The Persistence of Mummery?

John I’d crawl a mile through briers to throw rocks at your and Corey’s shit– that is real respect from my declasse white trash background–but really, the present mash-up of emotion and ideology isn’t really surprising is it? The election of an African-American President gave most left-leaners CPR of their near-dead progressive hope–defibrillated again after the Tea Party-induced heart attack of 2010 in 2012– but finally pronounced quite dead in 2016, and with the body hung in effigy ever since. Most even very educated folks are not attuned to the nuances of underlying currents of social and political continuities running beneath the obvious economic waves constantly tossing us about, but when it comes to a point that one sees every day that one-third of US citizens have been put in place to control the fate of this country as reflected in the soulless racist narcissist they worship–well, the response matters more than the narrative that got us here. Not that the narrative is irrelevant–but when the alarm is going off, you know you’ve got stuff to do.

I think there’s a sorites problem here. It’s not hard to imagine a gradation from Reagan to Bush to Trump to someone like Orban and then on to an American Mussolini or Hitler.

It seems to me to be true both that Trump is a continuation of long-standing trends and that he represents something exceptional.

– but if Trump indeed is just a ‘meme’ -(or just ”a bunch of sick tweets”) – any reference to some ”ancient” past is… some kind of a useless and very subjective exceptional… ”whatever”? –
and who ever came up with the funny thesis that a bunch off sick tweets is some ‘continuity-with-conservative-tradition’? –
But if you like that… ”fine”? –
but if ever had seen -(as a little kid) Ronald Reagan wandering confused around a golf-course and at the same time had to listen to US real ”conservative” conservatives you might believe that the only continuity is some different handicap?

faustusnotes’ comparison is invalid, because he is comparing scientific facts with human beings in a political context.

The degeneration of political parties and political discourse is not something which takes place in a technical context, which can be dealt with by technical means, like global warming.

The gist of the argument presented by Robin is that the degeneration of political activity is a process which takes place over time within a human context, and that we accommodate ourselves to it because we have no choice. However, we also take advantage of opportunities within it; for instance, pretending that the uniquely repulsive Trump is not only uniquely repulsive, but also an anomaly which can be fought against, not perhaps easily, but as an anomaly.

Instead, it is true that the Republican Party has degenerated (and therefore not only have the individuals within the party degenerated, but the discourse and context within which the party operates have degenerated, and the voters have degenerated). By this I don’t mean that they are “deplorables”, but that they are much more restricted in their understanding and much less capable of escaping from the box into which they have put themselves.

In order to challenge this it is necessary to challenge the whole context within which they function. (Thus, for instance, if Nixon were running for President now, he would almost certainly be a far more loathesome figure than he was in 1960 or 1972, because the negative aspects of his character and policies would be enhanced by the general degeneration of Republican politics. This is where faustusnotes’ complaint fails.)

But again, when we see Trump as unique and to be fought against, we are actually failing to see how strikingly repugnant the Democratic party and its candidates have become, and how we have accepted that repugnant nature as a norm. Republicans do not criticise this repugnancy because they accept it; what they criticise is often, in fact, largely irrelevant to what the Democratic party is.

The entire political system has become a calamity in waiting. This, in fact, is why global warming is happening; why the greatest crisis in the world is being either ignored (by the Democrats) or denied (by the Republicans). In practice, both responses add up to the same. Similarly the growing danger of global nuclear war and global economic collapse are being either ignored or actively promoted in a bipartisan fashion.

To say “but we have to remove Trump, nothing else matters but that” is to collude with this. Of course Trump has to be removed. But removing Trump and replacing him with a Trumpkin riding a blue donkey solves nothing. What is needed is a change in the context. And unless I am much mistaken, this is something which Robin is fumbling towards.

Well. My goodness. The linked essay really is fantastic. Corey’s not here to thank, but thanks to you John, we should. I disagree entirely that life is getting worse, but I’m very much a believer in sameness repackaged by succeeding generations. I applaud the 91 percent negative coverage of the president I continue to support.

Nothing quite says ‘off your meds’ like freaking out over a man who’s done so little to make the world worse, compared with your two previous presidents who, with all ‘good’ and ‘wise’ souls such as Brooks, Chait, Biden, Clinton, Bush, Rubio, et al – who drove America into two needless wars in Iraq and Libya. I only wish this same level of scrutiny had been deployed over the ‘imminent’ threat presented by Saddam Hussein.

Corey is entirely right. From a distance Trump looks like a relatively gentle, but spectacularly vulgar, face of the corporation disguised as an individual, otherwise known as the president of the United States. His ‘uniqueness’ is real in the sense that he tweets, but in much else he’s a product of the system. Growing up and serving during the cold war, survival the full tenure of any presidency was always very much an open question – from Kennedy to Clinton. I remember being bundled into the family car during the Cuban crisis as my middle-class parents – both European survivors of 1939-45 – prepared to head for the hills.

Today’s big crisis is the plight of trans-activists, economic migrants who really do ‘deserve’ a better life in another nation, and an excess of obesity and cell-phones.

Trump is very much the president for our time.

Corey consistently (and in my mind persuasively) argues that the way Trump (taken as a synecdoche for the Trumpist movement) thinks is well within the usual Conservative/Reactionary way, with no historical solution of continuity, or even significant difference, to be observed.

The fundamental ideas did not change. As I said, I’m convinced by this part of the argument. The people, however, changed. A good deal. As a consequence, the exact same ideas do not play out – socially and politically* – in the same ways. So “Trump(ism) is business as usual” is fine intellectual history; but it is very much wanting as social analysis (though even in that respect, the great changes happened I believe a couple of decades ago already, so the “business as usual” thesis can be defended with respect to Reagan or the Clinton era – but not with respect to the 1910-1960 period, for instance).

*There, I think, the most significant change happened (and is happening) among the Democratic, not the Republican, party (the easy empirical test is to compare with France). I think that, by now but perhaps not in 2016, Corey agrees with this assessment.

I would expect to learn practically nothing from a discussion between two people where one of them is affirming that Trump is exceptional and the other is denying that proposition.

I might hope to learn somewhat more from a discussion between two people where one of them is affirming that the difference between Trump and Nixon is greater than the difference between Nixon and Harding and the other is affirming the converse.

He loathed Republicans before it was cool.

Trump as the continuation of Republican politics by other means?

Somewhat tongue-in-cheek but the analogy may capture that there is continuity of the goals being pursued while something significant has changed about the ways and means by which they are being pursued.

And to pursue the analogy a bit further, those ways and means have a tendency to escape control and take on a life of their own. Which then feeds back into and changes the goals being pursued. A vicious circle in more than one sense.

There are actually numerous proofs that Trump is immensely better than the run of the mill Republicans.

Trump ran openly on running up deficits. Trump ran openly on tossing the neo-cons. out of the bus. Trump is only mildly pro-choice and we can be sure that both Ivanka and and all the Trump women have unfettered access to all family-planning measures. Trump couldn’t care less about gender-less bathrooms. Trump ran openly and proudly on defending social security.

The most reliable evidence that Trump is remaking the GOP as a party of inclusion is the fact that despite all his race-baiting and the Access Hollywood tape, and the voluminous coverage of his every sin, real and imagined, he still managed the best GOP electoral college vote since 1988 and did so with support from Hispanics and women.

Trump and Sanders were the only openly anti-globalist candidates in either party and it’s no surprise both remain immensely popular with their supporters. A lot can change, but currently jobs are up, the economy is as solid as it’s been since Clinton and Trump is willing to talk with Kim. I somehow don’t see Ted Cruz, or Mike Pence in the same mold.

Trump is a centrist and could fit easily to the left of Biden and Clinton on foreign policy and deposing dictators. The US steel workers love Trump’s tariffs, and there’s a good chance that Trump will see some form of gun control laws passes, especially if the some GOP clowns get picked off. Trump already put a Dreamers’ deal on the table that so scared the crap out of Durbin that he had to blow-up the possibility of resolution with the ‘shit-hole scandal’, which the media dutifully passed to the public as fact.

Trump might be the closest thing to an Eisenhower presidency we’ve seen since Gerald Ford. Bring back Bush! Republicans like Boot, Frum, Golberg, and company hate Trump’s guts.

Surely that counts for something?

Faustusnotes: “Hidari is an example of this final failure at 5. He says that without a militant left fascism doesn’t arise, which was true of 1930s Europe but irrelevant now. The right wing noise machine is building a fear of the democrats getting the levers of state that easily rivals the fear of militias back then : fast and furious, the NRA, Alex Jones’s entire channel, are built on this fear. You need to look at what’s in front of you, not what happened 80 years ago in isolation.”

