “No, that is the whole point: We want an explode-y hand grenade. We are throwing it into Congress. We are going to blow up some stuff and we think we can fix it [that way].”

This is a bit of a contradiction with the idea that Trump can put across a double-message in which one-half of the message is: Trump will govern as “a common-sense conservative” and one can trust that and its implication of continued stability. Of course, Adams would say none of this makes any rational sense, because politics makes no rational sense, because people are not rational, they are emotional and intuitive and act out of unconscious motives and suggestions.

What I would say is that people generally do not understand politics or policy in a rational sense, but they pick up some things, some patterns irrationally. Mass democracy assigns the people a choice among only two buttons to push: keep our guy(s), and throw the bums out. Hillary’s campaign very deliberately attached itself to the first button (“I’m with Hillary”) and Trump’s grabbed the second button.

Hacker & Pierson (see my earlier comment) made the case for Clinton as a policy dinosaur, a throwback to an earlier glorious era of effective policymaking without (imho) acknowledging the extent to which popular discontent is motivated by the felt reality that that system and framework of policy is corrupt, degenerate, worn-out and past its sell-by date. Corey Robin made a different but parallel point a while back: Clinton will be the last Democratic Presidential Candidate who can use the Third-Way themes her husband pioneered as a way of wresting power from the Republicans after the Reagan Triumph.

Both Trump and Clinton are right-wing candidates — they are just different flavors of right-wing: one is conservative, motivated by self-satisfied complacency about the status quo and wants to preserve the system, perhaps with some modest tweaks and pareto improvements. The other presents as potentially more radical, more willing to see a system that is not working satisfactorily for many of its constituents, break.

Now a broken system doesn’t work, almost by definition implying “for anyone”, so wanting the system to break is a bit irrational. But, the radical right has seen staged crisis as a means to its ends. You’d think a broken system wouldn’t work for any one, but that hasn’t been the recent experience of Republicans, while Democrats have pressed themselves into the service of the plutocracy as repair crews and preservationists.

Now, Clinton has an argument for why she is “progressive” and not conservative, even as she also has arguments for why she is conservative (Kissinger thinks she did a bang-up job running the State Department!). She’s going to peal away some conservative Republicans with the latter arguments. Some of the neocons have dutifully lined up in this round and many of the law and economics types have long since found Clinton-Obama economics cordial enough. Those are elites, though — I don’t think there are numerically as many votes as headlines from having a Robert Kagan (or Richard Posner) endorse Clinton.

So, there’s an argument — and Clinton herself has made a version of it — that hers is a left-wing politics after all because economics isn’t everything.

“Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow . . . would that end racism? . . . Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” I say that’s a right-wing argument. ymmv But, at the very least, it marks out a fault-line in the Democratic Party that puts a lot of Democratic voters on the far side of a fissure separating them from Hillary — Hillary is not with them. It probably doesn’t matter to this election, since Donald isn’t with them, either.

Shorter version of myself or actually a shorter version of what is plain for all to see. Trump is selling not policies but a promise to restore leadership through dominance by which America can reverse losses by imposing them on others. Dominance is a different strategy for leadership than prestige, according to Joseph Henrich.
From Politico:
‘He [Trump] says his nuclear concerns stem partly from his MIT professor uncle’s tutoring on the subject, but in any case his interest is deep-seated. Trump once even expressed a wish during the Reagan years to lead the negotiations with the Soviets to reduce strategic nuclear weapons. At a reception in New York City around 1990, he ran into the U.S. START negotiator, Ambassador Richard Burt. According to Burt, Trump expressed envy of Burt’s position and proceeded to offer advice on how best to cut a “terrific” deal with the Soviets. Trump told Burt to arrive late to the next negotiating session, walk into the room where his fuming counterpart sits waiting impatiently, remain standing and looking down at him, stick his finger into his chest and say “Fuck you!”’

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-missiles-nukes-button-launch-foreign-policy-213955#ixzz4BPE3ZBQ3
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

Mordecai Richler – Bad Jew

On a bad day, it’s may help to consider on iconic writer http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/why-mordecai-richler-isnt-being-studied-in-canadian-universities/article1321266/

“Since publishing the book this fall, he [Foran, Richler’s biographer] has discovered during various interviews and Richler-related events just how deep-seated the old antipathies remain, both among the Quebec nationalists whose project Richler savaged so effectively and among fellow Jews who saw him as a renegade exposing his community to the ridicule of anti-Semites.

Richler likewise offends contemporary literary sensibilities, according to Foran, especially what he considers to be the “pinched and ahistorical and impoverished notion of literature” that currently rules the academy. “More and more we want our novels – even those novels taught at the university level – to have simple and clear, preferably progressive thematic concerns,” he says. “They have to relate to progressive politics, they have to relate to social justice. What are these words doing mixed up with literature?”

There are no such programs in Richler novels. The author is condemned because “Duddy cashes the cheque,” according to Foran. The final event of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is the hero swindling his friend. The moral is opaque, to say the least…”

I just finished Perfidia, another masterpiece from a different writer equally willing to give iconoclasts the finger. Tis a good day to recall we’re not here to agree.

RNB @ 177 [Story about START and Trump’s remarks to Burt circa 1990]

Mildly interesting. Of course, this is exactly the way many professionals talk, for good and ill, mostly ill. Richard Armitage could be quite foul-mouthed in private. Victoria Nuland was famously captured on tape (and it’s on YouTube). Some of Richard Holbrooke’s stories sounded like an adolescent’s fantasy of how to talk to a dictator. Kissinger, as is well-known, has no moral compass and there’s serious reason to doubt that Madeleine Albright has one.

I am not discounting the implicit criticism of Trump as a narcissistic, immature egomaniac — just pointing out that U.S. foreign policy has long been driven by short-sighted amoral aholes. Trump is surely no remedy, but he also would be no particular novelty.

Gary Younge in The Nation. Or I could just listen to crotchety old dudes on CT threads. Difficult choice!

Trump spews nonsense. He responds to today’s tragedy with a renewed call for a ban on Muslims. Omar Mateen was born in the US to a father who may well have been welcomed here as a CIA accomplice (he was apparently given a green card under Reagan’s administration).

But Trump is not saying that we should think twice about Reagan’s policy of supporting and letting mujahidin supporters into the US or that this is not a problem of immigration at all but a home-grown one like Dylann Roof and Timothy McVeigh are home grown problems. He is going to try to get Americans to believe that this kind of violence comes from Muslims abroad mainly. He’s a demagogue.

With his ban Trump wouldn’t let Syrians or Libyans fleeing ISIS or Afghanis fleeing the Taliban or drug lords, or South Asian Muslim engineers and doctors into the US. He’s evil, and I mean this in the sense Susan Neiman has defined evil.

He wants a blanket ban on a billion people, and the effect of that ban will be to create discrimination against a lot more people than that.

Omar Mateen is home grown, and the Trump ban would only alienate American Muslims whose cooperation has proven helpful in other cases in ratting out increasingly deranged persons who the FBI can’t bust on the basis of known ties to actual terrorist networks

It will be a terrible moment in American history if Trump as the leading candidate of a major party actually blasts his call for a ban on Muslims tomorrow, and it seems set to happen. Paul Ryan is not going to rein him in. Romney has failed. Meg Whitman has failed. Lindsay Graham has failed. Mitch McConnell is a weasel.

What could help is a ban on assault rifles, a more effective system against spousal abuse, a more effective mental health system, a community more alert to the violence that can and does result from homophobia, and apparently (according to the former wife) better safeguards against steroid abuse. Here Trump won’t say a word.

What won’t help is a ban on Muslims or even the collection of useless information by forcing all Muslims to register.

Others can address Trump’s anti-pc common sense on domestic terrorism and hate crimes which at best he’ll do nothing to reduce. Or they can speak about his wall or his charges of Chinese currency manipulation. It’s all the same BS that Trump University is.

@ 187 I don’t believe the murder of 50 innocents is ‘helpful’ to anyone ever.

Please feel to wade through the blood with RNB to weigh the scales without me.

Fucking ghouls.

I don’t believe the murder of 50 innocents is ‘helpful’ to anyone ever.

Why do you suppose that terrorists kill innocents, then? Why do you suppose that Trump attempts to capitalize politically on the murder of innocents?

The interesting issue is not whether such things are ‘helpful’ — it’s pretty obvious that they can be, given a certain set of goals. The question is: Will ISIS succeed in its goals? Will Trump?

I can see why you want to shut down this line of inquiry, though. It’s pretty inevitably going to lead to some uncomfortable conclusions for you.

@ 190. You’re sick. The bodies aren’t in the ground yet. I’ve already asked you to leave me out of your loathsome speculations.

I’m not about to speculate about the efficacy of murder under any circumstances no matter what. Please fuck off.

@ 193 I’ve told you to fuck off already. I can’t prevent you from reading my comment, but be assured you’re not my intended audience.

The only part of the Orlando tragedy that I’m willing to discuss are the victims and future targets – gay people. Because whatever else this attack was/might be, it was unquestionably an attack on gay people – and the most devastating ever.

Owen Jones just walked off a Sky TV review of the news because the standard line seems to be ‘this was an attack on everyone., how can we use this to advance our cause.” Owen quite justifiably shot back that if a lunatic had walked into a synagogue and gunned down fifty Jewish people, the attack would unquestionably described as anti-Semitic. So, maybe, just maybe we can focus on the fact that all the victims of this terror attack shared one characteristic – twasn’t about being Muslim, or not Muslm – twas about living a life every bit as deserving of respect as any other.

We’ve seen already how dismissing the legitimate concerns of minorities can backfire on elites. The sense I get from reading the press is the people most likely to change behavior over this event are the future victims, who pretty clearly feel targeted by religious cranks. Ted Cruz was on stage with his father with a pastor who openly calls for the death of homosexuals (busted for it, Cruz later whined ‘Twas a mistake).

I won’t bother to link to the pieces (winning a lot of attention) about/by gay people who are going through a fairly serious period of reflection over their choice of political affiliation. What does one say to gay people when we learn that the lunatic was a known hater of homosexuality who been interviewed three times by the FBI?

Don’t worry? We’ll protect you from people who want to hang you from cranes, or shoot you dead in night clubs?

It’s a bad time for gay people in particular. The rest of us really can’t imagine what our gay friends must be going through right now as they try to simply live their lives, all the time aware that hate screeds are tolerated and accepted because they are couched in the language of ‘faith.’

It’s a fucking joke. Richler was right.

Here’s Trump in a naked effort to capitalize politically on the tragedy.

The original post addressed this issue:

What sorts of confabulations do you predict will prove necessary/psychically efficacious, to achieve this realignment, over the next 5 months?

How will Republicans rationalize their vote for Trump? I think it approaches consensus in the Republican Party that Obama has been insufficiently hostile to Islam, and that the threat of Islam is an existential crisis, or close to it, for the US.

I think Trump has a real problem, though, in that what works among Republicans will often shock the conscience of decent people.

Note Trump’s position on the victims. Unless I’ve missed it, he hasn’t mentioned gay people at all.

