The Republican phase transition

John, that’s a lovely (heh) distillation. It simplifies and clarifies what we mean when we talk about how Phallus Boletus said the quiet parts out loud, if you see what I mean. The base was more and more yearning to hear those quiet parts out loud, but the pols weren’t delivering. The base was still loyal to those pols, but …. well, they really wanted what they wanted. And then along came Phallus Boletus, and they got what they’d been yearning for. And they crystallized into the Deplorables we all have seen.

It’s not a catalyst, it’s a seed crystal.

I only have a wikipedia-level understanding of crystallization, but I think the key to the metaphor is that Trump isn’t particularly an active agent catalyzing change but a tiny center around which the formerly supersaturated latent racism etc. of the GOP has crystallized. He won the 2016 Republican primary by providing a structure for the anti-immigrant, xenophobic nationalism to orient itself, but it wouldn’t stop at this point even if Trump were removed.

First, the obligatory joke: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

Now the quibble: which is it? “The final product of the reaction emerges in its crystallised form”. Okay, the precipitate. The dregs. The jetsam, that which drifts to the bottom, or accumulates on either of the electrodes. But “The dregs that have precipitated out are ideas that were supposed to be important to Republicans” … wait, what?

The ideas and ideals we find most repugnant are most of the mix in the fetid stew of right-wing opinion, the charred shreds of liberty and community baked to the bottom of the pot.

I don’t know whether this helps answer your question, but it’s a data point (or at least a point of view).

‘Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the four-decade-long era of the free market ushered in by Ronald Reagan?…

It wouldn’t be the first time a crisis has altered the trajectory of the country. The Republican Party of today is defined by its commitment to tax cuts, deregulation, and cuts in social spending. But prior to the Reagan administration, the Republicans were actually the party seen as most likely to increase taxes, because their main commitment throughout the post-war period had been to avoid deficits. …

It was the economic crisis of the 1970s that led Republican politicians to offer proposals that radically rethought the economic order, and it was the economic crisis that led citizens to vote for some of those proposals. One of the most consequential was the party’s coalescing around the issue of tax cuts. A faction led by Congressman Jack Kemp began to argue that tax cuts could be popular, and could offer a Republican alternative to what they saw as the Democrats’ strategy of offering welfare programs for electoral purposes. In Kemp’s words: “Let the Democrats be the party of deficit spending. We are the party of lower taxes. Let the Democrats be the party of quick-fixes and more government jobs. We are the party of private enterprise jobs. Let the Democrats be the party of inflation. We are the party of a sound dollar.”…

A better explanation for why Republicans are so committed to free market policies is hidden in the Gallup Poll. For several decades, Gallup has been asking Americans this question: “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous—the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” Examining responses to this question over decades reveals an interesting pattern: since 1980, the version of this question asked in fall of the election year has correctly predicted the president in almost all cases, and the only exception, the election of 2000, adds rather than takes away from its utility as a barometer. Because of the stagflation of the 1970s, and then because of the wage stagnation and economic instability of the following decades, Americans have been increasingly likely to respond that the state of the economy matters to them and influences their vote choice. These changing priorities coincided with an astonishing change in party perceptions: in the 1960s, Democrats were considered more likely to handle the economy well than were Republicans, with an advantage of nearly 40 percentage points, but they lost that advantage in 1980, and have traded places with the Republicans for it ever since….

In other words, Republicans gained tremendously in the perception among the public that they are able to handle the economy well, at precisely the moment when Americans started to say they cared about the economy. One reason for this was the Republicans’ policy of tax cuts and of free market policies in general, which gave the party a story of how they would bring about economic growth. In the time of Kemp and Reagan, inflation was pushing Americans into higher tax brackets, and the Republicans were right that tax cuts would be popular. Ever since, these policies have allowed Republicans to construct a coherent narrative around the premise that they are the party that cares about business, and to paint the Democrats as the party that only wants to spend money…

The recent problem for the party is that the tax cut strategy has diminishing returns, because Republicans have been so effective at cutting people’s taxes that Americans are no longer as upset about paying them. This is one reason for the party’s sudden lurch to xenophobia, as there are not many other issues a party that rejects welfare policies can use to attract a large coalition of voters. .

One strategy for predicting whether the Republican Party of tomorrow will look like the Republican Party of yesterday is to watch that Gallup number like a dial when it comes out later this year. We may be moving into a different era, when cultural factors and appeals to racism mean the perception of which party better handles the economy is no longer as influential on the vote. If so, free market policies will no longer be so prominent on the Republican agenda. But there is another possibility: if voters still care about which party better handles the economy, and if the current president’s handling of the economy reflects on his party, one of the pillars for the Republican Party’s post-Watergate renaissance will start to crumble. In either case, as the crisis of stagflation began the era of Reagan, the coronavirus crisis could end it.’

My own personal feeling is that voters do still care about the economy, and, that when the Gallup polls comes out, and it shows that The Democrats are now seen as being ‘better for the economy’, then Trump is probably toast, but I could be wrong. *

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-crisis-and-the-free-market

*I read some of those vox-pops by Trump voters and not a few voters mentioned that they thought that Trump as a ‘successful’ businessman, would run the country like a business and therefore guarantee growth and jobs etc.

A key distinction that’s not made enough is between Big Business and Plutocracy. Eisenhower Republicanism was all about big, listed companies – GM and the like. They were focused on low taxes, loose regulation, free trade. But beyond that they were indifferent to, or even supportive of, other kinds of social progress: civil rights, environmentalism, education. Think of GHW Bush and the ADA, or Henry Paulson and the Nature Conservancy. Or all the corporations making a nod to LGBT rights or BLM. There was, and to an extent still is, a concept of “corporate citizenship”, constraining actions by entities employing thousands of people across dozens of national markets..

But Big Business Republicanism has been steadily eclipsed in Republican circles by Plutocracy: rich guys (almost all men) who are acting for themselves rather than for their corporate structures. Think of (unlisted) Koch Industries, or the Mercer family, or Sheldon Adelson. Free trade might matter for the specific markets they’re active in, but otherwise not a big deal. Low taxes, yes, but also weak tax enforcement. No regulation, ever, least of all environmental. Corporate citizenship, a joke. And if racist dog whistor airhorns expand and energize the coalition and keep them in power, bring ‘em on please.

I think this is a big part of the shift you mention.

I don’t think we need such a complicated metaphor to explain Trump.

(1) The transformation of the Republican party and American conservatism has been the process of training them to believe convincing liars, with the lies constructed by plutocratic-funded think tanks. Swallow the lies in exchange for support for racism and dominionism. Along comes Donald Trump, a more bold and convincing liar than the other Republican candidates (think of the pussyfooting of Rubio and Romney, for example.) The base quickly identified him as bolder, more direct, and more convincing.

(2) Everything Trump has done is a continuation of long-established Republican policy and practices simply because he is one stupid man without any plans of his own: all the Republicans (and plutocrats) have to do is serve him a menu of their projects. For example, the Federalist Society handed him lists of candidates for Supreme Court and other judgeships.

@11 and 12

This is surely correct, and true worldwide.

I’ve quoted from this before, but vis a vis Brexit:

‘The deregulation associated with (Thatcherism)
has facilitated freedom of capital on a global basis. This, in turn, has
dramatically altered the balance of social and political forces in the UK,
undermining the power of large-scale industry and of organized labour but
enhancing the power of the City of London. In particular this period has seen
the rapid growth of private equity funds and hedge funds. Hedge funds make
their profits through a series of bets on trends in the financial market, aiming
to ‘hedge’ themselves against losses by ‘shorting’ assets. This involves
borrowing assets such as shares or currencies, for example, which are
expected to lose value and then selling them to investors who pay for them at
the current market price, before it falls. When the fall does occur, the fund will re-purchase the assets at the lower price, with the difference between what it
sold them for and what it bought them for constituting its profit. The bulk of
the world’s hedge funds (some $2.6 trillion) are managed in the USA but the
UK is, albeit by some distance, the second most popular choice, with firms in
the City of London responsible for hedge funds worth $500 billion (equivalent
to almost 20 per cent of the nation’s GDP). The sheer size of these funds 18
gives finance a power and influence in the British State it has not enjoyed since
1914.
Hedge funds like the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, whose bid for
leadership of the Conservative Party is known to have received backing from
hedge fund managers such as David Lilley of RK Capital, Jon Wood of SRM
Global, and Johan Christofferson of Christofferson, Robb and Co…
Johnson’s campaign to become Tory leader
received much City backing. Both he and Cameron are old Etonians, as are
some of the leading proponents of Brexit in the Conservative Party, such as
Jacob Rees-Mogg (co-founder and co-owner of the hedge fund, Somerset
Capital Management) and Kwasi Kwarteng. This group has used Brexit to
stage a political and economic coup, as a result of which Britain will (so the
perpetrators hope) shake off the remains of industrial capitalism and embrace
a future supplying ‘business, technology and financial services to emerging
markets such as China and India and as the financial manager of the world.’
If they are successful, only sufficient manufacturing capacity to build and
service a military machine capable of protecting the new politico-economic
configuration would be retained.’

https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster78/lob78-angloarabia.pdf

This change from, ‘traditional’ capitalism (making things and selling them in shops and thereby producing profits) to the ‘airless’ ‘frictionless’ method of making mo*ney via the stock market: ‘financial’ capitalism is incredibly important in terms of working out reasons for the rise of Trump etc. As Branko Milanovic points out, in a world without borders (at least if you ‘are’ money) then it’s easier and quicker to just squirrel your money away in tax havens rather than actually build products that people want to buy. Or as the Panama Papers showed (as Ian Hislop once put it), Google, Facebook etc. are not media companies which happen to engage in tax-dodging, they are tax-dodging companies which happen to engage in media. Therefore the traditional working class are simply superfluous either as workers are (and this is new) as consumers. And Trump is above all paid for by big oil, yes, and big coal, yes, but also finance capital (more so than the Democrats: the Democrats are more the party of Big Tech, and also academia, conceptualised as part of the ‘knowledge economy’).