Yes, I had the same reaction to Hidari’s argument. It’s clear that the entire purpose of a right-wing media that ignores facts in favor of ginning up conspiracy theories is to create the illusion that there actually is a militant radical left in America, so that the potential fascist support has something to be afraid of and to unite against. They don’t need a real enemy; an imagined one will do just as well.

and
”Von Clownstick probably never ever will be actually like ”Eisenhower”.

But @21 –
at least it was (again!!) – the funniest comment on a CT threat!

It seems to me to be true both that Trump is a continuation of long-standing trends and that he represents something exceptional.

This.

Corey performs a service in reminding people of the continuities, which get less attention than the discontinuities. But I also think he gives short shrift to Trump’s genuine innovations.

Parts of the “intellectual” right understand the thing that Corey understands. Here’s Bret Stephens on Trump:

It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years.

Similarly, Max Boot:

I’m a lifelong Republican but Trump surge proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.

Trump is continuous in that he represents the aspirational goal of modern Republicanism, even if a lot of those same Republicans are discomfited by him. He is discontinuous in that he pushed the Republican agenda further than anyone thought it would go.

Nixon distinguished himself as a liar and a crook. Reagan’s terms were marked by the promotion of bigotry, a disregard for basic reality and the deliberate placement of incompetents in positions of authority. Bush II started an absurd war and undermined the rule of law.

Trump has achieved breakthroughs in each of those categories, with the exception of war. But he has only been in office a little more than a year.

burner: “If I understand Hidari correctly, he’s arguing that the ruling class has objectively nothing to fear from a non-existent left, and that it knows it. They don’t need a fascist government, they’re good.“

Well, that’s one argument, but it confuses the right with the ruling class (some of whom are not clearly on the right), and it doesn’t do much to explain the right’s permanent rage machine. If the right has nothing to fear from the non-existent left, why go to the trouble of inventing a dangerous radical leftist threat? Why not just let them be what they are, even if they manage to win the occasional election? Nothing to fear, right?

Is it impossible to have similarities and differences? Is it impossible to have a connection with the past and use some new mechanisms (within a non identical context)? Continuity and change? Continuities, deterioration and thus certain changes? Etc.

Sorry forgot link to that wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Meeting_of_20_February_1933

“Is it rhetorically more effective to frame Trump as exceptional, or does this mean a short-term gain in focus but a long-term drain in overall awareness?”

One of the side effects of framing Trump this way is the rehabilitation of mass-murdering war criminals as acceptably moderate. Bush and his team and Kissinger sport body counts in the millions, something Trump probably won’t equal even in his fever dreams. Still time for him, though, if he starts the terminal nuclear conflagration with Russia that liberals and centrists keep pushing him toward.

“is it true that Trump is exceptional?”

Stylistically, yes, which is far and away the most important thing to our elite media.

Layman If the right has nothing to fear from the non-existent left, why go to the trouble of inventing a dangerous radical leftist threat? Why not just let them be what they are, even if they manage to win the occasional election?

The problem is not so much that they may win the occasional election, the problem is that in the grossly distorted American political system, the only intelligible reason to vote R that remains (if you are not the kleptocratic heir to a fortune) is to be convinced that D candidates present a direct existential threat that cannot possibly be evaluated according to the same criteria used for R candidates. So the Right has to tar its opponent with something, lest it disappears. Reading them, I think they’re getting increasingly desperate in their search for a boogeyman (admittedly, your task becomes harder when your president is officially the worse possible human being in every respect), but I could be wrong. In that respect, Chait’s “College students twitting about micro-agressions are exactly like the Bolsheviks” skit discussed in recent threads is not helping.

The only alternative is to abolish elections or the one man/one vote principle, and though the Right has made considerable progress in that respect (see inter alia Scott Walker’s creative use of syntax to prevent local elections in Wisconsin), it is still far from being able to rely on it consistently.

During the 2016 election season, Corey Robin repeatedly told us that there was no chance that Trump might win, and so we should feel free to indulge whatever ‘my vote is an expression of my true political self’ impulse we might harbor. The point is not that his estimation of the election was wrong: there were very few observers who did not share in that miscalculation. But given the distinct threats posed by a Trump presidency, he chose to downplay them with the argument that it could not possibly happen, so we could blissfully ignore any strategic considerations on how we should cast our votes. His arguments since the election of Trump read to me as one long ex post facto justification for this critically wrong advice. When you end up comparing the Trump presidency to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, as he did, your continuity hypothesis has been stretched to the point of deep implausibility.

Come on Hidari. You really think nobody around here has a clue about why capital supported fascism (btw especially the more backward-looking factions of capital like steel and coal – oh wait! Why is Trump all about helping out the steel and coal industry?) You really think without your lectures it would never have occurred to any of us that “business elites might tolerate a dictator to safeguard profits”? Have you read any Krugman columns lately? What a radical! (Btw I wouldn’t mind myself being called a radical but I can do without your pseudo-radical arrogance).

I have long been mystified by the disconnect discussed above between the right-wing paranoia, the strength of their fear and viciousness of their hatred of the left (actually of “liberals”), and the nonexistence of an actually credible left “threat”. Yes, the theory says that fascists are a reactionary response to socialist organization. But empirically, there clearly are fascist movements in places without relevant socialist organization. Might it be that we ought to rethink our theory? A big clue is in the treatment Hillary Clinton got. She was treated by the Right – and not just the fascist fringe but much of the mainstream right and part of the center, and with considerable help from the mainstream media establishment – with a degree of openly aggressive, mouth-frothing hatred that recalls the hatred once reserved for the likes of Leon Blum or Willy Brandt. Clinton isn’t a socialist (and neither btw is Sanders), she wasn’t likely to start expropriations as president, but she is treated exactly the way socialists have historically been treated by reactionaries. Empirically. But in theory, this can’t be true because she ought to represent and be supported by the ruling class. And so self-deluded leftists still try to justify the anti-Clinton hysteria they themselves fell victim to during the most important election campaign of their life time, and they still aren’t ashamed of having echoed anti-liberal right wing talking points when they should been out in the street shouting “No pasaran!”

Leo 39, exactly.

Hidari, besides being deeply patronizing your comment is alarmingly wrong. Being stuck in the industrial age you are misunderstanding the motivations of modern elites and the crises that the societies they leech onto face; and being a radical you underestimate the role of culture and personal motivation in the trends we’re seeing. As I said, fascism won’t be the same as it was in the 1930s and we won’t get there by the same route.

First to your idea that fascism needs a militant left and that an elite that can make an accommodation with the government doesn’t need it. That may have been true in the 1930s but it isn’t now. The modern US elite need three things from their government: to protect the financialization of the economy, to avoid regulating their obsessive ecocide, and to continue shoveling tax payer’s money into their pockets. They had all this under Bush but it was clearly threatened under Obama and things are looking much harder for them now if the Dems win. Under the Bushes they managed to get money that should have gone to welfare into their pockets, but now they want to fleece the middle class. That’s a bigger project, which requires the silencing or misdirection of middle class voices. If they had not stacked the supreme court, their welfare stealing project would have been ended by Obamacare and now all Americans would have affordable helathcare, subsidized by a tax on the elite.

Many of the “radicals” commenting here are making the assumption that the Dems are equally friends with the rich, but they’re not, and this silly idea that they’re equal is the reason you fall into the trap of thinking there is no left that frightens the US elite. The US is the sole remaining obstacle to a new global order of international action on poverty, climate change and inequality. Once the US govt caves we will have an end to tax havens, a new fairer trade regime, and action on climate change. If US conservatives hadn’t stymied it for years we would already be in our post-carbon future, and the biggest victims of that move would have been the very industries – coal, energy, oil – backing Trump now. It’s no coincidence that Tillerson was the secretary of state in the government that pulled the US out of the Paris Accord. It’s no coincidence that he has stacked his government with bankers after he promised to drain the swamp.

Because the goal of US elites is to drain middle class money into their own pockets and protect themselves from regulation of their ecocide at any cost, they can’t afford to have even a weak opposition in the US, and the opposition ideas they see now are not weak – they know that if the Dems get more than 2 years’ control over the full organs of the state they’re fucked. And because their program is so antithetical to the interests of so many Americans – fleecing the bottom 80% is not popular – they need to destroy all opposition. This is exactly what the gangster fascists in Russia did – they have never faced a credible leftist opposition but they still introduced a gangster fascist state. Why? Because the interests of modern elites in Russia and the US are not the same as those of the elites of 1930s Europe.