I think the CIA basically got it right, per Wikipedia. bin Laden understood U.S. politics very well:

Ron Suskind noted that the CIA analysis of the video led them to the consensus view that the tape was designed strategically to help President Bush win reelection in 2004. Deputy CIA director John E. McLaughlin noted at one meeting, “Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.” Suskind quoted Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, as saying “Certainly, he would want Bush to keep doing what he’s doing for a few more years.”[4] The same speculation has been made by Bahukutumbi Raman.[5]

Racist is as racist does

Saying that “radical Islamic” terrorists justify their attacks with a perverse interpretation of Islam (Clinton) is different from saying that the religion itself should be cast under suspicion

Logically, yes. Politically—I think have enough experience of the ‘intelligent’ Islamophobia in Britain over the last decade to know how this plays out. The shooter was a homophobe, a wife-beater and a wannabe cop—but in Clinton’s eyes it’s all about one thing…

“Hillary Clinton agrees that radical Islam yadda yadda, only she’s not going to do anything about it and I will.” And then he names Joe Arpaio as ubergruppenfuhrer of homeland security.

political football @ 202

Deputy CIA director John E. McLaughlin resigned in Nov 2004. Bush had brought in Porter Goss to purge the Agency. Goss brought in Kyle Foggo as his number 3. Foggo would later go to jail for his part in the Cunningham procurement scandal.

It obviously isn’t “racist” to use the phrase “radical Islamism”. Perhaps it’s inaccurate, but racist it ain’t.

but in Clinton’s eyes it’s all about one thing

In her discussions of this, Clinton has given priority to generalized bigotry and gun control – only later mentioning ‘radical Islam,” defined in such a way as to exclude the vast majority of Muslims.

When you define the conversation in such a way as to deny the existence of things that exist, you are necessarily going to be led astray.

@Ze K
I can’t imagine why bin Laden would care who American preznit is

Bin Laden wanted to encourage U.S. and Western belligerence/aggression in the M.E. and environs b.c he had a vision of an apocalyptic battle in which the true faith (i.e., his) would triumph. You can’t have an apocalyptic battle if the other side doesn’t cooperate in providing one. Hence bin Laden had a definite interest in who the US pres. was and what policies he wd follow.

A terrorism expert here (Australia) last night suggested that another factor that might reduce the risk of such attacks by people who align themselves with ISIS in some way (in addition to better gun regulation), is if police and security forces had better relationships with Muslim communities in the US. If that is correct, Trump is a danger since his rhetoric is likely to make relationships worse.

p.s. Apparently he had made favorable remarks at some point about *both* ISIS and Hezbollah, suggesting at a minimum a very low amount of knowledge and/or high amount of confusion.

This idiot claimed allegiance to ISIS and their enemies in the Al Nusra front. He was a bog-standard American homophobe and misogynist, who cloaked his homophobia and misogyny in its commonest cloth. A servant of radical Islam he was not.

Right. This guy beat his wife had a long history of making homophobic and racist comments.

Wait, that remind me of someone!

“Listen! Treat women kindly; they are like prisoners in your hands. Beyond this you do not owe anything from them. Should they be guilty of flagrant misbehaviour, you may remove them from your beds, and beat them but do not inflict upon them any severe punishment.”

“Whoever you find doing the action of the people of Loot, execute the one who does it and the one to whom it is done.

“You should listen to and obey, your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin.”

I’d suppose all kinds of motives and thoughts can get tangled up in a confused way in someone who is mentally unstable. No reason as of now to conclude that a confused strain of ‘extremism’ could not have formed part of the tangle. But pending the detailed investigations, I think it’s too soon to say anything definitive.

This was a ‘Latin night’ at this gay club, and those murdered were mostly Latino and (to judge from a partial list of names and ages that I saw) mostly fairly young. The particular identities of the victims are probably irrelevant to ISIS, which at this point seems to be praising any mass shooting in the U.S. that can somehow be fit into its worldview, such as it is.

227 and 228
I can’t speak for anyone else but I hope it’s clear I wasn’t suggesting that Islamism (radical or otherwise) is to blame for this latest attack. In fact I was suggesting that people like this shooter use causes like ISIS as a justification for their violence, which actually comes from other causes.

In terms of my research interests, though, I think that all three of the big monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have been patriarchal and that homophobia is part of this. In the case of Islam, because it’s the newest, the patriarchy and homophobia may still be more apparent, but I certainly don’t think it’s unique to Islam.

shooter was gay himself & reported as a regular at that very nightclub.

Certain facts or reported facts about the perpetrator (Mateen) have emerged, among them: (1) he married a woman he met online, (2) the woman has said that, after an initial period of normalcy (for lack of a better word), Mateen became abusive and ‘unstable’, (3) according to his father, Mateen was angered (apparently on more than one occasion) when he saw men kissing; (4) according to a report in Gawker, and now apparently picked up more widely, linked by p. football @230, Mateen had showed up at the club w some regularity and had “exchanged messages with at least one gay man on a gay dating app.”

Based on the foregoing, I would hesitate to draw the inference that JeffreyG draws in the first four words of his comment @235. The picture is confused and to leap to conclusions, including conclusions about the killer’s sexual orientation, seems unjustified. (It may be that certain of the speculations upthread by RNB about the perpetrator’s psychology will turn out to have some basis, but again I’d hesitate to conclude that now.)

Btw, Trump has acknowledged LGBT people were the victims, but the mention was somewhat lost in the midst of his call for more immigration restrictions, etc.

pps correction: “perpetrator” not “victim”. Too late in the evening to be commenting

Same security firm that muffed the London Olympics — by someone’s count one of largest private employers in the world and probably one giant bundle of grifts.

PGD: “…certainly…certainly…clearly…”

You keep using those words. I’m not sure they mean what you think they mean.

As for Trump, he not only acknowledged that the victims were gay, he used it as a talking point.

It’s true, I missed that. For some reason the media didn’t focus on this – the gay solidarity stuff was much more prominent in reporting on Hillary. Media bias, I guess.

Hillary issued statements of solidarity with gay people, and you hear that loud and clear. Trump talks about banning Muslim entry to help gay people, and the media treats this as being all about the Muslims, and not the gay people Trump wants to help.

I think the question of motivation is an interesting and important one. Would Mateen have acted if ISIS didn’t exist? He didn’t seem to be all that fastidious about which Islamic radical group he was following — the reports say he also was a big fan of Hezbollah and al Qaeda.

But okay, let’s wipe out all the Islamic radicals — they’re all the same anyway, right? Is it likely that a young gay man taught self-hatred from the day he was born would react violently in the absence of radical Islamic teaching?

I think it’s fair to say that folks in this thread are minimizing ISIS’ influence in the sense that people are saying there was a lot more going on, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody here saying that ISIS wasn’t a factor. ISIS was pretty obviously a factor.

Engels at 246 for the win.

If Omar Mateen was a follower of ISIS at war with the West, why did he kill people who to him represent the decadence of West and presumably be weakening it? Doesn’t ISIS kill only gay people they find in their own ranks as a way of strengthening and purifying themselves? This is partly why I am suspecting that the real driver here was homophobia, not a commitment to ISIS’ vision and politics.

Still it does seem very likely that Omar Matee’s reading of certain radical jihadist websites strengthened his hatred of LGBT people and contributed to his willingness to commit this atrocity. President Obama said as much yesterday. @244 I see little reason to deny this.

But the evidence seems strong that homophobia was an independent driver of his actions and perhaps the most powerful one.

Trump will accommodate himself to the Republican base and speak of the security benefits of his Muslim ban, not its protection of sexual diversity of a liberal country. He cannot attack the Democrats as unwilling to take the radical security steps needed to protect LGBT rights specifically and hope to win the Republican base.

Radical warmongers often invoke liberal preferences to show how awesome war is and how hypocritical liberals are. The conservatives eat that shit up.

I think PGD errs in suggesting that Trump actually cares about gay people — I think (my previous sarcasm aside) that the media has been correct to emphasize Trump’s real message: that we must ban Muslims; that Obama is an accomplice – witting or unwitting – of Radical Islam, etc.

But yeah, it’s a perfectly ordinary move among conservatives to suggest that liberals are too wimpy to defend their own sick, perverted policy preferences.

GW Bush performed the exact same maneuver. You don’t think we should invade Iraq? Don’t you care about the gays? Don’t you care about the women? Don’t you care about democracy?

“America has certainly had lots of hateful aggressive assholes before, but this is the first one to shoot down 50 people in a nightclub. ”

Over at LGM they’ve been cataloging instances of settlers, local governments, and/or military forces killing more than 50 Native Anericans at a time in cold blood (that is, not even in a formal battle). Now they’re moving in to African Anerican massacres post-Civil War. Quite a few over 50…

I worry about Americans not being willing to grasp the consequences of the idiocy of our guys.

It is not like we had nothing to do with destroying Afganistan or Iraq and creating ISIS.

They wouldn’t be over here if we weren’t over there, to coin a phrase.

Omar Mateen may not have understood the difference between ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah

A few things:

(1) whether or not someone knows the difference between Isis, Hezbollah or al nusra isn’t a definitive data point against whether same person was radicalized into an extreme Islamic based ideology. Neither is the fact that they might not be great theologians or religiously sophisticated. Perhaps in some alternative universe the same person would have just been radicalized into some other extremist group, but we live in this universe so why not try and understand it on its own terms ? Can we move on from Fox news vs repetitive liberal talking points?

(2) There are a lot of homophobes out there. A lot of wife beaters and people with grievances. What you need to do is understand why some commit mass violence whereas others don’t.

So

(3) What radical jihadism does is offer a story for (primarily) a subset of young males who might be dissatisfied, feel out of place or persecuted. It allows them to make Sense of their grievances, gives them an ideology to justify violence, and a cause to kill and die for.

(4) what we see in the demographics who become radicalized is a mixed bag. They are not primarily mentally unstable (though perhaps in this case he was, for whatever definition of mentally unstable), they are not generally sophisticated religious scholars, they are not always people who are obviously impoverished or oppressed (though some are). They come from different socio economic, ethnic and educational backgrounds.

(5) Isis, among others, provides the narrative laid out in 3. They provide the story to give their lifes meaning, the ideology to justify violence, and the cause to die for. Would you, for example, look at the dyllan roof mass murder and say this has nothing to do with white supremacy, southern traditions of violence against blacks, or organisations and sites that roof frequented before the attack? He was simply mentally deranged/a bog standard racist/in another context he might have joined the Tamil tigers etc. Of course not, that would be idiotic.

“I taught in inner city London schools in the 1970s and the way that Pakistani kids were treated there was awful. ”

Right, but they didn’t blow up London in the 70s. The people who did were irish radicals. And the reasons they did it wasn’t reducible to their oppression or due to mental illness, but because they had a cause they believed in, an ideology that justified violence, and militant organisations to channel their frustrations.

Everyone who joined a militant org in NI didn’t have a sophisticated understanding of their groups political goals, but they were socialised into its aims and were tied into it through relationships to other militants, a larger community and an idealised in group under attack. *One* of the reasons (there are others) it developed in that specific part of the uk and not somewhere else, is because these traditions, ideologies and justifications for violence had more historical and political resonance in NI. This is the same, at the moment, for radical Islamist terrorism in the west. (Perhaps not to the same extent globally)

Ie all religions being patriarchal/potentially violent. Of course. But at this moment in time “Islam” is something of an outlier in reactionary political and social attitudes in the west, and there’s evidence that second generation immigrants (ie those born and brought up in the west rather than who.moved here) are developing more reactionary views than their parents. (Shadi hamid’s book “Islamic exceptionalism” has a decent overview of the evidence on this)

None of this means (1) I want to scapegoat Muslims (2) I think Islam is a monolith (3) I support a new war against terror (4) I support more extensive surveillance of Muslim communities (5) I want to restrict migration from Muslim majority countries etc.
But there are genuine questions over a divergence of social and political values between some Muslim communities and “the mainstream”, and the threat posed from radicalized groups and individuals.

sorry, Irish Republican ideology would be relevant to 21st century US residents? The structure of society and the relevant tensions are so different that I can’t begin to imagine how they’d map.

