Corey Robin's Blog, page 49

The Definitive Take on Donald Trump

Sorry, that’s just my self-aggrandizing way of introducing this Salon column I wrote about Trump and what he means within the long arc of conservatism. My frustration with much of the discussion about Trump is that it presumes he’s a complete outlier within the conservative tradition, that he simply crashed the party. Not so: in many ways, he’s a classic conservative. But there are some elements in his campaign that are new and that make him dangerous. But those elements have less to do with Trump, the man, than with the state of play of the conservative movement.

Here are a few excerpts from my piece:

If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination and the general election in November, it will be a victory for the GOP—and a defeat for conservatism. Not because Trump isn’t a conservative but because he is.

…

The right has a task: against a revolutionary or reformist left’s claims of freedom and equality, it must reinforce the ramparts of privilege. From the French Revolution to the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement and women’s liberation, conservatives have always defended social hierarchies, doling out rights to the few and obligations to the many.

What Burke learned on his way to the counterrevolution was that the greatest enemy to the established elite was…the established elite. Most elites were timid, inept, unimaginative, rule-bound. “Creatures of the desk” was how he described them. Pencil-sharpeners and paper-pushers, they lacked “the generous wildness of Quixotism.” They were weak and spineless, too cozy in their comfort to crush their enemies.

To defend the established hierarchy, the counterrevolution would have to be as energetic and immoderate, as wild and unpredictable, as the revolution it sought to overthrow.

…

Since the 19th century, nativism, nationalism and racism have been been ideal recruitment devices. “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black” declared the slaveholder statesman John C. Calhoun; “and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” Men and women at the near bottom of society have little money and even less power. But no matter how low they are, they always can lord their status and standing over those even lower than they. As John Adams so brilliantly recognized in his “Discourses on Davila”: “Not only the poorest mechanic, but the man who lives upon common charity, nay the common beggars in the streets…plume themselves on that superiority which they have, or fancy they have, over some others.”

For Nixon and Reagan, these others were blacks (sometimes coded as criminals or welfare cheats). For Trump, they’re Muslims and Mexicans.

Conservatism has one fatal flaw, however: Sometimes it wins. Once it beats back or destroys the left, the right loses its reigning purpose, its energy and élan. It is “in times of crisis,” the British conservative Roger Scruton once observed, that “conservatism does its best.” According to Friedrich von Hayek, when the defense of the free market was influential, it became “stationary.” When it was put “on the defensive,” it gained traction, depth, and force.

And here we come to the actual novelty of Donald Trump. Since Bill Clinton declared in 1996, “The era of big government is over,” the left has oscillated from retreat to defeat. Whoever the occupant of the White House, all post-Reagan presidents have beat the GOP drum of low taxes and standing tall, small government and a big military.

…

And this, in the end, may be why Trump is so dangerous. Without the left, no one has any idea when his animus will take flight and where it will land. While counterrevolutionaries have always made established elites nervous, those elites could be assured that the wild Quixotism of a Burke or a Pat Buchanan would serve their cause. As today’s Republicans and their allies in the media have made clear, they have no idea if Trump won’t turn on them, too. Like Joe McCarthy in his senescence, Trump might try to gut the GOP. At least McCarthy had a real left to battle; Trump doesn’t.

Trump is dangerous, then, not because he is an aberration from conservatism but because he is its emblem. He’s a threat not because the movement he aspires to lead is so strong but because the one he will lead is so weak. It’s weak not because it has failed but because it has succeeded.

Are We Dying of History?

Nazi salutes and Weimar pastiche. Debates laden with references to Mossadegh, Allende, Cambodia, and the Sandinistas. Gaffes about Nancy Reagan. Discussions of George Wallace. Decades-old legislation. Have we ever had a presidential campaign so saturated in history, not just of the US but of other parts of the world? I feel like we’re watching history unspool, in a completely chaotic, unedited way. It’s as if we’re at one of those sumptuous and feverish Viennese balls from the turn of the century, and every ghost from empires past has shown up to dance. What’s going on? Joseph Roth, where are you?

Local 33, Yale, and the Spirit of Conservatism

GESO, the graduate employees’ union at Yale, took a quantum leap forward this week when it was chartered as Local 33 of the UNITE-HERE international union. It now joins Yale’s two other unions: Local 34, the clerical and technical workers’ union, and Local 35, the service and maintenance workers’ union. Though Yale has yet to recognize Local 33, this is a big step.

As the Washington Post reports:

On Wednesday evening, something happened that generations of graduate students at Yale University had awaited for nearly two decades: The founding of a union. With about 1,500 members present, amidst New Haven’s other unions and with the support of a who’s who of Connecticut public officials, the international president of UNITE-HERE arrived to certify their majority support and grant them a charter.