You also ignore the role of culture in the drive to fascism. Fascism in Italy didn’t just arise from material conditions, but also from a cultural movement to renew the Italian spirit through war, a desire to roll back women’s rights and restore the role of the patriarch, and a fear of this new concept of universal suffrage (which was still new in Europe at that time). Similarly now America has many cultural imperatives towards fascism. Slavery, Jim Crow, perpetual war, McCarthyism, hyper militarism, Cointelpro … America has a long history of fascist impulses, many of them obviously derived from its racist past. You can’t ignore this impulse when discussing a small elite’s drive for a particular social order.

And finally you need to understand how small this elite is. We’re not talking about the top 20% here or even the top 5%. The whole Cambridge Analytica effort to steal the election was financed by one man – Robert Mercer. He sunk probably hundreds of millions into various propaganda organs and dark web actors. You can’t see this one man’s actions independent of his personal motivations, and this is a man who thinks that poor people should be treated like cattle. He’s a monster. A small group of industrialists whose entire careers are built on ecocide – the Kochs, peabody energy, for example – a pair of tech libertards (Thiel and Mercer) and a small number of openly fascist organizations (like the NRA) have driven almost all of the growth of fascist propaganda and activism in America in the last 10 years. You need to consider the personal motivations of grifters like Alex Jones, true believers like the NRA’s leadership, and vengeful libertarian vampires like Thiel, if you want to see what the drive to fascism is all about.

So no, lecturing us about how Hitler sucked up to big business won’t help. It’s condescending and deeply, stupidly wrong.

@42 is one of the most hilariously deluded bits of Dembot fantasy I’ve every read. It’s not worth fisking. Let’s just say it’s iomelines are completely skewed and wrong.

Halas—Did you mean me? I am number 42, but am puzzled as I don’t have a timeline in my post and while I vote unenthusiastically for Democrats am not plausibly insulted as a Dembot.

I think he means me Donald. Halasz has been ignoring the intense war the elites waged against Obamacare for years because it upsets his theory that the Dems are just as bad as the GOP. So he can’t see how the right wing noise machine is able to turn a supposedly compliant democratic party into a terrifying monster enemy.

The Dems used a huge tax on the interest earnings of the rich to find healthcare for all. It took the elites years of work to find a way to undermine it even partially, and they stole an election to complete the job. But halasz thinks the Dems are helping these people. So then he has no explanation for why there is this Ra kd divide in American politics. Perhaps he doesn’t even see that divide…

Since the very open and plainly expressed goal of my intellectual opponents on this thread is to persuade us that
a: there is a vibrant and thriving intellectual left in the United States and that
b: it is instantiated in the Democratic Party (not the Sanders insurgency, note, but the ‘higher echelons’)
and since both of those claims (especially the second) are obviously and self-evidently ridiculous there’s not much point in continuing this conversation.

But it’s worthwhile asking why? Why are so many wealthy white Democrats so keen to persuade us of the obvious falsehood that Naziism is just round the corner and that, in 1,2,3 years Trump will suspend all civil liberties, cancel further elections and appoint himself the Fuhrer? (needless to say, the odds of this happening are absolutely zero).

1: Surprising as it might seem, I think it’s to prevent political action. I know this is counter-intuitive, but it seems to me, that many liberals are, so to speak, ‘holding their fire’. ‘I won’t do anything now’, they say. ‘But when fascism comes…ah then it will be different! I will take to the hills and start to fight back, killing cops and soldiers to fight for freedom! Vive la Resistance!’
But of course this moment will never come. So in practice they do nothing.
2: According to Faustnotes, the radical, Corey Robin: ‘But if the GOP is sliding to fascism and the elections are now being stolen by dirty tricks and outside help, then everything Corey has written is positively dangerous.’
So it’s ‘really’ Corey Robin and those like him, who are the danger, not centrist Democrats. And why? Because they don’t buy into the Captain Mainwaring style ‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic’ ‘resistance’. In other words, we see for the millionth time that for Centrists it’s the radical left who are the ‘real’ threat for not doing what those nice centrist Democrats tell them to.

American centrist Democrats have the United States on the brain and are unable to conceptualise that other countries might not be America. But if they were able to think about other countries they might care to reflect that exactly the same political smears (‘he’s a tool of the Russians!’ ‘He’s leading us to dictatorship!’) are currently being used against the radical leftist Corbyn in the UK as are used against Trump. And by exactly the same people. What does this tell us about the motivation of those using them?

What remains a fact is in the absence of some kind of economic disaster, and the rise of some kind of leftist/radical threat to Capital in the US, the threat of fascism as classically defined remains literally non-existent. So we don’t ‘have to’ throw in our lot with centrist ‘Democrats’ (who aren’t) to prevent it, despite the fact that centrist Democrats are continually telling us the opposite (‘vote Democrat or get Hitler’ being the new de facto Democratic campaign slogan).

(The example of Putin doesn’t help as as Putin isn’t a fascist, he’s an oligarch, and the United States already is an oligarchy, and has been for decades. Another distraction of the ‘fascism is just round the corner’ claim is that it tries to persuade Americans that they have a democracy to lose. Americans lost that particular battle years ago).

and: CORRECTION!! –
(in big caps)
I wrote:
…and how ”great” history and histerical references are” – but somehow this dumb machine turned it into ”historical”!

– AND Hidari about the rest of your… writing – one might think you -(and a few other commenters on CT) never read:

”Die Banalität des Bösen”.

fn 43, good points but you omitted the Evangelical movement with its fanatically anti-modern, anti-science, apocalyptic world view. They are really what passes for Trump’s “mass base”. The fact that they voted more enthusiastically for Trump the serial adulterer etc. than for any candidate before him speaks volumes. No, economic anaylsis doesn’t explain everything, at least not straightforwardly.

Anarcissie 46, if you expect the members of the r. c. to conduct a rational analysis and then agree on the course of action that is in their overall class interest, that is … kind of cute. The ruling class isn’t monolothic and never was. There are always different factions whose interests don’t always align. And they don’t always act rationally either. Some factions did prefer Clinton, for the quite rational reason that competent government is in their interest too and that climate change and nuclear war aren’t in their long term interests either. But clearly the larger faction aligned behind Trump. The GOP establishment along with their donor class aligned behind Trump. They celebrated his conquest of the WH. The stock markets rallied, the financial press started writing enthusistically about all the business opportunities now opening up, the wealthy lined up to pay those six figure fees to be close to their idol at Mar-A-Lago. Your contention that the r. c. mostly opposed Trump is ridiculous.

“A.G. Sulzberger . . . will become a crucial steward of journalism at a time of widespread mistrust in the media, fueled by a President who delights in attacking the press.”

I was meandering, as is my wont, across the blogosphere, and ran across the Times article on its planned succession and this boring, pious sentence struck me as exemplifying the function Trump plays in our political-media culture. I stare at its easy self-excusing self-congratulation and even its anachronism.

The institutional lack of self-awareness or agency, let alone responsibility is remarkable, but I won’t remark on it: my moment of Zen.

@58
I haven’t answered your question because I don’t understand it. It’s pretty ironic that you talk about the right-wing ‘rage machine’ as, like many establishment Democrats (e.g. on this thread) you seem to be in a permanent state of boiling fury, most of it aimed at the left.

Insofar as your questions(s) have any meaning, I assume you mean this: If the Democrats aren’t a threat to the Republicans, why is there so much enmity to the Democrats from the Republicans? Simple answer: there isn’t.

‘Why conservative newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton in droves

With a week to go before judgment day, Hillary Clinton has racked up at least 186 endorsements from daily newspapers — about 31 times more than Donald Trump,…

Reflecting the “Never Trump” contingent of the Republican Party, an impressive number of publications with a solid record of endorsing GOP candidates — the Dallas Morning News and Columbus Dispatch, for instance — have urged voters to elect Clinton. So, too, have outlets like the San Diego Union-Tribuneand Arizona Republic, neither of which has endorsed a Democrat for president in the past century….

The Clinton endorsements from conservative outlets frame the choice in a familiar way: Their editorial boards maintain that she is the lesser of two evils, as well as the country’s best hope for defeating a Republican candidate who would wreak havoc in office. ‘ (our old friend the lesser of two evils).

http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-conservative-newspapers-endorsed-hillary-clinton-in-droves-2016-11?r=US&IR=T

‘The list of Republicans supporting Hillary Clinton is still growing. For months, we have been keeping track of all of the GOP politicians, administration officials, business leaders and donors who have crossed over to back Clinton over Donald Trump.

The most recent high-profile announced was from former secretary of state Colin Powell.’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/30/heres-the-growing-list-of-big-name-republicans-supporting-hillary-clinton/?utm_term=.f565ebdf7209

‘Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has received another endorsement from a leading Republican, two days after the first presidential debate.

On Wednesday she was endorsed by John Warner, a five-time Virginia senator.

