Corey Robin's Blog, page 51

To My Friends Who Support Hillary Clinton

According to the latest polls out of New Hampshire, Sanders is currently leading among all Democratic women voters there, and not just among women millennial voters. In Iowa, Clinton beat Sanders among women by 11 points; now she is losing to him in New Hampshire among women by 8 points. I thought this young woman quoted in The Washington Post, who’ll be voting for the first time in this election, explained well why women more generally are turning to Sanders:

While many older women’s rights advocates see the election of Clinton as the next logical step in a broader movement, some younger activists have expressed resentment at the notion that they should feel obligated to vote for Clinton simply because she’s a woman. Some have argued in recent months that Sanders, with his calls to end income inequality and make college free, is arguably the more feminist candidate.

“Hillary doesn’t seem to address those huge issues,” said Alexis Isabel Moncada, whose @feministculture Twitter account launched in April and boasts 170,000 followers.

Moncada, who is 17 but will be old enough to vote in November, said Clinton’s personal wealth and her life as a former first lady and secretary of state create a “disconnect with the entirety of women.”

The entirey of women. Nice phrase. A candidate who began this campaign with the media and his critics claiming women would never support him is now winning that support. Because…the entirety of women.

Which leads to my open letter…

To my friends who support Hillary Clinton:

If your position is that Clinton is the most qualified candidate to be president of the US, I respect that.

If your position is that electing a woman with some liberal bona fides is too important a milestone to pass up, I respect that, too.

If your position is that you are a moderate liberal, who does not like or is worried about the direction Bernie Sanders will take the Democratic Party and the nation, I respect that as well.

But if your position is that Clinton understands the political landscape better than Sanders, that only Clinton knows how to wield and work the levers of power in the world as it is, that only Clinton can wield and work those levers on your behalf or on behalf of the values you care about, I ask that you take a moment to reconsider.

I ask that you suspend judgment for a few weeks or months, to see whether that landscape—not just in the Democratic Party but in the nation as a whole—may be changing, to be open to the possibility that political assumptions forged a half-century ago, in the 1972 election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern, and reinforced by centrist victories a quarter-century ago, may no longer hold true today. I ask that you be open to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the world is changing, if only a little bit. And that unless you are ideologically indisposed to that change—or committed to Clinton on other grounds (see above)—you allow yourself the possibility that the changes you are seeing right before your eyes are in fact real, that what was true in 1972 or 1992 may not be true in 2016, and that you let 2016 be 2016.

In solidarity,

Corey

On Electability

I would have thought—after the surprises of the 2008 campaign and now this primary campaign—that media folks and academics would have acquired a degree of circumspection, if not humility, about their claims to know who is or is not electable. What these recent campaigns have shown is that the electorate can upend our expectations and that the opinions of voters are not static. Those opinions can change in response to the changing dynamics of an electoral campaign—you know, what we used to call “politics.” Not only did the voters in 2008 cast their ballot for a black man—something many right-thinking people were sure was not possible in the United States (remember the Bradley Effect?)—but now, to an increasing and unanticipated degree, they are casting their ballots for a self-declared socialist from Brooklyn. And not only is it not the limousine liberal set that’s voting in this unexpected way, as was the case during the 2008 primaries when wealthier Democrats backed Obama and poorer Democrats voted for Clinton. This time around, Clinton’s main base of support seems to be coming from the upper-income brackets of the party, while lower-income voters are flocking to Sanders. So could we perhaps stop making pronouncements about electability, about whom the voters will or will not support, with such confidence? Could we stop assuming we just know who the voters are and how far they will go? If nothing else, we’ll know in a few months if Sanders or Clinton is even minimally electable. So maybe we can allow the voters to deliver that verdict and not presume we know it on their behalf. Hey, that’s a radical thought: let the voters decide!

90% of what goes on at The New Yorker can be explained by Vulgar Marxism

On Tuesday night, Alexandra Schwartz, a critic at The New Yorker, posted a piece criticizing the young supporters of Bernie Sanders. Ordinarily, I’d be mildly irritated by an article titled “Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders?” In this instance, I’m grateful. It clarifies the dividing line between Sanders’s supporters in the electorate and the liberal journalists who can’t abide them.