“It’s a really historic and amazing event, and something that will bring a new local to the UNITE-HERE family at Yale for the first time in 30 years,” says Aaron Greenberg, a graduate student in political science who chairs the Graduate Employees and Students Organization. “We’re not waiting for the administration to come to the table.”

The only correction I would add is what my friend Kristi Starr said on Facebook: the grad students at Yale have not been “awaiting” this move for nearly two decades. They’ve been fighting like hell for this move for nearly two decades. The grad union drive began in the late 1980s, and if all goes well, it will come to a conclusion in the coming year.

Speaking of the union’s history, my friend Nikhil Singh, who’s now a professor at NYU but who was one of the founders of GESO, sent the founders of Local 33 a letter on this historic occasion. This excerpt really captures what’s so special about the unions at Yale:

The relatively small group of us committed to the unionization path began to pursue the issue with very little knowledge of what we were doing. We started researching other graduate student unions, mostly at public universities, and interviewing prospective unions to work with us, starting with the United Auto Workers (UAW). The UAW offered us a lot of resources — right up front — an office and an organizing budget. It was flattering, but also a little scary to be honest. Did I say, we had no idea what we were doing?

The following week we met with representatives from Locals 34 and 35, unions whose histories many of us knew well and admired. I don’t remember exactly who was in the room, but I’ll never forget what the 34 and 2 35 leaders told us that day. “We won’t make you any funding promises. And, anything that we agree to in terms of support will be contingent on ratification by our members. But the one thing we will teach you how to do is to beat Yale.”

Just because it’s a cliche, doesn’t mean it’s not true: the rest was history. After that meeting, we had no doubt about the union that we needed to work with going forward. To our immense credit, we understood very well, that our success hinged upon the success of all Yale’s workers.

From that day, I don’t think I ever worked so hard, or so systematically, and (less proudly) I have not worked that hard or systematically since! As you know, your union is no joke when it comes to organizing. Nothing is left to chance and you can never hide. Everyone must be talked to, repeatedly. You have your numbers for every meeting, for every rally, for every action. And, it is the one instance in life when taking no for an answer, is always provisional. Correction: you never take no for an answer.

I learned a lot of what I know about politics from being an organizer at Yale. In fact, there’s a whole generation of us who did, and it’s influenced the kind of intellectual work we’ve gone on to do, in a variety of fields: history, political science, English. We’re scattered across the country—at Berkeley, Oregon, Carnegie Mellon, U. Mass., NYU—and there are now several generations of scholars that have come after us, at Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago and elsewhere. This, I’d like to think, is the real “Yale School” of scholarship. About ten years ago, the Chronicle of Higher Ed even wrote a profile of a group of us.

The Post also mentions that Yale, along with a bunch of other schools, is fighting the union movement in court. There’s a NLRB case brewing (it comes out of Columbia University), and Yale, Harvard, Cornell and Company have joined together in an amicus brief. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but this bit from the Post‘s description caught my eye:

The elite schools also worry that granting grad students collective bargaining rights would interfere with academic freedom, since changes to teaching loads — even something as small as adding an essay to exam — could become the subject of extended negotiation, decreasing the flexibility of instruction.

That’s a pretty stunning statement. What it means is that Yale and these other universities believe that the relevant academic freedom in question is that of the professor, not the graduate student, and that the freedom in question—the right to make assignments in a classroom—is critically dependent upon the availability of a pool of labor that will simply execute the task of grading that assignment without questioning the professor’s decision to make the assignment. Should that right to make the assignment “become the subject of extended negotiation,” the right of the professor—and thus, her academic freedom—would be diminished.

Graduate student TAs are paid a certain amount of money per year to do these grading tasks for professors. On Yale’s accounting, the only limit on how many and how much of these tasks the professor can ask the TA to perform is…the judgment, discretion, decision, whim—call it what you will—of the professor herself. Any limit that might be imposed by a discussion with the laborer who carries out the task would be a limitation on the professor’s academic freedom.

Five years ago, I wrote a book on conservatism called The Reactionary Mind. You may have heard me talk about it here. There’s a passage in the book that seems pertinent:

Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. “We are all agreed as to our own liberty,” declared Samuel Johnson. “But we are not agreed as to the liberty of others: for in proportion as we take, others must lose. I believe we hardly wish that the mob should have liberty to govern us.”

I never quite realized it till now, but that describes Yale’s position to a tee.

In fact, in his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, which I didn’t talk about in my book, Edmund Burke, the founder of conservatism, has to this to say:

It is the interest of the farmer, that his [the agricultural laborer who works for the farmer] work should be done with effect and celerity: and that cannot be, unless the labourer is well fed, and otherwise found with such necessaries of animal life, according to it’s habitudes, as may keep the body in full force, and the mind gay and cheerful. For of all the instruments of his trade, the labour of man (what the ancient writers have called the instrumentum vocale) is that on which he is most to rely for the re-payment of his capital. The other two, the semivocale in the ancient classification, that is, the working stock of cattle, and the instrumentum mutum, such as carts, ploughs, spades, and so forth, though not all inconsiderable in themselves, are very much inferiour in utility or in expence; and without a given portion of the first, are nothing at all. For in all things whatever, the mind is the most valuable and the most important; and in this scale the whole of agriculture is in a natural and just order; the beast is as an informing principle to the plough and cart; the labourer is as reason to the beast; and the farmer is as a thinking and presiding principle to the labourer. An attempt to break this chain of subordination in any part is equally absurd.