She was also backed by the Arizona Republic newspaper, the first time it has supported a Democrat since its founding in 1890.’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37499678

And if one goes from de facto to de jure, one sees even more support. E.g. George Bush Jr. went out of his way to attack Trump, but not Clinton, which might be interpreted as de facto or tacit support for the Democrats. And this was at a time of an election! When there was particular pressure for party loyalty.

Believers in the myth that there is a left wing party in the United States, and that it is called the Democrats, might care to reflect on this question: Just how much ideological difference can there be, really, between two parties when huge swathes of one party (or at least its establishment and media ‘arms’) were prepared to openly endorse the leadership of the other in a crucial presidential election? Can we imagine large sections of the Republican establishment, for example, endorsing FDR in the 1930s? Or the British Labour Government of the early 1980s (or now) endorsing the Tories and openly campaigning for them?

It’s amazing that these facts are essentially suppressed by Democrats. It’s not as if this is Stalin’s Russia. You can’t just ‘vanish’ inconvenient facts. Establishment/media Republican support for Clinton in the run up to the election is not difficult to find. It was not just a few outliers. It was a large and influential body of opinion.

Wrong hidari in many ways. First of all noone blames the radical left for Trump’s victory – we blame the right. You know, the people who voted for him,the people who paid for his propaganda. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reserve a little bit of blame for the Berniebros and TYT and all the other idiots (including some on this blog) who recycled Russian lies about Clinton. For example Corey Robin recently recycled here some material from Greenwald about how the details a are the same as the GOP for supporting mass surveillance at just the same time that the GOP were building up a big brouhaha about illegal surveillance of Trump and the Dems and the “deep state” being aligned. Remember Greenwald is the man who betrayed a whistleblower on Russia to the NSA, and along with the rapist Assange is obviously collaborating with Trump’s team. That’s dangerous stuff and it has the effect of paralyzing the left. Which is exactly what Cambridge analytica were aiming for when they were paid by Robert Mercer to get people to stay home. Your and robins view on this that the GOP and Dems are all collaborating with the elites leads to no solution except to stay home and give up. Why would you think the centrist dem argument that Trump is worse than bush would have that effect? The turnout in state and federal elections in 2018 and the coming wave is obvious evidence against this silly idea.

Next, I am not an American and am perfectly aware of what is going on in the UK and it is not the centrist left accusing Corbyn of working for Russia – unless you think the daily mail is left wing now? How are you going to analyse anything if you get your sides so confused?

This again leaves us with your – and by implication from his writings – coreys default position which is that repubs and Dems are the same, nothing is getting worse or changing, so you might as well stay home. This cedes the entire political field to the GOP, who use the power they get to roll back welfare protection, militarize civil society, suppress black votes, and enable ever more vicious ecocide. With the likely additional icing on this particular shit dessert of starting a war with north Korea that will kill millions. And what is your solution to this? To stand around ranting that nothing has changed since Nixon and what, exactly, what?

In my opinion, one important characteristic of fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan is that all these three countries were strongly imperialist, by which I mean the wanted to expand their colonial empire.

Of course almost everyone in Europe has been an imperialist for some time but, at the time of fascism, the world was mostly already partitioned, so Germany, Japan and Italy had to directly attack other and bigger powers (this is most obvious in the case of Japan).

I think that this happened because all three governments had a policy of mercantilism and, so to speak, forced/hastened industrialization, and this was a big component of fascism.
I am a big fan of Hobson’s “Imperialism – a study” (1902) and I think that fascism was in some sense the endgame of that dynamic; Hobson sees imperialism as a consequence of “underconsumption”, however I think it’s better to say that imperialism gave an outlet to the increased productivity of the industrial sectors of the developed countries of the time.

On the other hand, in the USA today there isn’t really this crave for export markets, the “underconsumption”[*] problem is solved mostly by increased financialization and bubbles.
So for this reason I don’t think that USA policy will go in the direction of “fascism” in the strict sense, I think that it is more likely that China, Russia or other “semi-periphery” countries will go in that direction.

The USA learned to solve the underconsumption through government deficits and “new deal” policies after WW2, however:

1) Capital doesn’t want steady profits, it needs continually increasing profits;
2) new deal policies, while avoid crises, keep wages high.

so the policies of the right since at least the 80s have these characteristics:

1) They try to lower taxes, mostly on high incomes;
2) They blow big deficits and/or financial bubbles (often linked to lowering taxes);
3) They demonize other forms of government spending, that would enter in competition with enhancing profits;
4) In order to do (4), they create or greatly aggrandize various bugaboos who are supposed to live on the dole at the expense of “hardworking people”, like immigrants, people of this or that group (in Italy up to some time ago it was southern italians, hence the Northern League), highly paid public workers etc.

The first two points in my list mean that, even if/when this or that policy succeeds in increasing the profit share of the pie, this leads to more financial wealth that needs even more profits to be sustained, so even mildly leftish politics, or centrist politics that tend to keep the wage share constant, are a big problem; point (4) lead to what we now call “right leaning populism”, and generally bitter identity politics.

So in my opinion what happens is that there is this cycle:

1) right leaning politician goes into power, blows big deficit or bubble in order to increase profits;
2) financial wealth increases relative to total income;
3) the profit share has to grow to keep pace with the increase of wealth;
4) leftish (or center-leftish) politics are too tepid to roll back the clock, even when they are in power;
5) right leaning politicians blame this on some outgroup, so that when they are in power the can do (1) again.

I don’t think that this can lead to fascism in the strict sense, but I think that this will lead to continuously more bitter identity politics.
Even the sort of neo-protectionism that is now promoted by Trump, or Brexit, or various italian parties, etc. probably will not get the expected results because this is sold to the proles as a way to increase the wage share, but contemporaneously is supposed to increase profits for local businesses, and both things can’t be true at the same time, so either the proles will be stuffed with even lower wage shares (as seems the case with Brexit) or protectionism will turn out to be all smoke and no fire (like in increasing tariffs but also government deficits).

[*] by underconsumption I mean a situation where, because of big inequalities in income, the economy is often at risk of a crisis, or anyway employment is low enough to cause social unrest, unless there is a constant growth in debt, or some other external source of demand.

@60
“Beautiful blue eyes”?

Well – perhaps only at the Internet?
and that’s the beautiful thing – like the idea of F…face von Clownstick as a ‘continuity with-conservative-tradition’ – I -(and He?) but not you? – can be anything you – or any other commenter on this thread would like US to be –

But are you flirting with me?
If you do – I’m actually a 67 year old Russian Transvestite who believes that Americans and America believes everything which is ”on teh Internet”.

Even that ”der Schwanz” has naturally blond hair.

To answer the question of whether Trump truly is exceptional or not perhaps it would be instructive to list all the ways that the previous GOP POTUS was unexceptional.
He passed a massive tax cut for the rich.
He passed draconian anti-terror and surveillance laws.
He imposed tariffs on steel.
He instigated a major war of aggression.
He nominated a mix of extreme conservatives and cronies to the Supreme Court.
He commuted the sentence of an underling who had been prosecuted by a special counsel.
He passed a bill erecting nearly 700 miles of border fence.
He attempted a partial privatization of Social Security.

As you can see, Trump has accomplished only a tiny fraction of these unexceptional things. He’s got some time, but if he doesn’t get on the ball then Prof. Robin’s thesis will be disproven, as I assume it is exceptional to not do unexceptional things.

It would appear heliopause that I’m not allowed to reply to your comment and link – perhaps criticizing Greenwald is not allowed at CT. I deleted it because its part of a pattern of uncivil comments. Try to make your point without pointing out how silly everyone else is – JQ

@
”perhaps criticizing Greenwald is not allowed at CT.”

I doubt it – as I have told CT before nearly everything about ”the Great Greenwald” –
(and his ”cult”)
But now as I had to… kind of ”come out” and was forced by Lord Lep to reveal my real identity -(behind ”the blue eyes”) I have to confess I actually wrote that article heliopause was quoting and that I’m Russian has nothing to do with it!

And I hope I made this point without pointing out how silly I am?

@74
”the more he looks like a Trump patsy.”

Now please – In the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ”all religious individuals and groups -(even Trumps Patsys) are protected”.

And the Establishment Clause bars US from advancing or inhibiting religion and ensures that CT remains neutral.

”The Free Exercise Clause and supporting laws, like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, protect the right of religious individuals like Greenwald to follow his conscience in matters of faith.”

And being Russian Orthotox myself – I also believe that you are really mean to US Russians!

Heliopause @ 68, an article which in effect says that almost no one is pushing for war with Russia doesn’t do much to support your claim that the left and centrists are pushing for war with Russia.