Look at the Coronavirus. In terms of the American people, the results have been a total disaster, and the same goes for ‘traditional’ capitalism. But in terms of financial capitalism, the whole thing has been a triumphant success: look at the genuinely astonishing orgy of corporate looting that has led to the current boom in the stock market (even as the so-called ‘real’ economy tanks). CF also Trump’s tax cuts, the first thing he did.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/II123/articles/robert-brenner-escalating-plunder

Another thing, and another reason why attempts to link Trump and his mates back to previous right wing formations is futile, is the fact that Trump and Trumpism could only have arisen in the 21st century. Trump is a product of reality TV, of the internet, of Twitter (as is his putative opposition, #theresistance). And the collapse in journalist standards that has happened over the last 20 years that has led to the rise of the populists can’t be separated from the damage that the internet has done to ‘traditional’ print media, and what print media has had to do in order to survive (the rise in ‘clickbait’, ‘fake news’, social media as the key source of information, and, more generally, the ‘dematerialisation’ of ordinary life as we all live more and more on the net, a tendency that is being facilitated and accelerated by Covid-19).

Sorry, here’s the link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/06/30/biden-now-up-to-106-billionaire-donors-trump-has-93/#37b501652341

I feel… extremely seen by this post.

Ok, let me pick up this analogy and try to formulate it in a slightly more accurate way. I promise there’s a payoff here.

There is a concept in the theory of phase transitions called the order parameter. This is some quantity of the system which, as the name might suggest, represents a measurement of the order of a system within a given phase. What is order? Well, consider for a moment a gas of spins, magnetic moments at some finite temperature such that the thermal energy associated with the temperature is much higher than that associated with any spontaneous coupling between the spins (you probably didn’t expect to read that sentence on CT). There’s not much order in this system: all the different spins are pointing in different directions, and while some of them might be locally coupled to their neighbors (i.e. pointing in the same direction), there’s no long-range order present. The order parameter (in this case, the net magnetization) is zero on the disordered side and increases continuously from zero on the ordered side.

Now let’s vary some parameter of the system. Perhaps we’ll change the temperature and make things very cold, or maybe we’ll apply a magnetic field. What we will find is that at exactly at the point where the system transitions to e.g. a ferromagnet in which all the spins are aligned, it will exhibit “critical” behavior, that is to say, the fluctuations within the system will suddenly correlate over arbitrary length scales, and we will pass from a disordered state to a state in which long-range order dominates. What’s more, various quantities of interest will behave in a power-law fashion around this critical point, though far away from it they may have entirely different behaviors.

All right, so, who cares?

Well, the (imperfect!) analogy I would like to draw here is to the state of American politics after the stabilization of the New Deal/postwar consensus. This was a politics with a high degree of “disorder” in the sense that many of the constitutive elements of the two parties had very loose correlations with each other. Or to put it in terms that everyone is familiar with, for entirely contingent reasons, liberal Republicans and Dixiecrats found themselves on opposite sides of the aisle from liberal Democrats and big business Republicans, respectively. There was a good amount of local correlation (i.e. nearest-neighbor coupling, if you will) but relatively little (by modern standards) long-range order.

Over time, the parties have undergone a sorting process which I don’t think I need to discuss in detail. You can think of this process as being “driven” in some sense by a temperature-like phenomenon, by which I mean largely racism and other culture-war issues. Of course this isn’t a perfect analogy because the racism is not externally imposed, but I hope the phenomenological parallel is clear even if the exact mechanics are different. Anyway, under the driving force of this “applied field,” as it were, the political landscape has entered a critical regime: not only is long-range order across the political spectrum now more or less the norm, but various quantities of interest (inequality, polarization, etc.) are now experiencing power law scaling within the critical window.

What implication does this have for points 1 and 2 in the OP? I think it invites a synthesis of the two positions. The long-term continuity of point 2, accompanied by the appropriate drivers, have created a critical moment in which the acceleration of various phenomena has given us the appearance of point 1, i.e. that Trump represents a fundamental shift. But all that’s really happened is that a lot of the attitudes that were previously “disordered” (in the sense used above) have now aligned, and fluctuations at all scales have given us the combination of long-range order across the political landscape together with critical behavior. That’s why it looks to us like something fundamentally different is happening, when all that’s happening is the stuff that was happening before, but only more so.

Do you need a graduate physics degree to understand this? I would say no. But at the same time I’d like to thank John for giving me the opportunity to work out this metaphor.

I’ve not read the book so I won’t opine further, but Jerry’s extension of the analogy in @19 seems to be along the same lines as Ezra Klein’s thesis in Why We’re Polarized.

“This is one reason for the party’s sudden lurch to xenophobia, as there are not many other issues a party that rejects welfare policies can use to attract a large coalition of voters.”

Arguably, a lurch to xenophobia was always in the cards, not despite but because of this argument. A culture can set itself up by exclusion from people who can’t meet its expectations, it can set itself up by embracing everybody who can’t meet the expectations of “elites” by some definition, and it can set itself up by giving people who can’t meet those expectations a way to feel they’re on the side of some “elite” for some other reason. Expressing hostility to outsiders lower on the totem pole is one way to do this last thing. The ridiculous emphasis on respectability that followed in the wake of 9/11 was always going to increase the cost of feeling on the outside when everyone else is signaling that they’re on the side of law and order, and drive out other approaches.

@20 ‘ The countries which historically were called fascist were either defeated in war, or attempting to build their first empires. And US nationalist politics is completely dominated by efforts to maintain the informal US empire.’

This gets it exactly backwards. First it’s not US ‘nationalist’ politics, it’s US politics, all of it. Since the early 1980s no American politician whose hands have been permitted to go anywhere near the levers of power has been opposed to the American Empire or American imperialism, and, with the defeat of Bernie Sanders, it is vanishingly improbable that any American politician’s ever will.

Secondly the issue faced by the countries which went fascist were totally different, indeed, the opposite, of the US’ current issues.

Italy and Germany didn’t have empires, but wanted them.

The US already has an empire and wants to keep hold of it, permanently (hence the inevitable conflict with China: the US cannot tolerate imperial competitors).

So the comparison, overstretched though that is, is much more similar to the Roman Republic (Empire abroad, quasi-democratic oligarchy at home).

Hidari@25 lets the commitment to the free market over monstrous Communism lead to hasty remarks. Decolonization and/or democratization policy was very much a part of US politics until Truman had time to reverse course, especially after Wallace was defeated in 1948. The regimes installed in Germany and Japan after WWI simply are not the kind of regimes installed in Iraq, a confessional-canto ragbag of corruption that makes a mockery of any genuine notion of democracy. League of Nations/UN internationalism simply isn’t nationalist politics in any meaningful sense of demanding reactionary politics at home. Playing policeman of the world implies a politics of pretending justice in the US, a pose which culminated with the dismantling of Jim Crow in my opinion. You may count “international” tribunals trying enemies of the US for war crimes/crimes against humanity, mostly Africans, if you want. I don’t.

But conceding for the sake of argument, that now US politics is all nationalist, that didn’t happen in the eighties. It happened in the forties, with the defeat of Henry Wallace a key milestone. It’s nonsense to try to blame only the Republicans, not even Reagan. There isn’t the slightest indication Sanders was ever anti-imperialist or internationalist, either. Trying to somehow acquit a Democrat is more nonsense.

Most of all, it is hard to see how a country that lost its empire, like Germany did, is so very different from a country that’s losing its empire, like the US is. (By the way, Italy had Libya, Ethiopia, Albania and at the last gasp, Greece in its empire.) It was the struggle over the spoils of empire that destabilized the Roman Republic. By the way, there was nothing quasi-democratic about the Roman oligarchy. The whole point of a Republic (NOT A DEMOCRACY) is that elections don’t challenge class power. But this is true of all bourgeois democracies. It’s why so many people, especially here, repudiate the very concept of democracy as majority rule, as witness the horror at Venezuela, the home of tyranny.

The exigencies of maintaining a crumbling empire take their toll on US politics too. Trump has unilaterally launched trade wars and nobody dares even dream of taking that (dubiously constitutional, in my opinion,) away from him. The purge of the left by Truman/McCarthy/et al. was motivated by the desire to remake a world safe for democracy, which every one else here identifies with the free market. (The discovery that neo-liberalism has poisoned that well of life is paralleled by the discovery that trusts or banks are the ones who ruined it all.)

Trump made a speech at the UN where he spouted Roy Cohn nonsense about socialism. And Trump has openly usurped local powers to send assorted national police forces to attack the people of Portland, citing the revolutionary threat of the left. Does anyone truly believe this is true? Trump isn’t going to organize street paramilitaries because he’s got so much command over official state forces. But like fascist street fighters, the battles he wants to fight are a part of a campaign for empire. Again, the difference between struggling to keep an empire and to conquer one are not so different. Ask Caetano in your next seance?

There is no Chinese wall between foreign and domestic policy. Struggle for empire abroad means policing people at home, whether its CBP and ICE and the US Marshals etc., or the Kempeitai or whoever, wherever. People who apparently are sincere in thinking they are left will support a fascist regime in Ukraine while supporting economic warfare against a democracy in Venezuela. They will support the most predatory capitalists in China in hopes it will tear China apart in a civil war while they are appalled at “tankies” menacing society with internet posts.

Germany had a small number of African colonies from the C19th. So it already had an overseas empire, albeit not a large one, when Hitler came to power in 1933.

Germany lost all its colonies as part of the settlement after the First World War; none remaind German possessions in 1933.