In the same way that the beast is “an informing principle to the plough and cart” and the “labourer is as reason to the beast,” so is the professor, on Yale’s lights, “a thinking and presiding principle” to the TA, who in this scenario is little more than the beast, the plough, and the cart.

Yale is a place that prides itself on its liberal learning. Its professors style themselves as progressive; its administrators do, too. I’m sure they all vote Democrat, and are horrified by the spectacle of Donald Trump and the Republicans. Yet here we have these very same liberal sensibilities arguing a position that comes straight out of the right-wing precincts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

 

Liberalism and the Millennials

Last night, Hillary Clinton and her online supporters went after Bernie Sanders over his support in the 1980s for Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas. Glenn Greenwald shows why Clinton is in no position to be lecturing Sanders about tyranny in other countries. Clinton has not only walked the walk, but also talked the talk, on behalf of serial violators of human rights across the globe: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, Honduras, the Gulf states, not to mention “Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” As I said in a tweet last night, “Sanders stood with the Sandinistas, Clinton stands with Kissinger. Is this really a tough one?”

But Glenn raises another point worth mentioning.

Vehement opposition to Reagan’s covert wars in Central America, as well as to the sadistic and senseless embargo of Cuba, were once standard liberal positions. As my colleague Jeremy Scahill, observing the reaction of Clinton supporters during the debate, put it in a series of tweets: “The US sponsored deaths squads that massacred countless central and Latin Americans, murdered nuns and priests, assassinated an Archbishop. I bet commie Sanders was even against Reagan’s humanitarian mining of Nicaraguan waters & supported subsequent war crimes judgement vs. US. Have any of these Hillarybots heard of the Contra death squads? Or is it just that whatever Hillary says must be defended at all costs? The Hillarybots attacking Sanders over Nicaragua should be ashamed of themselves.”

In high school, I would say I was a moderate to liberal Democrat. It was an article of faith among my set that US intervention in Central America was not only strategically unwise but also morally unsound. Still reeling from Vietnam, nauseated over the barbarity of the Contras and the Salvadoran death squads, it didn’t take much in the way of liberal sympathy or imagination to think that anything the US did in Nicaragua, Guatemala, or El Salvador—short of getting the hell out of there—would be a disaster for the peoples of those nations.

Again, this was a position that was widely shared among mainstream liberals and Democrats. I just looked up the 1982 House vote on the Boland Amendment, which prohibited all military aid to the Contras, and it was 243 in favor, 171 against. Which means that some portion of moderates also adopted this anti-interventionist position.

The only reason Clinton and her supporters on Twitter can so reflexively attack Sanders over this issue—not his support for the Sandinistas or Castro, but his opposition to US intervention—is that, thanks to two decades of liberal support for regime change and humanitarian intervention, the whole discourse of liberal anti-interventionism has practically disappeared from the scene. Today, the only solid and reliable anti-interventionists you can find are either left-wing anti-imperialists, paleo- or other brands of conservative at outlets like The American Conservative, or an ever narrowing circle of IR realists like Steve Walt.

Which brings me to the millennials. I know a number of young leftists, in their 20s or early 30s, who have no experience or memory of this liberal anti-interventionism that I’ve been describing here. When they think liberal, they think of the Clintons and their allies, who are not only terrible on the issue of US power around the world, but also terrible on the question of economic justice and equality at home. They have no memory of a generation of left liberals who fought firmly for labor unions, who pushed hard for universal health care, public housing, and the like. They have no memory of a young Arthur Schlesinger rejecting Communism but nevertheless affirming that “class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier against class domination.”

For liberals or leftists of my generation, or for even older liberals and leftists, the discourse of anti-liberalism on the left has a resonance. It calls to mind some of the most bruising battles of the 20th century—Communists against parliamentary socialists, Popular Fronters and Henry Wallace Progressives against the Americans for Democratic Action, Irving Howe-style socialists against the New Left, and so on. For someone like myself, who identifies with the left but who nevertheless has a great deal of respect for the tradition of liberalism, it is imperative that there be a good and productive tension between liberalism and the left.

So I can imagine when liberals and leftists of my generation, or those who are even older, hear the flat refusal of millennials on the left to even entertain the possibility of a dialogue with liberalism, it can seem scary, like a return to some of the worst moments of intra-liberal/left fratricide. But this is where history can get in the way. For the millennials, the bankruptcy of liberalism is not Walter Reuther or Hubert Humphrey or A. Phillip Randolph or Bayard Rustin; it’s Clinton, Clinton, and Clinton.

