Trumpism after Trump

Two points, not particularly profound, but which both support points made in the OP.

First, to stress the point made in paragraph 4, it is, and has been for years, a point of honour amongst ‘Normie Dems’ that Trump is an aspiring dictator* (no evidence for this has ever been produced, although it is probably true that some of Trump’s, shall we say, more enthusiastic supporters, would probably like him to be).

Given that Trump has turned out to be an unusually weak (not strong) President, as Corey Robin predicted on these very pages (the comparisons with Jimmy Carter seem better and better, especially, of course, in terms of him being a 1 term President) the current form this takes is that if/when Trump loses, he will ‘refuse to leave office’ and the US will finally become a fascist dictatorship and etc. and so on.

Here is Fred Kaplan (hardly the most radical of writers) stating why that simply cannot happen.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/trump-election-refusal-leave.html

If Trump loses, he will leave office. End of story. And Trump’s grotesque mismanagement of the Coronavirus has happened because he was too ‘weak’ not too ‘strong’ (as not a few people pointed out, if Trump really was an aspiring dictator, the virus was his ‘Reichstag Fire’ moment, when he could easily have suspended core civil liberties, or even postponed/cancelled the election. Of course he never did anything of the sort, and nor did he plan to, at any point).

Second point: last paragraph of the OP. Yes this has occurred to me as well. When Labour (unexpectedly) lost the GE in 1992, people (consoling themselves) argued that this ‘was a good election to lose’ as the economic fallout of the ERM decision was so bad that it would ‘tar’ the Tories with the ‘brush’ of economic incompetence.

Unlike most of these ‘feelgood’ stories, this one turned out to be actually true, and the Tories’ loss of their reputation for economic competence directly led to the 3 term Blair administration under Labour.

The Republicans (many of whom have, let’s face it, always been fairly equivocal about Trump) won’t be happy losing the election (who would be?) but they may well feel that, on balance, it’s a ‘good election to lose’. The US economy is presumably going to be a smoking charred wreck by November. What is needed to fix it is radical action, the likes of which we haven’t seen since FDR. Hence the writings of pro-Biden propagandists that Biden ‘realises the depth of the problem’ and ‘sees himself as a new FDR’.

Do we really believe this? Well it’s a test of your gullibility, I guess.

But, yes, as JQ writes: if the economic situation in 2021 is as bad as it currently looks like being, and if Biden fails to rise to the challenge, it may well lead to a huge backlash in the Congressional elections of 2022. With Congress back in the hands of the Republicans, they may well be able to stymie any ‘progressive’ aspect to Biden’s Presidency (assuming there is any) as they did to Obama’s, and this may well lead to a massive backlash against Biden (assuming the economic situation continues to get worse) which would mean that Biden becomes a 1 term President. This is all very hypothetical, but it’s the Republicans’ best shot.

Finally, this all assumes that Trump loses. As the Democrats would like you to forget, before Covid-19 Trump looked as if he was going to cruise to victory in 2020 (and Democrats might well want to spend a bit more time thinking about why that was). Obviously Covid-19 has put a stop to that, at least for now, but it just shows how quickly things can change in a few months. ‘Events, dear boy, events’.

*And why would be it Normie Dems who most assiduously put forward this theory? Cui Bono?

Many thanks for the great post. I’m looking forward to the comments, the asterisk explained, and whatever you add next Congrats!

a big part of Trumpist mythology comes from wins against the odds, as with …more periphally, with the re-election of the Morrison government in Australia

Because I can’t vote (not being a citizen) I don’t follow Australian politics as closely as I might, but my impression was that Morrison and the “Liberals” were expected to win, and the only surprise is that they won quite as big as they did. Is that wrong? It wasn’t a surprise to me – Australia is a pretty conservative country that has mostly been governed by conservatives, and the Labor party was pretty mealy-mouthed, even more so than the Democrats are often portrayed as being.

Sadly, I don’t think Trump’s defeat will have too much effect on the global scene. He was a lagging indicator, behind many European governments, for example, and many of his very bad developments on immigration have been essentially copies of Australian policy from the late 90s on, to take a concrete example. It would be great if he (and the possible defeat of the right-wing government in Poland) is an indicator of things to come, but he was more following the trend globally than leading in. (The one exception is perhaps Brazil. Let’s hope they throw out their Trump soon, too.)

Hidari: “before Covid-19 Trump looked as if he was going to cruise to victory in 2020”

Trump is and was, at any point in his presidency, unpopular. He was and is a minority president who was never able to muster substantially more than 40% approval. All presidents have bouts of low approval numbers but only Trump has managed to keep his numbers consistently low (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/). Trump can only “win” the election by gaming the system and manipulation, as he managed to do spectacularly in 2016. It is still not impossible that he “wins” again in this way but an honest electoral majority was always out of reach, and he and his party are well aware of that fact, which is why the usual strategies of vote suppression are being used massively.

I generally do not think that discussing poll numbers is a fruitful use of our time (I thought so in 2016 as well), and so I’ll stop here. But please stop the mythologizing of Trump.

“Trump has turned out to be an unusually weak (not strong) President”

“Weak” or strong” defined how exactly? One can imagine a number of definitions (try for a moment to think how to apply a conistent set of criteria to statesmen of the past), for example the persistence of the legacy left by that president. That can only be assessed in hindsight but Trump’s merits with respect to hastening the burning of the planet will very likely be recognized by future generations, if they manage to survive.

… Australia is a pretty conservative country that has mostly been governed by conservatives …

If you’re thinking in terms of who wins elections, it depends on which countries you use for the comparison. For example, the Australian Labor Party (ALP)has been less successful in winning elections than its Swedish equivalent but more successful than its UK equivalent. It also depends on which parties you use for the comparison. For example, the ALP has been less successful in winning elections than the Liberal Party in Canada, but more successful than the New Democratic Party: which do you consider the closer equivalent?

One other thing occurs to me. The OP states:

‘So, the stage will be set for a fight in which the hard neoliberals who controlled the party before Trump attempt to reassert themselves…’

I wonder if this fight won’t break out sooner. Trump’s ratings, considering his historical unpopularity and his mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis haven’t been too bad so far. Part of the reason for this is the huge amount of help available to the unemployed etc.

But this help runs out in August, (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/28/extra-600-dollars-in-weekly-unemployment-benefits-runs-out-in-july.html) and various neoliberals (and others ‘concerned’ about the ‘deficit’) want to cut back these benefits, hard. If this happens, not to put too fine a point on it, Trump will lose and lose big. So there is a huge political incentive for Trump to face down neoliberal Republicans and keep the ‘stimulus’ going (and indeed, it is very much in Trump’s interests right now to ditch the rulebook and go full Keynesian…’dying for a principle’ is completely alien to Trump’s mindset, which, as the OP correctly states, is all about ‘winning’ and being seen to win).

I wonder who will win this battle. If the ‘grown ups’ and ‘fiscally responsible Conservatives’ win then Trump is toast.

There is no Trumpism. There IS a plutocratic and neoliberal coalition that controls the Republican party and its ideology. For decades that coalition has been training right-wingers to believe confident liars, and when Trump came along as the most confident liar around, he hijacked the nomination. Trump himself has no policies that could be called Trumpism: he only has self-aggrandizement.

What we will see post-Trump is that there will be hagiographic glorification of Trump, complete with an extensive conspiracy apologetics explaining the stacked deck against the great man. Because the right cannot admit to failures and needs mythology instead.

I think the fact that appeals to “Law & Order” are failing, and the response to Covid 19 exemplify that the Trumpists are the revolutionary insurgent party, even when they hold power.

They hold the minority viewpoint in all the critical political and cultural issues and the future is not looking favorably to them. This explains their increasing need for authoritarian solutions to impose their minority viewpoints.

For insurgents, chaos and instability, not law and order are paths to success. In 2016, the Russian meddling, the trolling, the ability to create division and suspicion were ways to weaken the Democratic regime of which Hillary was the heir and banner carrier.

Insurgents don’t need a positive or even coherent message to storm the castle; But once inside, they do need the ability to transition from insurgency to governing. Trumpism has an ideology of white supremacy, but no desire to build a governing coalition; His various Cabinet heads have no interest in their departments, no idea of what they might want to do with them other then stock them with loyal apparatchiks.