LFC: Germany’s overseas colonies consisted of modern Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania, the port of Tsingtao in China (hence the beer) and the Bismarck Archipelago in the Pacific (ironic name, given that the Iron Chancellor was opposed to colonial entanglements). Germany lost all of these in WWI, a full 15 years before Hitler came to power, and restoring Imperial Germany’s overseas possessions was not on his list of priorities as far as I know.

In fact, we can be thankful that Kaiser Willy was obsessed with creating an overseas colonial empire, as then he would never have built up his navy, would not have gone to war with Britain and likely the U.S., and Germany would probably have defeated France and Russia alone.

Imperial ambitions are often the road to destruction, which is why Britain abandoned its empire in the 1940’s-50’s before thousands of Brit soldiers could die in Africa and India, with the survivors bringing revolutionary or fascist pandemics back home (France wasn’t as smart and nearly died from one). With the possible exception of the Philippines, the U.S. was smart enough not to have a formal empire and to maintain actual economic control through multinational corporations rather than viceroys.

Attempting to get the conversation back on topic: like the OP I have two flatly contradictory opinions on Trump: one, that he is a completely normal Republican President, and two, that there is something different about him, though I find it difficult to put my finger on precisely what.

Doubtless there is the simple and obvious fact that Trump is not a politician. The American political system is a system of indoctrination (not just for the voters, that’s obvious enough, but for the politicians themselves) a system of behaviour modification, and a system of thought (or at least speech) control. In other words American politicians over the years/decades (most American politician are now very old, at least the ones in power) learn ‘what can be done’ and ‘what can be said’. There are very strict (albeit informal, and non-codified) rules about ‘how can should behave’ as an American politician, and Trump knows none of them. So, obviously, he breaks them, relentlessly. Nor does he show any willingness to learn. Why should he? ‘Breaking the rules’ has brought him to where he is now. So it’s almost true by definition that Trump does not behave ‘like a normal President’.

Another thing is that Trump is inconceivable without social media and, specifically, Twitter. Richard Seymour’s ‘The Twittering Machine’ didn’t get too much ‘play’ in the media, perhaps because it’s too close to the bone, but Seymour views Twitter in particular as a highly addictive medium and its key addictive quality is the way it provokes primal emotions, on a regular basis, especially, of course, anger and outrage. It’s been said that Trump produces racism, and of course he does, but it’s much more accurate, I think, to say that Trump, more than anything else, consistently produces outrage.

The cycle is always the same. Trump says something ‘outrageous’ on Twitter . ‘Liberal’ media respond with outrage. Conservative media responds with outrage to the outrage. Then we have commentary in dead tree media on the ‘controversy’. Nothing is sorted out, nothing is solved, nothing is resolved, and as the ‘controversy’ fades, Trump or one of his minions, tweets or says something else ‘outrageous’ and so the cycle repeats. What you have is people perpetually on Twitter (or other forms of social media) perpetually angry, perpetually outraged, perpetually shouting at each other. Hence the endless breaches of Godwin’s law. If you want to create anger the easiest way to do it is to accuse your opponent of being a Nazi, and in these ‘debates’ it’s simply a matter of time before the ‘left’ are accusing Trump of being a Nazi, Trump’s fans are accusing the left of being anti-semites (i.e. Nazis) or Communists, or both, and so on and so forth and etc. even unto the end of time.

This is also related to the de-materialisation idea I was talking about earlier. Capitalism has dematerialised but so has the media. We all live, increasingly, on the internet nowadays, and the internet is now run by giant corporations whose major ‘product’ is spite, malice, aggression and outrage. Or to be precise, encouraging their ‘users’ (actually the corporations use the users…one of the key fictions of social media is that it restores autonomy to an alienated and divided populace) to feel spite, hatred, outrage. And we do, all the time.

I think this is another reason why the Trump presidency’ feels’ different from previous presidencies, and why it is likely, in many ways, to be a pathway to the future, not an atavistic throwback to an imagined past.

@
”like the OP I have two flatly contradictory opinions on Trump: one, that he is a completely normal Republican President, and two, that there is something different about him, though I find it difficult to put my finger on precisely what”.

”though I find it difficult to put my finger on precisely what”.

What’s about that Trump cheats at golfing?

As see – the first Republican US President I met in my life was this incredible nice old men, who gave me a cookie when I was a little girl – and then my (Republican) grandfather told me that this was ”our President” and that he never cheated in playing golf – but we all know – that Trump cheats – so that’s for sure different about Trump – and you even could put ”precisely” you fingers on it.

@31 Thanks for correcting the record re: German colonies. Hitler evidently did want Germany’s overseas colonies returned: https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1937020500

Colonial expansion generally seems to have been a response to what could by taken and at what cost. The English into Ireland seems a logical move in hindsight, but began with the expropriation of church properties and occurred incrementally over a century.

Reading a bit on German colonial policy we read of the desire (rather than need) for raw materials, cheap labor, and a captive export market for German goods, similar to the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese empires. I doubt, however, Britain would have surrendered India voluntarily and dismantled the Empire by choice. That rickety edifice cracked and fell under the pressures of 20th century warfare, in much the same way the uncontested power of China collapsed when the gunboats of the British East India Company and the RN steamed through the Chinese navy a century earlier.

Returning to the twin topics: Are the Republicans really the only party of the rich, and is America a pre-fascist state. The first is barely open to debate, and the second ludicrous by any objective standard.

Only a regular CT commenter, or some similar figure, could squint hard enough to find similarities between two such patently different nations: the one a two-hundred year-old republic with a constitution and bill of rights, and with the crippled shell of an Empire crushed in its infancy by political change and bad luck. (Easy to forget but the German Empire very nearly won. How different would the world be now, had that been that outcome?)

I hope the book at least contains a robust counter-argument (s) to it’s fundamental premise.

Another early example of rightwing populist party was the italian postwar “Common Man’s Front”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Man%27s_Front

I think that there are many ideological similarities with trumpism. After the Christian Democratic party (DC) proved to be anticommunist enough, the Common Man’s Front essentially disappeared and merged with the MSI (that was essentially the postwar rebranding of the fascist party). PS: the MSI entered government with Berlusconi after more than 40 years, its current name is Fratelli d’Italia (brothers of Italy).

Abbasso tutti!

Andres @31
Yes, I was wrong on that point (a weird mistake, or at least I shd have known better). The Treaty of Versailles (as I was reminded by a glance at Wiki) turned what had been the German colonies in Africa into League mandates (at least formally; the mandates were administered by one or other of the WW1 victors, meaning here mainly Britain or France). But obviously my grasp of colonial history is not what it shd be. (Btw I keep telling myself to make time to read S. Pedersen’s fairly recent book on the League of Nations, but I haven’t.)

and what I always wanted to ask you guys:
What is the purpose of all this… ”musing” if Trump is just this ”continuation of long-established Republican policy and practices” or ”represents a radical transformation of the Republican party and American conservatism”?

Is it to teach Americans – who had/have a very difficult time to see any difference in their ”Politicians” – as so many Americans seem to believe that – ”all Politicians are the same BAD” – to differentiate?
And learn them – that indeed – there are a lot of differences between different politicians and different political believes and programs in general?

OR is it – in Trumps case – just an effort to ”elevate” a ”complete and total Idiot” to some level of ”serious discussion worthiness”?
(and please excuse – like always – my playful ”wordsmithing”)
BUT this questions – really always ”bugged” me – ever since so many of my fellow American voted for the Racist Science Denying Clownstick because they thought he was some kind of ”anti-mainstream-straight-talker” just like Bernie…

So –
YEAH! –
Whassup (old?) guys?

Procopius@40 wrote “Trump’s base is not people suffering economic insecurity, it is not people who cling to their guns and religion. It’s well-to-do people who thought he would be good for them, and our future depends on whether they still think that or not.” Despite much good sense in the rest of the comment, it seems to me Procopius is still buying into the error of the OP in dwelling on the “base” as if mass pressure were pushing events. This still seems to me more like a prejudice against the mob than a reasoned position, which is inconsistent with the main thrust of the comment in my opinion.

This higher SES segment of the population is not the people who have been investing in audience manipulation by Fox and Clearwater and so on. And they are not the people who have given Trump billions of free publicity (and hid the unsavory details of his previous life from widespread knowledge.) The core of Trump’s support is still rich people.

Also, the fact that relatively higher income people, who are apt to have stock market investments or real property doesn’t mean they can’t feel insecure about whether they can lose position. You might sensibly argue that it’s the ones who have something to lose but are low enough on the scale to feel the most insecure about the future. Indeed they might not be able to afford the best lawyers to legally avoid income taxes and actually pay some (as well as sales and property taxes, though these are usually omitted as taxes, a la Mitt Romney.)

Quotes from Trotsky I’ve read tend to center on enraged petty bourgeois who are losing their social position. (Curiously I’ve not his collection about fascism in Germany.) That sort of thing sounds plausible to me.

Referring back to the OP in general, it seems desirable to repeat: The continuity in Trump is not, not with the Republican Party so much as all predecessors who scoffed at the law or pursued mad policies aimed at war abroad and regimentation at home. There are precedents like Jackson monekying with the national banking system or appeasing slavers by censoring the US mails. Or with Polk falsifying reports to Congress to engineer a war. Or Truman starting a war without troubling to go to Congress for a declaration of war and demanding a purge via loyalty oaths of the entire federal government. Obama even thought it would be favorable publicity to let it be known he drew up drone murder lists, even to kill US citizens.

Part of the problem in trying to determine how Trump is continuous with the Republic (not a democracy!) Party is that so many of his offenses are also continuous with the Democratic Party. There just is no way to make pot/kettle arguments convincing to uncommitted ears.