I agree with Hidari on his foreign policy point. Matt Taibbi makes it here.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-the-legacy-of-the-iraq-war-w518193

And yes, it is bipartisan. What is different about Trump is the combination of mental instability and his unwillingness or inability to put lipstick on a pig. That is why so many neocons and liberal interventionists are opposed to him. They want proxy wars or actual American involvement in more wars, but it is much harder to sell our good intentions or keep a straight face about it with some buffoon who openly celebrates torture, advocates going after the families of terrorists, taking the oil of countries we invade and applauding death squads in the Philippines. I was going to add giving Jerusalem to Israel while pretending to be an honest broker, but some prominent Democrats cheered that one.

The imperialism thing is interesting. At the time Germany, Italy and Japan were locked out of the main source of resources and market growth – colonies – that the imperialist powers had, and they needed to go to war to steal colonies from those powers. How does that translate into today? People don’t do open colonial wars anymore. But we do have a huge problem of a different kind of resource – ecological services – that is shrinking and becoming increasingly conflict-prone. Water, energy and the right to pollute the commons. In the imperialist era resources were sought extra-territorially and states needed fascism to support the conquest of foreign territory, at times from equally-armed defendants. Now the resources are within our own territories – access to water courses to pollute, the ability to dump CO2 unrestricted, the power to tear fossil fuels from internally disputed territories such as national parks, the right of pastoralists to use any land they choose – and this requires a new kind of fascism, based on ecocide. You can see the growth of these elements of US fascism now – the land disputes through Bundy et al, the survivalists, drill baby drill, the global warming denialism. It all feeds into the economic demands of the coal and energy elites supporting Trump, but it’s connected to a broader ecocidal ideology with a strong christian underpinning. This – along with racist excision of blacks from the body politic, and a new attempt to control female sexuality – is what drives American fascism. Your Polanyi and your 1930s theorists have nothing to say about these modern fundamentals.

‘The ONLY thing characterizing the rise of fascism, in the dozen or more countries in which it arose, was the sudden failure of the market system.’

I would agree with this. However, I would add that it helps (to put it mildly) to have some exterior ‘threat’ to the market system, and while (as some commentators have pointed out) this threat might be imaginary it makes some sense if it’s real.

Imagine, for example, that Trump does destroy the American economy and cause a huge recession/depression and that he is suddenly ‘surplus to requirements’. He could be easily got rid of. Mueller would ‘suddenly’ ‘stumble upon’ some terrible fact about Russia or something. The ‘pee tape’ would ‘suddenly’ turn out to be real (cf ‘Deep Fakes’). All it would take would be for some Republicans to break and then he could be impeached. (Indeed, the threat of impeachment has hung over his whole Presidency: whatever Mueller has, it’s probably enough to impeach Trump, and so he needs, really needs the Republican establishment onside to stop that from happening. His hands are tied.)

So if he suddenly stood in the way of corporate profits he would be quickly deposed, and the liberals would cheer it on.

Economic elites don’t really like fascism. It causes instability. Innocent people get killed, which doesn’t bother them, but some of these innocents might be wealthy and white, which would bother them a great deal. Elites have grown used to the personal freedoms fought for by the ‘sixties radicals. Would they enjoy living in a theocracy or the equivalent? I don’t think so.

So: they will only bankroll (and therefore permit) a fascist government to take over when the economy is tanking, yes, but also when it looks like some ‘working class’ movement (be it socialist, communist, or, as we saw recently in Egypt, Islamist) might take power instead. Remember what Hitler said: he essentially went to the business class and said ‘I know you don’t like us much. But it’s us or the communists’. And in that situation, most of the capitalist class will break for the fascists.

To repeat, as things stand (and who knows! They can change!) but as things stand the chance of fascism/dictatorship in the US is absolutely and precisely zero.*

*Some people might mention a 9/11 type event here, functioning as a Reichstag Fire type event. But this would have to be much bigger/worse than 9/11 for ordinary people to decide that ‘democracy has to go’. After all, 9/11 was pretty bad (worse than the Reichstag Fire) and the US over-reacted, but never at any point did it actually and genuinely look like it was becoming a fascist or Nazi regime.

This is my take on continuity and Trump:

Stage 0 cancer and stage 4 cancer are the same cancer, and call for some of the same treatment. But there are also new features at each stage of cancer – things you need to do in hopes of containing the cancer and forestalling its advance to later stages, and in hopes of rolling it back or even squashing it outright. That’s why we identify separate stages, in fact. Quoting from a typical definition:

Stage 0. This stage describes cancer in situ, which means “in place.” Stage 0 cancers are still located in the place they started and have not spread to nearby tissues. This stage of cancer is often highly curable, usually by removing the entire tumor with surgery.

Stage I. This stage is usually a small cancer or tumor that has not grown deeply into nearby tissues. It also has not spread to the lymph nodes or other parts of the body. It is often called early-stage cancer.

Stage II and III. These stages indicate larger cancers or tumors that have grown more deeply into nearby tissue. They may have also spread to lymph nodes but not to other parts of the body.

Stage IV. This stage means that the cancer has spread to other organs or parts of the body. It may also be called advanced or metastatic cancer.

Same deal with the Republican Party and its network of funders, supporters, etc. It’s true that this administration is in specific ways not as bad as some of its predecessors. It’s also that some of the people I’ve known who died of cancer in its later stages had specific relief from some things that had been bad parts of their experience at earlier stages. They were still worsening, and they still died.

Living in history matters. Doing things like packing the higher courts with hardcore reactionaries is bad when you do it for four years, or eight. The packing itself is still the same kind of thing, but when you do it for twenty or thirty years, the effects are worse, because there’s more of it and the damage accumulates. “This is just more of the same” doesn’t help a damn bit in assessing how in what ways we should be worried now.

Should have stuck this in. Mark Penn, the Clinton insider has a new book. The Mail piece teases with the salacious, but is very good on highly-educated ‘flat-earth elites’ and their intense belief in Trump laundering Russian money in exchange for election tampering. Penn makes the same point as others: that 100 k in FB adds is unlikely to make much difference against a 1.2 billion Hillary spend.

Featured is an extremely impressive list of reasons Hillary gives to herself and potential donors! why she lost. It’s long and she’s evidently intent on adding to it! Lucky Dems!

@79

‘What is different about Trump is the combination of mental instability and his unwillingness or inability to put lipstick on a pig. That is why so many neocons and liberal interventionists are opposed to him. They want proxy wars or actual American involvement in more wars, but it is much harder to sell our good intentions or keep a straight face about it with some buffoon who openly celebrates torture, advocates going after the families of terrorists, taking the oil of countries we invade and applauding death squads in the Philippines. I was going to add giving Jerusalem to Israel while pretending to be an honest broker, but some prominent Democrats cheered that one.’

Yes! It’s not as if there aren’t a million good reasons to loathe Trump. Mainstream Democrats have gone out of their way to find bad ones. Remember Orwell’s Insight: most political language is not only a lie, but says the opposite of the truth. When Democrats accuse Trump of being a ‘liar’ what they actually mean is that he tells the truth. Trump openly boasts of torture, of the United States bombing Iraq for oil, that the United States is not exceptional, but is, instead, a utility maximising state like any other. These things are all unsayable (or were) in ‘polite’ American discourse. Obama’s blather was much more to the taste of American elites, as were Clinton’s ramblings about the United States being the world’s ‘indispensable nation’ (other nations, therefore, presumably being dispensable ). And so on.

It’s noticeable here that invariably (invariably) despite all the ramblings about ‘fascism’, when the US does in fact behave like a fascist regime (i.e. in terms of its foreign policy) this has bipartisan backing. CF the recent disgraceful vote on Yemen (to be fair, proposed by Sanders) the Nazi style genocide in which has the support not just of the Republicans but also of mainstream Democrats.

@81 ‘ People don’t do open colonial wars anymore.’

The word ‘open’ is doing a lot of work there. Incidentally it’s objectively not true that all (I know you didn’t say this, but you implied it) natural resources are available within national boundaries. For example, look at the wars in DRC, fuelled in no small measure by the ‘West’ (a euphemism). Do we think that this is in any way connected with the fact that DRC, allegedly, sits on $24 trillion worth of natural resources, including coltan, essential for Iphones etc. which cannot be mined within the US? Or what about the US’ oh so noble (and bipartisan) undeclared war on Venezuela? Is this wholly and completely unrelated to Venezuela’s possession of the largest oil reserves on planet Earth?