Ronan,

The fact is almost none of what you say seems relevant, though I agree that “he’s got the ideology wrong” is a waste of time. Lots of people mix and match theologies and ideologies and don’t turn into terrorists.

But the Internet makes an enormous difference in how people get radicalized and what groups they have access to, how they interact with those groups, etc. Plus, how many young American men (just restricting it to men for the time being) do you think are angry? I’d say quite a lot, and I’d guess a lot more than in Ireland (generally) or Australia. The trope of the young person with anger they can’t attach to anything objective, or to any ideology, is pretty old.

There’s an idea that “toxic masculinity” doesn’t come from traditional cultures (and thus is different from “patriarchy”) but from the absence of traditional culture: that you can’t radicalize someone who was raised traditionally. This is read as the reason the second generation is more radical. I think there’s some truth to this but it’s overblown: the fact is that toxic reaction is reaction, and it comes from a confrontation between an intense attachment to a perceived tradition and revulsion at a perceived lawlessness, and can borrow the rhetoric of pacific nostalgia. On the other hand, suggesting that an angry guy fits into all the other angry guy frameworks throughout history doesn’t seem helpful, either. There are both differences and similarities.

(And actually pro-IRA sentiment was pretty common in this part of the US, but separated from the community it was supposed to be defending, took some especially unsavory turns. It does seem plausible that pro-ISIS sentiment at a distance might have some similarities to that. But less so that an analysis of the IRA in Belfast would.)

Ronan,

That’s true if he was really radicalized by Islamists. If he was just generally radicalized, or radicalized by people who played at being Islamists be had no connection to an international movement, or radicalized by people who made him aware of the importance of a Muslim background in his being alienated from society, what ISIS or whoever does in the radicalization process doesn’t seem to matter as much.

As to whether someone was angry first and radicalized afterward, it affects whether your story holds, the one where radicalization by being socialized into a community, is still relevant in this case.

And by “trope”, I mean that it’s a kind of meme used by people who’ve never read something by Atran or anyone similar and don’t ever intend to.

I think we probably agree on more than we disagree. I was objecting to what seemed to be your trying to fit this case into what you happen to know about, and making this into a discussion about that instead of the specific horrific case. To the extent Val is doing the same thing, I object to her doing it too.

Not to beat a dead horse (and at the risk of putting those Billy Joel lyrics into my head), Masha Gessen wrote something that I think ties in pretty closely to what you’re saying, but is kind of the other side of the coin: that it isn’t reaction at all, or nostalgia, but an entirely imaginary fantasy. IOW, either it’s a real army or it’s all in the perp’s head. That seems like a vast chasm of a dichotomy to me.

And btw, I recognise that this case is very different, because of the shooter targeting gay people. The reason I got onto the issue of Trump stigmatising immigrant groups was because this is a thread about Trump originally, but happy to let that go now.

Also on the subject of religion, Ronan, I didn’t say all religions were patriarchal and homophobic, I said the three main (recent) monotheistic religions were. It’s important historically.

I also read a Facebook meme yesterday that said ‘homophobia’ was a misleading word, because people who hate gays aren’t irrationally scared, they’re just arseholes. Obviously it’s a simplification, and the self- and other-hating fear of being gay that RNB is talking about has some meaning in particular, but I think there’s some truth in it.

Well, about a generation ago – people now in their 70s and up – almost everybody was pretty homophobic and true equality before the law is only a very recent phenomenon. So I’m not sure if vilifying religion is the way forward, especially since e.g. the Protestant church in Germany has recently proven to be perfectly compatible with homosexuality and London elected a mayor with a conservative Muslim background who nevertheless embraces gay marriage. Homophobia often has other, deeper roots.

Val, I got what you were saying, I just don’t find it overly convincing because (1) if stigmatisation is so widespread, how can it explain such a rare occurrence ie terrorist violence (2) the sorts of people who become radicalized seem to be a pretty mixed bag, in terms of age, background, socio economic position etc. The life experiences seem to vary quite broadly. But I take your point.
I agree feeling like an outsider(whether caught between their parents traditional culture and values and the more liberal one they’re growing up in, or by facing racism and discrimination) can be an important part of radicalisation. I just think it’s overplayed. (Scott atran claims that one of the best predictors of who will become radicalized is the company they keep. Close friends radicalizing each other in small groups, ie football teams, neighbourhood groups etc). That obviously doesn’t rule out stigmatisation as a collective grievance, so I wouldn’t really argue against your point too strongly.

Layman @274. The differing reactions of Foster and Isis seem relevant here.

@247: Trump doesn’t want to help anybody, although I doubt he has anything against gays personally. The “Muslims hate gays” cudgel has now been taken up by people who care very little for gays, but at present find it to be useful for beating up on Muslims.

p.s. At the same time Obama made clear that, in his view, there is such a thing as ‘radicalization/inspiration via internet’ — the point was rather that the label ‘radical Islam’ plays into ISIS’s hands by reinforcing their desired narrative of ‘West v. Islam’. This is actually one of the few things GW Bush got right when he insisted (after 9/11 and subsequently) that lumping all Muslims together and demonizing an entire religion was wrong and counterproductive.

The attempt, by implication or otherwise, to blame the religion and all its adherents is something that not only Trump and his followers, but (at least supposedly) more intellectual voices, like Aayan Hirsi Ali (sorry for probable misspelling), have pushed. But it does seem to me v. counterproductive.

Yes, Lupita.

Whatever the mysterious psychology of this particular murderer, we need to look to the politics of our own chosen views. Not to lock ourselves into an imagined struggle, but to see plainly the actual, on-going war.

politicalfootball: “The differing reactions of Foster and Isis seem relevant here.”

How, or why?

Lupita @284
What I consider pertinent is that the West colonized, illegitimately deposed legitimate leaders, bombed, and occupied Muslim countries

There are a lot of pertinent things; this is one set of pertinent considerations, but far from the only one.

The original movements for liberation from colonial rule in many Muslim countries were largely secularist and radical-nationalist, not Islamist. And most of these countries have been formally independent for decades. One has to look at particular histories, which are complicated, and I don’t think homogenizing everything into something labeled ‘World Civil War 1’ is either esp. useful or esp. accurate.

As for the psychology of those who commit particular acts of violence, that wd seem to be of some importance — along w other things — if one is interested in reducing their incidence. (None of this is to excuse the West’s various crimes and blunders in its historical relations w the Muslim world, or some of what has been done more recently, but the question is what to do from now on.)

Given the ideology and modus operandi of ISIS in particular — and granting the role of the misconceived invasion of Iraq in setting the stage for its emergence — it’s not easy to see what alternative there is, again w/r/t ISIS in particular, to a policy of clear opposition.

p.s. my comment @289 is not meant to be a comment spec. on Mateen or his crime, but a more general response to Lupita’s comment.

Trump said on Hannity that American Muslims do not assimilate even after two or three generations.

Now that I think about it, I kind of wish Jodie foster did take credit for the attempted assassination of Reagan

#ReadyForWarOnTerror.2

I have no doubt — I have no doubt we can meet this challenge if we meet it together. Whatever we learn about this killer, his motives in the days ahead, we know already the barbarity that we face from radical jihadists is profound. In the Middle East, ISIS is attempting a genocide of religious and ethnic minorities. They are slaughtering Muslims who refuse to accept their medieval ways. They are beheading civilians, including executing LGBT people. They are murdering Americans and Europeans, enslaving, torturing and raping women and girls. In speeches like this one, after Paris, Brussels and San Bernardino, I have laid out a plan to defeat ISIS and the other radical jihadist groups in the region and beyond. The attack in Orlando makes it even more clear, we cannot contain this threat. We must defeat it. And the good news is that the coalition effort in Syria and Iraq has made recent gains in the last months….

Quote from a survivor of Matteen’s attack, from WaPo article:

“We heard him talking to 911 saying the reason why he’s doing this is because he wants Americans to stop bombing his country,” said Patience Carter, a survivor of Sunday’s shootings.

Try making an actual logical argument instead of spewing invective. Someone might suspect you have nothing to say.

Dumpf: this was obviously an act of WAR we need to ramp up the WAR between Islam and US
Shillary: it was an act of WAR we need to ramp up the WAR between radical Islam and US (#NotAllMuslims)
Radical US Internet people: an act of WAR we need to ramp up the (heroic) WAR (of liberation) between Islam and US (empire) and anyone who disagrees with me (re mentally disturbed homophobic mass-murderer’s psychology) is a pussy

From outside the US, *how* this crime was committed is really, really important. It’s the guns, people. However angry a man might be, and however full of hate (and please, let’s not define anger and hatred and violence as mental illnesses) he can do much less damage if he can’t get hold of a gun. Especially a machine gun.

“It’s the guns, people. ”

Yes, of course, it is the guns. Absent easy access to guns, this attack doesn’t happen. Sure, it happened in Paris, but only through a complicated scheme to smuggle guns overland from a war zone where they were readily available to a target where they were not; which scheme necessarily requires many people, communications, infrastructure, all of which are detectable by intelligence and / or law enforcement.

Here, it’s easy, because anyone can buy the guns, anywhere. It will keep happening, as long as it’s easy to get the guns, and regardless of the motivation claimed by the perpetrators. Even if we destroy ISIS, it will keep happening. They’ll just cite Jodie Foster, or the constitution, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, or ennui.

I don’t think either Iris or Holden has properly taken responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

From outside the US, *how* this crime was committed is really, really important. It’s the guns, people.

An eye-catching factoid in that respect: apparently, the number of casualties in Orlando is comparable to the number of people yearly killed in the US each year by… children under 3. So yeah, ideology is not nothing, but when toddlers are as deadly as Daech, you have a problem.

It is possible to address the wider context of prejudice and mental illness without discussing the murder in a nightclub of 20 gay men by an abusive and disturbed American citizen as ’21st century guerilla tactics’ in a ‘global civil war’ between the US empire and its subject peoples…

When the Orlando shooting happened, it was the 133rd mass shooting in the US *this year.*

Or take the civil war in Yemen, and the regional competition betw Saudi Arabia and Iran to which it is connected. Hard to put all of that at the doorstep of ‘US imperialism’.

133 mass shootings in 2016!!!!!! Horrific fucking …. abuse of statistics, and no wonder nobody takes gun safety advocates seriously. For example: there were 5 ‘mass shootings’ from May 29th to May 31st alone.

How can we be unaware of these 5 mass shooting, given the implied horrific death toll? Perhaps because the 133 mass shootings have devised metrics paper over the fact that the total number of deaths in the 5 horrific mass shootings is exactly – zero.

http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

@ 318. Fair enough. Chicago’s ‘efforts to restrict and control’ gun ownership.

Nice try switching metrics to ‘utility’ rather than ease of access and the more important total number of deaths. You could be spinning for the gunviolencearchive, where the murder of 51 by 1 in Florida carries less statistical weight than the murder of nobody five times.

Dead is dead and those who died and their families deserve something better than cynics planting flags in the corpses. But, twas ever thus.