First, some context. Exit polls from Iowa, according to Vox, show that “Sanders absolutely dominated young adult voters, in a way that even Barack Obama couldn’t in 2008.” Eighty-four percent of voters under 30, and 58% of voters between 30 and 44, cast their ballots for Sanders. More generally, as countless articles have noted, younger voters are shifting left, embracing ancient taboos like socialism and other heresies.

Schwartz finds this all puzzling:

Bernie would not be pressing Hillary without the support of the youth of America, a fact that I—a voter north of twenty-five, south of thirty—have pondered over the past few weeks with increasing perplexity.

Why are young people, she asks, “rallying behind the candidate who has far and away the most shambolic presentation of anyone on either side of this crazy race?”

A second’s Google search turns up an answer:

The youngest voting generation today is the most liberal bloc in a long, long time for three reasons.

First, they’re young and poor, and young, poor people are historically more liberal. Second, they’re historically non-white. Non-white Americans are historically liberal, too. Third, their white demo is historically liberal compared to older white voters, as Jon Chait has pointed out. It all adds up to one cresting blue wave. For now.

The poorer they are, says Vox‘s Dylan Matthews, the more likely millennials are to support a government-guaranteed living wage, the redistribution of wealth, and an expanded safety net.

It’s not just a function of income, Matthews adds. It’s also a question of race and life experiences. Non-white millennials who’ve been discriminated against—whether for reasons of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation—prefer socialism to capitalism and favor an economically egalitarian society over a competitive, meritocratic society.

That’s why young people are rallying to Sanders: no other candidate has made economic inequality, the growing divide between the haves and have-nots, so central to his or her campaign.

Schwartz won’t have it.

The obsession with the banks and the bailout is itself phrased in weirdly retro terms, the stuff of an invitation to a 2008-election theme party. As my colleague Ben Wallace-Wells points out, we voters under thirty have come of political age during the economic recovery under President Obama. When I graduated from college, unemployment was close to ten per cent; it’s now at five. Sanders’s attention to socioeconomic justice is stirring and necessary, but when his campaign tweets that it’s “high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,” you have to wonder why his youngest supporters, so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.

This past year alone, the unemployment rate among 16-24 year-old’s has toggled between 9 and 19%. Employment rates for 25-54 year-old’s have yet to recover to their pre-recession levels.

Nearly 70% of college graduates carry, on average, a student loan debt of $29,000. According to Mike Konczal, the student debt crisis is “a slow moving disaster,” which especially affects black and poorer voters.

Black students disproportionately rely on student loans for college access; according to the Urban Institute, 42 percent of African Americans ages twenty-five to fifty-five have student loans, compared to 28 percent of whites. Black families carry a student loan debt that is 28 percent higher than that of white families….

In order to manage these debt burdens, students have been drawing out their student loan payments over an even longer period of time, from an average of 7.4 years in 1992 to 13.4 years today. Only the elite avoid this burden. According to the Federal Reserve, those in the bottom 95 percent of households have seen their student-debt-to-income ratio skyrocket since 1995. This is especially true for those in the bottom 50 percent, whose education debt has more than doubled—from 26 percent of yearly income to 58 percent.

Many young people graduate today, buried in debt, without much prospect of digging themselves out.

But all of this flies past the 2014 recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Schwartz’s attentions are focused elsewhere.

Like all young people, she says, the millennial voter has a longing for “purity,” and Sanders, with his refusal to compromise, seems pure.

Bernie’s attractiveness as a candidate relies on the premise of purity—a political value as ancient as politics itself….The belief in the possibility of true purity might be a delusion for most voters, but it’s a privilege of youth, the province of people for whom the thrill of theory hasn’t yet given way to the comparative disappointment of practice.

It’s an eccentric kind of purist who manages to stick it out in the grubby world of electoral politics for four decades, working his way up from managing the potholes of a small city to servicing constituents in the House of Representatives to championing their interests in the Senate.

It’s an eccentric kind of purist who launches himself to a leading position as the potential head of what Kevin Phillips once called the “world’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party.” (This last achievement leads Schwartz to some cognitive dissonance: If he were truly pure, she wonders, wouldn’t he “run as an independent”? Perhaps. Which may be an indication that neither he nor his followers think of him or themselves as so pure.)