And the second issue, how Trump is different? King Andrew (as some coevals fondly dubbed him) was infamous for law-breaking. Were I able to write, I would venture into an alternate history SF novel, called El Presidente, which would be the life of Andrew Jackson transposed into a world where el Norte was a colony escaped from imperial Spain. Jackson as an early caudillo? Seems right to me. At any rate, Jackson is largely impervious to the modified limited hangout critiques popular in discreetly quite academic circles.

Possibly the more pertinent predecessor is Richard Nixon, even more directly part of the Great Purge of the Left than Trump (who is a mere acolyte of Roy Cohn.) Despite the incredible push to assimilate Trump to Jimmy Carter, Nixon is the spiritual predecessor. If I recall correctly Nixon was reported to have said that after he got done, they’d never be able to go back. As in, the old democracy would be gone. I think that is a part of Trump’s personal vision, which is why trashing government isn’t weakness but strategy. What’s truly different about Trump is that neither the Democratic Party isn’t getting the kind of support from the rich people to fight in the media and Congress. Not even Bezos, a personal rival, is pursuing all avenues. Compare the Washington Post then, and now.

I am not a historian, but it seems to me as if for anything that people point to at the moment and say “this is unusually bad, unusually corrupt, or unusually threatening to our freedom of speech or democracy” you can go back a few decades and find something comparable or worse. In the USA, the gilded age, Jim Crow, lynchings, McCarthy, Vietnam, etc., immediately spring to mind even for this foreigner. Similar observations can be made for the countries I am citizen of.

Humans today don’t really fundamentally differ from humans forty, eighty, or one thousand years ago, and we see throughout similar patterns of behaviour and cycles of reckless and corrupt politicians, then the next, more serious generation that has seen where that leads, and then the next one that has forgotten it again. I do indeed perceive certain parallels between the contemporary politics of the anglosphere and Weimar, in particular between Murdoch’s TV empire, the British right-wing press, and Hugenberg‘s newspapers.

So is there anything that is really new? Perhaps the impact of social media. They might be something that individuals and society as a whole still have to accommodate themselves with, similar to the impact that the rise of the printing press had when it came to Europe.

@48
Given the current state of the American economy, and, even more important, what is likely to be the state of the American economy in 6 months time, if the United States had a functioning opposition party (it doesn’t, obviously), Senators and Congressmen for this hypothetical opposition party would now be asking hard questions about whether this whole ‘American Empire’ thing was really working out, and, if so, for whom.

“So is there anything that is really new? Perhaps the impact of social media. They might be something that individuals and society as a whole still have to accommodate themselves with, similar to the impact that the rise of the printing press had when it came to Europe.“

Embedded in the German TV series Heimat was a scene that caught a foreshadowing of the social contagions (both benign and malign) spread via new media.

https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/heimat-unreliable-memories-and-living-in-spite-of-everything/

If only brainwashed cult folowing would be limited to the low educated and poor. That would be nice.

It seems to me that Hidari is onto something at 33:

Doubtless there is the simple and obvious fact that Trump is not a politician…. In other words American politicians over the years/decades (most American politician are now very old, at least the ones in power) learn ‘what can be done’ and ‘what can be said’.

I used to wind my National Review reading father up by saying, “I’m not one of those socialists who thinks President Reagan is stupid. After all, he’s possibly the most accomplished politician of my lifetime. He’s very skilled and very smart.” I think Americans in general, and the right in particular, have invested in believing that there are spaces where politics don’t intrude, and people who are above politics are the best people to solve our problems.

If my dad were still alive, I’d wind him up by asking, “How does the world Trump wants differ from that Reagan wanted?”

I suspect, though, that Trump realized that fifty odd years after Goldwater that “what you can say,” has changed. It’s not that he doesn’t know the rules and flouts them through ignorance. It’s that what he says is now permitted by enough people that he can accumulate and exercise power. He may be operating from ignorance, but he’s following the current rules that obtain in his neighborhood.

@54/49

There was a range of opinion among British and French political parties and publics about how to deal w their formal empires as the “winds of change” (Harold Macmillan’s phrase) swept through the colonial world in the 1950s and into the early 60s, though there was generally more of a wide cross-ideological consensus in France about the importance of hanging onto the empire. Which helps explain why France fought long wars in Indochina and Algeria[*], whereas Britain, despite some very brutal practices e.g. in E. Africa (Kenya) and bitter “counterinsurgency” campaigns (Malaya), let go of its colonies on the whole less violently and (to use one scholar’s word) less “histrionically.”

[*France officially considered Algeria not a colony but an integral part of France; can look up the details on what this meant.]

That said, I wd not really go along w Hidari @49’s phrasing. He’s right that there’s not a whole lot of opposition to the current U.S. global footprint in the Dem Party (though there is specific disagreement w some of Trump’s policies, e.g. T’s identification w Netanyahu to take just one example). But this doesn’t mean the Dems aren’t an opposition party, it just means that their status as such is more obvious when it comes to issues of domestic policy and that not a lot of Dem politicians are making connections between “empire” and domestic policy.

On some of Mr. Mister’s questions (rhetorical or actual), I’d say that US “empire” is a product of several factors: (1) inertia (the global base network and the alliance structure have been around for a long time); (2) political clout of mil/ind complex and defense “establishment”; (3) a more minor but not totally insignificant factor is the sincerely held conviction of some/many in the US f.p. establishment (and elsewhere) that U.S. hegemony is generally “benign” and benefits others not just the US. There are several think tanks and policy institutes that oppose “empire” and they even occasionally break through to get a hearing in US “mainstream” media but so far have not managed to move the needle a whole lot, I wd say.

I think Americans in general, and the right in particular, have invested in believing that there are spaces where politics don’t intrude, and people who are above politics are the best people to solve our problems.

Politics necessarily includes the possibility of power being wielded by those who do not currently hold it; therefore, to form the concept of ‘politics’ is a left-wing step. Conversely, an apolitical solution to any problem must mean that power remains with those who currently wield it and is therefore an inherently right-wing conception.

We once had a conversation about anti-deportation work I was doing and she said, “but those people are illegal.”

I’ve never been a Christian myself, but what did she think Jesus had to say about that?

LFC @ 57:

“[A] more minor but not totally insignificant factor is the sincerely held conviction of some/many in the US f.p. establishment (and elsewhere) that U.S. hegemony is generally “benign” and benefits others not just the US. There are several think tanks and policy institutes that oppose “empire” and they even occasionally break through to get a hearing in US “mainstream” media but so far have not managed to move the needle a whole lot, I wd say.”

That’s a crucial point. The idea of US hegemony still enjoys ironclad support in Washington, and near-unanimous, sometimes deeply emotional buy-in in many allied countries. Read some German international affairs commentators, for instance, and you’ll get the sense they’re more royalist than the king. That’s why I think you’re both underestimating support for, and overestimating criticism of, US imperialism among foreign policy communities.

That’s also why it’s hard to foresee any reversal of US foreign policy orthodoxy until a new generation that has been educated to question the idea of benevolent American hegemony takes over. Even that assumes the next Republican administration follows policies at least as awful as those of the current one. And even then, between those presidencies, we may well have Biden and a return to comfortable suzerainty, grounded in stated multilateralism and adherence to the UN charter. What Europeans – and probably Oz and NZ – are praying for, in other words.

Another problem is that it’s very hard to imagine what life without US hegemony would look like, assuming our leaders were remotely ready to consider that option. No other country in our lifetimes has exercised global power on such scale, and certainly none has any experience in dismantling a global empire. Maybe post-World War II UK bears loose comparison, if that, but no one with any institutional memory of that process is around to advise current rulers. Do you bring the troops home? Do you end the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency? If so, how? Do you hand the reins to Russia and China – doubtful – or do you move towards a multilateral world order? What does that even look like? Operationally, ending the empire might prove very difficult to conceptualize, let alone to bring about.

“I’ve never been a Christian myself, but what did she think Jesus had to say about that?”
That Jesus only said you shall love your next, and the foreign other is not my next. He is instead a big sinner, breaking the rules and shall be punished, possibly by death.

My rich evangelical cousin thinks Mathew 20,1-16 (labourers get the same wage no matter how long they work) means that everyone who is jealous of him being filthy rich for no obvious bigger effort than others is a big sinner. When i carefully suggested to him one could also interpret this one as to each according to his needs, favouring equality, he genuinly sounded like he never heard that interpretation even so he obviously discussed that story ad nauseum at his evangelical upper class bible circle.
The real absurd part is: My cousin is German like me, he got no connection to the US besides that stupid church. That alone was sufficient for him to believe every single typical US conspiracy theory, from covid to global warming, to all government statistics are made up (but for profits are trustworthy) that have hardly any direct connection to evangelical teaching.

Further to the comments at 62/63:

Charles Kupchan’s The End of the American Era (2003), which I did read, argued that the EU was on the verge of emerging as an independent center of power to challenge U.S. leadership, but the years since show that the argument didn’t really pan out. Then more recently Kupchan’s view seems to be that no one is in charge (No One’s World, 2013).

“I’ve never been a Christian myself, but what did she think Jesus had to say about that?”
That Jesus only said you shall love your next, and the foreign other is not my next. He is instead a big sinner, breaking the rules and shall be punished, possibly by death.

I don’t want to make you feel as if you’re being cross-examined, but I’m genuinely fascinated, even if only temporarily.

It’s not news to me that people interpret scriptural texts differently (just as they do with other texts). For example, when you describe the different interpretations offered by yourself and your cousin of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, I can figure out for myself, at least roughly, how each of you arrived at each particular interpretation (even though my own interpretation of the text would be different from both).

It’s also not news to me that some people believe that the foreigner is not a neighbour but a sinner deserving of punishment, and I can figure out for myself, at least roughly, some of the ways in which people might arrive at this conclusion (even though I disagree profoundly).