The gulf today between liberalism and the left is not of the millennials’ or even of the left’s making; it’s the product of a liberalism that has been moving right for decades and that, whatever feints to the left it has been making more recently, still has some way to go before there can be a useful and productive dialogue of difference.

“Two entries on Nancy Reagan’s birth certificate are still accurate—her sex and her color. Almost every other item was invented then or later reinvented.”

A thousand years ago, back when I was writing book reviews for Newsday, Laurie Muchnick and Emily Gordon asked their stable of regular reviewers to make a summer reading recommendation. Mine was Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography of Nancy Reagan. Before I die, I still plan to teach a course on American Politics where Kelly’s biography is the only text on the syllabus. In the meantime, here’s what I said back in 2000, about Kelley’s biography.

A friend of mine in graduate school, a member of the Communist Party even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, liked to brag that when he taught American politics he would assign only Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography of Nancy Reagan. I thought he was crazy. Until I read the book.

Authored by a reporter dubbed “the Saddam Hussein of privacy invasion,” Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography (Pocket Books, out of print) was more than a nasty assault on a nasty woman. It was also a poignant chronicle of America’s hidden history: the obsessive quest for privilege in a country that denies its existence. Through Reagan’s persona, Kelley profiled those Americans who reinvent their pasts, invoking imagined genealogies of gentility as cover for working-class backgrounds. Not since Alexis de Tocqueville had anyone produced such a devastating cultural biography of a nation committed in theory to equality but in practice to elitism.

“Two entries on Nancy Reagan’s birth certificate are still accurate—her sex and her color. Almost every other item was invented then or later reinvented.” So begins this merciless epic, straight out of Dreiser, of a poor, unhappy girl who lies her way to the top. The detritus along the way is extensive: the hushed-up suicide of an uncle broken by a miserable marriage; a birth father spurned and an adopted father embraced, all for the sake of money; a desperately engineered marriage to a second-rate actor with a wandering eye, wayward heart and shared penchant for ambitious fantasy.

“Nancy Reagan” suggests that the cost of social climbing in America goes beyond personal unhappiness. Because of our ache for aristocracy, we’ve suffered a terminal case of collective self-deception in this country, refusing to acknowledge that the poor are one of us, that a society built as a monument to personal success means that only a few can achieve it, that wealth is not a measure of merit but luck, power and personal connection.

As the Greek tragedians understood so well, an act of deception—particularly about one’s family—can wreak havoc upon the body politic. In this regard, Kelley’s biography remains a work of unfulfilled prophecy, anticipating not the Clinton impeachment scandals but the conflict that is to come when America wakes up and realizes the inequalities created in the name of Nancy.

Having said that, I found “Nancy Reagan” to be an exceedingly funny book—maybe because it was a pleasant distraction from a summer of lethal reading in preparation for my PhD qualifying exams, or because I was amused at the thought of my friend’s forcing rich kids to read it. Whatever the case, I giggled my way through a hot July. Who says Communists don’t have a sense of humor?

Actually, if you’re interested in the wider cultural ramifications of Nancy Reagan, I’d also recommend another book: Deborah Silverman’s Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreerland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America.

 

Same as it ever was: From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump, “This man scares me.”

In 1964, this ad ran on behalf of Lyndon Johnson (h/t Alex Gourevitch). The man in the ad is a Republican (probably an actor) who can’t bring himself to vote for Goldwater. Because? He’s a “very different kind of man. This man scares me.” Sound familiar?

Here are some excerpts:

I certainly don’t feel guilty about being a Republican. I’ve always been a Republican. My father is, his father is, the whole family is a Republican family. I voted for Dwight Eisenhower the first time I ever voted, I voted for Nixon the last time. But when we come to Senator Goldwater, now it seems to me we’re up against a very different kind of a man. This man scares me. Now maybe I’m wrong. A friend of mine has said to me, listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn’t mean he’s going to act irresponsibly….

The hardest thing for me about this whole campaign is to sort out one Goldwater statement from another. A reporter will go to Senator Goldwater and he’ll say, Senator, on such and such a day, you said, and I quote, blah blah blah, whatever it is, end quote. And then Goldwater says, well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I can’t follow that. Was he serious when did put it that way? Is he serious when he says he wouldn’t put it that way? I just don’t get it….

When the head of the Ku Klux Klan, when all these weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party, either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.

Have a listen.

 

Trump Talk

1. At last night’s debate, Trump said of Rubio, “And he referred to my hands—if they are small, something else must be small—I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.” Lest you think we’re tumbling down a new rabbit hole here, it’s important to remember that once upon a time, the king’s body and the body politic were one and the same. Trump’s reference is more pre-modern than post-modern. Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic book on the topic, The King’s Two Bodies, was subtitled “A Study in Medieval Political Theology.”