317: Time Online US Arm Sales Spike in 2014

“The United States remains the world’s preeminent exporter of arms, with more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market controlled by the United States as of 2014.”

Dear Engels,

I was not discussing the nightclub mass murder. I was discussing Islamism. Chill.

_was_ responding

I was wondering how quickly this thread would polarise between ‘thank God we have Hillary to defend us’ and ‘chickens coming home to roost’…

connection between terrorism here and our bombing overseas.

This is undoubtedly a thing, and it is a thing it would be good to try to understand. Whether something called “radical Islam” helps or hinders understanding is a separate question.

bruce wilder @333

So your prescription presumably would be to immediately end all U.S. operations in support of the Iraqi army and other forces opposing ISIS, and if ISIS ends up regaining the territory it has lost over the past year and proceeds to wipe out particular civilian populations whom it dislikes, such as the Yazidis for ex., well, so be it. Btw the number of Iraqis who fled Mosul and other places to avoid having to live under ISIS rule there speaks for itself as to how most Iraqis saw the prospect.

On one hand Lupita @329 faults the U.S. for pursuing its “sole superpower agenda” while b.w. on the other hand asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and torture of prisoners etc. resulted in the loss of the U.S.’s “capacity to conduct a foreign policy.”

The last phrase sounds impressive but on scrutiny makes, to me at least, little sense. No “capacity to conduct a foreign policy,” a “strategy empty of moral and practical purpose,” “elite betrayal and incompetence” are nice-sounding phrases, but not a substitute for actual analysis, imo.

Simply extending the air campaign, without any robust effort to follow up and oust ISIS from Iraq, seems to me the worst option. This strategy is straight from the ‘well we have to do something’ school of foreign policy, but I have never heard a coherent case for how this ‘something’ translates into strategic victory. (This excludes close air support for the Kurds, who have a functional society and held territory that can be supported, and for whom close air support provides a unique compliment to their fairly robust military capacity on the ground).

If bombing is unable to actually achieve the successful outcome that we desire (again, I have not seen the case that it can, but am open to that argument), continued air strikes will serve to 1) attract the ire of ISIS against the US and US targets, hurting our security; & 2) will empower the more militant elements within ISIS itself, who can use US strikes as ‘proof’ of their ideology and a rallying cry for their war. As I see it, the air campaign is actively detrimental to US interests in the region, provided that you exclude the profit margins of US arms manufacturers from your definition of US interest.

If the US were to be serious about ousting ISIS, we would need to stage a full ground invasion, and be prepared to leave troops in for a series of years, following up with a Marshall Plan style reconstruction effort. The success of this sort of strategy presumes the competence and right-intentions of the relevant actors, elements which also may be reasonably doubted given our recent history.

‘Bad things are happening’ only naturally prescribes action on our part under the assumption that US intervention cannot make things worse.

Ze K – “ISIS and similar Sunni forces in the region are a US-sponsored project”

There is something to this, but as phrased I do not think it is accurate. I think your statement only works if you accept a transitive property of sponsorship (that sponsored by whom we sponsor is therefore sponsored by us), and/or define sponsor to include unintentional (but arguably predictable) effects of one’s action.

Certainly, American support for Saudi Arabia, and US opposition to Assad, serve as major barriers to ‘the US being serious about ousting ISIS’ in any coherent way. But unless you know something I do not (if so please share), your comment oversteps what we (laypeople) can conclude from the record.

Ze K
That is presuming much more continuity along the mujaheddeen -> Al-Q -> ISIS trajectory that I think is reasonable.

ISIS is more directly a descendant of the Islamic State of Iraq, which arises during the Iraq War (post-Fallujah, pre-surge, in reaction to the political consolidation by Iraqi Shia in 2005 & 2006). There is a long period of time in which US forces and early-ISIS were in direct and heavy conflict – your comment completely elides this history.

This is not to say that there have not been times when US action has quite knowingly supplied weapons and resources to forces allied/congruent with ISIS. But again, your version involves quite a stretch from what the record tells us.

I think U.S. power gets hijacked pretty easily in the Middle East, in various collaborations, as self-interested and sometimes corrupt elements in U.S. politics and state apparatus interact with kleptocrats and opportunists in various Islamic and other states in the region.

To a large extent, I would attribute this to the severe weakness of the domestic political coalitions that might take an interest in the public purposes of U.S. foreign policy and the lack of a moral compass among prominent political leaders. No one constrains the Dick Cheneys or Victoria Nulands. This is compounded by sheer stupidity and ignorance, as no one as smart as, say, Henry Kissinger even comes near U.S. foreign policy.

I seriously doubt that “U.S. planning” (an oxymoron) of any sort of “project” figures in the current chaos in Syria and northern Iraq. There are so many dimensions to the power conflict among Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel and the deeply fractured communities and polities of Kurds, Alawites, Maronites, Yazidis, Hezbollah, Daesh . . . it makes me long for the days when George W Bush was struggling to distinguish Shia and Sunni. Should we mention Lebanon, Cyprus, Hashemite Jordan, Palestine or the current regime in Baghdad, just to test our computational capacity?

There’s no natural and stable alliance structure anywhere that I can see — certainly nothing that could be resolved into a winnable war or negotiable conflict between two sets of antagonists that ends in some agreement.

I think U.S. power gets hijacked via elite corruption and deep state degeneracy. If the U.S. has a genuine national interest, or a genuine “international” interest as global hegemon, it would be in projects of global stability, development and good government. But, designing such idealistic projects requires considerable resources and elite cadres to articulate and carry them out.

Instead we’ve got a Pentagon dominated by a military-industrial complex with a deep interest in selling weaponry; a massive global oil industry suddenly confronting its own mortality; a kleptocratic global system of banking and investment hiding ownership and cash for everyone from Russian oligarchs to Saudi princes, . . .

I do not think the American alliance with Saudi Arabia makes any sense without U.S. interests pressing their dubious case. (Yes, I am looking at the Bush family selling the country out.) I do not think role of right-wing Israeli’s in American politics is healthy for the U.S. I do see how U.S. support for Pakistan makes any sense, as Pakistan gives North Korea the bomb and harbors Bin Laden, aids Gaddafi and so on.

In the absence of a sophisticated moral and practical framework for understanding the politics of deeply fractured and damaged polities, we are left to the expedient of identifying the greater evil, the Hitler du jour, and opposing him or it, willy nilly and with no anticipation of consequences, the next move, and so on — just chaos begetting more chaos.

Given the weakness of the national will, yes, I think neo-isolationism might well be the best policy the U.S. could adopt, for its sake if not for the sake of the larger world (which may well suffer acutely from a withdrawal of dominating American military force and the final fading of a liberal ideal of cosmopolitanism). I don’t see neo-isolationism as a first-best or even a second-best policy, but it may be the only feasible alternative to riding “there is no alternative” over the cliff of imperial overreach and collapse.

I do see not how U.S. support for Pakistan . . .

The passage I quoted from Peter T. is from this post from last October:
http://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-campaign-against-isis.html

I assume there are other places, but I glance over at Sic Semper Tyrannis and Pat Lang for informed “sitreps” about Syria and the wars. Better than guessing or comments here.

Sample: “The map above was made two days ago. As of this morning the YPG/SDF forces may have completed the encirclement of Manbij or they may have left an escape route to the northwest open. They definitely have continued further west to Al’Arimah. They are halfway to Al-Bab. All those yellow dots on the map are Kurdish villages and towns just begging to be connected. Now that the chase is on, I don’t see how those YPG fighters can resist the temptation to fulfill their Rojavan dream… or at least try.”

I am not so confidant that the Levant trends toward peace after ISIL is defeated. Erdogan and Kurds have their own ambitions.

Collin Street @ 346
I do wish you and others would stop equating evil with craziness. No understanding is gained, and if you really mean by crazy, “mentally ill”, then you aren’t diagnosing mental illness so much as defining certain acts as such. And how then can the shooters be held legally responsible for their violence, if they are mentally ill? Not to mention the way this careless useage taints the concept for those struggling with psychiatric difficulties.

Not to pick on you especially; you’re just the most recent.

JeffreyG @350
I appreciate your thoughtful engagement here, and I agree on certain points. I am just ‘commented-out’ on this subject for now.

“Have you ever fired a machine gun?”

Yes, I’ve fired a number of them. I’ve been trained to fire them.

“I have and I was pretty good at it.”

Which ones? What does ‘pretty good’ mean? What range were you firing at, and which targets? What sort of mount did you use? Did you employ a traversing lock & bar?

“A subset of males in some countries today know practically nothing about carrying and maintaining weapons. You’re clearly one of them.”

This would come as a big surprise to the 2nd Armored Division and the 35th Infantry Division, who thought I was pretty good at it.

Reminiscing aside, what was the point of your post again? Something about easy access to weapons not being a significant factor in mass killings? Have you found anything at all useful to support that nonsense, other than your notion that there are no guns in Chicago?

http://www.theonion.com/article/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-36131
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/times-we-need-pull-ourselves-hold-our-loved-ones-c-53086

http://www.theshovel.com.au/2016/06/14/imagine-if-guns-could-actually-kill-people-americas-nra-wonders/

http://www.theshovel.com.au/2016/06/14/exhausted-muddled-donald-trump-accidently-calls-for-ban-on-muslims-instead-of-guns/

Which makes generalisations about Islam or Sunnis or Shi’a decidedly unhelpful unless you are at the Donald Trump level of obtuseness.

Obama’s not been exactly shy either when it comes to making generalizations about Islam . One in a very long line of politicians desperately eager to spout the “religion of peace” meme.

Ze K

The internet is a great research tool – one can find on it reports of what military and political action each party is taking without leaving home. Try it (without specs on)!

RNB

Mearsheimer and Walt are not the American government. I was referring to the CIA (wants to oust Assad) and the Pentagon (puts ISIS first). State is slowly moving positions as the reality sinks in that the only parties with any real power in Syria are the regime, the Islamists and the Kurds. Each of these has their own backers in Congress, the media and the executive. Obama has backed the Pentagon more, but not provoked a fight with the CIA. A settlement between the Kurds and the regime is possible if Russia and Iran lean hard, but neither will compromise with the Islamists (nor they with the regime or the Kurds).

The US has been very slow to grasp that the locals have their own agendas, and ways to evade or co-opt US power.

This thread, it looks like, has been all over the place, and I haven’t time to comment now, but I think the research reported in this article might be significant in the effort to understand mass shootings like the Orlando massacre and deeper roots of the ISIS phenomenon, as well as the authoritarian mentality of men who are among the Trump supporters and before that tea partiers and racist gun nuts. Anyway, it’s something to consider. It may be that in the search for a causal explanation the political or “religious” motives for the violent actions of these groups will be relatively superficial compared to the dark undercurrent of the male social norm of domination and control on the principle of physical power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/world/americas/control-and-fear-what-mass-killings-and-domestic-violence-have-in-common.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

“My own view is that removing the reasons people might want to use guns against others makes more sense than trying to restrict access to weapons.”

No one really knows what your own view is. You’ll say pretty much anything. I’m still hoping for some exposition on your skill with machine guns. Do you tell your students about it? Are they impressed?

“Your familiarity with weapons and your training makes your loopy remarks about magazine sizes and pistol grips all the more inexcusable. ”

All reality-based people are aware that there is absolutely less than zero value in arguing gun fetishists over terminology or hardware – no rhetorical value, no political value, no personal value. Once the discussion moves onto those grounds rational thought has ended and the thread should be closed.

