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The prose in this piece is sufficiently smooth that one might almost be carried away by its perhaps slightly-too-clever argument that "limousine liberalism" -- to blame for many current woes -- is finally meeting its comeuppance. The piece's message is that the real villain is not liberalism, limousine or otherwise, but the capitalism that it has served. Consider this passage:
Brave and audacious as they were, rarely had the rebel movements of
the fabled sixties or those that followed explicitly challenged the
underlying distribution of property and power in American society. And
yet if liberalism had proved compatible enough with liberty, equality,
and democracy, capitalism was another matter.
A case could be made that some of the sixties movements did challenge "the
underlying distribution of property and power in American society." But since Fraser in this piece never bothers to define capitalism, he is free to argue, or at least to imply, that the only movements in recent years that have challenged "the
underlying distribution of property and power in American society" have done so under an anti-capitalist banner.
The implication is, at best, dubious. In 1976, Sen. Fred Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on the message that what was needed was "a fairer distribution of wealth and income and power." Harris framed that message in terms of left-populism rather than (explicit) anti-capitalism. Bernie Sanders has framed a similar message against the backdrop of a stated commitment to democratic socialism. But that commitment has been mainly a matter of ideological self-labeling rather than program, since, as Fraser himself notes, Sanders's proposals have been mostly a left-tinged version of the New Deal, not anything notably more radical.
Btw, this is not to deny that Sanders is a socialist: within certain wide limits, a socialist is anyone who calls himself or herself that, and Sanders, who joined the Young People's Socialist League as a student, has long embraced the label. But Fraser the historian, in ignoring Fred Harris and his left-populist presidential campaign -- one that occurred after the New Left had burned itself out and when 'limousine liberals' for their part were somewhat in retreat -- can reasonably be faulted for having fallen into one of the memory holes of recent history.
Ordinarily I don't read David Brooks (I listen to him occasionally on the NewsHour and that would seem to be, well, more than enough -- though someone so inclined can search this blog [there's a search box in the upper left corner] and find that I have discussed a Brooks column now and then in the past).
Anyway, I noticed at Duck of Minerva that Josh Busby was tweeting a Brooks column and I said "what's that all about"?
So I zipped through the column. The basic message is that Trump is the culmination of 'anti-political' trends of the last several decades in the U.S. The column is bookended with quotes from Bernard Crick and Harold Laski. In between the quotes the column is fairly predictable -- not wrong, but also not very deep.
In particular Brooks does not delve into why some people dislike the compromise and messiness of democratic politics, apart from the suggestion that authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. Could it be that democratic politics has not served a portion of the population especially well, and their reaction is, not too surprisingly, to say **** it?
One thing's for sure. You're not going to sway most Trump supporters with quotes from two Brits (Laski and Crick), both of whom were (gasp) socialists (of one sort or another).
I just heard (props to C-Span radio) a bit of Trump's speech in Charleston, W.Va. It was a series of disconnected assertions of the sort that typify his speeches: "we're going to win, win, win"; "we're going to negotiate great trade deals"; "we're going to have lots of people enter the country, but legally"; "we're going to bring back jobs"; "we're going to get rid of Common Core"; "we're going to repeal Obamacare"; "we're going to crush [or some similar verb] ISIS"; and, of course, "we're going to make America great again." And he said to West Virginia miners: "get ready, you're going to be working your asses off [i.e., when Trump becomes President]."
The slogan "we're going to make America great again" is empty without some conception of what makes a country great. Does Trump have such a conception? Would America be great if the coal industry were again engaged in large-scale strip mining and laying waste to the landscapes that Trump has probably never spent any time in? Where does Trump stand on controls on emissions from coal-fired power plants? How can one give a speech in West Virginia, a state whose economy is probably just as dependent on tourism as it is on coal (if not moreso) and not even nod in the direction of saying something about the state's physical beauty and natural attractions (if he did, it wasn't in the part of the speech I heard)? Does Trump realize that climate change means that doing little or nothing to transition to non-fossil-fuel energy sources is signing a death warrant for future generations?
Instead of flying from New York to Charleston, giving a speech, and leaving, Trump should go to some small, depressed towns in southern West Virginia, for example in McDowell County, and he should talk to people who live there and actually know something about the region and the challenges facing those communities. But that would require a degree of curiosity and openness to experience that Trump shows no evidence of possessing. His entire career has been a matter of "winning" and attempting to advance the fortunes of Donald Trump. Fans of Trump like to point out that as a businessman Trump has hired thousands of workers. Who are they? How are they treated and paid? What is the turnover rate? Are they going to vote for Trump?