Trumpism can be compared to the Seattle CHOP or Occupy; They captured the territory, but now have no idea what to do with it. And at some point the revolution needs to deliver the goods.

There’s an asterisk. Where’s the footnote? :p

While the nice possibilities that John talks about are more likely, let me inject some (warranted?) pessimism. John does not mention the worst possibility, which is even worse than an outright Trump victory: That Trump loses the popular vote by a similar or larger margin than in 2016 but the Republicans still manage to actively suppress enough Democratic votes (and possibly pull off one or more Florida 2000 shenanigans) in the swing states to have the electoral college declare him president, while control of Congress is unchanged.

If that happens, it becomes evident to everyone who is not mind-controlled that the U.S. is a de facto dictatorship not simply of the Republican party but of its nationalist/white-supremacist wing, with the neoliberal/neocon wing tagging along because they think the Democrats are worse. Which domestically, means more of the same: Continued spread of and deaths from COVID-19 until a vaccine is found, more violent police counter-demonstrations, an increasingly visible white supremacist movement acting in parallel opposition to BLM demonstrations and a state of cold, undeclared civil war throughout the country.

Globally, another four years for the Clownstick means more murderous misbehavior by not-so democratic U.S. allies, including an acceleration of war in Yemen and suppression of opposition in Brazil, among other nice possibilities. And Russia and China becoming even more intransigent, with a likely violent suppression of HK protesters as a possibility.

I find the comparison between Trump and other weak one-term presidents to be misleading, whether or not it is correct. Carter may have been a weak president, but he didn’t damage the country because he led a stable political party that was not entering an ideological death spiral the way the Republicans started to do so in the 1970’s. By contrast James Buchanan may have been the weakest president in U.S. history, but the two things he managed to do–persuading a swing SCOTUS justice to provide a broad pro-Southern decision on Dred Scott v. Sandford and looking the other way while some in his cabinet armed the future confederate army–nearly destroyed the U.S. It is not the man in the White House that matters so much as the faction he speaks for and the party it controls; a weak president will actually be worse than a strong one if the faction he represents is driving off a cliff, so to speak.

Here’s a prediction for 2024: Biden and Trump will both be too old to run, and they represent the last of the generation of men who can successfully perform the role of “responsible leader” to masses of people from conservative to left-centrist, and on down into the farther left, including those sensible souls who-don’t-like-it-but-know-what-the-electorate-will-accept.

There is no possibility of a continuance of this style. Those younger than the Clinton-GWB generation (who will also be too old) who are intellectually and temperamentally closest to it don’t look like it. They don’t act in a way the world expects it to act. They don’t have the personal histories the world expects it to have. If they’re white and male, they’re missing something essential to it. If they’re conservative enough to come close to it, they’re probably not white and male. Clinton, GWB, and Obama were as far as the electorate was willing to go away from it, and the reaction was swift.

I’m not going to speculate on what happened in the world, largely during my lifetime, to create this state of affairs. But our unwillingness to support people who don’t look like Biden or Conrad Hilton is not going to make leaders in that mold miraculously appear. We see this in the effort to pretend Trump is what people pretend he is. In the best case, we’ll see it after the Biden administration when a successor can’t be found who lives up to it. The right will probably fall in line behind doofus libertarians who give lip service to religion even if they sound too individualistic and unserious. The left and liberals will have to decide whether they prefer the manly, superficially compassionate style of a white male pol who isn’t smart enough to choose competent advisers or choose his words carefully, or someone from one of the mutually incompatible groupings non-white-male progressive leaders will be coming from.

“The big question is whether hard neoliberalism can recover.”

Yes, and also: what can be done to prevent it from recovering?

As you say, some of the right wing will go down with the ship, but “others will engage in some quick reinvention”. I think the thing to do, then, is make that reinvention as difficult as possible, starting now while they’re still stuck with Trump. Make the GOP’s showing in 2016-2020 (and 2020 in particular) their brand. Don’t let anyone forget their cowardice and servility towards Trump, nor their cruelty and incompetence.

Joseph O’Neill had a good NYRB piece recently on how the Democrats should approach branding (paywalled, sorry: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/05/28/brand-new-democrats/ ). Much of what he says about negative branding there is relevant:

“The party of Trump,” however potent, is transitory. When Trump leaves the scene, the GOP will find itself stuck with an identity and raison d’être that will have lost its basic logic. (It’s true that dynastic fantasies abound, but neither Don Jr. nor Ivanka Trump has their father’s unique appeal and dominance.) Second, Trumpism has made explicit the GOP’s hatred of, rather than disagreement with, people who oppose it. Of course, partisan disparagement has long been a Republican tactic. The word “liberal” became such an effective term of abuse that by the 1990s even many liberals were embarrassed by it. Belittlement signals solidarity to the base, conveys the impression of Democrats as weaklings and illegitimates, and tacitly asserts the über-legitimacy of Republican ideology and interests. But before 2016 the ideological viciousness of the GOP—its abhorrence of minorities, of “coastal elites,” of the poor—was obscured by a certain corporate deportment, talk of “compassionate conservatism,” and fables of market forces. Trump has changed that. The Republican Party is now visibly and authentically aligned with racism, vulgarity, sexism, and brutality. That may excite its base, but a lot of Americans don’t like it. That’s a big problem for the GOP, which has long based its marketing on “values.”

The most vulnerable part of the Trump–GOP brand, however, may not be how Republicans comport themselves but what they do when in power. The much-touted great economy has crashed—and in any case it was essentially the Obama economy plus greatly increased deficits, plunging industrial production, trade chaos, and enormous farming bailouts. Our national security is shockingly compromised by the corrupt influence of foreign despots and the disastrous federal and gubernatorial mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic. Our energy policy is owned by fossil fuel interests. To cap it all, the Republican Party is bent on undermining the American commitment to the rule of law and fair elections. Registered voters approved of Senator Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote to convict Trump by eleven points.

The current Republican “product” is historically terrible. At this moment of liberal outrage and GOP brand instability, Democrats have an extraordinary opportunity to cement in the minds of Americans that Democrats can be trusted to govern and Republicans cannot.

…

The Democratic story about the GOP would be designed for a particular audience. The audience isn’t the Democratic base, which already has a strongly negative perception of the GOP. Nor can it be the Republican base, whose gut feelings are fixed. The audience for negative branding is squishy voters who occasionally check the (R) box, which they associate with competence and patriotism. Currently, that audience may be smaller than usual, but it is crucial. We’re talking, as always, about winning at the margins and winning for years. Democrats want marginal Republican voters to feel that they can’t trust the Republican Party—not anymore. There’s something off about those guys.

There’s your master narrative, by the way: Republicans can’t be trusted anymore. “Anymore” is important, because your audience may have a history or culture of trusting them. The nature of your audience also dictates that your messaging can’t consist of trashing the other side. That would backfire. Your messaging goal is simply to make your audience feel uncomfortable about what (R) now stands for.

…

When, at some point in the future, the GOP tries to distance itself from Trumpism, Democrats should already have affixed in people’s minds that the GOP, not Trump, is the problem. What Democrats cannot do, at any point, is help the GOP rehabilitate its own brand.

@21

Here’s Andrew O’Hehir on why, long-term, the Republicans are fucked, but (surprise!) the Democrats are fucked too, for the same reason.

‘Are Joe Biden and the Democrats poised to win a sweeping victory this fall, repudiating the legacy of Donald Trump and winning control of both houses of Congress for the first time in a decade? Yes, or at least that’s how it looks right now. But don’t let that fool you: They’re still a total mess, internally divided, ideologically rudderless, committed to symbolism over substance and run by a feeble and delusional gerontocracy. Other than that, though, everything’s great. Vote blue no matter who!…

Democrats are once again chasing public opinion like a dimwitted Labrador chasing a minivan — this time on coronavirus relief, national health care and law enforcement reform — just as they previously did on marriage equality and marijuana legalization. To be fair, their confusion is understandable: Who do they really represent: the white suburban moderates who elected 40 new Democrats to the House in the 2018 midterms, and who poured out in extraordinary numbers to support Biden over Sanders? Or the rebellious progressives who seem intent on overthrowing the establishment in local and state elections?