No matter. Schwartz knows that her fellow millennials have a penchant for purity—and “historical fetishism.”

I sense a whiff of historical fetishism to the young love for Bernie, a yearning for an imaginary time of simpler, more straightforward politics that aligns with other millennial tendencies toward false nostalgia for past purity, in fashion or food, for instance.

It’s an odd sort of charge coming from someone who can’t explain her youthful enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 without dipping her hand into a till of clichés from the French Revolution:

It’s a rite of passage into political adulthood, when the contours of the world seem sharper than they may ever be again, and the notion of the correspondence between the politician one votes for and the one who arrives in office is still intact—that moment of “very heaven,” as Wordsworth’s famous line about witnessing the start of the French Revolution as a young man has it.

The college students and recent graduates who fervently support Bernie are enjoying their own moment of heaven, inevitably brief. I say this in spiritual solidarity. My own phase of very-heaven fell during the first campaign of Barack Obama….

It’s doubly odd coming from someone who wishes to present herself as older, wiser, and world-wearier than her cohort. There is, after all, only one vantage from which the events of 2008 can seem, in 2016, to be “retro”: that of an adolescent.

And trebly odd when you consider that the only fetish on display in this article is the author’s own:

But Obama as a candidate may be as close as many of us will ever come to a twenty-something’s ideal politician—the sheer force of that fluid, academically honed intelligence! The nuance and honesty of the race speech! The dancing!—and a comparison of the two on that count yields something very odd. Bernie’s crankiness to Obama’s cool, his age to Obama’s freshness, his nagging to Obama’s rhetorical deftness, his hokiness to Obama’s humor, his gout to Obama’s jump shot: all make for a strangely conservative vision of a youth idol. (Then there’s the awkward fact of the most diverse generation of voters in the country’s history rallying behind another white guy.)

These are the words and phrases Schwartz uses to describe a black president: sheer force, fluid, honed, the jump shot, the dancing. The dancing! Not to mention the unmastered revulsion to age itself (that mention of gout), which seems to drive so much of this piece.

But that’s all incidental. What really strikes the reader is just how removed Schwartz is from the experiences of her generation, how utterly clueless she is about the economic hardships so many young men and women face today.

It’s true that Schwartz graduated from the tony Brearley School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $43,000) in 2005 and Yale (annual tuition, fees, and costs: $65,000) in 2009, whereupon, after a few detours, she landed a spot at The New Yorker, from which she reports on Paris (cost: priceless).

But does she have no friends or relatives who are struggling with student debt, low-paying or nonexistent jobs? Has she not read an American newspaper or magazine in the last twelve months? Is the cognitive divide between the have’s and the have-not’s that stark, that extreme?

Whatever the case may be, the Sanders campaign has brought that divide to light. We officially live in a world, to paraphrase Bob Fitch, where 90% of what goes on at The New Yorker can be explained by vulgar Marxism.

Every Movement Fails. Until It Succeeds.

I have friends on both sides of the Bernie-Hillary divide. And tonight on Facebook, they’re all posting articles that give the edge to their favored candidates, articles that anticipate alternative—and conflicting—futures. And that is as it should be. Politics is not a science of representing reality exactly as it is (that is, uni-dimensionally). It is an art that sees reality in all its flux, a mode of judgment that identifies multiple paths and possibilities, a mode of action that presses harder on some of those possibilities—pushes further along some of those paths—than others. Not because they’re more probable but because they’re more desirable. Which is why I have so little patience with the armchair strategists in the media, those political meteorologists who spend their days forecasting the future, who tell you there’s no point in voting for a candidate because there’s no way he or she can win, as if the end is a fact of nature rather than a choice of citizens. Or their counterparts in the electorate, those anxious realists who demand that you lay out the path for them, assure them of the destination, before they even take a step. Oh, to know the end of the day ‘ere the day is done! The fact is: Every movement fails. Until it succeeds. And then, when it does, everyone says, of course it succeeded, it had to succeed. No, actually, it didn’t have to succeed. But what made it succeed—or at least helped it succeed—was that men and women, for a time, shook off the need for certitude, let go of the bannisters of certainty, remembered that they are not scientists, and put themselves into motion. Without knowing where they’d end up.