In any event, I’d rather hear Trump’s opinions about his penis than his views on Muslims and Mexicans.

2. The rhetorical brutality of Trump is unprecedented. Never before have we seen a candidate so cruel.

 

 

 

 

Nor have we ever had a leading politician who so shamelessly, if rhetorically, flirted with violence.

3. Speaking of precedents, I don’t deny that there are differences between Trump and conservatives and Republicans past (I am in fact writing about those differences as we speak!) But the notion that you can tell a story of qualitative devolution, that you could look back upon the Golden Days of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon as some kind of sharp counterpoint to the brutality of the man and his movement today, is delusional.

A few days ago, the Washington Post even had the chutzpah (or amnesia) to suggest that Trump’s embrace of torture and dirty tricks mark him as some new dangerous force.

Mr. Trump gives ample reason to fear that he would not respect traditional limits on executive authority. He promotes actions that would be illegal, such as torture. He intimates that he would use government to attack those who displease him.

The Post compares Trump to Putin and Chávez but not to the two American presidents in recent memory who did torture and who did use government to attack those who displeased them.

Even if you’re only referring to the ambient thuggery that surrounds the man, it’s helpful to remember that Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered. And that, when debating his Republican opponents, was just as interested in establishing full spectrum dominance.

All of which reminds me that in the waning days of George W. Bush’s regime, I mischievously, facetiously, predicted that some day, some establishment pundit like Brooks or Broder (he was alive then) would hold up W as a man of honor and integrity—in contrast to whatever future combination of clown and criminal happened to be ruling the day. That’s the one prediction I’ve ever made—tongue-in-cheek no less—that has come true.

So now I’ll make another prediction, less tongue-in-cheek. If, God forbid, Trump is elected, some day, assuming we’re all still alive, we’ll be having a conversation in which we look back fondly, as we survey the even more desultory state of political play, on the impish character of Donald Trump. As Andrew March said to me on Facebook, we’ll say something like: What a jokester he was. Didn’t mean it at all. But, boy, could he cut a deal.

4. Various Republicans and conservative elites and intellectuals have been saying that if Trump gets the nomination, they’ll not support him. If they keep their word, this election could look an awful lot like 1972, when a fair number of Democrats backed Nixon against McGovern. With perhaps similar results.

Here’s the classic ad (h/t William Adler) that Democrats for Nixon (a front group, Rick Perlstein informs me) ran.

Interestingly, today it’s national security types who are once again leading the fight against a candidate perceived to be too extreme for the party.

Of course, the only way this scenario actually works is if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination. With Sanders, I’ve little doubt that every Republican and conservative would quickly—and happily—line up behind Trump. It’s only because Clinton does not pose a threat to core GOP commitments that these apostates from Trump can even think about straying from the fold. In the same way that it was only because Nixon didn’t fundamentally threaten core New Deal commitments—for all the backlash that he spawned, he wasn’t willing to fully repudiate the New Deal or the Great Society (indeed, he pushed for wage and price controls and created the EPA)—neither does Clinton fundamentally threaten core Reaganite commitments. When she attacks Sanders for possibly increasing the size of government by 40%, she’s still reading from the Reagan playbook.

So, to play out the scenario: against Trump, Clinton gets elected, like Nixon got elected against McGovern in 1972. And we all know what happened next.

5. When Hannah Arendt set out to understand fascism, she looked back to Europe’s history of continental racism and extra-continental imperialism. The working title of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in fact, was “Race Imperialism.” Today, journalists and pundits like to claim Trump is a fascist or flirts with fascism. But while commentators will talk about his connections to racism, nativism, and Islamophobia, they seldom mention his connections to imperialism. (Jamelle Bouie even claimed that George W. Bush, who more than anyone took American imperialism into the stratosphere, was just the kind of sober-minded establishment voice to put an end to Trump-ish exploits. Arendt would have had a field day with that one.) For these liberal-minded commentators, it’s easier to talk about red-blooded bigots in the sticks than blue bloods in the war machine.

Adam Smith said it best:

In countries where great crimes frequently pass unpunished, the most atrocious actions become almost familiar, and cease to impress the people with that horror which is universally felt in countries where an exact administration of justice takes place.

And then we get Donald Trump.