Amid the pandemic and the national explosion of outrage against police brutality, Joe Biden is nearly irrelevant. He’s a placeholder, the guy who happens to be standing there and is more or less capable of adult behavior at a moment when the public (understandably enough) yearns for it. He may become president, but he will never be more than a historical footnote….

It’s the Republicans who are conventionally regarded as the party for fearful older people, suckered in by Sean Hannity and late-night gold-bug infomercials. But nearly the entire Democratic congressional leadership now consists of multi-millionaires over 70 — the top two House Democrats, Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, are 80 and 81, respectively — and their 2020 nominee will become the oldest president in history on the day of his inauguration, should that event occur.

One way to understand the Democrats’ dilemma in confronting both Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter is that the first major generational conflict since the 1960s has suddenly broken out. Both our major political parties stand with old people now, and they’re running out of time.’

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/29/the-democrats-dilemma-supposedly-theyre-winning–but-their-leaders-keep-on-losing/

In the same issue, Matthew Rozsa on why, even if Biden is good, he is unlikely to be good enough.

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/28/joe-biden-wants-to-be-the-next-fdr–but-that-wont-be-enough-to-solve-our-crises/

We come to a fundamental problem: neoconservatism and neoliberalism are both dead: Trumpism has a future but (probably) mainly outside the US, and the left, in the United States and the UK is simply dead, at least for the time being. Meanwhile we are faced with deeper and more complex problems than perhaps any generation in human history and our political system, at least with the present leadership and the current system, is simply not up to the challenge.

and nearly all of these comments here read – as if the World wouldn’t have seen the HUUUUGEST Revolution of our Lifetime – with all of these – political labels – from the ”Ancient Times B.V. (Before the Virus) obsolete…

AND I really wonder:
Haven’t y’all’s lives completely turned UP Side down?!
Everybody – I know – knows that nothing – NADA will be like B.V. EVER again –
and especially NOT… ancient (political?) labels like ”Trumpism” –
(what was/is that anywhoo?)
Or
”Neoliberalism” –
(what is/was that anywhoo?!)

And so – as complete chaos rules -(especially in my homeland) can’t you guys come up at least with some basic wisdom of a Dr. Fauci – who said – kind of – if y’all don’t believe in (some kind) of Science – and… Structure? – y’all ”Trumped”.

While – as @14 forgot to tell US –
”The thing about Merkel is NOT ”being a PK (Preacher’s Kid)” -which might have come ”complete with a mind corrupted with nonsense basically about God arranges the world and it’s sinful for men to defy”.
NO! –
the very pleasant… thing about Merkel -(who I never liked – because I thought her ”politics” were far too ”conservative”)… so the very pleasant thing about her was/is – that in the face of a crisis – which has turned ALL of our Lives completely UP Side down – she really proved NOT to be STUPID!
(and that saved a lot of lives – Right?)

Mr. O’Neill’s article reads like a sales letter from an Advertising Man. One is reminded that the only thing advertising has to sell is itself. And so, all the client needs is a new look, a new label, a new brand, and all will be well. However, that kind of thing is not going to cure the problems of the Democratic Party. It is truly odd, this late in the day, to see this kind of gesticulating and shadow-boxing going on. There is nothing left to vote for but image and tribe, and in a country that is still mostly White, fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding, I fear the outcome may be rather unpleasant.

I should have said “heretofore only demanded of the undocumented, the poor, and people of color”. Sorry about that.

It is possible that we may get a 2000 election repeat, where Trump only gets re-elected because one or more states put him over the top by (a) … (b) … or even (c) in close states, having the Republican state election officials certify a Republican victory even though Democrats can provide documentation that the result went narrowly the other way.

Pennsylvania has a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Secretary of State: they are not going to steal the State’s electoral votes for Trump. Michigan has a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Secretary of State: they are not going to steal the State’s electoral votes for Trump. North Carolina has a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Secretary of State: they are not going to steal the State’s electoral votes for Trump. Wisconsin has a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Secretary of State: they are not going to steal the State’s electoral votes for Trump.

And – as I still love predictions – and Mr-Spoon @26 predicted that Trump will be reelected and ”The 2024 election: Junior. After that, based on the close parallels between the Decline and Fall of the American Empire and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a succession of coups with actors from various parts of the military”
let me make the serious predictions that – whoever will be the new D-President – there will be a ”Coloured” (Female) Vice President who will run ”the show” – and my homeland will be on the way to a more ”equal” society – which also includes ”economics” as the millions of coming evictions will NOT be tolerated by ”the people” –
and so there will be as much pressure economical-wise as the already existing pressure from a ”all inclusive” BLM movement –
which –
by the way –
like OUR Fight against the Climate Crisis –
will ”Rock y’alls World” –
as don’t old dudes say that…?
Or something… like it?

Much as it pains me to agree with nastywoman, it seems more likely than not that the pandemic will be the major concern facing President Biden next January, with much of the economy remaining in suspended animation. The scale of the nearly reflexive Keynesian responses to the crisis leaves me cautiously optimistic that a turn to austerity is far in the future, and the buoyancy of the stock market suggests that I’m not alone in that delusion.

Trump’s delinquency has exposed the inadequacy of America’s erstwhile allies, the absence of an alternative center of power. Much of the world runs on American infrastructure. While there are advantages to redundancy, is it necessarily the case that Europe needs Galileo as an alternative to GPS, or that the UK needs an alternative to Galileo?

Consider nuclear proliferation. It was probably a lot of fun for the British and French to design and test their own thermonuclear weapons, but what good came of it?

However, American withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and its control over SWIFT left Europeans scrambling to cobble together an alternative. That tells us something. On the one hand you have shiny boy’s toys, bombs and satellites; on the other you have something that matters.

@28
Yes this is unquestionably correct. Also, don’t forget, impeachment. I don’t think Democrats are aware of how angry Republicans are about the impeachment ‘thing’ that happened a few months ago (seems like a lot longer doesn’t it?). What we have seen in recent decades is an ‘arms race’ vis a vis impeachment: something that was simply not used in the early to mid 20th century. But, (from the point of view of the Republicans) the Democrats ‘started it’ by impeaching (or trying to) that nice man Nixon. What the Republicans did to Clinton was just payback. Then the Democrats impeached Trump! And so I would imagine that the Republicans will want payback and soon.

Biden is a man with so many skeletons in his closet it’s a miracle he can get it shut, and so it wouldn’t surprise me if Republicans attempt to get him impeached in his first term (always assuming he wins of course!) although whether or not this results in him being removed from office is much more dubious. But in any case, radical reform of the American system requires bipartisanship and that simply doesn’t exist any more.

@32 ‘If the GOP reacts to a defeat the way it has since the 1990s – i.e. doubling down – and regains Congress in 2022, then, hard neoliberalism is what we’ll have in the short term, in the form of brinksmanship, shutdowns, etc.’

Yes. This is precisely what will happen. De facto (if not de jure) neoliberalism will continue, purely because it’s in the Republicans’ interests to ensure that the Democrats can’t govern. Also Biden has literally devoted his life to neoliberalism: it’s hard for me to believe that at the age of 79 he will turn on a dime and change into FDR, even if the Republicans will allow that, which they won’t.

‘Internationally, the one good thing that might have come from Trump’s presidency would have been allies thinking about alternatives to Pax Americana. Little or nothing of the sort has happened. Tom McTague was right to note in the Atlantic that European response to Trump’s presidency has been as lamentable as that sad character’s ascent.’

The ‘Decline of the American Empire’ thesis is very fashionable right now, but overdone. The objective facts are that at the moment, the American Empire faces no real competitors. The only serious possible competitor is China, but that is a good 20 or even 30 years away from economic parity with the US and, of course, it will take even longer for it to power ahead of the US. So the Europeans are simply living in the real world.

Even assuming Biden wins (and that’s still highly questionable) I wouldn’t imagine there will be a huge change from the situation that existed under Trump. In an era of Covid-19 the Open Borders movement is simply dead, and so Trump has ‘won’ that argument, albeit for completely the wrong reasons, and in a deliciously ironic ways (in the immediate future, the issue will be other countries passing laws to keep the Americans out, not the Americans keeping ‘others’ out).