Hillary Clinton: The Ultimate Outsider

Veteran Democratic Party strategist (and former Clinton 2008 adviser) Peter Daou:

One of the prerequisites of Washington insiderism is disdain for Hillary Clinton. Hating Hillary is an industry among the political class and media elites…

There’s much talk of populism in 2016, of establishment versus outsiders, of Trump and Bernie. But what’s more populist than a candidate beloved by the people and reviled by political tastemakers and media elites?

Yes, Hillary is the true outsider, and yes, that statement torpedoes conventional wisdom.

It definitely torpedoes something.

Here is the number of Clinton’s endorsements*:

Cabinet officials: 28

Governors: 42

Senators: 47

House Representatives: 192

Members of the DNC: 113

By way of contrast, here is the number of Sanders’s endorsements*:

Cabinet officials: 1

Governors: 1

Senators: 1

House Representatives: 3

Members of the DNC: 7

* except for the DNC, all numbers include former and current officeholders

 

For Any Leftist Who Has Spent Too Much Time in Meetings…

…You aren’t alone!

This was the utopian conclusion to visionary Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1922 poem “All Meetinged Out.”

It’s early morning;

I greet the dawn with a dream:

“Oh, how about

just

one more meeting

regarding the eradication of all meetings!”

Lenin was not a fan of the experimental Mayakovsky (Stalin, on the other hand, would later write that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.”) Even so, Lenin valued “All Meetinged Out” for its anti-bureaucratic sentiment.

Six Things You Need to Read About Donald Trump

As we move into the last days before Iowa, it’s useful to review some of the very best things that have been written on Donald Trump. Much of it is recent.

1. Hands down, I’d say Jodi Dean has penned the central text for understanding Trump.

Donald Trump cuts through the ideological haze of American politics and exposes its underlying truth, the truth of enjoyment. Where other candidates appeal to a fictitious unity or pretense of moral integrity, he displays the power of inequality. Money buys access — why deny it? Money creates opportunity — for those who have it. Money lets those with a lot of it express their basest impulses and desires — there is no need to hide the dark drives when there is none before whom one might feel shame (we might call this the Berlusconi principle). It’s the rest of us who bow down.

As Trump makes explicit the power of money in the contemporary US, he facilitates, stimulates, and circulates enjoyment (jouissance). Trump openly expresses the racism, sexism, contempt, and superiority that codes of civility and political correctness insist be repressed. This expression demonstrates the truth of economic inequality: civility is for the middle class, a normative container for the rage of the dispossessed and the contempt of the dispossessors. The .1 % need not pretend to care.

The freedom from civility, the privilege of enjoying superiority, incites different responses, all of which enable people to enjoy — get off on — this political round.

Some of the underpaid and exploited enjoy through Trump. Not only does he give them permission to…

2. Earlier this week in Salon, Steve Fraser offered a bracing comparison between Trump and his most important predecessor:

From its earliest days, the nation has witnessed its fair share of demagogues, some from the left, some from the right, even some from an elusive zone that overlaps left and right, but is neither. Some have aspired to high office, others have even managed to get there (Huey Long and Joseph McCarthy, for example). But none of them – except one – shared Trump’s profile. None of them – except one – rested their claim to political preeminence on their previous careers as titans of industry and finance. None of them – except one – threatened to breach the borders of conventional political protocols and established hierarchies to seek approval instead from the streets.

William Randolph Hearst is that exception.

…

Despite these striking similarities, The Chief and The Donald didn’t really speak the same language, even if both were masters of political invective and the Great Lie. What they didn’t have in common is a commentary on the evolution of American public life over the last century.

Hearst rose to the surface on a tidal wave of populist anti-capitalist sentiment. The Populist Party and its call for a Cooperative Commonwealth preceded him. So did a vast labor insurgency that faced off against the armed might of the nation’s mightiest industrialists. Those often violent confrontations continued as Hearst established his media empire. So too did a nationwide anti-trust movement that captured the imagination of millions of working- and middle-class people and even influenced the country’s political establishment. Immigrants toiling in the nation’s sweatshops made common cause with middle-class reformers to expose the scandal capitalism had become in urban ghettoes from coast to coast. The Socialist Party elected local officials all over the country, including some congressmen. The Chief tried and to some considerable degree succeeded in convincing all these foes of the new order of industrial and financial capitalism that he was their champion, their “chief.”

