If You Want to Beat the Right, Call the Left

Trump’s political style bears comparison not with Mussolini but George C Wallace, who ran for the presidency in 1968 and 1972 on a conservative populist ticket. Protestors turned up to his rallies, too – and he loved it. Wallace perfected the anti-hippie zinger. When kids shouted “F**k Wallace!” he replied: “Why don’t you try learnin’ some other four letter words – like W.A.S.H. and W.O.R.K.?” The confrontations added to the Alabamian’s appeal, confirming him as “the only guy willing to take on the mob”.

Wallace ran as a Democrat from the Deep South – a reminder that the history of demagoguery and racist innuendo runs at least as deep in the Democrats as it does the Republicans. Indeed, Wallace was routinely condemned by philosophical conservatives because they regarded him as a liberal with racist sensibilities. Exactly the same dynamic exists between Trump and the intellectual high-priests of modern Republicanism. To the scholars and the pundits of American conservatism, Trump is an interloper in the GOP and a threat to the Constitution. The Right is as alarmed by his authoritarian streak as the Left.

[snip]

Trump is a blowhard. His views are unconstitutional, illiberal and sometimes they trigger hate. But he did not take America to war in Iraq on flimsy evidence, establish Guantanamo in contravention of human rights law, licence the torture of enemy combatants, oversee the gargantuan NSA data-gathering operation, launch a dirty war of drone strikes against both terrorists and those unfortunate enough to live near them, undermine the religious freedoms of employers who do not want to subsidise the sex lives of their workers, overrule the states’ wishes on marriage, compel citizens to buy healthcare products or deport thousands of illegals through aggressive round-ups. No: these things were done by “moderate” Republicans and “liberal” Democrats.

Trump is not new. The violence in Chicago has been a part of American politics for a very long time. The angry nihilism of the far-Right has incubated for decades; the “no platform” tendency of the Left is authoritarianism by any other name. And the slow corruption of American republicanism – the growth of the state and the willingness of politicians to do anything to get votes – began long before The Donald threw his hair into the ring. Trump is not a political crisis in isolation but, rather, a symptom of wider institutional failure. A symptom of American political decline.

Read in full: Donald Trump is not a fascist – Telegraph

I support Bernie but I’m not confident he would survive being elected president. I worry that we only have the illusion of a choice. The establishment will accept fascism or neoliberalism and nothing else.

Feel the Bern or burn the field.

NRO conservatives and NPR democrats are part and parcel the same folks, and they seem to quite dislike actual policies that would help less fortunate citizens.

I agree with Ian on his point here- and I see more and more people willing to burn it all down if they are not offered a compelling, decent option…

Points well-made, Ian Hillary may squeeze out a win this November. She will, however, take office as a hobbled president. A significant percentage of her own party doesn’t like her, independents mostly don’t like her and Republicans loathe her. She’s a neoliberal in economics, which means continued strangulation of the middle class. If she runs against Trump, she might win because more voters fear a Trump presidency than like her. Combine that with her aggressive, interventionist bent in foreign policy, the odds of a hot war erupting on her watch are much higher.

If the GOP forces a brokered convention and nominates someone other than Trump, they will lose hundreds of thousands of their own core supporters, particularly if the nominee is a corporate tool like Rubio or Romney.

There exists now a moment for a major realignment within the existing parties, or fertile ground for the emergence of a new political party. We actually may be beyond a 1932-style realignment, and are looking at something like 1860.

We ma

Yes, the fault lines are cracking wider every day, but the American presidential race is still a big, fat beauty contest. A charade. Trump and Sanders are injecting some actual politics into the mix, but their followers range from vaguely nativist to vaguely liberal to incoherent. A Trump or Sanders presidency is likely to be rendered impotent.

It’s tragic that black voters may be responsible for putting Hillary over the top. We live in the United States of Amnesia. (hat tip, Gore Vidal) Even that is too generous, by assuming they ever knew enough to forget in the first place.

The dark state is making preparations for any contingency.

and now Dean works for PhRMA

I have been uncomfortable for some time with labels like right and left. I call myself a progressive, but that is largely to distinguish myself from liberals. In the common parlance, liberals equal New Dealers. This is not true. (Part of my thesis that Americans don’t know their own history) FDR was a liberal who adopted populist language and socialist programs, like Social Security and jobs programs, when he needed to and only as long as he needed to to save capitalism. Once that was done he reverted to type, classical liberalism. This was the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson. It was pro-corporate, interventionist, elitist, paternalistic, and virulently anti-populist. Hillary Clinton’s neoliberalism is simply a return of liberalism to its roots under Wilson. Nonetheless this schizophrenic conflation of New Dealism and liberalism persists and goes largely unnoticed.