Nazi imperialism was caused by ideology yes (and that’s all bourgeois historians want to talk about) but it was also caused by the economic need for natural resources. ‘Everyone’ knows about the battle of Stalingrad. Far less well known is that this was only a ‘way station’ in the Nazi plans. The real goal of this operation (i.e. what they were going to do after they took Stalingrad) was to capture the oil fields of Grozny and Maikop. Hitler’s main purpose in attacking the Ukraine was to seize its grain. And so on.

So again, we see that in terms of foreign policy, which no centrist Democrat wants to talk about, American foreign policy goals are different from those of Nazi Germany. But the difference is qualitative, not quantitative. And Trump, who points out (correctly) that the attack on Iraq was based on lies, and was all about oil, blows the lid off the American ‘cover story’ of human rights and democracy etc. For this he can never be forgiven.

@steven t johnson 84

“…a shaky underconsumptionist thesis that ignores international economy, especially international finance. One of the dominant trends in politics is the difficulty of sustaining the US role in the world financial order. It was the first Bush who firmly committed the US to a policy of permanent war. The US ruling class has fished in troubled waters, and now its agents make sure the waters are always troubled.”

I think that, on the opposite, the role international finance is central in an underconsumptionist thesis, since the idea is not that there is an actual underconsumption, but rather that the growth in debt (and therefore in the size of “finance” relative to the real economy) is necessary to avoid an underconsumption crisis.

In the 19th century colonial powers stiffed colonies with debt, and then sent gunboats when colonies couldn’t pay back; today what’s different is that the USA learned to stimulate the economy by going itself into debt, but is in a situation where other economies are used to be net exporters and so to speak to depend on demand created in the USA, which is sort of the opposite of what happened in the 19th century, while American capitalists need both to keep the ball rolling and to intercept most of the profits that come from this.

@90 Bunk, de-bunk, de-bunked

From that notorious pro-Trump rag; the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/poll-republicans/536472/

Democrats have sometimes expressed equally worrying views in polls. In the summer of 2016, for example, a pollster found that two-thirds of Democratic voters would trade an unconstitutional third term for Obama if it meant avoiding either Clinton or Bush. Perhaps you think, They must have been joking, and would never have followed through. But that’s just the point: What happens in polling often stays in polling.

CBS quoting the bunk authors retreating from their own ‘hypothetical’ situation:

“Were Trump to seriously propose postponing the election, there would be a torrent of opposition, which would most likely include prominent Republicans,” they wrote in the Post. “Financial markets would presumably react negatively to the potential for political instability. And this is to say nothing of the various legal and constitutional complications that would immediately become clear. Citizens would almost certainly form their opinions amid such tumult, which does not at all resemble the context in which our survey was conducted…Postponing the 2020 presidential election is not something that Trump or anyone in his administration has even hinted at…”

This crap was dealt with last year when the crap poll was released.

But perhaps CBS, or the Post, would like to commission a poll today asking Dems whether Obama should have delayed the 2016 election until he could ensure the election would be held without interference. Or, if Trump should be removed from office even if no hard evidence of collusion with the Russians can be proven? If the press is any indication, large percentages of Dems want to invalidate the 2016 and are daily on the edge of their seats waiting for some, hell any, excuse to do so.

Won’t the generals step up? The orange-haired Manchurian candidate is in office and selling us out right this frigging minute! Help!!!

That’s not hypothetical, that’s daily reality for the highly-educated ‘flat-earth elites.’

What percentage of Dems would vote for delay, or a do-over?

Hidari, everyone knows that Stalingrad was a way station to the oil.why do you think nobody knows this? These kinds of statements – liberals don’t know this, nobody knows that – are unprovable rhetorical guff. They set up your rhetoric but they simply aren’t correct.

I also wonder how you can tread the line that Trump was just open about America’s real imperialist goals, while also believing that Clinton was more militarist than Trump. It’s particularly difficult given that the people you claim were always doing just what Trump is openly saying didn’t actually steal much of Iraq’s oil. And now Trump has decided to appoint Bolton, which is going to be a rocky road for those of us living in his ideal killing zone. What resources do you think Bolton wants to take from north Korea? What benefit does this coming war offer the ruling elites? I think you don’t have a coherent story, and your idea that fascism can only arise from 1930s style class conflict can’t explain why an oligarch in a perfect position to loot civil society for himself and his mates wants to bring the whole thing crashing down in a nuclear war.

@96 I’ve tried to compliment you where I can, but I really don’t appreciate you putting words into my mouth. To your point regarding my claims about the Stuarts. I made no claim whatsoever about the Stuart Restoration. The topic is revolutions, and on that topic I’d have to check to see if what is often called the Glorious Revolution was in any sense revolutionary.

Nor did I state that Trump speaks ‘truth to power.’ I’m not sure he ever produces truth at all, at least in public. As Scott Adams and others have demonstrated conclusively, Trump simply does A B message-testing and goes with the line that gets the biggest applause. Unlike most politicians, Trump is more interested in what other people believe to be true, than any imagined deeply-held belief of his own. As a Trump supporter, I’m not sure he has any. That’s one of the reason’s I think he makes a fine president. And on the subject of truth, here’s what truth is: it’s whatever people believe it is. The definition of a ‘good deal’ is whatever the customer believes (or can be persuaded to believe is a good deal. His worst excesses are constrained by the system of checks and balances.

Trump, brimming full of crap, is by a considerable margin more honest than most politicians, and certainly the crap candidate he beat.

I’m not annoyed by your comment, but rather disappointed in your sloppy reply.

Sorry, that was candidate Ted Cruz who was shacking up with the neocons. Candidate Trump had a hodgepodge of 3rd-rate foreign policy advisers, including some anti-Muslim people.

Won’t bother posting on this thread again as it’s getting silly, but just a reminder that my main point is that, right now, as things stand, there is no chance that the US will turn fascist. People replying by pointing out that if things change, radically, the US might go fascist at some undetermined point in the future, are hardly invalidating my basic point.

Hidari #101: “it’s getting silly… People replying that if things change, radically, the US might go fascist at some undetermined point in the future, are hardly invalidating my basic point.”

To review, your basic point in #8 was that fascism needs austerity and a strong and radical left. But these are only short episodes in the continuum of danger. What fascism needed was a failing market system and institutional deadlock in dealing with it. This is a description of our current condition. Things need not change radically from here to make it worse — and to get to fascism. (I sketched a possible scenario based on possible changes in world trade, above.)

Does fascism need its own movement? No, that is the culmination, the last thing that happens. Polanyi described the syndrome in his time, and the formation of a new party was not a salient characteristic:

“A country approaching the fascist phase showed symptoms among which the existence of a fascist movement proper was not necessarily one. At least as important signs were the spread of irrationalistic philosophies, racialist aesthetics, anticapitalistic demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, widespread disparagement of the ‘regime,’ or whatever was the name given to the existing democratic setup… In no case was an actual revolution against constituted authority launched; fascist tactics were invariably those of a sham rebellion arranged with the tacit approval of the authorities who pretended to have been overwhelmed by force…” (The Great Transformation, p. 238)

The 2016 election showed, once again, how easily an economically distressed populace will fall for a demagogue promising to break institutional deadlock by use of his personal strength instead of facts. The political system’s reaction to him has not been reassuring; it is another form of the deadlock: His own party the Republicans (or half of it) is waiting on evidence of guilt in unrelated criminal matters before removing him constitutionally, so as not to upset his Republican voters. The opposing party the Democrats (or half of it) may try to alleviate some of the economic distress by strengthening the welfare state, but only if their voters surge in the next election, and only if the party musters an intellectual understanding which it has never possessed.

There is still no general solution for current problems except to foist them onto powerless individuals, and there is no plan to ameliorate the next crisis of the market economy.

The very recent spate of commentators (here, and elsewhere) writing that fascism has been avoided in the US (or even go so far as to write that it cannot happen) rely upon a misunderstanding of what fascism was, or take too large a comfort in a narrow diversion from it. That may not be good enough, next time. Far from being silly, I see this as Corey Robin’s basic point, too.

@or
”Not good”??!

Or?

As it has been proven by now – that in the very short US history there – probably? – never ever was anybody – who more successfully – in a shorter time – destroyed any ”continuity of conservatism” – and Von Clownstick -(by employing them for just a short time) destroyed some of my favorite – in nearly no time – will he hopefully – also completely ”deconstruct” this Bolton Dude also in the coming month?

”And, as the president for our time would put it:
Beautiful!”

OK so I was lying the last time when I said that that was my last shot. Maybe I should run for President (but for which party?). But this really is my last shot.

A good article in Foreign Policy (who’da thunk it), on the predictable hysteria about the John Bolton affair from those desperate to pretend that the ironically named ‘Democrats’ constitute some kind of ‘alternative’ to the Republicans.