Peter T @ 360: I wish people . . . would stop using the word “Islam” so broadly. . . . . Ditto generalisations about military force. it’s not the same everywhere or all the time – it’s highly contingent. . . .

I wish people would choose to analyze more the beer and less the froth. I am not saying you are doing that, but you’re not not-doing that either. Still, what’s the order of things? When I hear journalists, in their cliché-filled reports, talking of tribalism and fundamentalist religion, I usually presume they are talking, whether they know it or not, about a polity coming apart at the seams, its social institutions degraded and the population under stress. Trying to weave details of ancient doctrines and sectarian rivalries into the consequences of a society confronting the stress of approaching Malthusian limits or coping with neoliberal immiseration seems to me to be talking about the wrong things — or at least talking about them in the wrong order and frequently leaving out key parts, like, oh say, the capacity to produce sufficient surplus from agriculture or trade to support and busy an urbanized population, or the demographics (e.g. the often all-important age structure — how many testosterone-filled young men are available for riots and war?)

When the corrupt centrists and their handmaidens on the neocon Right follow the high-flown pedantry of a Clash of Civilizations with the minutiae of tactical military or political maneuvers, my eyes glaze over. Once you’ve broken a society’s foundation stones, and the harsh unreasoning discipline of fundamentalist religions or the atavism of tribal loyalties are the only structures of social cooperation anyone can cling to, to survive, it is hard to see how blowing up the sand pile is going to turn anything around within the next Friedman unit. Contingent my ass.

Peter T @ 360: BW . . . overlooks that the US is the largest concentration of financial, military and political power on the plan[e]t.

Did I overlook that? Use of the term “global hegemon” might indicate otherwise.

Peter T @ 360: The US system of government makes it difficult to prevent this. It also makes coherent policy difficult. . . . If you want a different outcome, change the constitution.

It seems to me that any modern nation-state synthesizes policy from conflicts of faction and interest. Scratch “modern”. Intrigue was a feature of feudal monarchy; deliberative parliaments and rotation in responsible office, taking more notice of bourgeois interest in trade, finance and industry and less in dynastic alliances were a marked improvement in terms of consistency, commitment and rationality. That’s how we got constitutions.

A small-c constitution is just a framework for the political dynamics of accumulation and habit, merging the logistic curves of development into the cosine rhythms of anacyclosis. The gradual build-up of the complex set of interests in the military-industrial complex and its deep state, combined with the steady increase in the proportionate costs of complexity and corruption, puts a lot of pressure on the small-c constitution. One and the other will break and give way to some new configuration — that much is certain, because as they say, if something cannot go on indefinitely, it won’t go on forever.

Constitutions — especially small-c constitutions — are plastic enough. They do change to accommodate and re-channel the pressures placed on their polities. Republics become Empires and Empires fail and collapse. Understanding what part of the outcome can be controlled is almost misunderstanding the nature of a statesman’s choice, which is rarely a outcome itself. Rather, the statesman is asked to choose a path to opportunities to choose in the future. It is a matter of choosing to occupy the high ground, knowing that will be an advantage in any case, and the trick is to know what is high ground and how it can be secured.

I fear we are focused politically on the wrong things, the wrong questions, following a figure-8 path of Friedman units nowhere, because we cannot or will not lift our eyes to the horizon to form some idea and goal of enlightened self-interest that might guide fashioning a better constitution for the next phase of the global order, one that will have to cope without the U.S. as a global hegemon, because the U.S. is either not generating a sufficient surplus from its superior position or that surplus is being skimmed away and the material basis of U.S. hegemony has eroded away. We may well discover that the U.S. has become a hollow hegemon in some global crisis. U.S. hegemony has not been such an unalloyed good that I, personally, would mourn its passing, except that I fear that we are so stupidly and stubbornly ignoring the inevitability of its passing without preparing even an idea of an order in succession.

BW

Sure. But when you have taken into account the environmental, demographic and other drivers, there’s still a lot of yards to cover before you get to the tactical minutiae. Politics makes what it can in coping with the challenges out of the materials available, and the materials in, say, Iran, with its imperial and high-cultural traditions and Shi’a political/religious fusion is very different from the materials available in China. It’s foreign policy’s job to take that into account – figure out where these people are coming from – and work towards the best achievable outcome. US policy discourse seems to have trouble finding the middle ground between the large-scale and the minute where good policy is mostly made.

The sheer size, loose structure and federal nature of the US system provides a lot of openings that are simply not there in smaller, tighter states (as a minor example, the invitation to Netanyahu to address Congress in defiance of the White House would simply not happen in the UK or Germany). Couple that with enormous wealth and it’s an open invitation to wheeler-dealers everywhere.

Relevant to some of the foregoing discussion — T. Burke referring to “a system of checks and balances [having] turned into a system of chokepoints and barriers.”

In a long-ish post that I only read part of (link in next box).

RNB @ 381

Obama has given up on democraticizing or even defending human rights in countries in which he does not think the US has vital interests.

The U.S. had a long record of trading away other peoples’s democracies and human rights for the flimsiest of reasons long before Obama emerged into politics.

Obama has not always been willing to defend Constitutional rights in the United States, as was dramatically demonstrated in the case of Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning’s conditions of imprisonment and he’s blown up his share of weddings and funerals abroad.

RNB: That Obama stepped back even after Assad used chemical weapons represents something of a shift in US foreign policy . . .

I’m not sure who used chemical weapons; the most obvious reason to use chemical weapons was to try to get the U.S. to respond in knee-jerk fashion. It is to Obama’s great good credit that he resisted the impulse, and to the credit of Putin’s diplomacy that Obama had a face-saving opportunity to resist.

RNB: I know that you think Obama is most dangerous in terms of NATO expansion setting off a hot war with Russia . . .

I don’t think Obama in person is at all dangerous in that respect, but I do think the “system” is out-of-control (and, honestly, his inability or unwillingness to rein in the many rogue elements will be on him in the history books).

Though I hesitate to attribute it to a constitutional defect, I think Peter T is correct that U.S. policy at this moment has grave difficulty finding coherence and making commitments (that is to say, making commitments that antagonists are confident that it will remember, let alone keep). Debating the role of the constitution in this malaise of the national will is far less important than clearly acknowledging it as a critically important fact contributing to the palsy of national policy.

The U.S. doesn’t deliberate much on national policy: values, goals and means. We are notoriously self-righteous, to the point of giving righteousness a bad name, and that self-righteousness attaches itself with very little memory of the immediate past or understanding of consequences to fictitious narratives designed to give play to that sense of righteousness. We have lurid made-for-cable-teevee stories about, say, the grave risk of a nuclear-armed North Korea or an Iran determined to get the bomb. And, anyone can volunteer a narrative, apparently. OK, maybe not anyone, but it is not like anyone fact checks the narratives offered.

There is some vague memory in U.S. policy of having stood in the past for constitutional democracy, but there’s little understanding of the original rationales for such a policy and the exceptions and betrayals have piled up high. There is some vague memory in the U.S. of having once shied away from war as terrible, cruel waste, but, again, the example of the U.S. committing the war crime of aggressive war in invading Iraq, compounded by the inability or unwillingness of the Bush Administration to prevent Reconstruction from being blown up by complete idiocy and looting, stands as a capital fact, embarrassing every bit of idealistic rhetoric uttered by this country’s representatives.

The U.S. made an agreement with Russia concerning the political and economic alignment of Ukraine and it seems to have been forgotten even why that commitment was made (hint: nuclear arms limitation). Letting a neocon undermine constitutional democracy and foment civil war in Ukraine in pursuit of some dream of neoliberal looting is not sensible policymaking.

It is not like this is the only big risk the U.S. is taking in the world at any moment. The U.S. has bought quite a number of losing lottery tickets in the service of someone’s narrowly self-interested or simply bad judgment. The military wants to overthrow the liberal President of Honduras? Sure, why not? Couldn’t possibly be any connection to that country’s emergence as murder capital of the world or the crisis on the U.S. border as massive numbers of unaccompanied minors flee Central America. (Hillary has such varied experience: she knows how to get things done.)

And, while we are playing Manichean checkers in an apparent fugue state of national (unconsciousness), the world’s financial system, based on our dollar, stumbles about, China’s economy implodes, and a global ecological crisis looms as an extermination event gathers force. Wot me worry?

The Jeffrey Sachs-led Sanders left has claimed that al-Assad would have been willing to enter a peace agreement had Hillary Clinton not cooperated with the Saudis to subvert his regime. Sachs obviously does not understand the character of al-Assad’s regime.

RNB @294 — I just got around to reading the Cole piece you linked. It says much better what I was trying to say (unsurprisingly!) Cheers.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-state-department-officials-call-for-strikes-against-syrias-assad-1466121933

I wonder how this goes once Obama leaves office…

Assad, not the U.S. intervention in Iraq, creates ISIS. Convenient storytelling. And nowhere do we hear about climate change or neoliberal trade policy putting pressure on the lowest income tier across the Arab mildest.

It’s not either/or. It’s easier to start a fire in a drought. Climate change, trade policy, rapid population growth, internal repression (the Baathist regime under Assad’s father shelled rebellious Hama into submission in 1982), Saudi proselytising, changes in the Shi’a political outlook, US pea and thimble games with Saddam, the Kurds and Iran, oil prices all played their different parts in bringing about this fire.

The aim of good policy is to put the fire out in the shortest, least costly in human terms, way possible. Obama, to give him some credit, seems to be feeling his way to that aim. The State Dept officers, not so much.

LFC @ 384: “In a long-ish post that I only read part of (link in next box).”

It’s not bad. Especially with the discussion of _Seeing Like a State_ in comments. (LFC, you have a writing tic of saying that you haven’t fully read whatever you’re referring to, and you shouldn’t write that. Either don’t comment, or read it, or at worst pretend that you did. Announcing that you’re not reading whatever you’re commenting on is annoying to me and, I suspect, to many people.)

Timothy Burke (from the above-linked article):
“The general problem is that the modern liberal nation-state and its characteristic institutions are simply no longer capable of delivering on their baseline promises and possibilities to any national population anywhere. ”

Yes. This is basically why I’m an anarchist. The accumulated baggage of prior political commitments need to be dropped so that new ones can be picked up. Look at Timothy Burke makes his argument and then goes back to the old standards: we need passionate, visionary leadership that speaks honestly and straightforwardly. What if honesty isn’t enough? There are plenty of people who speak honestly: what is that worth, really? Almost nothing within our system.

What Timothy Burke’s argument doesn’t really consider is the time scale of our problems. It’s common to say that “things that can’t go on will some day stop” or some variant, and to say that our system is in a bad place and that some day it will have to change. But for global climate change we really have a ten year deadline to make very major, sweeping changes. Right now we’re betting on the magic of the marketplace plus some minor technocratic nudges and international diplomacy because we have nothing else. Maybe that will work: it’s what people are working on because there’s nothing else. If it doesn’t work, we can’t just kick the can down the road indefinitely. Confusion of timescales is one of the main problems in responding to global environmental crises.

OK, people can go back to their discussion of manliness and machine guns and who is favored to win a political race because someone killed 50 people now.

Ze K @399

it was a prosperous, secular, and relatively liberal state

“Relatively liberal”? It was basically a one-party dictatorship, under Hafez al-Assad and then Bashar.