Relentlessly, Hearst denounced the trusts, local monopolies that dominated New York’s economy, and national ones that lorded it over the country and preyed on workers, consumers, and small businessmen alike. He talked about the “Trust Frankenstein.” He loathed Teddy Roosevelt (who hated him in return), for his “preening, bombastic, and aristocratic airs.” Like many populists and progressives of the day, he called for the direct election of senators, an income tax, and public ownership of public services. He was staunchly pro-union, arguing that without them the country would be like “China and India where rich mandarins and rajahs lord it over starving populations.” He campaigned for shorter hours and higher pay and portrayed himself as a hero of the immigrant working classes. He came so close to becoming New York’s mayor precisely because he did so well among those immigrant workers as well as the emerging white-collar proletariat and small business people. Not only did Tammany lose the loyalty of its immigrant base, but so too did Hearst take away votes from the Socialists, who were a party of real weight in the city.

…

One thing is certain, however. For The Donald, this is terra incognito (think immigrants for starters). If Hearst was the inheritor and master manipulator of a widespread left-leaning populism, the prodigal son of Jefferson, Jackson, Bryan and Debs, then Trump is the bastard son of Richard Nixon. Himself a maestro of political choreography (until it did him in), Nixon invoked something he famously anointed “the silent majority” to grease the wheels that landed him in the White House. What nearly got Hearst there was the polar opposite; we might call it “the vociferous majority.” (There is of course no mathematical realty behind either of these “majorities.”) It is the silent one that Trump now speaks for and that makes him a salient component of our public life.

 

3. This morning, Josh Marshall put the recent dust-up over Trump’s withdrawal from tonight’s debate in a larger perspective:

When I heard last night that Trump was pulling out of the Fox News GOP primary debate I was quite certain he had every intention of finally attending tomorrow night’s event. The point was simply to engineer 48 hours of cable news drama, begging by Fox News, all topped off by Trump finally deigning to attend the event after all the other players had been sufficiently humiliated. But unless the man is managing a far better bluff than I can imagine, that is clearly not the case. It also seems clear it was never the case. I see no evidence that Trump fumbled this gambit or boxed himself into a non-attendance he didn’t intend. Being a no show was the plan.

I can’t say that I know how this is going to play out for him. But I thought this was an important moment to revisit an issue I’ve discussed in various posts going back over a dozen years. In the present context I would put it like this: Pundits and political obsessives tend to get distracted by process and policy literalism. But politics generally and especially intra-Republican political battles are really about demonstrating dominance – not policy mastery or polling leads but a series of symbols and actions that mark the dominating from the dominated.

…

Trump doesn’t apologize. He hurts people and they go away. He says things that would kill a political mortal (ban members of an entire religion from entering the country) and yet he doesn’t get hurt. Virtually everything Trump has done over the last six months, whether it’s a policy proposal or personal attack, has driven home this basic point: Trump is strong. He does things other people can’t.

This is why Trump has so shaken up and so dominated the GOP primary cycle, at least thus far. As I’ve said, this kind of dominance symbolism is pervasive in GOP politics. It’s not new with Trump at all. Most successful Republican politicians speak this language. And yet somehow for most it is nonetheless a second language. But it’s Trump’s native language.

4. Rick Perlstein knows more about conservatism and the modern GOP than just about anyone. He gave a masterful interview today to Isaac Chotiner in Slate, in which he confessed his bafflement:

I had a very interesting experience this summer. I remember exactly when it was. It was when I was reading an article by [Evan] Osnos in the New Yorker about Trump. He happened to be covering the white nationalist movement, basically neo-Nazis. Coincidentally, it was right when Donald Trump burst onto the scene, and he wrote about how these guys were embracing Trump, as they never had embraced any Republican candidate before. The feeling I got was that this was the first time in a very long time that I’ve read anything about the Republican Party that I couldn’t assimilate into my normal categories. That was a very uncanny and uncomfortable feeling for me. I realized that I had to go back to the drawing board and rethink what was going on. This is something that’s very new, very strange, and very hard to assimilate into what we thought we knew about how the Republican Party worked.