‘There seem to be two general reactions to the latest upheaval in Trump’s topsy-turvy. One interpretation is that this latest reshuffle amounts to Trump getting rid of the “grown-ups” who have been trying to manage the tweeter-in-chief for the past year and replacing them with advisors who see the world as he does and will let “Trump be Trump.”’ (This is of course the response of the Serious People’ in the media).

‘The second interpretation is more alarmist and basically tells you to start digging that backyard bomb shelter. In this view, the departures of Tillerson and McMaster and the arrivals of Bolton, Pompeo, and Haspel herald the ascendance of a hawkish contingent that will tear up the Iran deal, reinstate the torture regime, and eventually start a war with North Korea that goes way beyond a simple “bloody nose.” ‘ (This is of course the view of those on this thread who spend their time running around with their hands on their heads screaming ‘Oh noes! Trump is Teh Hitler!’ and preparing* for a fascist coup that will never come).

The reality, of course: ‘the real lesson of the Bolton appointment has less to do with Bolton himself and more about what it says about the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. You’re undoubtedly going to read a lot of heartfelt, knickers-in-a-twist commentaries in the next few weeks about the dangers of appointing a wild-eyed radical to such a sensitive position, but the plain fact is that Bolton is not really an outlier within the U.S. foreign-policy community. It’s not like Trump just appointed Medea Benjamin (from the left) or Rand Paul (from the right) or even an experienced and knowledgeable contrarian such as Charles W. Freeman Jr. or Andrew Bacevich. Instead, he appointed someone with decidedly hawkish views but who is still within the “acceptable” consensus in Washington.

Look at Bolton’s pedigree and career. He’s a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School. He worked at Covington & Burling, a venerable D.C. law firm where former Secretary of State Dean Acheson also worked. He has been a senior fellow for years at the conservative but mainstream American Enterprise Institute. He writes frequently for obscure, wild-and-crazy, “radical” publications including, er … the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and even Foreign Policy. Is this your idea of a “fringe” figure?

True, Bolton was a vocal supporter of the Iraq War, but that hardly makes him a weirdo. As I’m sure he’d be the first to point out, a lot of other people drank that particular Kool-Aid, including Hillary Clinton…And don’t forget that the other geniuses who dreamed up and sold that disaster — people such as William Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Bret Stephens, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. — are still respected figures in the foreign-policy establishment despite having never admitted they were wrong or expressed any public regret for launching a disastrous war in which hundreds of thousands of people died.

Like Trump, Bolton seems particularly worried about Iran and North Korea, but so are most members of Congress and much of the think tank world in D.C., too. Indeed, there are plenty of people who strongly support the current nuclear deal but who also believe the United States should get tougher with Tehran. Nor is Bolton the only person in Washington who has proposed taking military action against North Korea. After all, it was Bolton’s predecessor, the now-departing McMaster, who kept making the case for the “bloody nose” approach.

Bolton is also something of an Islamophobe and is deeply suspicious of international institutions, but that hardly makes him unique in U.S. foreign-policy circles either. He seems especially fond of using military force, but how many prominent foreign-policy intellectuals are openly opposed to it and willing to stand up and say so? I’d say damn few, because nobody angling for a top job in Washington wants to be seen as “soft.” Remember how Democrats and Republicans alike applauded Trump when he authorized some strategically meaningless cruise missile strikes on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria? That simple fact goes a long way toward explaining how the United States came to be waging wars of various sorts in a dozen or more countries, with no end in sight and with hardly anyone saying boo about it. Bolton is just a more outspoken member of the consensus here, too.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to “normalize” this appointment or suggest that it shouldn’t concern you. Rather, I’m suggesting that if you are worried about Bolton, you should ask yourself the following question: What sort of political system allows someone with his views to serve in high office, where he helps talk the country into a disastrous war, never expresses a moment’s regret for his errors, continues to advocate for more of the same for the next decade, and then gets a second chance to make the same mistakes again?

So by all means worry. But the real problem isn’t Bolton — it’s a system that permits people like him to screw up and move up again and again.’

Precisely. Clinton and Trump and Obama and Bolton and McMaster and all the rest of them (even Sanders) are symptoms of a diseased and rotten imperial system, which the Democrats and the Republicans both collude in propping up.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/23/welcome-to-the-dick-cheney-administration/

*Though their preparations never seem to get very far do they?

– and furthermore – the fact that in a nearly totally comedy free zone like CT some Academics -(I’m not one of them) – dispute what ”Fascism” really is…
or was? –
years and years after… no – not WW2 – but Mel Brooks ”Producers” – is another proof that IT never can happen – here.

I totally would conflict with CT’s… policy of passing certain postings!

kidneystones

I’m so old I can remember how Democrats planned to stop Reagan cold early in his administration by backing a strike by air-traffic controllers – a group deemed essential to commerce and safety. Reagan fired them and never looked back.

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865560028/This-week-in-history-Ronald-Reagan-fires-11345-air-traffic-controllers.html

In a show of true bipartisanship, congressional Democrats stood behind the president. [Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation Drew] Lewis phoned Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts who told him, “I’ll help get you Democratic support.” To be sure, some Democrats made some unflattering noise, but no major Democratic action was taken against the president for political advantage. The president of the AFL-CIO, Lane Kirkland, also offered support to the administration.

Hidari: “…but just a reminder that my main point is that, right now, as things stand, there is no chance that the US will turn fascist…”

Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but what you’ve said in support of yours is hardly convincing. If you said you had no idea what the chances were, now, that would be convincing, and perfectly reasonable.

Hidari@101 “… my main point is that, right now, as things stand, there is no chance that the US will turn fascist. People replying by pointing out that if things change, radically, the US might go fascist at some undetermined point in the future, are hardly invalidating my basic point.”

Apparently I have failed completely to be clear. This formulation draws an imaginary distinction between fascism and democracy, which are on a continuum. Democratic nations like England, France and the US conducted genocidal wars, which certainly seems fascistic enough. The democratic revolution in Turkey immediately resorted to genocidal ethnic cleansing a part of replacing Ottoman subjects with Turkish nationals. As to going fascist, I suppose the criterion is…what? Canceling elections? We already have elections that don’t matter. A government that whips up a nationalist frenzy in the population in lieu of actually doing good for the majority, instead of serving select interest? Have that too. Repression of the left? Did that in the Forties, and everybody here is relieved to be purged of the totalitarianism. Militarism? In spades. Mass incarceration? World leadership.

A fetish for the leader who tears up the old restrictions and GETS THINGS DONE? Trump’s working on it, which is exactly why he is indeed discontinuous with anybody except Nixon (well, maybe Jackson,) except that he has the tacit support of the ruling class, which will only tolerate criticisms from the right…which play right into Trump’s hands. This is true no matter what Corey Robin wants to sell us. Police action against “elites,” which usually means democratic politicians rather than owners? Trump’s working on that too.

As the old wag has it, history doesn’t repeat: It merely rhymes. US fascism will not look anything like Nazi Germany or Franco Spain or Msgr. Tiso’s puppet regime or State Shinto in Japan. It won’t even look like today’s Ukraine, another fascist regime. When the US goes fascist will be an occasion for debate and denial, just as it is for Ukraine.

Fascism I think is a mobilization of the nation for empire (lost, to be reconquered, or a new nation seeking to conquer.) There is a de jure discrimination against some of the population, as a divide et impera strategy. There is a regimentation of the economy for militarism, starting with taxes and budgets, but turning to directed economy as more efficient for warmaking. The owners no longer have a free hand but their interests are protected overall, especially by control of the labor movement. There is a resort to a mass ideology of heroism and sacrifice to substitute for material service to the interests of the working class majority. There is a policy of extralegal action, force, threats of violence and violence, directed primarily at the scapegoat targets. But oppositional elites (primarily politicians brandishing worn out democratic credentials but also owners who lose out in the struggle to gain favor,) are also targeted. Ethnic cleansing, mass expulsions and massacres are tools of the nation, under fascism just as they are under democracy.

The advent of fascism in the US will always be a matter of debate and denial precisely because it is continuous with US democracy.

Hey, John.

This is only remotely on-topic – but is a health concern regarding one of my favorite complaints – legalizing the ‘perfectly’ harmless and much better than alcohol – marijuana

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5539941/Top-doctor-warns-psychosis-paranoid-delusions-superskunk-schizophrenia-timebomb.html

Great snaps of the the shrunken hippocampus! And that is it for me.

Light-up kids! It’s harmless!

I imagine that the intellectual confusion and dismissal was similar in the 1920’s-30’s. It’s interesting that today so many intellectuals think that fascism originated from outside the individual, as some sort of organized imposition of structure by a vanguard. So today, we will see it coming: “It can’t happen here.” (Or else they think that our current democratic institutions and media culture are strong enough and varietal enough to withstand it.)