 

Super Tuesday: March Theses

I. Sanders won four states: Oklahoma, Minnesota, Vermont, and Colorado. Clinton won seven states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. That means, altogether, that Sanders has five states (those four plus New Hampshire) and Clinton has ten states (those seven plus Nevada, Iowa, and South Carolina). But here’s the critical thing: the elections in Nevada, Iowa, and Massachusetts were either close or extraordinarily close. A little bit more time here, a little bit more organizing there, and they could easily have tipped his way. In other words, Sanders could very easily have eight states now to Clinton’s seven [Thanks, Mom, for catching my error!]. He doesn’t, and coulda shoulda woulda is just that. But what this does mean, going forward, is that we have the opportunity to turn potential into actual. We’ve got time, we’ve got organizing, we’ve got money: let’s make use of it all. Clinton’s strongest weapon is the aura of inevitability that she and her supporters and the media have concocted around her. Part of that is based on reality, part of it is based on super delegates (which I refuse to concede), and part of it is based on spin. Don’t accommodate the super delegates, don’t accommodate the spin.

II. The exit polls in Massachusetts, which Clinton won narrowly, are fascinating. Here are some highlights:

Sanders got 41% of non-white voters (they don’t break down the category further). I want to come back to this.
Sanders beat Clinton among voters making under $50k, and voters making between $50k and $100k. The only income group she won was voters making over $100k.
Among first-time voters, Sanders got a whopping 71% of the vote.
Among independents, Sanders got 65% of the votes.
Sanders won among very liberal voters and moderate voters.
Clinton did better among married women than she did among unmarried women.

Also, related to the gender question, in Oklahoma, Sanders nearly tied Clinton among women voters (48% for Clinton, 46% for Sanders).

III. I’ve seen lots of claims that Sanders is only winning because of white men; among every other demographic, he loses. That simply isn’t true. In Vermont and New Hampshire, he beat Clinton among all women voters. In Oklahoma, as I said, he nearly tied Clinton among women voters. In Nevada, he nearly tied her among Latino voters (though the experts are still debating that one). In Massachusetts, as I said, he got 41% of non-white voters. We don’t have any exit polls for Colorado and Minnesota (at least not on CNN’s website, which is the one I’ve been using), but given the size of his victories there, I would be surprised if Sanders didn’t win or tie with Clinton among non-white voters and perhaps women voters.

IV. The issue of race and demographics in the campaign is fascinating. There’s absolutely no question that Clinton has a commanding lead among African American voters. She’s won that part of the electorate in every single contest thus far.

But here’s where things get interesting. Back in the fall, when the issue of the gender gap between Clinton and Sanders supporters was raised, Matt Bruenig very shrewdly pointed out that the real divide there was as much one of generation as it was one of gender: younger women voters were supporting Sanders, older women voters were supporting Clinton. A lot of the subsequent polling and primary results have confirmed his premonition.

I wonder if we’re not about to see something similar—if not quite as dramatic—with non-white voters. The cross-cutting factor here is not only age—Bruenig has also shown that younger black voters are trending toward Bernie (see the graph at the bottom of this post), and even in South Carolina, Sanders did much better with younger black voters than he did with older black voters—but also region.

Think about it. With the exception of Nevada, the states where there’s been dramatic support for Clinton among non-white voters have all been in the South. And in Nevada, Latino voters almost went for Sanders (the experts are still debating that one). But outside the South and Nevada, there have been primaries in three states that are virtually all white (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa), and three other states that while majority white, have more diverse populations (Colorado, Minnesota, and Massachusetts). Still no exit polls from Colorado and Minnesota (at least not on CNN’s website), but in Mass., Sanders got 41% of the non-white vote. Compared with all those states in the South, that’s stunning. So the racial divide is real and a problem for Sanders—don’t get me wrong—but it may be more complicated than people have claimed.

V. Outside the South, Sanders has won or come very close to winning every single state. From here on out, many of the states are much friendlier territory for him. Unless our brains are so completely scrambled by the Nate Silvers/Voxification of political life—where every poll is a destiny, every super-delegate a fact of nature, where everyone’s a crackpot realist rather than a citizen activist—it would be the definition of insanity to give up now. This is an uphill battle, always has been. So what? We move. Vorwärts. Always.

Notes on a Dismal and Delightful Campaign

I’ve been posting about the presidential primaries on Facebook and Twitter, and neglecting the blog. I thought I’d gather all the posts here. Some notes on an often dismal—and sometimes delightful—campaign…

1. Amid all the accusations that Hillary Clinton is not an honest or authentic politician, that she’s an endless shape-shifter who says whatever works to get her to the next primary, it’s important not to lose sight of the one truth she’s been telling, and will continue to tell, the voters: things will not get better. Ever. At first, I thought this was just an electoral ploy against Sanders: don’t listen to the guy promising the moon. No such thing as a free lunch and all that. But it goes deeper. The American ruling class has been trying to figure out for years, if not decades, how to manage decline, how to get Americans to get used to diminished expectations, how to adapt to the notion that life for the next generation will be worse than for the previous generation, and now, how to accept (as Alex Gourevitch reminded me tonight) low to zero growth rates as the new economic normal. Clinton’s campaign message isn’t just for Bernie voters; it’s for everyone. Expect little, deserve less, ask for nothing. When the leading candidate of the more left of the two parties is saying that — and getting the majority of its voters to embrace that message — the work of the American ruling class is done.