5. Speaking of the New Yorker, I thought this by Ryan Lizza was quite good:

Dnald Trump has a rule at his rallies: for the fifty minutes before he takes the stage, the only music that can be played is from a set list that he put together. The list shows a sensitive side, mixing in Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and music from “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” But it’s heavy on the Rolling Stones—“Sympathy for the Devil,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and the famously impolitic “Brown Sugar.” The young volunteer in charge of music for one rally sent me the full Trump-curated playlist and asked for requests. “Remember,” he said, “the more inappropriate for a political event, the better.”

…

Trump’s fans tend to express little regard for political norms. They cheer at his most outlandish statements. O’Reilly asked Trump if he meant it when he said that he would “take out” the family members of terrorists. He didn’t believe that Trump would “put out hits on women and children” if he were elected. Trump replied, “I would do pretty severe stuff.” The Mesa crowd erupted in applause. “Yeah, baby!” a man near me yelled. I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.

…

Throughout his campaign, Trump has made much of the dangers posed by immigration and political correctness. But central to his platform is his insistence that Americans are being cheated. To protect themselves, he says, they need to hire someone who will cut them a better deal. Domestically, he argues that undocumented immigrants are causing the wages of middle-class workers to plummet, and that campaign donors are bribing politicians—except Trump, a billionaire who can’t be bought. His foreign policy, such as it is, is guided by the idea that America is besieged by a long list of adversaries. He customizes his us-versus-them argument to every issue. At rallies in New Hampshire and Iowa, he warns voters that the two states might lose their status as hosts of the first two Presidential nominating contests. “There’s a big movement to put you at the back of the pack,” he said in New Hampshire recently. (In reality, there is little momentum for any movement to change the primary calendar.)

…

Some prominent Republicans fear that a Trump nomination would fundamentally alter the identity of the Republican Party, even if he goes on to lose the general election, which seems likely. The Party would become more downscale, a potential asset if it meant drawing in disaffected Democrats, but also more alienating to non-whites, who represent the largest source of potential growth in the electorate. It would be defined by ethno-nationalism at home and an anti-interventionist retreat from America’s obligations abroad. The last major figure in Republican politics who came close to Trump’s brand of nationalism was Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon aide who ran for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. Buchanan was driven from the Republican Party by mainstream conservatives, who called him an isolationist and an anti-Semite; in 2000, he captured the nomination of the Reform Party. If Trump wins the nomination, it will be his opponents who are driven from the Party.

6. Last, there’s a book on conservatism that came out a few years ago. Controversial, they said. Yet every day, its theses seem truer and truer.

Update (11 am)

Jed Purdy also had a great piece in Dissent yesterday that I missed:

There is another difference that may be more telling about just what the Trump phenomenon is. His political language conjures up a very different world from the other candidates’. He dismisses the high-church liturgy of American politics: rag-tag colonists, a terrible Civil War, World War Two and fear itself, the sin of slavery (either lingering or long-since overcome), the Constitution, the Constitution, the Constution. That will be the language of the GOP debate, along with its pathetic jabs and sick burns. Cruz, although a man of the hard right, speaks this language just like virtually every American politician of the last century. Trump’s language, less consistently anti-government than Cruz’s, is something different and strange. That is part of Trump’s unsettling novelty.

When Trump mentions the Constitution, it tends to be the Second Amendment. “We’ve got to have the right to protect ourselves,” he told students at the evangelical Liberty University earlier this January. Announcing his candidacy last June, he praised a couple who, fearful of being attacked by escaped convicts, told him, “We now have a gun on every table. We’re ready to start shooting.” Vigilante fantasies of citizens shooting back at terrorists have become standard on the right, but the meaning of Trump’s Second Amendment is especially private and personal. In his America, haunted by illegal immigrants out for rape and murder, under a government too cowed by political correctness to protect its people, people have to be prepared to look out for themselves. No one is looking out for them.

That turns out to be the key to Trump’s message: no one is looking out for you.

And here is Joe Lowndes, setting Trump against the back drop of the troubled history of the GOP, racism, and National Review:

It is no coincidence that Trump’s strongest support comes from working-class Republicans who feel their whiteness no longer protects them.