But the evidence is that fascism arose spontaneously within individuals. It’s almost a pure emotion in the anger & hatred quadrant. It suddenly swept up a lot of people into supporting “doing something”, to cut through the confusion and deadlock. Yet it emotionally disregards facts, logic, science, humane values. It’s not a political-economic form in the same category with liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, socialism. These are more or less democratic. Fascism is an anti-democratic disease. Yet it adopts the facade of democratic elections.

Perhaps now fascism has taken a different form, to update to the times. Perhaps we are seeing a world-wide electoral resurgence which will be stanched, but that something larger has been going on underneath. Bertram Gross’s book, Friendly Fascism (1980) argued the case that we have been moving into it for decades, and that an open resurgence of fascism may not even be required, in the clutch of deadlock in economic catastrophe. The military-industrial-cultural machinery is complete, with all the appearances of allowing freedom.

Mann and Ornstein’s book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (2012) documents the legislative history which clearly shows that in the US the deadlock has been engineered almost entirely by the Republican Party over the last 25 years. Otherwise the workers would certainly be in much better shape. This should put an end to the endless mantra by the intellectuals that the Clintons and Obama are the big villains here, but it will not put an end to it: intellectuals have emotions too. There is no doubt that the Democratic Party believes the mainstream economics of the last 40 years, and so half of them buy into neoliberalism, or at least to the extent of trying to compromise with the Republican juggernaut to get anything at all accomplished. But it’s clear that the main culprit is the GOP, throwing facts, logic, science out the window, perhaps in the slow-roll of friendly fascism. It has been aided and abetted by less-than-majority support through well-documented gerrymandering plus the laser-like focus of the Fox propaganda network.

In this case, Bannon’s spearheading of the populist nationalist uprising to overthrow the Republican Party — not just to defeat the Democrats — would have been categorized by Karl Polanyi as yet another case of a very typical dynamic:

“Now, fascism was a revolutionary tendency directed as much against conservatism as against the competing revolutionary force of socialism. That did not preclude the fascists from seeking power in the political field by offering their services to the counterrevolution. On the contrary, they claimed ascendency chiefly by virtue of the alleged impotence of conservatism to accomplish that job, which was unavoidable if socialism was to be barred.” (The Great Transformation, p. 240)

bruce wilder@112 asks “Is there a reason the reality of the present moment in politics can get so little airtime?” Because confusion about what’s happening is so beneficial to certain people, I’d say.

For instance, Corey Robin will explain that Republicans are Republicans and have been citing the history of the world, which began when the Cold War liberated the American people, leaving the true left behind when the old, fake, totalitarian left was rejected by the American people. And Corey Robin will point out that Republican politicians are all continuous with one another and imply by omission they are never continuous with Democrats. And this is beneficial to the Sanders swindle.

The only perceptive idea I saw in the Polanyi quotes on fascism was the notion of “sham revolt.” This is Trump draining the swamp! A ph who prefers the sham to the reality is equally as interested in sowing confusion.

I do wonder why anyone, including bob mcmanus and bruce wilder, think the militarization is not just overt, but in your face, screaming like R. Lee Ermey, and, worse, in your bank account. It really is no secret that the major theater commands have tremendous influence in setting foreign policy, likely more than the Secretary of State. But those who wanted to settle a political score with Clinton pretend to forget this, counterposing an overt, yet covert, “coup” that would separate the happy now from the unhappy yet to be.

Aside from being something like the old idea of Jehovah’s Witnesses that Jesus returned in 1914, again, there is a continuum between fascism and democracy. There is no distinction between merely authoritarian and the novel totalitarian. It may be more comfortable to think so. But remember, Hitler himself was chosen, not elected, and his powers were authorized by parliament. One of his perfectly acceptable predecessors, Bruening, relied on decree to a marvelous extent. The street violence marking the Nazi movement was created by the Frei Korps, under the blessings of the army and the Social Democratic leaderships. People have motives for denial and debate.

– and that was a great question of Mr. Wilder.

“Is there a reason the reality of the present moment in politics can get so little airtime?”

Yes there is – as ”politics” in general in the homeland actually never got more than –
let’s say? – 15 to 20 percent airtime? -(about the amount of ”airtime” AND interest in ”politics” compared to ”entertainment”) – and it’s true that in the last 8? years interest -(and ”airtime”) for politics have grown – but probably only BE-cause WE erected a F…face
and his erection has proven that the erection of an US President is even less ”political” than ever before?

– and sometimes I wonder…?
-(thinking about how many Americans really know that – for example – ”New Mexico” is – and I repeat: ”IS” – A State of the United States –
(an not of ”Mexico”) –
and if you guys ever would have driven through our country – and would have met so many wonderful Americans who spend all of their life – completely and totally removed from any type of ”politics” or ”political thoughts” – and let’s say – there would be far, far away in a city called ”Washington” a dude suspected to be ”a fascist” – they still would live their life as if there wasn’t – and you only can do that in our homeland the US –
like:

Who in California really – I mean REALLY – or as much as any good Californian Surfer cares about ”the Ocean” cares about some idiot in Washington?

@128 You’re worth a reply. I’ve no particular difficulty with your comment, other than. Puritan intolerance of Catholics, the Children of Light, and the Levelers make clear (to me) and the closing of parliament (coupled with a Cromwell succession upon Oliver’s death) that the tyrant and his generals were just as bad as the gang he replaced. Then there’s Cromwell’s founding ‘work’ in Ireland – establishing colonies/plantations and removing the indigenous population to a life of slavery in the Antilles. The Dutch republic confirmed that Protestants were just as keen to exploit and enslave as any monarchy. I made no mention of theater closings, and given that state censorship thrived under Elizabeth, I’m not sure of the utility of that metric. Schama observes that Cromwell’s legal reforms (finally) allowed Jewish folks to worship with legal protections. The practice, however, of Cromwell policies preclude any notion of benevolence and toleration from his rule. And it was his rule.

I was taught that gradual move towards constitutional monarchy, and indeed the formation of the UK, was more pragmatic than programmatic. But that’s a bigger topic.

My point is that revolutions exist as fact, and do not always lead to desired outcomes. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who knew (of) intellectuals drawn back to Iran during the infancy of their great revolution – only to be stood up against the wall and shot. In the last fifty years, we’ve seen Iran, Cambodia, Albania, and others. They vary according to their time, place, and history. There is no golden age of revolutions, past or future. And that must be last. (I like your comments very much, btw!)

Democratic revolutions were not aiming at a modern-day social democratic day dream of pacifist choirs wordlessly humming an endless crescendo. Democratic revolutions were about creating a nation fit to fight other nations, and win because they were united as a people.

Thus it is not a shocking betrayal of the revolution if Cromwell crushes the Irish, it is a culmination of the project the Tudors and Stuarts failed at. Nor was it a betrayal when Cromwell crushed the left. The Levelers and the Diggers and the like-minded in the army were weakening the nation.

It is not a shocking betrayal if the heirs of William conquered an overseas empire, it is the just fruits of victory. Nor was it a betray of the Dutch revolution when the Stadtholder returns a monarchical element to the republic.

Benjamin Franklin took inspiration from the Iroquois League because he admired the way the Iroquois League conquered such vast hunting grounds, raiding its enemies hundreds of miles away.

People seem to be confused because historically democracies do not tend to fight each other. But predators usually prey on much smaller species, because a nasty fight can lead to fatal infections of injuries. It is the same for democracies. The whole point to democracy is to truly unite the majority, to mobilize their strength. If the ruling class feels it does not need committed soldiers, that they can buy mercenaries, they are historically much less tolerant of democracy as unnecessary to its fundamental purpose.

burner@132 Well, yes, there is that too. One of the few interesting ideas in Jacobinrag was Peter Frase’s vague notion of an exterminist future. You should cross-post in the immigration thread.

“Pacifist choirs wordlessly humming”, and maybe endlessly rocking – put me down, #131! Of course, it doesn’t rouse like cornpone military hymns and Tom Clancy Inc.s Smear em video games, the dawn’s early light and generals on parade on all the tv stations, but if we’d been ruled by pacifist choirs, say over the last two decades, most people would be much better off.

In my democratic socialist dream, though, the pacifist choirs do square dancing as well. And the mens act like women!

‘ The Democratic Party is fielding a new kind of Blue Dog in some of the purpler districts — younger, more women, often with military experience if they can get them, but (unlike the old Blue Dogs) in favor of universal healthcare, LGBT rights, reversing the tax cuts for the wealthy, protecting environment and climate, etc.’

That’s an understatement.

(There is an) ‘an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.’

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/13/pers-m13.html