What I can’t figure out–and what intrigues and baffles me–is this: which is the scriptural text that your mother interprets as meaning ‘the foreigner is not a neighbour but a sinner deserving of punishment’? Although, as I mentioned, I’ve never been a Christian, I could easily find the texts which I would interpret as meaning the opposite, but my purpose here is not to prove that your mother is no true Christian (I regard that as a meaningless argument) but just to arrive at a better understanding of her point of view. As I observed at the beginning, at least for the moment it fascinates me.

@
”Then more recently Kupchan’s view seems to be that no one is in charge (No One’s World, 2013)”

BUT as now the Virus is in charge –
”BIGLY” – as Trump would say –
and there is no US ”Empire” anymore –
”Sadly” – as Trump would say –
and we – so many of the once proud Empire – couldn’t even meet this summer in CA -(because some… some ”Virus” rules) –
AND we couldn’t meet in our favourite ”Empire where no one is in charge” -(London) BE-cause that’s where the Virus rules too – so for the time being the Virus is ”the Empire” – and thanks god ”that Empire” doesn’t rule Italy anymore and we can drive to the Isola Pescatore on Sunday…

‘there is no US ”Empire” anymore –’

Ha! Yes the Americans would very much like you to believe that.

Getting back to the topic, the ever excellent Branko Milanovic has a blog post that clarifies some thoughts of my own about what is ‘different’ about Trump.

‘Until Trump came to power the invasion of the political space by economic rules of behavior was concealed. There was a pretense that politicians treated people as citizens. The bubble was burst by Trump who, unschooled in the subtleties of democratic dialectics, could not see how anything could be wrong with the application of business rules to politics. Coming from the private sector, and from its most piracy-oriented segment dealing with the real estate, gambling and Miss Universe, he rightly thought—supported by the neoliberal ideology—that the political space is merely an extension of economics.

Many accuse Trump of ignorance. But this is I think a wrong way to look at things. He may not be interested in the US constitution and complex rules that regulate politics in a democratic society because he, whether consciously or intuitively, thinks that they should not matter or even exist. The rules with which he is familiar are the rules of companies: “You are fired!”: a purely hierarchical decision, based on power consecrated by wealth, and unchecked by any other consideration….

People complain that Trump, in this crisis, is lacking the most elementary human compassion. But while they are right in diagnosis, they are wrong in understanding the origin of the lack of compassion. Like any rich owner he does not see that his role is to show compassion to his hired hands, but to decide what they should do, and even when the occasion presents itself, to squeeze them out of their pay, make them work harder or dismiss them without a benefit. In doing so to his putative countrymen he is just applying to an area called “politics” the principles that he has learned and used for many years in business.

Trump is the best student of neoliberalism because he applies its principles without concealment.’

I think this is accurate and shows why Trump may not be the best American President but he is definitely the most representative American President. He is American-ness boiled down to its absolute essence: the purpose of human existence is to accumulate money and commodities: everything else is meaningless and valueless, everyone is for hire, everyone is for sale, truth, beauty, philosophy and religion are for sale to the highest bidder. And of course this is the essence of capitalism, boiled down to its essence, denuded of its social democratic ‘veneer’ that was only necessary when there were other options, other socio-political arrangements either of the extreme right or extreme left that one could choose from. But now fascism and socialism and, finally social democracy (even in its watered down Blairite/Clintonite form) have been annihilated, and there is only Trumpism from now on. Blairism has been Pasokified, the radical left will always be destroyed by the right with the compliance of the liberals, and fascism is simply a voodoo doll to be brought out of the closet to scare the liberals into voting Democrat (or whatever is the local equivalent…outside of the United States with its bizarre electoral system, this is unlikely to work for much longer: cf Macron).

So that’s it, that’s your future. It won’t go on forever of course. Everything has an end, and we all have a fairly clear idea of how this particular game will play out.

https://glineq.blogspot.com/2020/04/trump-as-ultimate-triumph-of.html?spref=tw

@72
”But now fascism and socialism and, finally social democracy (even in its watered down Blairite/Clintonite form) have been annihilated, and there is only Trumpism from now on”.

What? –
as I just posted that WE are celebrating the (”social-democratic”) Triumph of Science over some Right-Wing STUPID at the Isola Pescatore in Italy?

AND!
Sorry – there CAN’T be an ”American Empire” anymore – as long as the ”Virus Empire” DOMINATES the American Empire and our FBA’s (full bloodied) American friends can’t even join US!
As how often does it have to be said:
”In order to be an ”Empire” you HAVE to be ”an extensive group of states” AND not some ”Isolated Island of STUPID”.

AND about ”the Science Denying Dude” who destroyed the US Empire –
STOP writing about him as if he wouldn’t be ”FIRST” in being STUPID.

MisterMr@62 listed theories for European colonialism: “1) need for captive markets for mainland products;
2) need for cheap non-industrial resources;
3) according to for example Hobson (who was an underconsumptionist) the military was a great thing to blow money on for a capitalist country (increases demand but doesn’t compete against private business) but once you are spending a lot on the military you have to use it now or then.”

Strictly speaking, these are rationales. “Rationale” means justification, an effort to show the nation as a whole benefits from the expense and peril of empire. “Rationale” also means a scheme to select and proportion means to ends, that the goals may be more effectively achieved.

I suggest that a tremendous amount of effort is usually expended by the rulers to convince the people at large they are being threatened somehow and empire is not aggression but defense, and that they are nobly sacrificing for the Good and the Right in a crusade to help fellow good people. This is inconsistent but a fraudulent sales campaign is not about logic, but rhetoric.

By and large, I suggest, empires are for vested interests (to use an old phrase.) And, every effort to prove the mass of people somehow profit tend to be shaky because they don’t profit, not in the sense implied. The idea that a public school teacher in the US (tacitly assumed to be white, so far as I can tell,) is the primary exploiter of the oppressed peoples of the world (tacitly assumed to be POC) because they are sucking at the teat of the empire seems to me to be much more about moral condemnation of the masses.

This kind of thing, where the psychological rewards of villainy are supposed to lure the rabble into creating empires is I think not just a diversion into vain moralizing, away from effective politics. But it is an active endorsement of folly, the absurd notion that ideas, in the sense of autonomous thoughts freely chosen by individuals, rule the world. This may be regarded as philosophy of science, but if so, it is a deeply reactionary philosophy of science, the Mont Pelerin kind of von Hayek and Popper.

If instead of looking at rationales, you look at history, the slow creation of “European” colonialism seems to lie elsewhere.

The colonies are machinery of conquest where the goal is to rob the inhabitants. The Spanish colonies were about the seizure of gold and silver and the colonial apparatus was about making that happen to the benefit of the Spanish rulers. Other early colonies were about stealing land, as in Ireland. And though in one sense many of the settlers who came in to work those lands may be viewed as thieves in their own right, the simple truth is there is a fundamental ambiguity: Most of those people were also subordinate, even to the point where their very presence was involuntary.

Whenever private parties can rob, such as pirates, they do. But as in so many things, if you really want to get the job done, private initiative and wealth and free markets really don’t work the way economists pretend. Colonies can even be perceived as an orderly division of the loot, at least in some cases. Columbus pretended it was India to preserve his legal rights. (In my opinion, though for some reason lots of people seem to assume it was merely stupidity.) His patents from the Spanish crown were about property rights, and so were colonies.

Colonies were very rarely about markets, historically speaking, as it generally does not take an elaborate government administration to sell things to people who want to buy them. One of the most important examples of colonization, India, seems to show that destroying competition, especially in textiles, was a key factor. Distorting local economy by force and menaces, as when driving Bengal farmers to produce opium rather than food, created the Great Bengal Famine or the depredations of Leopold in pursuit of rubber in the Congo, was also exceedingly important. The economic benefits from this sort of thing did not redound to the nation, even if John Stuart Mill was fond of the contributions to a rather specific class of colonial administrators.
The replacement of the East India Company (both English and Dutch,) I think is a fine example of how risks to the people who truly profited were pushed off onto the home government. Colonies were a socialization of costs to the handful who personally benefited, as in the white highlands of Kenya.

And though Hobson may have thought armies had to be used occasionally, just because, I would simply point out, that once great armies exist, they pose a risk to others. The commonest proximate cause of war is the belief in easy victory. (The second is that the rulers are losing the peace and have no way to win but by arms.) If you think of diplomacy as an elaborate system to prevent destructive wars, then you should realize all complex systems will eventually break down.

Once you admit the threat of competition from other empires, colonies are very much about preempting enemies. The notorious Scramble for Africa is a particular convincing example of this, indicating how strong a motive it is.

The current US system of military bases that chain that larger part of the planet is not nearly as burdensome as colonies, which usually had to gesture at services and investments in the colonized lands. But the notion it is paying off for the US people is as dubious as the notion the conquest of Ireland paid off for the English people, rather than some English lords. Trumpery of course, is about pretending the US crusades should pay off. The logical conclusion is to quit, not get more ruthless, which is what a ph stands for, despite pretenses.

It seems to me we should think of the imperialism as a class thing. The state in a single country carries out fundamental activities in defense of property (which includes enforcing a system of land and labor policies, as well as merely policing the streets.) The states in the world economy also protect property, not least from other states. Their actions are about ensuring the value of the currency, the safety of property, the continuation of the current system. Like these activities within domestic realms, the activities abroad mean that the normal operations of capitalist development concentrate and centralize capital, generate financial powers that ever more shape all operations and remorselessly, ceaselessly support the repression of the working classes above all else.

I think this is not a digression from Trump’s uniqueness. I think Trump is resorting to cruder exploitation of so-called allies like the EU and pursuing aggressive economic warfare (which means risking military warfare of course,) because the capitalist system on a world scale is not doing well. Desperate times call for desperate measure, for capitalists too. Individual capitalists cut out the luxury of quality control when profits drop. And en masse they are cutting out the luxury of the old forms of bourgeois democracy. Hence Trump.