2. This is what Greg Grandin can do on a shattered leg (he broke it in two places a few weeks back) and Percocet:

Over the last month, Bernie Sanders, in slowly cobbling together what might be called a ‘Bernie Doctrine,’ has introduced a radical concept into American politics: the idea that history matters, that every effect has a cause. It seems a simple point—that actions taken in the past reverberate into the present—but it’s not. For America’s militarized brand of malignant exceptionalism is founded on the idea that the United States transcends history. That statement—that America believes itself exempt from the law of cause and effect—seems especially abstract. But the belief has a very concrete expression: a refusal to recognize the reality of blowback…. I did a lot of work on declassified US documents, mostly memos and cables generated by the US embassy in Guatemala City during the worst of that country’s political terror. And I was always struck by historical stupor of most foreign policy officials. Occasionally there’d be a flash of insight, including the recognition that Guatemala’s death squads were in fact created and maintained by Washington policy. But then that official would be rotated out of country after his two-year post, with his successor was once again portraying the death squads as outside of US control. Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits.

3. I’m getting tired of the argument that if you criticize Clinton, saying she’s bad for poor people or for black people or for other constituencies, that you’re somehow presuming false consciousness, that you’re somehow presuming you know better than those voters. Not only does that move defang any and all political argument and political critique; not only does it presume that we’re not talking to each other as citizens, that we can’t criticize each other’s opinions and judgments but are instead walled off from each other in hermetically sealed silos (an especially irritating notion to me personally: I mean, who are these people I’m getting emails from at all hours of night, violently disagreeing with me, from all points of the ideological spectrum, and why am I responding to them, if we’re not in a dialogue?); but it also is radically self-defeating, especially for the left. You don’t think, come November, that a fair bunch of working class people are going to vote Trump? Are we not allowed to say that that’s a bad move for them and for the rest of the country? People, it is possible to say two things at once: a) voters have reasons for casting the ballots they do, that they get something for their vote, that it’s not irrational; and b) that it’s still, all things considered, a bad move that they should reconsider. The only world in which you’re not allowed to say some combination of those two things is a world where you in fact believe that you are so radically different from your opponents that you can’t even enter their world to have a discussion or dialogue with them. I’m not sure what kind of world that is, but it sure as shit ain’t a democracy. Or even on the road to a democracy.

4. Speaking of which, Cedric Johnson cuts through a lot of the bullshit about South Carolina here:

Hillary Clinton’s firewall strategy worked. It was built on decades of campaigning in the state, and the widely held impression that a Clinton presidency has the capacity to deliver both substantive and symbolic benefits to supporters. As she’s said, she doesn’t need a tour of the White House. The Clintons are not Daddy Daley or Boss Tweed, but they’re about the closest version we can imagine in today’s national context. Their ground game is strong, decades in the making, and was just too much for the Sanders camp to surmount in the time it had. Remember: Sanders started out polling around 7 percent support in South Carolina. That he was able to more than triple that backing over the past few months is significant, but obviously inadequate. Exit polls during Saturday’s primary suggested that 72 percent of all South Carolina Democrats wanted to continue Obama’s policies, and only 18 percent wanted something more liberal than what Obama offered. In the same poll, only 43 percent of black voters identified as liberals.

5. This headline from the Austin American-Statesman

 

 

 

made me think of this:

It may peradventure be thought there was never such a time nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so over all the world, but there are many places where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America…

6. But when it comes to David Duke and the KKK: further research is necessary.

I never fall for scams. I am the only person who immediately walked out of my ‘Ali G’ interview

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2012

7. “‘She [Hillary Clinton] was asking every question you could imagine,’ Mr. Jibril [Libyan opposition leader] recalled.”

That’s a quote from the first of a two-part New York Times report on Clinton’s role in Obama’s decision to join the effort to overthrow Qaddafi. What’s so important and interesting about these articles, which you should really read, is that they show Clinton in all her virtues. She’s thorough, she’s careful, she’s prepared, she asks all the right questions and studies all the right angles. She’s everything George W. Bush and his advisers were not. And having made her mind up, she’s forceful and persuasive: “It was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.” And yet…after all that care and study, after all those years of experience, after Iraq, she gets it wrong. Disastrously wrong: “The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.”

8. O, Michael Rogin, where art thou?

“He called me Mr. Meltown,” Mr. Rubio said. “Let me tell you something last night during one of the breaks, two of the breaks, he went backstage. He was having a meltdown. First he had this little makeup thing, applying like makeup around his mustache because he had one of those sweat mustaches. Then he asked for a full-length mirror. I don’t know why, because the podium goes up to here, but he wanted a full-length mirror. Maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet, I don’t know.”