The comment is either a flat-out lie or an indication that the commenter doesn’t understand the common meaning of certain non-obscure English words.

I never said S.A. and Jordan “are the paragons of progress and freedom.”

@406 Well yes it could be that the 50 State Dept officials see Assad’s possible consolidation of power as an existential threat to US allies Israel and KSA and fear regional chaos from the disruption of the regional balance of power. These State Dept officials may want Obama to force Assad’s ouster or at least his acceptance of some kind of negotiated settlement that would greatly weaken his powers.

Still it is Syria that is unraveling; no other country in the region is suffering a crisis on this scale with 400,000 dead in five years and 60% of the population displaced. And as Peter T notes above, there are those in the USG who think the situation cannot be stabilized without the ouster of Assad. I am not sure whether Hillary Clinton remains one of them. But they may be right. Obama does not deny this; he simply says that it’s not in the US interest to bring stability to a country in which the US has no vital interest.

The USA should directly target Syrian government forces (and inevitably but oh-so-regrettably-and-collaterally killing their Iranian and Russian allies) in order to turn Syria into something like other beneficiaries of American air power — Afghanistan? Libya? Iraq? Thanks, but no thanks. It might be tempting if the USA had a track record of bombarding foreign nations into peaceful prosperity. But the USA hasn’t managed that once in my lifetime, so there’s nothing attractive about the proposal.

The different factions fighting against the Syrian central government fight each other too. If the central government capitulated we could expect years more of fighting among the different non-government factions. The situation cannot be stabilized in the next year without the ouster of Assad. The situation cannot be stabilized in the next year with the ouster of Assad either. The situation just cannot be stabilized in the near future. (Not that the USA’s actions really exhibit respect for stability in Syria. If they wanted stability they wouldn’t be funneling weapons to any of the rebel factions. (Not that I think “stability” is so great by itself; I rather wish that the USA didn’t help to keep the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia stably under its hereditary dictatorship.))

Kevin Drum had some good observations about Syria and the State Dept “dissent” memo:

http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/06/snake-oil-salesmen-syria-are-back

[in the Bush/Cheney era those 50 would have been lucky to be transferred to a remote desert island; thise without clout or who had been appointed by WJC might have been sent to Guantanamo prison]

@414 The State Dept officials probably see aerial power being used to explicitly support fighters on the ground supported by the US military. Drum is brilliant, and always worth reading.

LFC @ 384-5, RP @ 402

I thought the Timothy Burke essay was stimulating in a way, though maybe that was not his best effort — it did bring together a number of disparate observations and sentiments around foreboding about the future and deep ambivalence about Clinton’s path to coronation.

I’ve read Burke’s stuff before and he suffers a bit from Tom Friedman’s disease — wishing for a Goldilocks politics that is just right — and in his case, it involves a longing for charismatic, hero politicians, especially for the office of President. He’s the kind of voter for whom John F Kennedy wrote, Profiles in Courage, the kind who believes in the politician as a chivalric knight, selflessly championing a cause or principle even to the point of self-sacrifice as if that cause was a damsel in distress, or in general, pursuing some grand purpose as if it were the holy grail. And, though he writes with an easy style and grace, he is prone to anodyne formulas when he cannot quite say more specifically what he means without offending.

I think he’s on to something here:

I think Clinton and all the people surrounding her are very nearly incapable of recognizing, let alone responding to, the actual crisis they will be facing. That crisis is not Islamic militants. It is not political stalemate or Republican obstructionism. It is not police brutality and the scourge of racism. It is not income inequality or a lack of financial regulation. It is not even or only the structural transformation of the global political economy through technological change and social reorganization.

I do think Clinton and her most ardent supporters are far more complacent than our actual situation justifies. Obtuse, even. That last quoted sentence above, though, hints at a turn in Burke’s way of thinking away from agency and toward the ineffably abstract that troubles me.

Burke summarizes: “The general problem is that the modern liberal nation-state and its characteristic institutions are simply no longer capable of delivering on their baseline promises and possibilities to any national population anywhere.” The passive voice has swallowed agency (the liberal state is no longer capable — what could that even mean?), while the rhetorical trope has run away with any possibility of evidentiary analysis (really? any nation anywhere?).

As he expands on this thesis, he leans on his taste for charisma and the grand gesture. “Very little policy gets made because it’s the right thing to do” he complains. “Every play is a scrum in the middle that moves the ball inches, never yards. “ The state of political rhetoric troubles him deeply: “Political elites around the world either speak in laughably dishonest ways about hope and aspiration or stick to grey, cramped horizons of plausibly incremental managerialism.”

There is other stuff floating in his soup to be sure. He seems to have cut off bits of other arguments and added them in, like nuggets of meat or slices of carrot. Because it fits with arguments I often find myself making, I predictably found this appealing: “The brief moment of reform in which capital seemed to be harnessed to social democracy is very nearly over, and the difference between illicit and licit economies now seems paper-thin at best.”

In comments, Burke offered a one-sentence analytical expansion on the reasons for nation-state palsy that had me nodding in agreement:

. . . liberal governance and the nation-state are in crisis everywhere for some similar underlying reasons–fundamentally, that it is proving nearly impossible to keep political elites from using the state as a means of extraction and from allowing the state to be used by capital for similar ends, and that the ties people feel to their governments are everywhere fraying or devolving into pure client-patron relationships. I think this is turning the entire field of social relations within states into winner-take-all affairs, and leading to an ever-waning interest in any idea of a public sphere or public goods in which one might feel that an immediate benefit to other people might ultimately be a benefit to all.

At the very end of comments, there’s another bit that’s important, because it questions “progress” and brings to the surface some of the deep ambivalence in many leftish critiques about how the modern world got built.

. . . the modernist state was capable of coordinating large-scale projects of construction and administration that current states (all around the world) seem largely incapable of carrying out, and it was capable of speaking in confident, progress-embracing terms about a better future, a way of speaking which the political class seems largely uninterested in today. The part of that change that isn’t simply a case of going from good to bad is that those modernist projects were often destructive or at least mixed in their impact and they required some profoundly undemocratic strategies for ignoring, overriding or compelling the action of communities affected by such planning.

I happen to think that’s some seriously muddled thinking. It does raise questions in my mind about why he has latched onto “large-scale projects of construction and administration” as a key component in formulating his thesis. Is it true in a factual sense? Maybe in some factual sense, but it seems like engaging with facts to test which works and which fails might pay off in a more refined and subtle sense of where we are and what our critical problems are. (London or Los Angeles seem to be able to extend their rail systems; the Swiss finished the Gotthard Base Tunnel; I’m sure I could come up with a long list.)

The fact is that technological progress has continued to accelerate and some very large-scale projects have been completed in recent decades, but they don’t astound us in quite the same way. There is an odd wishing for “flying cars” that goes on, alongside a dyspepsia about the past being tainted by racism or sexism or ecological madness or just a general philistinism. And, large-scale projects, because of the steady progress of technological capability and the general increase in our surplus of wealth (in the developed world at least, which has by the magic of compound growth risen to astonishing heights, even if it is way too concentrated in a very few hands), do not require the same kind of Fordist mass mobilization that gave the Second Industrial Revolution echoes of the field at Valmy.

What troubles me most profoundly is not the absence of high-flying rhetoric in our shared political narratives; it is the absence of critical thought. Burke casts this as a deficit of honesty. I rolled my eyes at this Tom Friedman-like sentiment, worthy of the second worst kind of hand-wringing op-ed: “The first thing she [Clinton] or other leaders could do is simply start talking honestly and straightforwardly about these problems–with a bit of real passion and anger mixed in. “ Rhetorical “honesty” is an ambiguous quality, suggesting the other Marx: “the key is sincerity; if you can fake that . . .”

Critical thought is harder, especially for a mass polity, not least because it requires real resources of time and effort, as people try to understand their common predicament. But, it is the only way politics can escape meandering back-and-forth aimlessly at the edge of unacknowledged cliffs. Enlightened self-interest requires a higher level of understanding of choice and consequence than the mere feel-good incrementalism of, say, adjusting interest rates to avoid a stock market crash or hoping that gas prices stay low.

BW: “The passive voice has swallowed agency (the liberal state is no longer capable — what could that even mean?), while the rhetorical trope has run away with any possibility of evidentiary analysis (really? any nation anywhere?).”

Whatever the problems with the passive voice, on the level of evidence it appears to me to be true. Even the old stalwarts like the Scandinavian states are reluctantly falling into line with neoliberalism. If we’re really talking about a worldwide phenomenon, then agency becomes questionable once again: we can talk about something being the fault of particular elites, but it becomes more tempting to refer to it as structural.

BW: “It does raise questions in my mind about why he has latched onto “large-scale projects of construction and administration” as a key component in formulating his thesis.”

There does seem to be some confusion there between high modernism and “large-scale projects.” Renewable power was 59% of net additions to global power capacity in 2014 and by the end of that year was supplying 23% of global electricity (source). Non-hydro increased from 85 to 657 GW over the last decade. Was this due to large-scale projects? Generally not. High modernism requires a plan — in theory, made by technocrats, but in practice, generally originated by one theorist — and a charismatic leader who forces adoption of the plan. Large-scale change doesn’t have to operate that way.

…do not require the same kind of Fordist mass mobilization that gave the Second Industrial Revolution echoes of the field at Valmy. Inspired, this is. Just purty. I agree about Burke

As long as we are linking and critiqin, here’s some Nancy Fraser Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism, Fall 2015, free trial of Critical Historical Studies, so read it or save it while link lasts, she gets some pushback against her post-Marxian analysis, if you look around the site a little. Via Jacobin.

“Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order
Michael C. Dawson” response to Fraser

“Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson”
Nancy Fraser response to the response

The last two are Spring 2016, and long and deep as months can allow them

@419 Qaddafi had already lost a big portion of the country, perhaps 30% if I remember correctly. He was either going to be defeated or find himself in a bloody protracted civil war. The NATO intervention did not create deadly chaos in Libya. What I mean by the anti-intervention left getting its way is that Clinton loudly called for some deployment to protect the democratically elected govt in Libya and Obama said that the air strikes would be the sum total of US intervention, and he said that because of the deep effect the anti-interventionists had and have on his foreign policy.

Matt the anti-intervention left also got its way in Libya.

Oh, it was the anti-intervention left that ordered US airstrikes in Libya, was it?

“Obama refused to provide any support to the post-Qaddafi government” — Libya no longer had a national government afterward, it had competing aspirants to a national government. As Syria will if Assad’s government falls. The implicit acknowledgement that destroying Libya’s bad old national government did not lead to a good new national government seems like reason enough to not do it again in Syria.

If you want the US to save the lives of innocent vulnerable people, spending resources on sanitation and health projects in poor-but-not-warring parts of the world will spare more children, prevent more suffering, avert more deaths than spending resources on military interventions will. It might be different in a world where the only suffering and poor people left were those in war zones, so every decision about helping the global poor was also a decision about interventions in wars; but that’s not the world we inhabit now or for the foreseeable future. If you want to help vulnerable people, think of toilets and water treatment, not drones and missiles.

@ bruce wilder (386): “Letting a neocon undermine constitutional democracy and foment civil war in Ukraine in pursuit of some dream of neoliberal looting is not sensible policymaking.”