A central question in this election is whether the way to "make America great again" is to hire as President a demagogic misogynist who embodies the worst aspects of a system that generates waste, inequality, and environmental destruction on a planetary scale.
Paul Campos (here):
The French revolution’s slogan was “liberty, equality, fraternity.” The Reagan revolution’s guiding principles have been “stupidity, celebrity, plutocracy” – and Trump is the ultimate example of all three.
Whether this is exactly right might be debatable, but it's snappy and, as they say, close enough for jazz (do they still say that?).
I'm making a rather slow start on Before the Storm [link], despite its excellent research and -- in many passages, though not all -- very good writing. Learning a lot about the details of U.S. politics around the time when I was born. Where else, for instance, would I be likely to find out that "in 1957, Republican National Committee chair Meade Alcorn put one of his best men, the affable Virginian I. Lee Potter, to building a [Republican] rank and file in the South in a project called 'Operation Dixie'" (p.47)?
However, the author's skills notwithstanding, so far I'm not thoroughly engrossed, the way one sometimes can be by a good novel or even a work of history. I'm hoping that will change as the narrative moves into the early 1960s and then the 1964 campaign.
ETA: One thing (among others) that comes through clearly in the first 50 pp. or so of the book is the extent to which the emergent or reconstituting U.S. Right in the 50s and early 60s found a key constituency in family-owned and/or privately-held manufacturing and other businesses, a sector that still exists but is presumably a good deal smaller today than it was then. Indeed Perlstein opens the first chapter with a sketch of the political views and trajectory of one such (hypothetical) businessman. Here's one actual example of many: In '59, on the eve of Khrushchev's visit to the U.S., we're told that "Milwaukee's Allen-Bradley Company bought a full page in the Wall Street Journal: 'To Khrushchev, "Peace and Friendship" means the total enslavement of all nations, of all peoples, of all things, under the God-denying Communist conspiracy of which he is the current Czar.... Don't let it happen here!'" (p.52) Pretty clearly only a family-run or closely-held business would have felt able to spring for this kind of full-page ad in the WSJ -- a big publicly-traded company presumably would not have done this sort of thing, even if some of its executives might have shared the same views. (I use the word "presumably" because I'm not sure that this speculation is correct, but it seems fairly logical.)
According to the front page of this afternoon's (digital edition) WaPo, Trump has announced a team of five foreign-policy advisers, a group apparently chaired by Sen. Sessions (R-Alabama), who has endorsed Trump. Because I'm too cheap to take a WaPo sub, I haven't read the article. The headline refers to a 'non-interventionist' foreign policy, which could mean a number of different things, and of course what looks like 'non-interventionism' to the WaPo might be anything that deviates from the quasi-messianic tradition in U.S. foreign policy that the newspaper's editorial board has been, with occasional exceptions, a fan of for the last, hmm, let's say 60 years (give or take).
ETA: More on this at some later point. There'll be plenty of time to discuss Trump's positions between now and the general election (assuming he's the Repub nominee). For now I'll just say that even if particular Trump foreign-policy positions, e.g. on the disposition of U.S. forces abroad, should turn out to be closer to my views than certain of Clinton's foreign-policy positions, the way Trump has campaigned and what he has said about (among others) Muslims and Mexicans completely disqualifies him, imo. So at this point if he adopted, say, Posen's Restraint word-for-word and made it his foreign-policy platform it wouldn't matter, from my standpoint. (There is of course a long Repub tradition, albeit lately mostly submerged, of skepticism about and opposition to the U.S.-as-world-orderer, going back at least to the '30s and the America Firsters and the Taftites. In the opening of Before the Storm, which I've begun to read, Perlstein calls Taft's foreign-policy approach "anticommunism for isolationists.")
Repellent as Trump is, this piece from Nat'l Review, as excerpted here, is just as repellent.
Various Repub members of the "national security community" have delivered a blast at Trump (h/t). A glance at the list of signatories reveals some big neocon names (though not all are neocons). This open letter is going to have no effect on Repub primary voters. As to the substance, many (not all) of the points are, imo, valid, but that's partly because they're pitched at a high level of generality. It's mildly amusing, in a black-humor sort of way, to see so many supporters of the G.W. Bush admin expressing grave concern about Trump's remarks on torture.