9. Hillary Clinton, NPR, 1996: “My political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism I was raised with….I’m very proud that I was a Goldwater Girl.”

10. At a town hall tonight, before a national televised audience, Bernie Sanders not only stands by his 1974 critique of the CIA as a ‘‘dangerous institution’’ used to ‘‘prop up fascist dictatorships.” He also cites its role in the overthrow of Allende as a reason for standing by that critique.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton stands by Henry Kissinger.

11. I had two responses to the announcement by the Senate Republicans that they would refuse to consider any appointment to the Supreme Court that Obama had to offer, that the Senate had to wait until the American people voted for a new president in November.

Here’s my first response:

Three thoughts. First, given the spirit of lawlessness that courses throughout these people, the sheer contempt for constitutional procedure that is the beating heart of the Republican establishment, I wonder how anyone can still maintain the fiction that Trump is somehow radically different from or alien to mainstream GOP conservatism.

Second, it was the illegitimate decision of the Supreme Court in 2000 that gave new life to these clowns—and legitimacy to an election in which the popular will did not prevail. It seems altogether fitting that the GOP would now attempt to block the democratic process from taking its course in order to hold onto the least democratic branch of government—all in the name of democracy.

Third, what will the Democrats do? This latest cycle of American politics began with an illegitimate election in which the loser took power through illegitimate means; the Democrats carried on. It continued with an illegal war based on lies and deception. The Democrats carried on (when they weren’t voting for said war). And now this: the obstruction of not just an appointment, but the very idea of an appointment, to the Supreme Court. That glittering prize that Democrats have been telling us for years is the most important reason why we need to vote for their candidates, the holy of holies, the golden chalice. What will they now do in the face of a party that simply says: this cup shall pass away from thee?

Here’s my second response:

In my earlier post, I mentioned a series of constitutional and legal crises that preceded today’s announcement by the Senate GOP that they will simply not hold hearings on any Obama nomination to the Court (not that they will reject a specific Obama nominee but that they refuse to accept the very idea of an Obama nominee). I focused on the 2000 election and the Iraq War.

But there may be an even more important precedent here: the way we’ve all normalized the notion that any piece of legislation, in order to pass Congress, must have a filibuster-proof majority. I don’t know exactly when this became the price of doing business in Washington—sometime in Obama’s first term, I recall—but the way in which everyone in the media, and a lot of people in the Democratic Party, essentially accepted this notion is not encouraging. Every time someone says, “Of course Obama couldn’t do x, he’d never get it past the filibuster,” no matter how accurate a description of empirical reality that is, whoever is tendering it is making that reality more and more normal, and more and more normative. It’s no longer enough to win the majority of the electorate in the two elected branches of government in order to pass a law; you now have to have a super-majority. That is a deeply conservative and anti-democratic position, but it’s become the rule of the day.

My fear is that, once again, we’re about to see an unprecedented, anti-democratic, anti-constitutional gambit by the GOP established as yet another new normal. I don’t have the answer or the solution, but it seems pretty clear that there’s no way to just game your way out of this. The Dems may emerge victorious come November—or perhaps the Republicans will manage to extract a nominee that’s just one degree short of their revanchist views (I doubt that scenario will hold)—but I’m hard-pressed to see how anyone will understand those electoral victories in November as punishment for what the GOP is doing now. The deepening un-democracy and anti-democracy that is the American polity increasingly seems to be something that the two-party system is incapable of challenging.

12. Since I became department chair, I’ve generally avoided media interviews. Not for political reasons; they just throw off my entire day. But I made an exception for David Parsons, a History PhD from the Grad Center. He’s one of the best interviewers out there, and I find conversation with him to be exhilarating rather than enervating. We talked about Trump, Clinton, and Sanders. I gave my short statement of a piece I’m working on about Trump, how he’s new and not new as a conservative. Cryptic preview of that piece’s punchline: “If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination and then the general election in November, it will be a victory for the GOP—and a defeat for conservatism. Not because Trump is not a conservative but precisely because he is.”

Why You Should Never Listen to the Pundits

From Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm:

At their 1964 convention in San Francisco, the Republican Party emerged from a corrosive faction fight between its left and right wings to do something that was supposed to be impossible: they nominated a conservative. Barry Goldwater went down to devastating defeat in November at the hands of Lyndon Johnson, and there, for most observers, the matter stood: the American right had been rendered a political footnote—perhaps for good.

The wise men weighed in. Reston of the Times: “He has wrecked his party for a long time to come and is not even likely to control the wreckage.” Rovere of The New Yorker: “The election has finished the Goldwater school of political reaction.” “By every test we have,” declared James MacGregor Burns, one of the nation’s most esteemed scholars of the presidency, “this is as surely a liberal epoch as the late 19th Century was a conservative one.”

…

Men like this did not detect the ground shifting beneath their feet.

It took this country a hundred years to get a weekend. These things take time.