I’m afraid you’re quoting Putin on Ukraine uncritically; at any rate, you are denying agency to the Ukrainians who stood up to Yanukovich after he had reneged on his promise to sign an association agreement with the EU. The US and the EU may have been guilty of falsely assuring the opposition of their support – which they failed to provide when Russian forces attacked in Crimea and in the East. The “civil war” in Ukraine has been almost entirely Moscow’s doing; it’s essentially a war between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine’s problem has long been its remarkably corrupt institutions, and for all the cheap gas that Russia could offer, it does not have decent, well-functioning institutions for export, unlike the EU. The smart opinion in Ukraine in 2013 was, without the EU’s gravitational pull, the country would not be able to follow the example of the Baltics and Eastern Europeans in building a functioning state; therefore, Yanukovich’s volte-face on the EU doomed the country, turning it into a failed state forever.

If this appears all incoherent and rambling, it’s cause reality has gone all fractal.

Fractals are very orderly things.

Second to last paragraph above was supposed to be in block quotes: it’s a quote from Fraser.

@428 If you don’t see that anti-interventionist sentiment deeply affected the nature of US involvement in post-Qaddafi Libya, fine. But you have a test case of non-intervention in Syria. Clinton’s hawkish policy was rejected by the Obama administration. She has been saying insistently that things have turned out worse in Syria than Libya. As a Bernie bro, you can call me a charlatan all you want–I don’t abuse you–but I don’t see a word of engagement with what Clinton has been saying for a year now. Sanders’ views on what to do in Syria may be as muddled as they are for a reason: he has no idea what he could propose to do that would make things even marginally better.

your interest in Syria here is less out of humanitarian concerns, and more about using the events there as a political cudgel in support of your favorite candidate.

When the Empire falls, RNB’s arguments will be used as examples of the decadence that brought it about, much like the orgies of ancient Romans.

@427 Spot-on. One of the critical disconnects between the people supporting HRC and reality is the proven fact that consequences down matter to the clown princess. Iraq taught her nothing. Libya taught her nothing. Supplanting a government either means occupying and rebuilding the nation – see Germany, Japan, or creating more ISIL. There appears to be no other option in the ME at the moment. It isn’t clear whether that rebuilding Iraq, or Syria, will require more US money and lives, or less.

What is clear is that the current arc of actions is leading to the prospect of real conflict, possibly between US and Russia, definitely by proxy and perhaps directly in Syria and the Ukraine, with other arenas possible across the Balkans and eastern Europe. Ditto, in the South China Sea. The current policy of simply allowing China to militarize sand and coral at no cost has encouraged China’s expansionist ambitions. Allies are noticing.

The failure to rally around Sanders may well be the worst of long line of bad decisions American have made in selecting leaders. HRC is absolutely the candidate of Wall St, international globalization, and the establishment. Trump is the insurgent and all the forces of power are now rallying to defeat the final obstacle to four-eight years of the same only much worse.

The GOP, HRC, and the DNC are lock-step in agreement on war, surveillance, and secrecy. The only debate is which rights to remove, which nations to bomb, and who to shake down first for protection money – see exemptions from the Affordable Care Act etc.

Meanwhile, the execution of a senior anti-terror police officer and his wife in their home in a quiet village in France raises more troubling questions about how to cope with asymmetrical attacks on the polity. The story is all too familiar and very different from the tragic attack in England. The murderer was a confirmed ‘terrorist’ and known to security forces. How he managed to locate his targets does not require much imagination. Data bases are not secure.

The identity of virtually every individual recruited to keep the citizenry safe from criminals, and those of their loved ones, is now accessible to any virtually anyone with the expertise, or cash, to access these date banks.

What does that mean? Francois Hollande announced new measures to keep the identity of police people secret. Huh? That’s the solution?

The notion is, of course, completely unworkable and would rightly cause a great deal of consternation among the populace, should the effort achieve any measure of success. More disturbing is the message this sort of attack sends to rank and file police officers, many of whom already go to some lengths to maintain their anonymity in their communities, especially those living in areas where there is a great deal of hostility towards the police – university campuses, for example.

Currently France is failing to provide protections to those entrusted to protect the public. And don’t think the cleverer police folks and their families aren’t noticing. Those with options that include more reliable protections and a safer environment will be considering whether to leave, or continue to serve an often hostile public.

What happens when the good cops quit? Don’t ask.

http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/06/state-department-syria-letter/487511/

With all due respect to Prof. O’Connell, I doubt that what the letter calls for amounts to “a grave breach of international law.” It may very well be unwise on policy grounds, but that’s a different matter.

Is it not calling for a war that is not in self-defense, aka a war of aggression, aka “supreme crime”?

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

It’s perhaps easy to forget that it’s worse than “unwise on policy grounds” because the USA has done it so often and cannot be held accountable.

Is it not calling for a war that is not in self-defense, aka a war of aggression, aka “supreme crime”?

Not all uses of force that are not in self-defense amount to illegal wars of aggression. Seems to me this would fall under the old customary intl law standard for humanitarian intervention inasmuch as Assad’s actions ‘shock the conscience’, to use the old phrase. However, she is a professor of international law and I’m not, so I’ll leave it at that (except to note that some other intl lawyer somewhere can prob be found to disagree).

Oops, multi-tasking is always a bad idea. “Between…’ should read ‘Between…people, there’s a real chance she could, you know, lose.

“The White House strongly denied Tuesday that regime change is part of its mission in Libya”

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/151191-white-house-suggests-regime-change-is-goal-of-libya-mission
—

For some reason I am not reassured when you tell me that regime change is not part of the plan.

kidneystones –
I appreciate you holding to your unconventional opinions and swimming against the main current here (sincerely, I do), but please quit the Trump boosterism. It is a long way until November, and people here are fully capable of looking up Trump’s talking points themselves. There is a fine line between passionately arguing your side and crass signal-boosting of campaign propaganda, but comments like #450 [where you just drop a youtube video of a Trump rally without any explanation/analysis] imo crosses it.

Family members knew in advance Orlando terrorist planned to kill.

Buy my house $100.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647150/Omar-Mateen-s-brother-law-REFUSES-say-knew-terror-plot-revealed-gunman-sold-deed-165k-home-just-two-months-club-massacre-100.html

RNB,
How are you doing on getting the draft back in operation and tax increases in place to pay for all this aggressive world policing/restructuring? And pay the Iraq War II debt while we are at it? For certain specialties the US Army will accept new recruits up to age 43 – have you talked to your local Armed Forces Recruiter about signing up?

No? Very Serious(tm) proposals you’ve got there.

@455 I hope that Trump chooses as his VP the man who introduces him in the video. Of course he may have no choice. He may be the only who accepts the offer, and he is sure to turn away half of Trump’s racist supporters.

actually you are implying they are not worth protecting given the costs of doing so.

If only the US would stop “protecting” people in the Middle East much would be gained.

@464 You raise important points, and perhaps I skirt them by saying that on the very debatable assumption that US military force could induce Assad to make concessions that the State Department dissidents hope for–linked above is Kevin Drum calling this snake oil–you may be gravely underestimating the costs of inaction which the State Dept memo also lays out: a stronger Daesh, continued wasted expenses in the whack-a-mole campaign against Daesh, a refugee crisis that could destabilize the Middle East and Europe, and huge losses of Syrian lives.

Cranky Observer @ 464, bravo!

@ RNB, if Achcar’s book really claims that Obama’s decision not to launch a war against the Assad regime was the result of “of deep human indifference to the fate of the population of an oil-poor Arab country”, I’d say that’s a book you can safely skip.

@ RNB, I don’t care if Libya has liquid gold flowing across the land, free for any to dip a pail into; anyone who thinks Obama operates from “deep human indifference to the fate of” ANY population is such a poor observer of human nature I can’t imagine they have any insights of value. So, yes, you probably ARE better off reading the commentary here, as some of it is not written by such apparent cretins.

“that the catastrophic development of the situation in Syria is, to a large extent, a result of Obama’s wrong policy”

This is true only in so far as the US intervention in Libya served as a lesson to actors in the region, encouraging the Syrian rebels to precipitate a humanitarian catastrophe in order to induce US military assistance to serve their desired political ends.

see Alan Kuperman.

Again a blatant misrepresentation . You are shameless.

@465 You’re either scrupulously dishonest, or a fucking moron.

You don’t ‘skirt’ the Grand Canyon Size gap in your own argument as much as pretend it doesn’t exist. You’re careful, however, to demand only that others step out into the air and commit their children to another poorly-planned and executed exercise in ‘we can kill, so we will.’

The precise challenges presented by deposing a despot in the region were ‘gamed out’ in real life twice in Iraq, first in Desert Storm and then by Bush. And here you are acting like the examples are nothing more than a book you’ll get around to reading when you have a spare moment.

People fucking die in these little experiments in fp you are advocating. They are not exercises for ivory-tower pinheads such as yourself to play out.

Put a helmet on both those kids you like talking about so much and tell them we’re going to play a game with guns and real bullets.

If you’re not ready to that, please stop suggesting other people (draftees and guess which demographic these folks usually come from) risk their own lives and limbs. All so you don’t have to admit you support a war-mongering cynic.

You’re not just an HRC supporter, you’re a mayhem-loving sociopath, and that’s why you attract condemnation from so many quarters. I have no expectations you’ll change.

@RNB

That a policy has not worked well, or has failed, does not necessarily mean that a different policy would have led to a better outcome. Sometimes a good outcome is not achievable no matter what policy is followed.

If the U.S. had more vigorously armed the FSA in 2012, or if the U.S. had bombed certain Assad regime airfields as HRC apparently advocated in internal admin deliberations, would that have led to Assad’s fall or to his negotiated departure? Or would it have led to more or less where we are now, albeit by a different route? I doubt anyone knows the answer to these questions w anything approaching certainty.

I think Obama’s view was that, bit by bit, the U.S. would be sucked into another civil war in the region and even if Assad fell, the FSA might not have been able to consolidate control and there would have been an ongoing civil war as in Libya, which would have required probably a significant soldiers-on-the-ground commitment to resolve (or, alternatively, J. Stacey’s chimerical “largest UN peacekeeping force in history” that would have been vetoed by the Russians). In sum, Obama’s judgment might have been mistaken, but I think it was a sincere call, not the product of “indifference.” Hindsight is 20-20, and from the perspective of today it’s easy to say things should have been done differently. W/r/t future policy, I am unsure about whether the State Dept dissenters are right; haven’t followed the coverage closely enough.

@478 Assuming that you have read the entire Goldberg interview, I have to ask you whether you do not think he comes as coldly indifferent to the fate of the Syrian people. I quoted that bit only to indicate that inside critics have also drawn that conclusion. I encourage all to read this historically important piece and draw their own conclusions about what Obama himself is quoted as saying.

@473 Jeffrey G says that the Syrian rebels precipitated a human catastrophe. But don’t call him an Assad apologist. He means something else, he insists. Funny to see where the Bernie Bros will go due to their hatred of Hillary Clinton.

@477 kidneystones loses his cool and calls me a sociopath and a moron, though I am saying that we should consider seriously what 51 State Department officials are saying even if we disagree with their recommendations. It could well be that the diplomats are wrong that there is some way at this point to put the requisite military pressure on Assad to make the concessions they hope for. But there is already a horrific bloodbath in Syria possibly due to inaction at the right time.

Hillary Clinton is to blame for this iff there was a possibility of Assad actually agreeing to and complying with the terms of Annan’s negotiated settlement were she not subverting negotiations with covert support for the rebels. Stephen Kinzer for example says: “At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on “an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva.” The precise opposite is true. In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan’s UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her.”

I do not think al-Assad’s recent violation of the cease-fire gives any support to the idea that Assad could have been trusted then and can be trusted now without military pressure being brought to bear on him. That does not mean it is worth the human and financial costs of bringing that pressure to bear on him.

typo: Obama may not have been indifferent in the early stages but the way Goldberg quotes him he does INDEED come across that way to me now.

“I have to ask you whether you do not think he comes as coldly indifferent to the fate of the Syrian people.”

He does not. He does to you because you’re a simpleton, someone who thinks that something must be done! and bombing Assad is something!, so it must be done!, and anyone who doesn’t agree must be indifferent to the fate of the Syrian people. In the real world, there’s no reason to believe that bombing Assad will improve the lot of the Syrian people, and good reason to believe it won’t (see Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, etc).

“Again we are talking about 400,000 dead people and 12 million people displaced. ”

The Iraq war killed a million Iraqis, and displaced millions more. So, maybe intervention isn’t such a slam-dunk after all.

Absolutely, Layman. It’s not a slam dunk. Everything LFC says about uncertainty is exactly correct. But the difference is that the US destabilized Iraq and caused the tragedy that unfolded while the US refused to support millions of peaceful dissidents in an already chaotic society.

@ 481. Wrong. I called you a “mayhem-loving sociopath” and [either] “scrupulously dishonest” or a fucking moron.” All three clearly fit.

Put some skin in the game chicken-hawk, or stop suggesting other people be killed.

Deal with the hard evidence that Iraq twice and Libya once confirm that HRC’s plan’s for endless war without committing enormous US resources towards nation building over 5 decades minimum do nothing but create more refugees, more suffering, less stability and more justifications for more regime change and, btw, a never-ending money train for arms and munitions producers, military technology companies, military and security companies, and the pricks who profit from the preceding.

It’s about the fucking money. And please do not assume that I have lost my cool. I deploy profanity as a norm when people supporting death and suffering deploy academic language to obscure lies and the obscenity of needless death and suffering.

So, I suppose we can add “f’ing ghoul” to the above. (Sop to those comfortable with calls for endless war, but uncomfortable with a particular class of intensifiers.)

You’re entire series of posts here can be boiled down to ‘help me hide from the truth.’ Doubtless you’ll continue to try to draw others in to help you ‘skirt’ you willingness to kill, but not fight.

RNB @486
I have not read the interview in a while but when he says that the US has no vital interest in Syria and that Russia is caught in a quagmire, that does read to me as indifferent.

“Vital interest” is a fairly standard phrase in the f.p. lexicon typically used as a rough synonym for ‘vital strategic interest’ — so that cd be a wrong judgment but does not indicate indifference, at least to me; if he had said “no vital humanitarian interest” that wd indicate indifference.

(Btw & FTR, I don’t think kidneystone’s insults are doing much of anything except muddying things up and relieving his feelings)

@494 kidneystones:

(1) can you give me some, any evidence that Assad would have complied with Annan’s peace agreement had Hillary Clinton not subverted the process as Jeffrey Sachs and Stephen Kinzer are alleging (and do note that I am the one to have brought attention to their most serious criticisms of HRC which frankly have much greater significance and importance than your angry posts here)? I have said repeatedly–in fact I think this was the issue I raised in my first post on the Democratic nomination struggle–that I would count this as a devastating criticism of Hillary Clinton. I just don’t see how Sachs and Kinzer are not exaggerating the willingness of al-Assad to have made and to make any compromises given his actions during this supposed cease-fire even when he has an overwhelming military advantage, as a result of full spectrum support from the Russians and Iranians. But perhaps Sachs and Kinzer are right; I just don’t see their case being argued against contrary evidence.

(2) You seem not to understand that US troops are already at risk in the military actions against ISIL. In fact they are now even at risk from Russian forces who may be lumping all anti-Assad forces in with ISIL. The question which the State Dept diplomats have raised is whether it will be possible to reduce the risk posed by ISIL to the the people of the region and to American troops without forcing Assad to make major concessions or even to oust him. I don’t see how you have spoken to their memo at all. They are calling for a refocusing of military intervention in the region, not necessarily more military intervention. But a change in mission. They could be dead wrong, but not a word you have written speaks to their concerns.

(3) You can follow Mearsheimer and Walt and argue for the US not to take military action against Assad and ISIL (except for some tactical supports to some groups fighting them). This is certainly a discussion worth having, but this position is contrary to Trump, Clinton and Sanders.

We won’t get along, but, hey, Bernie Bro Jeffrey G appreciates your posts. It’s great the CT has allowed the partisan divide between Trump and Sanders supporters to be bridged and for you both to have a civil conversation that you can’t have with those of us voting for Clinton.

There are certain fixed assumptions floating around here which are, to put it politely, just not grounded in reality.

There are people in the Middle East, with their own ideologies, aspirations and calculations. These are quite different to those of US policymakers, and often different to those of the US population generally.

The US occupation of Iraq was a failure not because the US failed to flood the country with troops and money, but because Shi’a Iraqis and the Kurds had their own agendas. The Shia had been shifting from their traditionally apolitical stance from the 70s, the Kurds wanted a high degree of autonomy and return to the lands Saddam had driven them from. Neither were (nor are) compatible with Sunni political dominance. When the US tried compromise, the Shi’a gave them a forceful nudge. As in “you’re having trouble with the 10-20% of the population unhappy with things – we can make that 80% any time we choose – here’s a few bombings as a reminder”.

Quite simply, Iraq was not Germany post 1945, nor Japan either. And No US policy was going to make it so.

The Assad regime is wantonly brutal. It is not genocidal. The main opposition groups are genocidal, insofar as the term can be applied to sectarian conflict. An-Nusra and allies and ISIS both openly declare their intention to wipe out the Alawites (ISIS also wants to wipe out Ismailis, Christians, Druze, non-conforming Sunnis, Kurds….An-Nusra wants to forcibly convert them) . Both have carried out massacres in accordance with these aims. Many of the internal refugees in Syria are moderate Sunnis sheltering in regime-controlled areas, and the regime has a fair number of Sunnis, including quite a few in high positions (the governor of Latakia, for instance).

The secular opposition was always a small and ineffectual group. If the regime goes, it’s an-Nusra or ISIS (probably an-Nusra. Massacres, the flight of Alawis, Christians and Druze into Lebanon, a fight to the death between the Islamists and the Kurds. Probably an invasion by Iraqi militias in defence of the sacred shrines the Islamists keep trying to blow up. Maybe Saudi intervention. In short, an even bigger, nastier, less containable mess.

Just because Washington geeks can imagine a better outcome does not mean one is achievable. Again, policy-makers spinning stories about how this might just work is not a substitute for understanding what those people over there want and will fight for. The State Dept 50 think you can throw a small grenade into a four-cornered gang-fight in a glass factory and predict the result. They’re delusional.

Please review your comments here and elsewhere and count the number of times you describe your lack of understanding of a given topic and finish the mess with an all-purpose ” I’m unsure…”

Pls review yr comments here and elsewhere and count the number of times you wantonly display stupidity and ignorance, capping it all w a confident declaration of opinion based on nothing more than a concatenation of prejudices devoid of any grounding in reality. Lack of certainty need not stem from “lack of understanding” but rather from an accurate recognition of the limits of one’s own expertise, something that you don’t understand b/c you regard yourself as omniscient and fit to pronounce definitively on things you know little or nothing about.

Your commonplace bumbling efforts to express a cogent argument amuse and offer a certain charm.

You wouldn’t know a cogent argument if it hit you in the face.

RNB: “Obama has not been willing to risk greater intervention in Syria not only due to assessments of costs and likely outcomes but also because the humanitarian catastrophe of Syria does not rise for Obama to a top-level security threat to the US (see quotes at @490 and @498). ”

I’ve already pointed out your careless reading. The quotes you cite at 490 and 498 do not mention ‘the humanitarian catastrophe of Syria’.

At 490, Obama is not quoted all; rather, Goldberg says Obama believes ISIS is a threat to the US but not an existential threat, and Goldberg says Obama believes the Assad regime is not a threat to US national security. The only mention of ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in that post is your own mention.

In 498, Goldberg quotes Obama as saying (again) that the Assad regime is not a threat to national security. There is no mention of weighing the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ to determine if it is a threat to US national security, because that would be an absurdity.

“Layman insists that only a simpleton would read this as indifference”

And you happily continue to demonstrate that.

RNB #505: “Obama still won’t elevate its importance to the point where it would be worth risk taking action.”

This is ridiculous. There are about a half dozen different actors directly involved in Syria. The question is, what do you YOURSELF think that the US should do. Give us the details your own preferred policy.

But he is also saying that even if thought intervention may not make things worse in Syria or lead to worse governance, intervention still could not be justified as Syria does not have that great importance in his realist scale of values in spite of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding.

@510 And from this you assume that Obama is indifferent to the suffering? That makes no sense.

1. You don’t know that Obama won’t act on it in the future. 2. You don’t know that, if Obama does follow the advice, it will work. 3. State Dept. diplomats send dissent letters all the time, it is part of the usual process and it looks like this one was leaked for political reasons. 4. The last thing the U.S. public knew about the Syria situation (not that anyone was paying attention) was that Kerry and Putin appeared to have a deal on what to do about Assad, but we know very little about the outlines of that understanding.

Again, this is a pretty complicated situation. Why don’t you walk us through the details of your OWN solution of the matter? Or else take a break from commenting?

Clear as mud. I follow the military events on the ground, and generally avoid the interpretative news reportage.

Please. At any rate, let’s get to the real problem. Obama has kowtowed to the insular American public so he won’t help millions of innocent Syrian civilians due to the putative costs that you and Cranky Observer are complaining about (in a very short-sighted manner, by the way). Sanders could not even get himself to talk for one minute during his campaign about how he would respond himself to one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes since WW2. Then Bernie! played to American insularity by exaggerating the role of NAFTA in US job loss and even threatening to cut off trade with poor countries. All this high moral talk here about protecting innocent third world people from US imperialism is just dissimulation of American insularity here.

Obama the putative Muslim foreign-born socialist caved in to America Firstism as if he were raised by people from Kansas. Oh my god, he’s an American. Really. But look at him! Check out his name.

I am outta here. It’s Father’s Day. I am going to have my double mimosa brunch and then watch the Warriors. Then I am sending money to Hillary Clinton.

Huh. I never knew that Duncan Black must have met RNB.

Nah, not really: RNB sounds just like every other “humanitarian” out there.

Yeah, I don’t even know how he stopped long enough to block that shot; he seemed that he was rising like a rocket to top of the board. And that was after 43 minutes of play. But I tell you Curry was not right after the injuries early in the playoffs. Otherwise Tristan Thompson and Kevin Love would have been his playthings on the perimeter. And taking Draymond Green out of Game 5 was just terrible; series probably would have been over in 5. The Warriors had won both regular season games, then the first two Final games by historic margins and three of the first four. They were on a roll. Then forced to play Game 5, they lost Bogut in Game 6, and his replacement Ezeli made crucial errors including the 3 pt foul on LeBron and a couple of missed dunks to help the Cavs to the win.

@515 I am sorry to discover Lupita that you have not been writing intentional parodies of some form of Third World radicalism. Yes I was being sarcastic as I thought you always are. But I see that I have been wrong.