Traditional conservatism is dead. It was small government, pro-corporate, states rights, and isolationist. The libertarian Rand Paul perhaps came closest, but not really. Modern conservatives and libertarians pay lip service to “small government”, but look past the rhetoric and they want big government just with different priorities, like a big military. But why have a big military if you are isolationist? Neoconservatives are more coherent, if less conservative, on this point. They want a big military because they are interventionist. In fact, they never met a war they didn’t like. Modern conservatism also includes groups that were really never a part of traditional conservatism, like the movement conservatives who support conservative social values, which are, of course, whatever their social values happen to be. Modern conservatism is, if anything, even more schizophrenic than modern liberalism.

And none of this gets into the contradictory nature of the Presidential candidates themselves. Trump is the egomaniac billionaire populist. Cruz is the sleazy evangelical. Rubio is the Establishment empty suit. Clinton is the pragmatic grifter, and “Folds like a cheap lawnchair” Sanders is the great progressive hope and accidental nonrevolutionary revolutionary.

All this is a long way round to saying that I am not sure that left and right mean much anymore, neither offer much of anything to most Americans, and Trump and Sanders supporters have a lot in common. They are both screwed with conditions as they are. What I see from neither Sanders nor Trump though is a coherent, over-arching vision of the kind of a society they want, and how their various proposals would fit into that society.

@hugh,
your missive on labels is as cutting as ian’s missive on the decline and fall of post war liberalism.

the collective (wall street corporate/ church/ political party/ skull & bones/ zioners/ whatever) always wins. the small guy? good luck [and don’t get caught in the belongers’ convenient use of labels for propagating propaganda].

the current state [of affairs] is only as good as the dollar.

Um, it’s TRUMP who’s attributing this to Bernie. This isn’t what we Bernie people do. We’re fed up and furious, yes, but not violent. We’re the good guys.

If anti-Trump protests are being organized by anyone, my first guess would be Trump. Painting himself as a victim forced to cancel rallies gets him a new form of attention and, from some misguided souls, sympathy.

If he isn’t behind it, how about the ever-sinister Kochtopus? Even Hillary, whom somebody mentioned already, can be a dirty-tricks player. Bernie just isn’t. That’s why he’s Bernie.

From Tomorrowland. Governor Nix-

Let’s imagine. If you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck!
 
The only facts they won’t challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in.
 
But what if… what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone’s head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they’ve ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse.
 
But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn’t fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You’ve got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won’t take the hint!
 
In every moment there’s the possibility of a better future, but you people won’t believe it. And because you won’t believe it you won’t do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up! It’s not the monitor’s fault. That’s yours.

There are two wolves…

To Hugh, regarding left-right political spectrum.

In 2009, Stirling Newberry posted what I consider one of his classics: , Three Polar Politics In Post-Petroleum America. Newberry explains that there are three loci in American politics today: Progressive, Moderate, and Confederate. It appears to have been reposted twice by Lambert at CorrenteWire, most recently in November 2013, and teh exact original date in 2009 is lost to me.

I think Newberry’s “tri-polar” schema is far more accurate than a left-right bi-polar schema, but I also believe that Newberry’s three poles can be further refined by applying Thorstein Veblen’s bi-polar schema of Producers versus Leisure Class, or, in the terminology I prefer, Producers versus [economic and financial] Predators. There are, for example, many Confederates and Moderates and even Progressives who are entirely in thrall to the financial markets and the FIRE sector in general. As Newberry once put it: there are many people who have never known any other way of making a living than dipping a cup into the Niagara of financial flows. particularly noteworthy, there are also many Confederates and Moderates who are solidly based in the productive half of Veblen’s schema, such as people in agriculture, forestry, and especially the oil and gas industry. What I think is particularly important to understand at this point in history is what Veblen called pecuniary culture, which I think would give us a broad, general foundation on which to apply Veblen’s schema to Newberry’s.

Here is something I wrote on pecuniary culture in January 2011. http://real-economics.blogspot.com/2011/01/pecuniary-culture.html

I would also note that I think Ian’s ongoing formulations of good and bad societies and economies encompasses all this in terms that are probably easier to understand for most people.
The

Jon Larson of Real Ecomics developed a graphic representation in the 1980s of Veblen’s analysis; more recently, Larson has used new graphics software to refine his work, and presented it at his blog, Real Economics: Illustrating a class theory. (Please be sure to take the time to watch the short, 1980s video Larson has placed there.)