ETA: NYT notes some people who didn't sign the open letter.
Did Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server as Sec. of State harm national security? Who knows, but it's not something I lie awake at night worrying about. It is, however (and needless to say), a political talking point for Republicans, as was underlined again this morning when a Repub senator, questioning John Kerry at a hearing, asserted that we must assume that all those e-mails are now in the hands of "our enemies" (direct quote). I'm sure our enemies have not been having fun wading through the e-mail traffic, most of which must be boring, routine garbage.
The quote is from Danielle Allen; see here. (Didn't read full WaPo column as I've used up free WaPo articles for the month.) One problem with the strategy is that Rubio might be a more formidable opponent in the general election. [ETA 3/17: Well, so much for the whole Rubio thing.]
In his post-South Carolina primary speech, Marco Rubio might as well have been a priest worshiping at the altar of Saint Ronald Reagan. Despite some references to conservatives fighting for those who are trying to get ahead but haven't quite made it yet, the core of the speech was recycled Reaganism, the same rhetoric that Republican candidates have been delivering since at least Goldwater: free enterprise, limited government, strong national defense. Rubio wraps it in a "twenty-first century conservatism" wrapper, but it's the same old crap.
As for Trump's speech, it was pure demagoguery. Both the speech and the reaction to it were frightening. The "wall with Mexico" appears to have become an ideé fixe with him and a symbol of how far removed he is from anything that resembles reality.
Empty Reaganite slogans and chilling xenophobia. Thank goodness I didn't hear Cruz's speech. I don't think I could have taken three performances like that.
Jeb Bush's withdrawal speech on the other hand -- and I say this as someone who loathes strongly disagrees with his ideology and his policies -- was actually kind of classy.
I haven't done more than glance at the transcript of the most recent Clinton/Sanders debate, but I gather from this that there was a question about which foreign leader the candidates took inspiration from when it came to foreign policy. Not an easy question to answer on the spur of the moment, especially if you've been absorbed in a presidential campaign for months. Sanders's answer was Churchill. We've been over Churchill, so to speak, here before, for instance here (and also see the comment thread, where the Bengal famine gets mentioned at the end), so I don't see the need to rehash this again, at least not right now.
Lemieux at LGM:
My guess is still that Rubio will to some extent break the knot by
finishing ahead of Cruz and clearly ahead of Christie and Jeb! in New
Hampshire. Things are at least trending in a “Party Decides” direction.
But given how long Rubio has run behind Cruz and Trump, considerable
skepticism about his candidacy remains justified.
How long Rubio has run behind? It's really not that long when you consider that the actual voting has just started. The real reason for skepticism about Rubio's candidacy is that he appears determined to repeat stale, idiotic talking points, as when he accused Pres. Obama of "pitting people against each other" [!] by giving a speech at a mosque at which Obama urged the inclusion of Muslims in American society on the same basis of tolerance accorded to members of all other religious groups (and to the non-religious, for that matter).
P.s. I'm not actually linking to the LGM post from which I quote because they already get enough ******* traffic. If they don't like it, that's just too damn bad. (Of course, they won't know one way or the other.)
Bernie Sanders in conversation with Ezra Klein.
Excerpt -- close paraphrasing (not verbatim):
Klein: Turning to foreign policy, is there a school of foreign policy you identify with - are you a realist or ...
Sanders: I don't know what the word means. I think we're all realists...
Klein (smiling): I'm not sure we are.
Sanders (repeating): I don't know what the word means.
Would have been a bit better, I think, if Bernie had said the word was unhelpfully vague instead of saying he doesn't know what it means. But this is a nitpick, admittedly. I didn't watch the whole interview, but the parts I watched were interesting.
Added later: Note also the exchange near the beginning where Klein asks about global poverty, immigration, and 'open borders'. Sanders's reply is substantively more or less what one would expect him to say, but it perhaps could have been framed a bit better.
I'm using "incoherence" because it's the politest word I can think of under the circumstances. Those circumstances being that Jeb Bush has called, albeit vaguely, for ground forces to fight ISIS, and that call has also come from John Kasich (not to mention, needless to say, Lindsey Graham and other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, although the latter has probably been so vague as to have deniability for anything).