Nastydude-ess:

“AND about ”the Science Denying Dude” who destroyed the US Empire –
STOP writing about him as if he wouldn’t be ”FIRST” in being STUPID.”

There is an undefined, blurry VENN-MATHGUY DIAGRAM overlap between SELF-SERVING and MALEVOLENT and (relatively?) STUPID. Clownstick may be at the three-set overlap center, but too much of the political class (though not just the CLOWNSTICK PARTY) is on their surfboards weaving zig-zags between the three.

@steven t johnson 79

“The idea that a public school teacher in the US (tacitly assumed to be white, so far as I can tell,) is the primary exploiter of the oppressed peoples of the world (tacitly assumed to be POC)”
I’m totally not tacitally assuming colors, in fact I think that USA imperialism to the degree it is advantageous to the USA it is advantageous against other industrialized countries, that often are quite withish.

“This kind of thing, where the psychological rewards of villainy are supposed to lure the rabble into creating empires”
The point is not luring the rabble, the problem is avoiding a crisis of the capitalist system, that in the immediate is certainly damaging to workers too. By the way, this is Lenin’s idea of a worker’s aristocracy.

“Colonies were very rarely about markets, historically speaking, as it generally does not take an elaborate government administration to sell things to people who want to buy them.”
It does if you want to prevent them from buying from others, but this is something you agree with later.

“But the notion it is paying off for the US people is as dubious as the notion the conquest of Ireland paid off for the English people, rather than some English lords.”
My understanding is that income in Britain in the 19th century was still higer than income in Ireland, though.

“I think this is not a digression from Trump’s uniqueness. I think Trump is resorting to cruder exploitation of so-called allies like the EU and pursuing aggressive economic warfare (which means risking military warfare of course,)”
Trump is attempting this sort of economic warfare, but I doubt that he can win thias war: for example I think that if he actually managed to put on substantial tariffs the USA would lose out more than others, which is sort of my point (unless you assume that the USA is completely stupid, one would assume that since the current world system was built by the USA it at least in part advantages the USA, whereas Trumpers believe thy are being taken advantage of).

What comes after November looks increasingly like more of the same only worse – a Trump victory and a general decline in civic goodwill, at least in the short term.

The conflict between those who can profit off America first and those who want to return to globalism will intensify. Democratic voters in larger cities will question more intensely the efficacy of their political leaders and the Great Society policies of the past – both from the left and from the right. The white moderate Democratic urban voter is likely this election’s ‘secret Trump voter.’

This constituency will not be moved to vote for a leader from the last century, and especially not if ‘the real candidate’s’ is selected only/primarily on a combination of ethnicity and gender. Every night cities burn, police retreat, violence increases – and the media response is mute. All roads lead to Putin is not going to get Dems over. AOC dropping the F-bomb on the floor of Congress impresses few.

Bogus stands against ‘federal troops invading’ Detroit and Portland read as flip political posturing, even as minority-owned businesses are torched by out-of-control ‘anarchists’ travelling in from secure suburban enclaves. The leader from the last century death-rattles ‘first racist president’ – another gaffe certain to disappoint even his most cynical handlers and supporters. Apparatchiks from the failed Sanders campaign and the DNC work fervently to re-fashion their globalist candidate as a leftist populist leader. Mine workers shiver watching the DNC embrace the ‘job-creating’ green new deal. 2020 more and more resembles 2016. The Dem holds commanding leading in the polls and among the pundits while the enthusiasm gap between the two candidates points to another ‘surprise’ Trump victory.

The current response against the sitting president seems tired and feeble by 2015-6 standards. Celebrity-millionaires rail on Twitter and are re-tweeted a billionty times by the like-minded just as they have lo these many years. The followers of these keyboard commandos will not vote, or do so in Dem dominated enclaves, or are simply too young. Years ago, Henry sagely noted the difference between activists who knock on doors and those who embrace politics to improve a social media profile.

Now, we can all finally meet the ‘primary source’ of the infamous pee- dossier here: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/07/24/meet_steele_dossiers_primary_subsource_fabulist_russian_at_us_think_tank_whose_boozy_past_the_fbi_ignored_124601.html

Criminal investigations into the hoax, like the violence in America’s cities, has been muted by the media, or dismissed as politically-motivated. Had the NYT and old media covered the last four years with some energy, none of this would come as a surprise. The irony is that four years of covering for Obama’s FBI, Justice and CIA bad apples isn’t enough to save their jobs. The new guard have little need for Putin puppet narratives. The DNC is as much the enemy as Trump.

A vocal supporter of the president was executed in broad daylight on the streets of Wisconsin two days ago.

Out of answers, and out of candidates, leaves unhappy voters with few choices. George Will, a media figure from the last century, announced he will vote for the candidate from the last century. It’s like that.

The gap between the candidates will close as COVID becomes the new normal. Those who wish to blame the president for COVID and everything else will do so. The president’s base is unified, defiant, and (I’d say) growing.

Nobody but the very boldest, would ever in their right minds publicly admit to supporting the president. The toxicity of Trump hate, the vitriol and venom directed against his supporters, makes current polls almost meaningless.

Regarding the American empire, as some call it; this empire is not in retreat. Space is the new frontier. The desire/need for new resources and trade and territory – the impetus for empire, rather than mere colonies, is ever present. Corporations form to profit from the new terrains, online and otherwise.

Where will voters and ordinary folks figure in the post 2020 universe. Where do you think? The same place we’ve always been – squarely at the bottom.

@83 ‘What comes after November looks increasingly like more of the same only worse – a Trump victory and a general decline in civic goodwill, at least in the short term.’

Of course you may be right, but it certainly doesn’t look like a Trump victory right now.

And to follow-up on the OP, I expect Trump to effectively retire the day after inauguration. He seems sick to death of the job. Pence takes over, and Donald plays a lot of golf.

@
”I expect Trump to effectively retire the day after inauguration – He seems sick to death of the job”.

and I always like ph jokes the best – with the exception when he jokes about ”the people” – the ”voters and ordinary folks” who in the post 2020 universe. -(after Trump) – will find themselves in such a worst place – than they’ve always been – BIGLY – HUUUGLY at the bottom.
And it will take the US Dems a lot – to stop the –
”general decline in civic goodwill, at least in the short term”.

And as ph writes himself:
Nobody but the very boldest, would ever in their right minds publicly admit to supporting the president. The toxicity of (rightful) Trump hate, the vitriol and venom directed against his stupid supporters, make the current response against the sitting president so much more effective by 2015-6 standards.

Even his Celebrity-millionaires buddies rail on Twitter and are re-tweeted a billionty times by the like-minded and the followers of these keyboard commandos will vote,
like George Will, a media figure from the last century, announced he will vote NOT FOR TRUMP It’s like that.

The gap between the candidates will never close as COVID never will NOT become ”the new normal” in the next months. Those who wish to blame the president for COVID and everything else will do so in order to reduce the president’s crumbing base.

Regarding the American empire, as some call it; this empire is in retreat – as Space is NOT ”the new frontier” in comparison to the desire/need for flying to Europe – and the profit from ”new terrains” -(like vacations in Utah) can’t make up for looking at the Italian Lake I’m looking at –

Right now!
-(and especially after this awesome lunch at the Belvedere)

AND so what comes after November looks increasingly better and better – with Biden or any D-Candidate and especially with AOC dropping the F-bomb on the floor of Congress so impressively.

And the stands against ‘federal troops invading’ Detroit and Portland and the ‘first racist president’ – will be forgotten fast as ”another gaffe of some US Idiots” – and –
Trump will have a really difficult time… golfing – again – as he had ruined his handicap for life –

AND NO PROBLEM calling me ”dudess” – even if I prefer ”dudett”
AND I will repost this comment again – after the election of the New -(NotTrump) President – in order that WE ALL can have a good laugh with our comedian –
ph.

and by the way –
as Trump has just complained – that there is far too much ”trending” – and I told you guys that you just need to look at ”trending” if y’all want to know how anything will turn out –
Let’s try to beat the ph joke about ”golfing” with:

”If you live by the Tweet – you die by the Tweet”!

I was going to post something else here, my own inconsequential thoughts, but Samuel Moyn puts it far better than I could.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/19/the-trouble-with-comparisons/

ph assuming Trump won the election yet again fits CT though my response to MisterMr doesn’t? Nonetheless, I must demur to Hidari@95, sort of. Moyn is wrong, because Moyn is dismissing the intimate relationship between imperialism, colonialism, war, even death camps. The first essays in death camps were the US jails where black men were worked to death. (Ava Duvernay apologized for them as mere slave labor, an expose of Lincoln’s supreme villainy in saving the slavery we have today.) Like everyone else at CT, when it comes down to it, the millions dead in the great crusade against communism, were, as Madeleine Albright put it, a price worth paying.

But even though Trump was an open pupil of Roy Cohn, tracing his political lineage to the Cold War is still astonishingly incomprehensible. I would quote Upton Sinclair, but he was an optimist: It’s hard to get someone to simply shut up when they hear someone else make a point that shows them to be wrong, or worse, irrelevant.

ph’s characterization of Biden as someone who wouldn’t be hired as a greeter at Walmart says nothing about Biden but quite a lot about ph’s boundless asininity. We already know what ph’s political opinions are, so his finding new and ever more hyperbolic ways of expressing them really doesn’t add much to the thread.

I’m a Foreignanian who’s never even been in a Walmart, so I don’t know what’s expected of Walmart greeters; still, I can’t think of any good reason why somebody who was drawing up a list of desiderata for a US President should include ‘would be a good choice for employment as a Walmart greeter’. Did Abraham Lincoln have the qualities that would make somebody a good choice for employment as a Walmart greeter? Did Franklin D Roosevelt? Did [insert here the name of somebody you think was or would have been a good choice for US President]?