Vis a vis the dominant issues of our time (the rise of China, the Middle East, Israel), Biden’s views are more or less identical to Trump’s, and when he differs, he is slightly more to the Right than Trump (there was a tweet recently by Biden’s campaign manager in which he accused Trump of being ‘weak on China’). On Global Warming, Biden is obviously better than Trump, but the American political system is broken, so it’s not clear what Biden will actually be able to do. Maybe rejoin that talking shop they had a few years ago where the global leaders jet in (on their fossil fueled planes) and write a toothless declaration which everyone then ignores.

Even domestically, it’s not clear what Biden can or will be able to do: e.g. the BLM movement has made clear that American policing needs fundamental root and branch reform. Will Biden be able to do anything about that? Does he want to?

It’s very hard to make predictions, and also pointless. But the parallels at the moment with the decay of Roman Republic are very very obvious. Given that is the case, history may see Trump as a weak, 1 term President, followed by Joe Biden as another weak, 1 term President, and then maybe another Republican, weak, 1 term President and so on for the next 10 or 20 years, as the problems faced by the American Republic/Empire become more and more insurmountable and the (broken) American political system becomes increasingly obviously unable to solve them.

But all predictions are pointless (who could have predicted Covid-19?) and this one is no more or no less likely to be correct than anyone else’s.

Thanks for the clarification on the asterisk. Thanks, too, for the often insightful comments. A couple of points. First: Trumpism is an insult – you know that, don’t you? I’m fine with the term as such, but the term obscures what is and what will remain irrespective of the outcome of the November election. What is has been amply and succinctly addressed in the OP and in a number of comments – morally and politically bankrupt political parties run by a corrupt geritocracy of mischief-makers and the self-interested. Thankfully, no country is the sum total of its political class. There’s plenty right with the more sober-minded African-American BLM supporters who offer useful critiques about inequality. In terms of solutions, however, there’s an unwillingness, by some, to acknowledge the appeal capitalism and conservative policies have for a substantial subsection of minority voters, both those African-American and Hispanic.

I find some truth and merit in every critique of the current president. If climate-change mattered to voters he’d never have been elected in the first place. 53 percent of white women can live with his foot-in-mouth tweeting persona. Like it or not, I can’t see the American public trusting a Democratic president (at least the current nominee) to propose anything but a big-spending, ineffective bail-out, most of which will be funnelled to prop up Dem special interests. Dismissing the accomplishments of any president or politician is a mistake. Ditto: treating all of her/his supporters as dunces and cult-members. Plenty of people had sound reasons for voting for HRC and for Trump in 2016. 1/5 who pulled the lever for Trump didn’t like him, or believed him unfit for office. Contra the popular memes, the COVID crisis is going to strengthen Trump’s chances of bring re-elected. The economy is going to improve somewhat before November – which means voters are going to be faced with a choice between a sitting president who oversaw the most successful economy of recent history, and yesterday’s failed candidate. People forget clearly why and how Biden ended up being the nominee. He was nobody’s choice, the DNC just needed to stop Bernie.

That’s still the reality. I expect most voters made up their minds well before March. The riots, as some here note, haven’t helped the Dem cause in the slightest, especially when only 1/6 in the street are actually people of color.The Dems ruled by executive privilege under Obama for 8 years, and in the process bled out at the state and local level. There are plenty of great young Dem politicians, but they can’t get any traction in the current climate of cancel hysteria – indeed, as I noted elsewhere, the toxicity of cancel culture, coupled with white grifters making millions selling mandatory diversity trainings to corporate America, while the real problems of average African-Americans (see school choice/literacy rates) couldn’t be more unhelpful.

Neo-liberalism is alive and well and hasn’t gone anywhere. As others have noted, it’s that or America-first populism, which is really what much of what many don’t like is all about. Making American supremacy into white supremacy blinds critics to the appeal capitalism and opportunity hold for immigrants, many of whom do not see America as a land of oppression, or a pre-fascist state, perhaps because so many have experienced corrupt authoritarian governments first-hand. Until Democrats learn to love America, capitalism, and the America of Washington, Jefferson, and Betsy Ross, warts and all, they’ll face an uphill struggle even against a deeply and obviously flawed candidate such as Trump.

That’s been my retort for the last two years – if Trump is so obviously inept, why can’t Dems find a couple of dozen candidates who could beat him easily? Dems can’t. No solid candidates (thanks to 44 depleting the Dem bench) and no really good ideas. That’s why Bernie (not a Dem) nearly won. The only recourse Dems had was to rally around a permanent senior’s moment as their ‘best chance’ of beating Trump. Speaks volumes.

America first stays, as does neo-liberalism. Neo-conservatism? Not so much, thank god.

Robert Weston@32 objects to my assessment there is no significant reform yet accomplished. “That’s a strong statement. Proposed cuts to police budgets (see NYC), greater scrutiny of police union privileges, enhanced responsiveness to brutality complaints, renaming of buildings and/or institutions, the NFL’s reversal on player protests, all those were just about unthinkable two months ago. The extent of acceptance of ‘Black Lives Matter,’ or ‘White Privilege,’ terms that until now prompted angry, defensive reactions from most Caucasians, is just breathtaking. But here also, people under 40 are key: They’re driving this movement and how much change does occur may well depend on what happens once their generation takes the helm.”

It may be a strong statement but my response is simply symbolic victories are meaningless. In particular, proposed (!) cuts to police budgets are not “Defunding the police.” They are the denial of the demand, cloaked as acceptance. True, the swindle is easily accomplished because there is no political content, no political movement, just chatter.

But the people who really imagined “Defunding the police” meant something are not going to be satisfied, save for the handful of who somehow actually get some gravy. (For instance, if some of the Chicago PD police budget gets sent to community centers, the people who run them will benefit. The trickle down theory of social democracy is that enough of that will cure racism.)

If an Eleanor Holmes Norton attacks Abraham Lincoln in the name of feeling black agency, why should any supporter of this movement vote for Biden? (There’s a statue of Lincoln and a slave rising to his feet, which as I understand it was paid for by freedmen, that is condemned as racist, like that statue of Grant. John Wilkes Booth is a fellow critic of the white savior.)

In particular, the notion that prattle about “White Privilege” actually means something politically assumes that systemic racism is a mental phenomenon in the depraved brains of white people. There’s no contesting that minds are messed up on race, as essentially no one is immune to the ideas taught by their environment. But the proposition that social arrangements are the products of people’s psychology and that they will change if people talk differently is essentially superstition. Or economics, a la Hayek. It is the same reasoning as in claims that only people truly converting to Christianity can improve the world. Psychological determinism may be very popular, but it is reactionary ideology.

Also the notion of White Privilege depends exclusively on the premise that white supremacy is the systemic racism of all white people. White Privilege is something all white people have without acting to create it; exercise without choosing to; something that makes them victorious at the expense of black people, no matter how hard it is to see their rewards from their villainy; there is zero agreement on how to divest oneself of White Privilege. None of this is amenable to a political program, beyond putting a bullet in the defective brains of white people. Since essentially nobody really wants this, the solemn incantation of White Privilege is diversion.

The notion that the best politics is leaderless enthusiasm without political organization, political principles, political discourse, mass action that exalts the pure minds of youth was perhaps last best exemplified by Syriza? The current movement pretends to be about systemic racism, but refuses to acknowledge anything but, not just words and actions, but unconscious feelings! It is guaranteed to fail, and, no, I do not think it’s too early to say that. Stupidity never helped anyone, not even self-righteous stupidity.

The idea there will be a massive left-wing turnout of youth voting for Biden in the general when they know he will not enact their program is strange.

Andres@24 is correct I think to acknowledge that low Democratic turnout was the most important factor. The insistence on stolen elections was entirely about Russian election fraud, which is as stupid as insisting Clinton’s email server was treasonous. But this stuff is very much about trying to criticize Trump from the right. This might strike sensible people as absurdly difficult, and decent people as shameful in itself. But political hacks have neither common sense nor common decency in my opinion, for what it’s worth.