Veblen’s 1898 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class is not easy reading, but Veblen offers much better insight into the nature and problems of class in modern industrial societies than does Marx. While Marx’s offers very little when it comes to understanding why socialist societies also ended up developing authoritarian political and economic structures as bad as, or even worse, as any authoritarian structures developed under capitalism, Veblen’s analysis very easily applies to this phenomena of socialist societies becoming authoritarian.

I’m a Sanders woman. If he doesn’t win this country will be up the ick creek without a paddle. Even if he does win we’re going to have to butt-kick congress all the way.

I keep waiting for the pitchforks to spring out but all I see are members of the 99% kicking at other members of the 99%. I would prefer if we all turned our eyes to the 1% and… well, there’s this saying I’ve heard of – “Eat the rich!” This is class war.

@futureman – You still haven’t realized this isn’t left/right. It’s class war. Our pitchforks should be on the same side but make no mistake, you point that pitchfork at me and you’re going to get a real surprise.

Ian, your other recent posts are very good and insightful, and I thank you for them, but this last comment of yours constitutes a sudden sharp turn into the stupid. Most blacks are solid for Hillary, and the BLM folks who represent the cutting edge of black activism nowadays are the lowest, most self-centered scum in the the entire political spectrum right now; they live for and thrive on confrontation, and they are proud of that, and they make no bones about it.

If you hate violence, hate the BLM. If you think the Trump supporters couldn’t beat the shit out of any number of BLM folks who showed up at his rallies, you have really lost your mind, my friend.

May I propose a simple solution for a better start? Let’s just agree to turn our backs forever on any and all liars, and any and all who choose to INITIATE violence. Then we can probably do great things with whatever is left.

I’d like to see some interviews of the Sanders supporters that would turn to Trump, and what of, in the opposite case, the Clinton supporters turn? To Trump as well?!?

Trump is subsiding, slowly, but surely. Cruz is only 90 delegates back now. There was an interesting reaction from a beltway Republican openly mocking that a Dem strategist would rather face Cruz than Trump. It really gives you an insight as to how out of touch the GOPe is from the voters, and non-voters.

That’s the real wildcard here in the USA. We’ve got nearly 50% who don’t vote in the GE, many of them poor”losers” in the economy, and if they turn out to vote, it’s only to bring it all down, especially in the GOP.

I still am at the stage of denial, as far as Trump goes, and keep waiting for the next Tuesday primary when there is finally a break of the Republican voting insanity.

Tony, what is the revelance of Veblen to 99% of Americans or adding yet more labels and categories? People don’t need to be classified. Indeed nowadays classification is just a set up for class war where we in the lower 80% of the population fight, fear, and hate each other, according to our classifications, while the top 20% watch in comfort and the top 1% make out like the bandits they are.

If we wish to stop being duped and dupes, we need an over-arching vision of the society we want and how it will operate. So we have something to measure against and judge the proposals we are being offered. Otherwise, we will have what we have now, an assortment of third-rate hucksters willing to fill the void and fleece us for them and theirs with a host of contradictory lies and cons.

Hugh askes: “what is the revelance of Veblen to 99% of Americans or adding yet more labels and categories?”

Well, for one thing, if people understood Veblen’s explanation of how the Lesiure (Predator) class gains and enforces its rule through fraud, deceit, force, and the corrupting influence of pecuniary culture, liberals and the left generally would not present such a pathetic spectacle of push-overs. Jeebus effing Christ, allowing Ayn Rand’s and the Koch’s libertarianism to thrive and succeed as a public philosophy? That could only have been accomplished by rejecting the Enlightenment and actively forgetting the heritage of the American Revolution: the idea of public virtue, meaning citizens willingly curb or even surrender their private interests when the public good requires it.

And achieve what? Chaos, confrontation and destruction – that’s what, as the youngsters find out for themselves what they should have learnt had they been paying attention in class.

The primary objective for any moderate politician and statesman is to build and maintain a cohesive society. That can come from unity against a common enemy of course, but these days the enemy is more likely to take the form of internal stresses. Your concerns about falling living standards and widening income and wealth gaps, exacerbated as they are by high levels of unskilled immigration, is just such a challenge on both sides of the pond. Only time will tell whether moderates or extremists will prevail. If the latter, and I include Sanders and Corbyn in that group, then history will indeed repeat itself.

The producer/predator template may line right up with feminist political theory.

If one thinks of women as Producers, with a producer’s investment in and concern for that which we produce, that would make the Abrahamic, goddess-effacing codes the work of Predators.

@futureman Hahahahaha Thanks I needed the laugh.

Trump has stoked this response since he went full Mussolini on the campaign trail. And the response seems to be that he doubles down on his antics with more outrageous soundbites. I still think that if we are to get a Man on Horseback He or She would need to be a tad more subtle. Trump is way too much PT Barnum.