Still, if that’s the test we’re applying, would Donald Trump be hired as a greeter at Walmart? I have only the sketchiest idea of what a greeter does, but if I were ever to walk into a Walmart I think I’d prefer being greeted by somebody like Joe Biden to being greeted by somebody like Donald Trump. I think Joe Biden, whatever his limitations in the role, would probably still be the better choice of the two for the role of Walmart greeter, as well as being obviously the better choice for the role of US President.

@96 Thanks for the pushback. I’ve read each of your points twice (at least) and find myself unpersuaded. The best and most reliable indicators are the lack of confidence Dem voters and the Dem establishment have consistently demonstrated in Biden’s candidacy. He’s won nothing. The DNC changed the rules (remember?) to get Bloomberg on the debate stage because Biden was so demonstrably unable to cope. When that strategy failed, Bernie (not a Democrat) surged. The DNC elites rallied and ‘persuaded’ a number of Dem candidates to drop out, and let’s recall just how mediocre this crew is.

The DNC is going to glue Obama and George Clooney together on to the Biden shell. Might work, but my sense is that the strategy simply underscore’s Biden’s screaming weaknesses. If the DNC trusted Biden to command the stage, he’d be ripping through the crowds to public acclaim. Had he a pair and any real power, Biden’d tell the DNC to stick it and run as his own man. Biden can’t. He can’t because he radiates uncertainty, confusion and weakness. He’s being handled and he knows it.

I very strongly suspect Biden is no longer in charge of his own campaign. My bet is that a condition of Obama’s public support is that team O calls the shots. Obama isn’t likely to sit still and let his legacy get trashed twice because the ‘best’ the Dems can offer can’t get the job done.

Unconvincing as a leader couldn’t be clearer with O hogging the spotlight. The message? Don’t worry voters, O inc. is really at the helm and won’t let Joe screw up to badly.

Might work, but I very much doubt it.

As for, ad homs and adding value @… etc., have a nice day.

@101
It’s depressing that I have to tell a self-professed Trump supporter this, but, see all that stuff about ‘values’ and ‘character’ and ‘personal morality’ that the NYT and other pearl-clutching liberals are always going on about? If 2016 teaches us anything it’s that no one gives a shit. Absolutely no one cares. Everything negative about Biden can also be said if Trump and, ipso facto, everything negative that can be said about Trump (too old, too sexist, too white, a history of, um problematic statements about race, both been accused of rape and sexual harassment) can also be said about Biden.

No.
One.
Cares.

It’s only intellectuals who care about that ‘Shining City on the Hill’ crap. Ordinary Americans have a much more realistic grasp of what American politics is, and who American politicians are. Ordinary Americans think that almost all American politicians are cheating lying scumbags and they are not wrong.

What American voters want is a basic level of economic/socio-political competence, (demonstrated via some objective way: e.g. higher growth, lower unemployment, people feeling that they have money in their pocket) and some kind of proficiency in foreign policy, which can be demonstrated in an objective manner (i.e. not getting into any foreign wars). Trump has demonstrated the latter but, after Covid-19, not the former.

Vis a vis Covid-19, Trump….what’s the phrase? Oh yes ‘he radiates uncertainty, confusion and weakness.’ And everyone knows it.

Not that I’m calling the election for Biden, it’s still too far away and there are still too many variables, but it quite definitely does not look like a victory for Trump at the moment, and the ‘tone’ of the country is very different. As I said, at the moment, like it or not, Trump is now the mainstream, establishment candidate, and that is not a good fit for his personality.

If it is true that both parties are putting on uneffective dudes as candidates, it might be because nobody has a clear idea of what change they want.

Often people say they want change, but what they actually mean is that they want to go back to some sort of better past normal.

Trump in my opinion is an example of this,and perhaps Biden also is. Change however will still happen anyway.

Hidari 44:
“What’s very strange is that this point keeps on getting made in CT comments threads, frequently by people who then go onto make comments (about Trump supporters being ‘brainwashed’ about Trumpism being a ‘cult’ about them being ‘fanatics’) that only really make sense unless you infer that Trump supporters are mainly uneducated white workers which is not, of course, true.”

Hidari is here repeating a talking point he’s made frequently (see https://crookedtimber.org/2020/06/29/trumpism-after-trump/#comment-802166), claiming that CTers wrongly think Trump’s base is mainly the working class. Whether that is a fair rebuttal of Alan White (who in 6 referred to “large group of disenfranchised/minimally informed/rascist-friendly/under-economized white folks”) I leave to others to judge. Myself, I have always rejected the “working class” claim (which has been advanced by analysts both left and right) because it marginalizes all those workers who are not white and male and mostly rural. To put it differently, many white male workers have indeed voted for Trump but must workers are not white and male. And it angers me when “working class” is turned from an economic category into a racialized and genderized one.

With regard to Hidari’s quote above, there is an interesting claim implicit which deserves attention, namely Hidari suggests that only uneducated workers could be “brainwashed” or fanatical”, while wealthier or more educated people apparently are believed to behave rationally. I have encountered this rather condescending view of the “lower” classes many times here on CT and elsewhere. I remember when racist incidents surged after the German unification, there was always a discourse handy about “uneducated”, “underprivileged”, “left-behind” “youths”. But racism isn’t an invention of the poor and underprivileged, although they may act it out in somewhat different ways than the rich and powerful. Hitler (*) was supported by university professors no less fervently than by uneducated proletarians, and the financiers and capitalists who supported his rise weren’t acting purely out of rational economic interest. In fact, in purely economic terms, they made a spectacularly bad bet, as they would soon discover. Although it is true that many capitalists survived the Nazis and did well, in hindsight their economic interest would probably have been better served by helping to stabilize the Republic, rather than destabilizing it. The idea that capitalists are somehow above mere ideology and only act on hard economic data is itself an idealization of capitalism. Marx rightly pointed out that the mechanisms of capitalism are not a result of individual malice. Nevertheless economic actors often do have different choices (within the system) and those choices can matter. Otherwise it would be hard to explain why different capitalist societies have followed radically different pathways (including fascism and social democracy), while still being recognizably capitalist.

(*) Stop crying “Godwin’s law”! Godwin never said that one should never mention Hitler. I refer to Hitler not because I think he is a good historical model for Trump’s rise – there are vague parallels -, but because Hitler is an important edge case. One can learn from history at least this much: what happened in the past can happen again.

[Could you please discard the first post – sorry for that]

Jon 56: I don’t think your mum is representative, starting from the fact that she has actually seriously read the Bible (which most “Christian conservatices” don’t; I do wonder though what her reading has really gotten her if all she distills out of it is a “single issue”!). In any case, there is ample evidence that a majority of white evangelicals are supporting Trump not with disgust and holding their noses but full of enthusiasm. You might want to read this book: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/9/21291493/donald-trump-evangelical-christians-kristin-kobes-du-mez

@103 In the alternate universe you’re now writing from you inform us that it’s depressing to have to tell me about “character, values, and personal morality.’.

@101
It’s depressing that I have to tell a self-professed Trump supporter this, but, see all that stuff about ‘values’ and ‘character’ and ‘personal morality’ that the NYT and other pearl-clutching liberals are always going on about? If 2016 teaches us anything it’s that no one gives a shit. Absolutely no one cares.”

You can do as you, please, but I’d ask that you Command F the word “character, etc” on this page before flatly attributing to me words such as “character” I would never employ when discussing voters, or the criminals, con-artists, and hucksters commonly referred to as ‘politicians.’ As you rightly note, voters don’t much care, and those who do are among those easily fooled.

Pretty much everything else you write is either (forgive me, please) provably false, or a re-hash of your the ‘voter’s vote with their wallets’ argument. As I noted earlier, they do, but the determination of how their wallets will be protected rests heavily, I suggest (see my 88)

I’ve arrived at a point where I believe Trump will win. I’m employing the same metrics I employed in 2016: 1/ enthusiasm for the candidate; 2/ media skills; 3/ voter priorities.

I’ll be brief – the essentials are base enthusiasm across categories, on camera agility and atmospherics, track record and ability to convince voters the candidate is better than the other guy, the desire and ability to go for the throat, and the ability to fool voters.

Obama is among America’s finest, still, by these metrics, none of which have anything to do with ‘character and values’ -( see ‘the ability to fool voters.) As is Trump. Are you reading me clearly, now?

Biden today is an empty shell, a shadow of the slick liar who radiated authority and self-confidence (attributes which actually do matter), a fact underscored every time the two men appear on the same stage.

So, no, you’re dead wrong EVERY thing that can be said of Biden cannot be said of Trump. I have relatives in their nineties blessed with the genes to remain cogent and clear-headed.

What happened to Biden is physiology, nothing more.

Propelling a man who clearly needs care onto the stage is an act of supreme cynicism. A fact not likely to be lost on voters. Ditto the shoehorning of a DNC selected candidate into the VP slot to ‘take over’ January, 2021.

Putting this senior citizen onto the stage with one of the most talented and vicious debaters of the modern age is far beyond cynical, a man who “will tear him to bits” observed Sanders, who knows a thing or two about the cut and thrust. Hat-tip to BW for reminding us of just the Dem elites are.

What happens if Biden breaks down on stage before a national audience during one of the debates? That’s a real possibility. Is that the ‘plan’ – a ‘risk’ worth taking? Trigger a collapse during the debates, and hope enough Trump voters turn on him for publicly destroying a ‘much-loved’ liar and war criminal? Who knows.

Finally here’s Ted Rall, no fan of Trump, calling for Biden to withdraw in March because of his dementia.

“…I spent the last few years watching my mother’s decline due to dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. She had been brilliant. Years before her death, however, she was having a tough time keeping it together. I would have voted for her as president in 2012 but not 2016. It would have been wrong.

No one who has been close to someone deteriorating from that disease could fail to see the same signs in Biden. In online discussions Biden apologists sometimes say that a senile Biden is better than an evil Trump. Is this really where we are?…”

Seems so.

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_ted_rall/joe_biden_obviously_has_dementia_and_should_withdraw

Tm @106: You do have a point that it takes more than a change in the electoral rules to completely transform a country’s political map. In addition to getting rid of first-past-the-post voting, I should also have mentioned privatized campaign financing and a corporate-controlled news media that either manufactures consent (CNN, NYT, WSJ, etc.) or is an active neo-fascist propaganda tool (Fox, etc.). Plus an education system that should teach a diversified perspective on U.S. history (i.e. one that also spotlights the litany of crimes committed by various U.S. governments since 1776) rather than the Lost Cause-laced fairy tale of democracy we had when I was in high school. I was assuming that most readers including you are aware of these other aspects so that I could use a change in the electoral system as a shorthand for a radical turnover of the political system.

But it is your exhortation that progressives should work within the electoral system’s parameters while also working (?) to change it that seems to be on the pie-in-the-sky deluded side. For starters, the Democratic Party leadership will never voluntarily change unless it is pressured, and this will be true as long as the financial system controls the party’s purse strings. It is a serious exaggeration to say that the Dems are the party of Wall Street while the Rs are the party of Big Oil and Murdoch, but it has much more than a grain of truth.

As for working(?) to change the electoral system, this is not going to be accomplished by merely circulating pamphlets and petitions to Congress, nor by campaigning to elect more progressive Democrats. It will only happen after non-electoral political movements such as BLM (among many others) have succeeded in bringing the economy and the political system to a standstill by systematically disobeying the rules, with demonstrations being just one small aspect of such disobedience.

I don’t think the racist policing incidents of this year and the resulting backlash come close to tipping the boat over; COVID19 might do so if Trump gets re-elected and he and his party continue to push for infection promotion until a vaccine is mass-manufactured, but that looks less likely now; a competent but still oligarchic Biden administration (i.e., one that does little to reverse the “socialism of fools” subversion of the white working class that is the Republican electoral strategy) is now the baseline forecast. But if a future Republican government starts a war with Iran or China that leads to a conflagration, or if some environmental catastrophe lays bare how lacking in egalitarianism the U.S. political system really is, then we might at last get an avalanche of people disobeying to change the electoral system rather than working(?) to change the electoral system.

Every worker’s nightmare is the horrible boss — everyone knows at least one — who is utterly incompetent yet refuses to step aside. Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch — everything they handle turns to crud — but they’ll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions they’re supposed to lead.

Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, he’s not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America.

Has any previous president failed his big test as thoroughly as Trump has these past few months? He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.

The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic.

Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four — four! — per day in Germany. Vice President Mike Pence’s mid-June declaration that “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’” felt like whistling in the dark even at the time; now it feels like a sick joke.
PAUL KRUGMAN’S NEWSLETTER: Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what’s on Paul’s mind.
Sign Up
And all those extra deaths don’t seem to have bought us anything in terms of economic performance. America’s economic contraction in the first half of 2020 was almost identical to the contraction in Germany, despite our far higher death toll. And while life in Germany has in many ways returned to normal, a variety of indicators suggest that after two months of rapid job growth, the U.S. recovery is stalling in the face of a resurgent pandemic.

Wait, it gets worse. Trump, his officials and their allies in the Senate have been totally committed to the idea that the U.S. economy will experience a stunningly rapid recovery despite the wave of new infections and deaths. They bought into that view so completely that they seem incapable of taking on board the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t happening.

Just a few days ago Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economist, insisted that a so-called V-shaped recovery was still on track and that “unemployment claims and continuing claims are falling rapidly.” In fact, both are rising.

But because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis.
Editors’ Picks

Destroying a Way of Life to Save Louisiana
The Pandemic Could End the Age of Midpriced Dining
Why Did She Leave Me There?
Thanks to Republican inaction, millions of unemployed workers have seen their last checks from the Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, which was meant to sustain them through a coronavirus-ravaged economy; the virus is still raging, but their life support has been cut off.

So Trump has completely botched his job, bringing unnecessary pain to millions of Americans and unnecessary death to thousands. He may not care, but voters do. So he should be trying to turn things around, if only as a matter of political and personal self-interest.

And about ”The Republican phase transition”
(the topic of this thread)

from Paul Krugman:

”Every worker’s nightmare is the horrible boss — everyone knows at least one — who is utterly incompetent yet refuses to step aside. Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch — everything they handle turns to crud — but they’ll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions they’re supposed to lead.

Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, he’s not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America.

Has any previous president failed his big test as thoroughly as Trump has these past few months? He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.

The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic.

Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four — four! — per day in Germany. Vice President Mike Pence’s mid-June declaration that “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’” felt like whistling in the dark even at the time; now it feels like a sick joke.
PAUL KRUGMAN’S NEWSLETTER: Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what’s on Paul’s mind.
Sign Up
And all those extra deaths don’t seem to have bought us anything in terms of economic performance. America’s economic contraction in the first half of 2020 was almost identical to the contraction in Germany, despite our far higher death toll. And while life in Germany has in many ways returned to normal, a variety of indicators suggest that after two months of rapid job growth, the U.S. recovery is stalling in the face of a resurgent pandemic.

Wait, it gets worse. Trump, his officials and their allies in the Senate have been totally committed to the idea that the U.S. economy will experience a stunningly rapid recovery despite the wave of new infections and deaths. They bought into that view so completely that they seem incapable of taking on board the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t happening.

Just a few days ago Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economist, insisted that a so-called V-shaped recovery was still on track and that “unemployment claims and continuing claims are falling rapidly.” In fact, both are rising.

But because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis.
Editors’ Picks

Destroying a Way of Life to Save Louisiana
The Pandemic Could End the Age of Midpriced Dining
Why Did She Leave Me There?
Thanks to Republican inaction, millions of unemployed workers have seen their last checks from the Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, which was meant to sustain them through a coronavirus-ravaged economy; the virus is still raging, but their life support has been cut off.

So Trump has completely botched his job, bringing unnecessary pain to millions of Americans and unnecessary death to thousands. He may not care, but voters do. So he should be trying to turn things around, if only as a matter of political and personal self-interest”.

Btw Andres your last paragraph sounds a lot like that old chestnut “heightening the contradictions”. Sure, let’s hope for World War III or some really bad environmental catastrophe, that will surely get us closer to the revolution! Come on bro wake up, this is bullshit.

Tm @112, you have a wonderful way of putting words in people’s keyboards that they didn’t actually type out and also of knocking down straw men; the true mark of presidential material if our current president is any guide. Plus you even have down pat the basics of red-baiting as well. Are you sure you’re a progressive Democrat?

I am not advocating following a “heighten the contradictions” strategy** by any political party or movement. To do so would be not only stupid but highly immoral given the type of catastrophes that triggered left-wing revolutions in many countries over the past century and a half. That you would attribute such advocacy to me indicates that Republicans are not the only ones susceptible to the paranoid style in U.S. politics.

**Sorry to disappoint you but I am not one of Vladimir Ilych’s fanboys; I hate the bastard for having turned a true revolutionary moment into a quasi-tsarist dictatorship with a red flag—in some ways he was a hyper-efficient Donald Trump.

What I am saying is that the type of constitutional/electoral/political system the U.S. has makes it very difficult, maybe impossible, to enact the type of meaningful political reform that is needed to avoid further geopolitical disasters like Viet Nam or Iraq or the aftermath of the Arab Spring, health disasters like COVID19, and socio-environmental disasters like Hurricane Katrina (on that scale; the Flint example you cite is small potatoes in terms of the number of lives lost, and examples like it were common long before U.S. politics lurched to the right). Which means that further disasters like these are the baseline outlook whether there is anyone following a “heighten the contradictions” strategy or not.

Maybe the Democratic party can prove me wrong by electing a genuinely radical president and Congressional coalition that make the Clinton/Obama years look as deeply Republican-lite conservative as they actually were. But I would not get my hopes up; Sanders and AOC have been the much more the exception and not the rule so far. Which is also why I’m not optimistic that the U.S. will be able to avoid another Trumpism-without-Trump spell of Republican political power and its consequences.

Even if it were morally defensible (which it isn’t), it would be redundant to follow a “heighten-the-contradictions” strategy if the contradictions are already there and rising because the political-economic system is resistant to needed policy change. But one does need to be able to perceive when standard electoral politics by themselves will be insufficient to ward off catastrophe. Just like with the Civil Rights movement, it is non-electoral protest/disobedience movements that can shift the political center when elected leaders initially refuse to lead.

Ok, time to sign off on this thread. Observation/aside: CT posts that confine themselves to economics or books tend to generate more stable, civilized comment threads. But topics that relate to U.S. politics, no matter how well intentioned, tend to bring out immature comments and I have better things to do than to either type out a quick immature response or a longer-thought out mature one.

I should have known of course. I wrote this two weeks ago:

„If you, Andres, are interested in a meaningful exchange, it’s up to you to come up with actual arguments. You have several times attacked my with unfounded accusations. I already challenged you in 171 to come up with rebuttals if you wish to take issue with my arguments. So far, nothing. Again, it’s up to you.“

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/07/04/the-economic-consequences-of-the-pandemic/#comment-802672

LFC 114: you are of course entirely correct. The delusional thinking encountered so frequently around here is depressing.

Hidari: „Remember, in 2016, American voters did indeed think that Trump was awful. They just thought that Clinton was more awful.“

No they didn’t, they gave Clinton three million more votes. Engaging with Hidaris fantasy world is just as pointless as engaging with phs trolling. How about we give them a thread of their own?