So, yes, it is true the Trump has an excellent chance of winning the Electoral College, though it’s hard to imagine he won’t lose again, likely enough by even more. At this point, I can only say it is no accident that reforming the system is the real third rail of US politics. After all, one can’t say Social Security is an outright failure, can you?

As for the long run prospects after Trump, well, if all the people want a world run like Hong Kong, the most predatory capitalist city in China, then the long term prospects of neo-liberals or austerians or plutocrats or whatever are rosy indeed.

I’ve been saying it for years, but trump’s not having empathy is the selling point to people who themselves don’t have empathy (and so can’t understand how a lack of empathy leads to negative outcomes for the affected)

Why people continue to defend President Bone-Spurs aka Agent Orange–even indirectly–is beyond me.

When there is a mismatch between what is happening in reality and what a person expects to happen on the basis of that person’s understanding of reality, reality is not at fault. Personally I like to think I have some understanding of why people support Donald Trump, but I’m sure there are points I’ve missed so I’m interested in other ideas.

@48

‘Why people continue to defend President Bone-Spurs aka Agent Orange–even indirectly–is beyond me. ‘

Far be it from me to defend Trump who is as awful as everyone says he is. But as John Bolton’s latest book shows, there are actually worse people out there than Trump. The irony of Bolton’s book (which has been given lots of free publicity on lots of ‘liberal’ TV channels, apparently….I wouldn’t know) is that Bolton makes Trump look better and saner than him (i.e. Bolton)…and Bolton doesn’t realise this.

As a few people have pointed out, almost every American President since Vietnam has, at some point in their Presidency, started a new war. Trump hasn’t……yet.

Do we think President Biden will?

Covid-19 has obviously changed everything (and yes to be fair, as a few commentators have pointed out, this was predictable, but it wasn’t predictable right now ) but before that, and BLM erupted, the stock market was booming, unemployment was low, the US wasn’t involved in any new wars….it’s simply ridiculous for Democrats to sit around and scratch their heads and go ‘gosh why would anyone think Trump is a good President?’ when the reasons are self-evident.

We still don’t know what will happen in November, although it does look now like Trump is a long shot. But if Covid-19 and the death of George Floyd had happened next year, not this year, Trump would have won, and, as I said above, Democrats might take a minute to reflect on why this is.

A thought:

As a non-USian with little understanding of the system, I certainly cannot comment with any degree of confidence. But it seems to me that Trump is hardly a bastion of popularity if he got ca. 2million fewer votes than HRC.

In that case, surely the question is not “is Trump unpopular” but “is Trump sufficiently unpopular so as to get so many less votes that the EC is forced to elect Biden”. To that end, perhaps someone could enlighten me as to where that limit is – i.e. at what point of having more votes (if any) would Biden have to be elected (or is it theoretically possible for the EC to elect Trump regardless of the popular vote)?

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but my google-fu appears to be insufficient for this.

“The People’s Action Party could lose the current election in Singapore”. Unlikely. They just had a TV debate in which the PAP was given as much time to talk as the opposition parties together. However, I for one would welcome seeing less of their fascist-derived logo around our streets.

The impression I get from Bolton’s book/PDF is that Trump is a spoiled child who never grew up; always wants to be the center of attention, always wants the universe to succumb to his willful impulses, doesn’t want to work hard at anything, has a basic strategy of lying his way out of problems, and doesn’t accept any rules or restrictions on his behavior without a tantrum. So to the extent someone sees something to identify with in him, it probably is their inner child which would like to be released and empowered similarly.

I also got the impression that many of the top-level people in his administration, chosen by him, are contemptuous of him but feel that by flattery and artful briefings in the form of video presentations they can direct him in accordance with their own agendas. They would rather have a competent President who understood and agreed with their personal agendas, but will settle for Trump against anyone with a progressive agenda. Fortunately they have different priorities that often conflict with each other, so little winds up getting done. I suppose that might be almost a defining feature of the conservative persona, the belief that one’s own innate feelings are paramount over all others’.

@52
‘Biden – a harmless old white male insider – was a truly terrible choice to go up against Trump. They needed to get as polarising a figure as Trump himself; Sanders, even as another old white male insider, would have had more chance.’

Not so sure about that. The United States is a gerontocracy in which old white people vote for old white people and the major policy goal of all the ‘old white millionaire’s parties’ is how best to screw over the young.

Trump has been losing core support amongst elderly white people (not surprising considering Trump’s unusual ‘kill all the old people’ Covid-19 policy) who like the cut of Biden’s gib (which, considering Biden was the Democratic candidate who most closely resembles Trump is not really surprising). On the other hand Trump has been gaining Hispanic votes so go figure. Despite the fact that some people are trying to create a narrative that Trump’s defeat is inevitable (like Hilary Clinton’s was, remember?) it really all is still up in the air.

@56

Yes it’s interesting how many people in this thread buy into Trumpian propaganda and infer that Trump’s ‘core support’ is in the white working class. Actually as psephologists have tirelessly told us, the people who voted for Trump are basically the same people who voted for Romney and for much the same reasons (tax cuts, law and order etc.) and yet if Romney* had won no one would be talking about him or his supporters in the same derogatory terms. I wonder why that is.

*Particularly important given that there is very very little that Trump has done that Romney would not have done.

Trump is a shoo-in despite the current polls.

To suppose that it can be known at this stage that Trump can’t lose; to suppose that it can be known at this stage that Trump can’t win; both are folly.

Even close to the election, the polls are an unreliable guide to what’s going to happen; now, they are a much more unreliable guide; but every other guide is even less reliable, especially including the subjective confidence levels of Internet prognosticators.

Hidari 53: Fact is that most Americans think Trump is not s good president. His approval ratings are historically low for a first term president and were low even before Covid-19, despite a favorable economy. Perhaps American voters aren’t as simpleminded as political analysts tend to think? Since Trump has become president, he and his party have lost all elections they could possibly lose, even the Kentucky governorship. Your claim that “before Covid-19 Trump looked as if he was going to cruise to victory in 2020” is just baseless. (Btw also your claim of an “‘arms race’ vis a vis impeachment” in 41 is baseless).

The best argument for Trump seems to be it could be worse, respectively all the things he hasn’t (yet) done but might have done (Bolton’s book is indeed revealing but don’t forget Trump hired Bolton knowing he was a war-monger). Perhaps the opposition deserves some credit for having managed to somewhat restrict Trump’s agency, and voters for depriving him of congressional control? In any case, the amount of damage that Trump has already done, mostly bypassing Congress, is staggering and shows that he is fiercely intent on pushing his anti-planet, anti-worker, anti-regulatory, anti-rule-of-law, pro-plutocracy, pro-white-supremacy agenda by any means at his disposal. And the fact of us having this conversation at all shows to what extent part of the public has already been numbed to the reality of Trump’s (and his party’s) horribleness.

P.S. I think we need to read Fromm’s Escape from Freedom to understand current politics.

Further to 66: What Trump most clearly represents is privilege: the plutocratic privilege of a spoiled child born rich who thinks he doesn’t have to follow the rules like everybody else – and turns out he can get away with it. His petty bourgeois admirers will never have that kind of privilege but they do see in him a defender of their white and male privilege which they feel is under assault, and that is where they can identify most closely with the plutocrat. But it is a huge mistake to think that they have more than that in common.

The bourgeois ethos is characterized by hard work, following the rules, and equality before the law. As Marx pointed out, that bourgeois equality is hollow without economic equality, but it still represents progress compared to feudalism and absolutism (as Marx also knew). In that sense, Trump is anti-bourgeois in the reactionary, i. e. neofeudal, sense, and all the nonsense written about him being an “anti-elite, anti-establishment” figure is based on not understanding this. That’s also where Fromm’s analysis is relevant.

Hidari 61: “Yes it’s interesting how many people in this thread buy into Trumpian propaganda and infer that Trump’s ‘core support’ is in the white working class.”

Who in this thread has made such a claim? I don’t remember suchlike but I haven’t read all the longer comments. I do remember such claims having been made in the aftermath of the 2016 election, for example from the likes of Jacobin. I don’t know whether they are still caught in this delusion.

J-D @ 62

Thank you for answering my question, and I apologise for my lack of clarity. I did attempt to understand the relevant constitutional text, but given that: a) I am not American, and have never had any pertinent civics classes; b) I have no real relevant legal expertise; and c) while the US does impact me, it does so only to the extent it impacts anyone living in Europe; I have not really dedicated the time and effort required to properly understand the topic (a personal failing, perhaps).

In essence, I was trying to understand if it is predictable how much more of the popular vote would be needed for a candidate to be statistically significantly likely become president. I understand there is a correlation between popular vote and election, but does not appear to be 100% given the results of several of the elections within my lifetime. Given that it seems not entirely implausible [1] that Biden could win the popular vote, I wondered if it was predictable to what degree that would need to occur before the chance of Biden becoming president was high enough to attribute a significant degree of confidence to it. If I understand your response, essentially there is no specific mechanism which would stop the electoral college electing a given candidate even if he got significantly [2] less votes than the opposing candidate, other than a reliance on norms, tradition, and potential consequences.

So, in short, if candidate A got 0% and candidate B got 100%, the probability of B becoming president would approach (but not necessarily reach) 1. As the percentage B commands decreases so too does the probability of them becoming president, but there is no real way to predict in advance how much of a greater % B would need to still be likely to become POTUS. Thus, while there may be evidence suggesting candidate B could receive X% more of the popular vote than A, this may be indicative but ultimately not particularly meaningful.

I believe I understand better now, and appreciate your explanation.

[1] With the usual caveats regarding unreliability of polls, the general lack of predictability, etc.

[2] for an unknowable value of “significant”

Other things that will remain – media grifters moving from panic-crisis to panic-crisis. The media business model now demands on a state of permanent hysteria – see the last 4 years. The media can’t afford to go ‘back to normal’ no matter what happens. I suspect the public gets that. So, those who just want to get on with their lives can’t look to removing the current crisis of the day. A new crisis is certain to arrive within moments of the current madness whatever happens in November.

Re: the extreme awfulness of the current president. I agree. But that’s the problem. HRC was definitely worse in virtually every respect. The current crop of Dems are either Clinton clones (remember the hold her campaign had on DNC funds?), or AOC-type anti-American lunatics. Sanders bailed on class and embraced identity – which is why his 2016 rural support evaporated in the primaries. Trump is disliked by a significant subset of the voters planning to pull the lever for him in November.

Why, oh, why, I wonder? Perhaps because America first sounds a whole lot better than neoliberal globalism which saw real wages flatline for more than 30 years. Pelosi et al are no different than Paul Ryan and the rest the Mitt Romney types.

So, no – Mitt Romney would not have torched the trade deals that Trump did, that’s why Mitt is currently employed as a Never Trump GOP token on MSNBC and the ‘dummy’ is on track to win a second term.

Hmm. Time for my own ruminations on the U.S. constitutional order. I normally tend to lean more to Hidari’s “things fall apart” outlook than to Chetan “Everything’s fine with the Dems, just nominate a centrist who will win some elections” Murthy’s myopia. But nevertheless I have to stake out some points of disagreement with the former:

@64: “Now, with Covid-19, a crisis that the American political system has simply been unable to fix (and please note, it’s only the American political system that can’t deal with it….even in the UK and Sweden, things aren’t nearly as bad as they are in the US) the idea that the US political system is totally dysfunctional and that the US is a failed state should be self-evident. And be under no illusions, as someone on Twitter pointed out (I won’t say who as it will derail the thread) it is highly possible that under President Biden or Clinton the Covid-19 situation might have been either worse, as the Republicans would have simply refused to cooperate with the Democrats, and the death toll might have been even higher.”

The U.S. is not a failed state. It is, rather, undergoing a transformation into a more openly oligarchic and quasi-dictatorial Latin American country. Indeed, it is Latin America as symbolized by Bolsonaro, Uribe, Macri, Pinera, Moreno (and if push comes to shove, Pinochet, Stroessner and Videla) which is the region that shows the U.S. its own future under the Republicans and even under centrist Democrats like Biden. The Clownstick is simply another Bolsonaro wannabe, and I predict that Brazil will end up having a higher per capita COVID19 death rate than the U.S., but with few if any serious political consequences. Sometimes though, the inequality, poverty, and corruption under Latin American oligarchies becomes too unbearable, and so we get Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all of which are hamstrung by their lack of access to foreign capital.

Btw, someone pointed out that the Hispanic preference for Trump is starting to increase; I think that most of this is due to the increased share of rich and upper middle class Miami and California residents from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico (amazing how someone like AMLO can make the rich dudes decamp to north of the border, even though he’s been fairly ineffectual so far), combined with a falling rate of poor Latin Americans moving north thanks to Clownstick.

And Latin America also shows that provided the repressive mechanisms are strong enough to prevent a Cuba or Venezuela-style blowup, the openly oligarchic system is politically quite stable even though it has its ups and downs. Unless protests and demonstrations ramp up to a critical mass here in the U.S. (which is unlikely but still possible, especially if the police and/or white supremacists really start to go apeshit), politically the system in the U.S. will be stable with ugly Republican presidents continuing to alternate with less ugly but equally oligarchic Democratic presidents. It is only once the climate and the environment head south permanently (with pandemics and East Cost hurricanes and coastal flooding becoming more regular) that we might get the opportunity for the political-economic system to turn upside down, for better or worse.

There is a famous moment in Tolstoy’s War and Peace when Prince Andrei, lying wounded on the field of Austerlitz, sees Napoleon on horseback looking down at him. Against the sweep of the sky, Napoleon seems to Prince Andrei like a small insect crawling across the vast space of eternity. When I stop stressing about the headlines, that is what the Trumpstick seems like from the perspective of history.

Re:

<

blockquote> Hidari 07.02.20 at 9:02 am /blockquote>
I think you are underestimating the demographic situation in the Great Plains states specifically and the rural areas of the US generally. In approximately 10 years but no more than 20 seventy percent of Kansas, for example, with be completely depopulated. Under the current Constitution the state will retain two Senators but may be down to one Representative and those will no longer automatically be rural Republicans but will be elected in tug of war between the KCK [1] metro area (conservative, but not irrational) and Republican Wichita, with the Citizen children of the “illegals” who have run the food processing industry for the last 20 years reaching the age of voting. The situation in other states isn’t quite so stark as the Great Plains but a few weeks spent in rural Illinois, Iowa, etc will reveal that the generation now in their 60s-80s is not being replaced. That’s a lot of Republican-friendly districts and electoral college votes gone forever.

[1] not to be confused with the larger Kansas City, Missouri.

Mike Huben @ 13 has it exactly right. And for those arguing there is no big-picture difference between Dems and Rethugs, then ask intelligent people who might just be a better advocate across the gender/caste spectrum, especially in appointing the judiciary.

@76
”Here is a brief primer on neoliberalism. It is NONE of the following”

Aha?
But then we -(my Italian friend and me) – looked at the ”official” definition of Neoliberalism – again! – and it still said what we quoted – and when we read YOUR very extensive ”private” definition – we thought:

AHA!! That’s why we believe so much more in ”trending” as everybody on the Internet tends to construct his or hers own ”private” or subjective definition of anything and only it you look at all of this… confusion… ”holistically” – or as a famous German Philosopher once said: GESAMTKUNSTWERK – the ”trending” becomes BIGLY obvious – and one – suddenly – realises that ”Neoliberalism” is a ”B.V.”… label – which is of NOOO use anymore in the –

NEW WORLD A.V.

“When applied with a decent respect to actual reality, neoclassical economics is in fact the discourse of social democracy, not of laissez faire capitalism.” – Andres@64

Indeed, as our OP – a fine neoclassical economist – has spent his professional lifetime pointing out.

But Trump, too, will pass. He represents only a slight hastening of US decline; as the original neoclassical economist said responding to claims England was ruined by the loss of America “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.

Hidari, if anybody made a prediction what Republicans will do in 2022, that would be you. Of course your scenario is possible but it’s unlikely the GOP will have two thirds of the Senate, and it‘s unlikely Biden will engage in conduct that would justify impeachment in the eyes of the electorate, as Trump and Nixon have done.

My comment referred also to the other parts of your claim. Do you really think a relevant number of living Republican voters consider Nixon a hero and are angry about his resignation (forced by bipartisan pressure) almost 50 years ago? You always seem very confident in your often generalizing proclamations, but usually unable to substantiate them.

That also applies to your claim about Trump cruising to victory without Covid. His chances of winning the EC were and are still intact as I never disputed but that is not the same as saying he would be cruising to victory.

The greatest for the left in this situation is complacency. This election must be fought with the fullest commitment. Nobody should delude themselves into thinking that the election is already won, or heaven forbid that a few third party votes won’t hurt since Biden is winning anyway. I am confident progressive Americans have learned from 2016 (and 2000).

@84

‘The most immediate cost of U.S. decline — and the most vivid demonstration — comes from the country’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic. Leadership failures were pervasive and catastrophic at every level — the president, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, and state and local leaders all fumbled the response to the greatest health threat in a century. As a result, the U.S. is suffering a horrific surge of infections in states such as Arizona, Texas and Florida while states that were battered early on are still struggling. Countries such as Italy that are legendary for government dysfunction and were hit hard by the virus have crushed the curve of infection, while the U.S. just set a daily record for case growth and shows no sign of slowing down”.

But the consequences of U.S. decline will far outlast coronavirus. With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S. will be a less appealing place for high-skilled workers to live. That means companies will find other countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere a more attractive destination for investment, robbing the U.S. of jobs, depressing wages and draining away the local spending that powers the service economy. That in turn will exacerbate some of the worst trends of U.S. decline — less tax money means even more urban decay as infrastructure, education and social-welfare programs are forced to make big cuts. Anti-immigration policies will throw away the country’s most important source of skilled labor and weaken a university system already under tremendous pressure from state budget cuts.

Almost every systematic economic advantage possessed by the U.S. is under threat. ‘

How true! –
And we couldn’t agree more with this quote – but how could this ”threat” collapse ‘’America’s constitutional democracy”?

If ”Americas constitutional democracy” even survived a ”Civil War”?

Hidari once more: “I suspect that Biden will be, like Trump, another weak President, unable or unwilling to reverse long term trends of decline.”

And I suspect that this prediction is meaningless as long as you are not willing or able to offer a definition of the terms “weak president” and “decline”.

And I’d add that whether Biden will win, what he can accomplish if he wins, whether he can win and keep control of Congress, whether he will be hostile to China, and on and on, all of this isn’t some predetermined fate but it depends on the agency of American citizens, and if I were American, I would invest my energy into action that might make the outcomes I prefer more likely. As it stands, I am just one among the 7 billion people who cannot vote in the election but will be heavily affected by its outcome, and I can assure you that most of these 7 billion people pray for the Trump nightmare to end. (I’ve been telling this to American friends on the left who,when Sanders didn’t win the nomination, started talking about another third party vote. Believe me I’m frightened, and I can tell you if these assholes pull it off one more time to help a fascist win against a liberal because “what’s the difference really” and “we’ve had enough of lesser-evilism”, history’s judgment will not be kind.)

I suspect that Biden will be, like Trump, another weak President, unable or unwilling to reverse long term trends of decline. – Hidari @84

But on your own (correct) reckoning, US decline is structural, multifaceted and long term. Presidents really only hasten it a little (Bush the Lesser, Trump) or slow it a little (notably Obama).

Short of causing a nuclear war or a civil war they just do not make as much difference to the US, let alone the rest of the world, as many here seem to think. In fact as someone a long way from the US I can afford to enjoy Clown Trump for his entertainment value.

The problem for Republicans is formed by the double bind of having the rabid support of a rapidly dwindling population. For the last decade at least, if not longer, Republicans have punched above their weight, nationally, through a combination of gerrymandering and the fact that old people, who are mostly conservative, vote in higher proportion to their share of the population than everyone else. But if you hitch your wagon to a movement powered by the elderly, well, at some point they’re not going to be around to vote for you anymore. On the one hand, you have to keep feeding them stronger doses of the same stuff you were serving up 20 years ago because if you let up, the panic abates, but on the other hand, the number of people sticking around on this mortal plane that you can scare up into voting for you is diminishing.

As far as I know, the phenomenon of a correlation between age and likelihood to vote for conservative politicians is a persistent one; that is, at any given point in time, going back for I don’t know how many decades but perhaps a century or even more, the cohort of people over (say) sixty have voted more conservatively than the cohort of people under (say) forty. If this is so, then it’s true that in (say) twenty years time the cohort of people currently over sixty will mostly have died, but they will have been replaced by a new cohort of people over sixty who will vote about as conservatively as their predecessors.

It’s certainly true that rich people vote more conservatively than poor people, and it’s also certainly true that rich people live longer than poor people: this must be at least part of the reason for the greater conservatism of the elderly cohort, and it may be the whole of the reason.

The cohort of people who will be aged over sixty in twenty years time will be made up mostly of people who are currently aged between forty and sixty (with the addition of a small number of people already aged over sixty who survive at least another twenty years); but it won’t include all the people currently aged between forty and sixty, because a substantial fraction of those will die over the next twenty years, and death will not take them equally from all demographic groups, but selectively, more of the poor than of the rich and therefore more of those who vote against conservative politicians than of those who vote for them.

It’s a reasonable default expectation that conservative politicians in twenty years time will be able to place much the same reliance as conservative politicians now on a conservatively voting cohort of the elderly.

@92

‘Trumpism’ is not hard to define, although the ‘liberal’ media have muddied the waters a lot by shrieking about fascism and Hitler and whatnot.

1: ‘Economic nationalism’. Trumpists tend to be suspicious of trans-national economic entities like the EU and trade agreements like NAFTA. ‘America (or Britain, or Turkey, or Russia, or Israel) first.’ A certain suspicion of the nostrums of ‘free trade’ except insofar as they benefit (directly, economically) the nation.

2: Extreme hostility to immigration (which frequently slides into outright racism). ‘British jobs for British workers’ (an old NF slogan then propounded by Gordon Brown). Building walls where possible or, if not, an emphasis on having strong, secure borders.

3: Suspicion of foreign ‘entanglements’, especially of course military alliances, except insofar as they can be economically justified (this follows from ‘1’).

4: Suspicion of military action, except insofar as it is linked directly to economic goals (‘we should have taken the oil!’) . Again this follows from ‘1’. Total lack of interest in ‘spreading democracy’ or ‘ending tyranny round the world’ etc.

5: Stylistically a certain love of rhetoric, tropes, rituals and the creation of myths that demonstrate that the leader is not one of the ‘liberal establishment’, that he (sic) is an outsider, the use of ‘coarse’ language, never apologising, and a certain indifference to whether one’s actions as a leader are, strictly speaking, legal. The (mainly mythical) idea that the leader speaks for the ‘little guy’. Trying to create an image of a ‘Strong Nation’ (whatever the reality). But this is always, ultimately, justified via the ballot box. None of the Trumpists have cancelled elections, and (so far) none of them have expressed an interest in doing so. The worst they have done (cf Erdogan) is to accentuate corruption trends that were already there.

6: Keep the safety net and the welfare state for the core support (pensioners). A certain suspicion of the idea of ‘balanced budgets’ and other neoliberal ideas, in favour of directly helping (economically) one’s core support population.

I suspect the ‘populism train’ has a long way to run before it reaches its destination. With climate change (and the ecopalypse), spiralling inequality, the growth (since 2015) of worldwide absolute global poverty, and the increasing breakdown of the ‘liberal’ world order backed by American military power, and, of course, the global annihilation of the Left who would normally be the people that one would look to to solve these problems, there is very little way for popular anger against these trends to express itself.

@91

‘Short of causing a nuclear war or a civil war….’

Don’t discount the possibility of President Biden starting one or both of these. As I mentioned above, Noam Chomsky has been essentially alone in warning of the dangers of a nuclear war breaking out. Tensions with the Russians will presumably increase under President Biden (assuming he wins!) , even more than they did under Trump, so the Old New Cold War will keep going (and get worse) and the New New Cold War with China is also just beginning (and has in fact already broken out on the Indian Chinese border). Both China and Russia are of course nuclear powers.

In any case, we sail into the sea of chance. Our elected politicians have essentially given up on creating meaningful solutions to any of the problems above, so random chance will presumably decide whether or not there is a 22nd century.

So strap in, it’s going to be a helluva ride. Empires are frequently at their most dangerous in their declining years.

‘The failure of the Delphic Oracle to define its terms was, as they say, a feature, not a bug. If you refuse to explain your meaning so that people can understand it, they can never prove you wrong and you can always appear prescient in retrospect.’

I haven’t defined Biden, Trump or President either. Clearly I am a fraud. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for you pesky blog commentators.

3: ‘Entryism’ as previously tried by the Militant Tendency in the UK, and, in the US, by the DSA, in which you slowly try and take a party over ‘from the bottom up’. Has never worked.

What you describe is a common account of how the Republican party changed in the past several decades, leading to earlier speculation (maybe by Corey Robin) as to whether Sanders might be a Reagan or a Goldwater.

@95
‘Trumpism’ is not hard to define”
and then it comes in 6 – (in words: ”sex”) – parts of ”one” STUPID?

And my dad – who is this very old ”Art Historian” once wrote even more ”parts” about the Art of an Ape – which he presented as the works of ”The Human Genius I.”
-(one of these typical ”Art-Happenings in the 70th”)
And after the exhibition was sold he told all the buyers that they had bought the Art of an Ape – and he offered to give the money back – but most of the buyers were just too embarrassed to take it…

JD@94:

<

blockquote cite=”Hidari once more: “I suspect that Biden will be, like Trump, another weak President, unable or unwilling to reverse long term trends of decline.”

And I suspect that this prediction is meaningless as long as you are not willing or able to offer a definition of the terms “weak president” and “decline”.”>

“The failure of the Delphic Oracle to define its terms was, as they say, a feature, not a bug. If you refuse to explain your meaning so that people can understand it, they can never prove you wrong and you can always appear prescient in retrospect.”

If you think that the terms “weak president” and “decline” are Delphic cyphers then either you haven’t done very much thinking about the U.S. political-economic system or you are just trying to score debating points. To belabor what should be completely obvious to most of us:

Weak president = POTUS who either (1) rightly or wrongly believes that he has little agency and must bend to the will of his campaign financers, party faction or voting base in the predominant majority of cases, or (2) is easily manipulated into taking the policy actions favored by his “advisors”. There is a tendency (with exceptions) for Republican leaders to fall into category (2) and Democratic presidents to fall into (1).

Decline = a combination of political and economic symptoms including (1) stagnant or even declining physical capital stock, caused by a combination of financially-driven caution by private businesses and fiscally driven lack of public investment, (2) a narrowing circle of individuals who can influence business investment or public policy (3) mostly because of (2), a succession of weak leaders (see above) at the higher levels of government, (4) stagnant or deteriorating demographic statistics, including but not limited to death rates from causes other than old age diseases (e.g. Case and Deaton’s “deaths of despair”) as well as chronic social pathologies such as alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. Also crime, though the U.S. has succeeded in suppressing crime thanks to a large carceral state.

Decline does not have to be an irreversible phenomenon. An intelligent but not acute observer in the early 1850’s might have said that the U.S. was in irreversible decline thanks to the growing power of the slave oligarchy which had cemented its power with the Fugitive Slave Act and was able to either put in its favored politicians into high office or else constrain the presidents it didn’t favor (and so we get Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, three weak presidents in succession). Along with economic stagnation outside of major cities and large plantations, the rise of anti-foreigner Know-Nothingism as a political force (sound familiar?) All of which were acting to turn the U.S. into another banana republic (though cotton republic might be more accurate). But this observer would have been wrong because he underestimated the degree of popular backlash to the slave oligarchy, leading to a third party revolt, and the extent to which industrialization could drive the U.S. economy once slave agriculture was no longer an impediment.

The point is that no one who reads the news and is not mind-controlled would deny that the U.S. is in decline right now. The real argument is whether that decline can be reversed (I think it can) and if so how.

In the last comment, I hit submit before realizing one of my sentences was unfinished:

On the global environment, Obama accomplished nothing far-reaching other than maintaining the U.S. existing treaty commitments (including its nominal approval of but non -ratification of Kyoto; no attempt was made to get the treaty ratified during the Obama years, nor to hammer out a stronger global warming agreement) and passively agreeing to the Paris Accord targets, which were also promptly torn up by Trump.

Given a majority of votes in each individual state and the current convention of winner-take-all-electors in each state, the question of how much of a margin in the national vote tallies (which both Clinton and Gore won) in necessary to secure a de jur win is more deterministic than probabilistic, and depends on elector arithmetic. The math is, to quote oceanographer Joseph Pedlosky describing a several-dimensional but solvable matrix of fluid dynamics equations, straightforward but not trivial.

No.

To go into more detail:

In 2016, the difference between the total Democratic vote and the total Republican vote nationally–what might be called the national Democratic margin–was 2.1% of total votes cast. The Democratic margin, in the same sense, in New Hampshire was 0.4% of total votes cast. Thus, New Hampshire voted 1.7% less Democratic than the country as a whole. Meanwhile, in Michigan, there was, in the same sense a Republican margin of 0.2%, so Michigan voted 2.3% more Republican than the country as a whole. A similar figure can be calculated for each State: some more Democratic than the country as a whole (Nevada by 0.3%; California by 28.0%), some more Republican (Florida by 3.3%; Wyoming by 44.2%).

If these State indicators were fixed from election to election, it would be possible to calculate directly the effect of a change in the national vote margin on each State. If the Democrats achieve a three-point margin in the national vote they’ll carry Michigan, a four-point margin and they’ll carry Florida; on the other hand, if the Republicans reduce the Democratic margin to one point they’ll carry New Hampshire and if they achieve a one-point margin of their own they’ll carry Nevada.

But these State indicators are not fixed from election to election. No matter which direction the national margin moves, some States will move further in the same direction, while others will move less far or even move in the opposite direction. If the movement was uniform across the States, we could predict (deterministically) that a movement of the national margin by one point towards the Democrats would give them Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (and the ball game), while a movement half that would be insufficient (because it would deliver only Michigan). However, if the movement in critical States is less than the movement in the national margin (which is possible), a one-point movement might be insufficient; whereas if the movement in critical States is greater than the movement in the national margin (which is also possible), a national movement of half a point might be sufficient. (Critical States, in this context, means States which were close last time: there’s not a binary division, then, between critical States and others, but rather States are more or less critical, in this specific mathematical sense, as the margin last time was more or less close.)

The resulting relationship between the national popular vote margin and the final outcome can only be modelled probabilistically, and as a matter of fact I recently discovered that this has actually been done, and I might try to find the reference again if I can. (The model I saw contradicted my own seat-of-the-pants estimate in an earlier comment: in the model, the chance of a Republican victory only diminished to negligible levels when the Democratic margin in the national vote reached or exceeded six percentage points; with a Democratic margin of four or five points, in the model, went a small but not negligible chance of Republican victory. For added clarity, 53-47 would mean a six-point margin, but so would 51-45 or 50-44 with the rest of the vote going to candidates neither Democratic nor Republican, and something similar applies to other figures for the margin.)

If you think that the terms “weak president” and “decline” are Delphic cyphers then either you haven’t done very much thinking about the U.S. political-economic system or you are just trying to score debating points. To belabor what should be completely obvious to most of us:

Maybe the definitions you offer are the ones Hidari intended; but then again, maybe they aren’t. There’s not much point discussing them the problems with them as clear definitions of Hidari’s terms if it’s not established that they are the definitions Hidari intended (or close enough).

@106
”Chomsky is a genius and always worth reading, but he is also 91, and there is some evidence that he suffers from ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ – the belief that Trump is something fundamentally ‘other’ in the American political tradition, which is obviously not true”.

As we had developed this very simple test how to identify ”a Trumper”
by getting then answer t o just two – very simple questions –

Do you support BLM?
Do you support wearing a mask?

are we allowed to add:

Do you use the words: Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Do you belief that Trump is NOT something fundamentally ‘other’-
(than all the other NOT STUPID US Presidents)

And we even would credit CT for the two additional questions – which will make ”the test” for sure a lot less simple – but perhaps we need these two additional questions to identify the ”lesser simple Trumpsters”?