According to an NBC News report of a Kasich speech at the National Press Club:
[he] proposed leading a coalition that includes soldiers fighting on the
ground in both Syria and Iraq. He would not indicate a number and said
the coalition should not be involved in Syria's civil war.
How soldiers can be on the ground in Syria without being involved in its civil war defies the imagination. This person is a serious presidential candidate? Not to mention Trump, Cruz, et al.? This is a disgrace.
Oh yes, I almost forgot: Kasich also wants a new government agency devoted to spreading "Judeo-Christian values" around the world. (The phrase is in quotes to indicate that these are, from what I gather, Kasich's words.)
Before the Oct. 13 Democratic presidential debate fades into memory or becomes, in campaign timeline terms, ancient history, I just want to mention that I was impressed, while watching the debate in a restaurant, to hear Martin O'Malley quote the John Quincy Adams line about America not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. On the one hand it's a quite well-known line in some circles, but on the other hand how likely is it that one would hear it in a presidential debate? So props to O'Malley. I'm still for Sanders and I think Clinton will probably wind up being the nominee, but anyway...
One of the better moments in The Best of Enemies, the currently playing documentary about the TV encounters between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968, is a three-minute side-by-side comparison of the two men's origins. Both came from privileged if not especially 'old money' backgrounds, both went to elite prep schools, both rode horses well as teenagers, or so the photographs on the screen indicate. Both were intellectuals. Both spoke with the sort of upper-class accent that has now almost vanished. Both ran for office (Vidal more than once). A Marxist -- or anyone else, really -- from another planet might wonder how in the world these two men ended up calling each other names on prime-time TV during the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions in That Year, 1968.
Class is not always destiny, would be a five-word answer to that question. And yet, as one of the many (too many) interviewees in this movie suggests, it is possible that each man saw a bit of himself in the other, maybe just enough to nudge dislike over the boundary into loathing. Despite -- or, who knows, perhaps because of? -- his utterly despicable political and ideological stances, it is Buckley whose charm and air of insouciance (for lack of a better phrase) are more evident when the two square off in front of the ABC-TV camera. Vidal was, as the person with whom I saw the movie remarked, more self-contained, his gestural, non-verbal language a bit less naturally suited to TV. There was nothing shabby about Vidal's verbal performance, however, even if, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out with reference to the most infamous exchange, it was not actually true that Buckley was a crypto-Nazi, though he was unquestionably a reactionary. Still, it's not difficult to see why Vidal, responding to a somewhat loaded question from moderator Howard K. Smith and faced with an annoyingly interrupting Buckley, reached for an insult.
The Best of Enemies is a thesis movie, i.e. it has an argument, and that argument is that the Buckley-Vidal encounter was the ur-moment that shaped TV punditry as it came to exist in the U.S. in the ensuing decades. Maybe, though I think the argument is pressed a bit too hard. I have no recollection of watching the Buckley-Vidal encounter at the time: my memories of 1968, somewhat sketchy in general given my age then, are not primarily televisual, though I do have a couple of memories of the Democratic convention that I think must derive from having watched some of it.
In the end, despite this movie's best efforts to convince one otherwise, the Vidal-Buckley debates must be considered, I think, basically an interesting footnote to a tumultuous, historic year -- even if it was a footnote that generated subsequent essays and lawsuits by the protagonists -- rather than a central event. However, as many of us know, footnotes are not necessarily unimportant; and The Best of Enemies, despite its flaws as a movie, will help ensure that this particular footnote will continue to be remembered.
"The rhetoric [of the Republican presidential candidates] is really out there. On foreign policy, this is the most-aggressive kind of stuff I've ever seen."
-- Richard Herrmann of Ohio State Univ., as quoted in this Aug. 2 article in The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch
The most dangerous of the current bunch of presidential candidates may be Ted Cruz. He strikes me as a demagogue par excellence. Of course I realize he has competition for that title.
Announcing his presidential candidacy today, John Kasich said that the way to create jobs is to "balance the books," and he had kind words for the idea of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.
It's as if these Republicans are living in a mixture of the austerian 2000's and 1920. As if the Great Depression never happened and Keynes never existed.
ETA: Remember Nixon's "we're all Keynesians now"? When it comes to domestic policy, Nixon would be derided by today's Republicans as a RINO. (Clarification: I'm talking about Nixon's domestic policies when he was President. His earlier career is a different matter entirely.)
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