 

 

Abraham Lincoln on the More Realistic, Experienced Candidate…

At an Iowa town hall event tonight, Hillary Clinton was asked which president most inspired her. She answered Lincoln:

“And I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancor, a little more forgiving and tolerant than might possibly have brought people back together more quickly,” Clinton continued. “But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the reigns of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.”

That comment is straight-up Dunning School, and it naturally set off a lot of alarm bells among liberal journalists. As well it should.

Speaking of Lincoln, political theorist Roy Tsao sent me this quote from a letter Lincoln sent to Charles Wilson in 1858.

The context: Lincoln was running for Senate in Illinois against Stephen Douglas. That campaign was the setting of the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln won the debates, but lost the race. Horace Greeley backed Douglas, much to Lincoln’s chagrin. But in his letter to Wilson, Lincoln tried to damp down speculation that Greeley was corrupt or on the take. No, said Lincoln, what led Greeley to back someone like Douglas over Lincoln, whose opposition to the expansion of slavery was much closer to Greeley’s own position (Greeley wound up supporting Lincoln in 1860), was, well, let’s let Lincoln speak for himself.

It is because he thinks Douglas’ superior position, reputation, experience, and ability, if you please, would more than compensate for his lack of a pure republican position, and therefore, his re-election do the general cause of republicanism, more good, than would the election of any one of our better undistinguished pure republicans.

Sound familiar?

What the Clintons Mean to Me

Maybe this is a generational thing, but this is what the Clintons will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate affirmation to win over white voters by declaring: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, We are not the Rainbow Coalition.

People don’t seem to remember just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised upon the repudiation of black voters and black interests—a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed this was the only path to taking back the White House from the Republicans—but for me, it’s vivid as yesterday. Maybe it’s because it happened at a formative period of my life, during my first years in graduate school. My roommate and closest friend throughout those years was Paul Frymer, who’s now a professor of politics at Princeton University. Paul’s dissertation—which he began to write in the apartment we shared on Canner Street in New Haven, and which formed the basis for the now classic Uneasy Alliances—was born in part out of the tremendous frustration and anger many of us felt about the wrenching transformation the Clintons imposed upon the Democratic Party.

I was recently re-reading some of Paul’s book, and it brought that whole sordid moment back in painful detail. Like the fact, according to an article by Andrew Hacker, which Paul cites, that “for the first time in almost half a century, the party’s [1992] platform made no mention of redressing racial injustice.” (I re-read the platform: it does mention affirmative action and civil rights in passing, but it’s cursory.) Or the fact that in their 1992 book, Putting People First, Bill Clinton and Al Gore only mentioned race once. And that was to oppose the idea of racial quotas. Or the fact that their chapter on civil rights was mostly about people with disabilities.

What’s more, white people got the message: according to polls, white voters were more familiar with Clinton’s attack on Sister Souljah than they were with his economic plan. So did black people: though they voted for Clinton, their share of the total voter turnout fell by 20% from 1988, when they cast their ballots for Michael Dukakis (and accounted for 20% of the vote for him and 10% of total turnout), and 1992, when they cast their ballots for Clinton (and accounted for 15% of the vote for him and 8% of total turnout).

Stanley Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster, celebrated all these changes in an influential book, arguing that this recalibrated attention to black voters “allowed for a Democratic Party that could once again represent people in the broadest sense.” It doesn’t take a close reader to know what that “people in the broadest sense” looked like.

This is what the Clintons were to millions of voters. This is what they will always be to me.

Update (10 pm)

Tim Barker just reminded me on Twitter, that the Jesse Jackson bogeyman was part of the Clintons’ playbook as late as 2008. A fact I should have remembered, since I just mentioned it the other day!

What is Hillary Clinton Up To When…

…she says this?

I am a person of faith. I am a Christian. I am a Methodist. I have been raised Methodist….There is so much more in the Bible about taking care of the poor, visiting the prisoners, taking in the stranger…

It’s uncharacteristic of her, journalists note, to talk about her faith on the campaign trail.

Is she trying to say, “I’m not an atheist Jew“?

Or she is trying to make us forget she once referred to poor people—”these people,” she called them—as “deadbeats”?

Or is she trying to make us forget what she said in 2014 about children who are undocumented immigrants?

We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay.