PMC Commentary

The Bernie Bros and Donald Trump

George Will's usual charge is to proffer conservative claptrap with florid eloquence, but today he violates himself by being uncommonly lucid:

The minority of people who pay close attention to politics includes those who define an ideal political outcome and pursue it, and those who focus on the worst possible outcome and strive to avoid it. The former experience the excitements of utopianism, the latter settle for prudence’s mild pleasure of avoiding disappointed dreams.

All of which means, in Will's further formulation: "Were [Trump] to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states." (The other would be to rescue "as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible.")

As do others among the right's intelligentsia, Will dreads the growing assemblage of "Republican quislings" — "collaborationists" who will imprudently sign on to Donald Trump's "Believe me" revolution of making American great again via the cult of personality and the force of Nietzschean will. To say that Trump's theme is fantastical borders on understatement; to say it's "utopian," in a crypto-fascistic way, is no overestimation of its perversity.

Will's advice to those he would regard as true conservatives? Work to purge the Trumpian scourge, embrace a Hillary Clinton presidency, and then labor to dethrone her in 2020. I remain mystified as to Will's fully encompassed definition of true conservatism (is, for instance, heaving modern science from its belief system an element of legitimate conservative thinking?), but on this element — the full-throated repudiation of Donald Trump — George Will is spot on. Genuinely conservative delegates to Cleveland's asylum should (though they won't) tell the plurality of Republican voters to go jump in the rising seas.

On the other side, however — the "true progressive" side — we find in Walker Bragman's Salon piece, "A liberal case for Donald Trump: The lesser of two evils is not at all clear in 2016," an embrace of Trump and a scourging of Clinton. Though he rejects the identity of "Bernie Bro," Bragman, a blogger, political cartoonist and law student, is head over heels in brotherly love with Bernie Sanders. This, naturally, means that arguments must be formulated to embrace the Wicked Queen's almost certain opponent. Here's one of them, and it will leave you speechless:

Historically, the party in control of the White House loses seats in the midterm. A Trump presidency would force Democrats to organize and turn out in the off-year. And it might provide a head-start on taking back the chamber in 2020.

Did I nail it or what? You're speechless, right?

Here's another glittering diamond of Bragmanian wisdom:

Rightly or wrongly, [Trump] represents America’s crypto-fascist element. The best way to discredit both [Republicism and crypto-fascism] is to let them fail on their own. Trump will not succeed as a president.

Would someone please explain the reasoning behind the two adverds introducing that passage? At any rate, the thrust of Bragman's argument here is that a President Trump would be catastrophic — so by all means, bring on the catastrophe. That, we can afford. But,

On the flip side, if Hillary Clinton screws up by compromising too much (which is likely) or doing too little (also likely), progressivism will take a big hit in the public eye, which is something we cannot afford.

It's true, a Sanders presidency wouldn't do "too little." It would do — it would accomplish, rather — nothing at all. Yet for reasons unexplained by Bragman, "progressivism" would take no big hit at the hand of Bernie's absolute impotence. It would at the hand of Hillary's compromises or unavoidable constraints, but not at the hand of Bernie's total failures.

You know what? When the specific thinking of a Walker Bragman makes George Will look broadly reasonable, the Bernie Bros might then want to stand back — and rethink this thing.

 

Gov. Pence: Are you sure about this?

Commentators on both sides have been expressing little surprise at Gov. Mike Pence's endorsement of Sen. Ted Cruz. I, for one, am shocked.

As the Indianapolis Star understates it: "The endorsement carries some risk for Pence, who risks alienating his party's presidential front-runner and some supporters, who have been packing Trump rallies across the state by the thousands." ("Some" ≠ "packing.")

I appreciate that Pence is as cretinously ideological as Cruz, but I always believed that Pence was also more intelligently political than Cruz. And Pence's endorsement just doesn't seem politically smart. Not at this foregone stage.

 

From the sublime to the iffy

The Republican word from several battleground states, which, assuming the absence of a certain troublesome variable, will be more like demilitarized zones:

"There is positively no way for Trump to win in Pennsylvania," said a Republican from that state.

"Trump cannot and will not carry Ohio," a Republican from that state insisted. "He will do well in Appalachia and in the Mahoning Valley but he will get killed in the rest of the state. The danger for the GOP is losing Rob Portman which is a very real possibility under this match-up."

Added a Florida Republican..., "Trump is grinding the GOP to a stub. He couldn't find enough xenophobic, angry white Floridians to beat Hillary in Florida if he tried."

"NH is potentially a swing state but Hillary would win in a rout with profound down ballot consequences," wrote one New Hampshire Republican.

Said a Virginia Republican, "While a Trump candidacy will gin up turnout in the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest, Trump will get killed in the suburbs of the urban crescent."

Now, about that variable. Trump, speaking on MSNBC: "Bernie Sanders has a message that's interesting. I'm going to be taking a lot of the things Bernie said and using them." Continues CNN:

Trump's advisers say [this is] a preview of more explicit overtures the campaign is ready to make to Sanders' supporters once the populist liberal exits the 2016 race. That strategy is based on the broad areas of overlap between voters attracted to Trump and those who have flocked to Sanders. Both have angrily denounced the political system as corrupt and expressed deep frustration that Washington is not helping ordinary people. They both oppose international trade deals, saying they hurt American jobs.

And that strategy is going to be one fascinating potential to watch. For now, the potential seems weak. From a late March, WaPo/ABC News poll:

In a head-to-head match-up of Clinton versus Trump, 10 percent of Sanders backers say they’d support Trump, 77 percent Clinton, and the rest say they would vote for neither or not vote at all.

While "that’s not a great conversion rate for Clinton from Sanders backers" (my emphasis), notes the Post, the combined 23-percent defection rate could yet grow — depending not so much on Trump's appeals, but a sustained insurgency message from Sanders. And there could be lost those "routs" in some otherwise demilitarized zones. It's possible.

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Just to clarify, I am in no way suggesting that Hillary could lose any of these states. I'm merely saying that a maximum pounding of the Republican position could be endangered.    

 

With Bernie, an upside-down election?

For David Brooks, this election is pretty much over. The Republican nomination is Trump's — "a Joe McCarthy moment" — and yet GOP leaders are "going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention." What they'll get is a permanent character stain, to be followed by "general election slaughter," despairs Brooks. And he will have nothing to do with it. Instead he's trying on sandals, sizing a staff, letting his hair go Bernie — and out among the little people he'll go, listening and ministering. Because on the institutional side of things, it's over, as far as David's concerned.

Colleague Paul Krugman essentially agrees. "[I]t really is over — definitively on the Democratic side, with high probability on the Republican side," he writes. It'll be Clinton vs. Trump. Put more broadly, it'll be the Democratic establishment vs. the right's anti-establishment. The former has triumphed, argues Krugman, because it "more or less tries to make good on [its] promises"; the "Republican establishment has been routed because it has been playing a con game on its supporters all along, and they’ve finally had enough."

So it's over, says the Times's opinion page. Yet in the pages of the Times's straight reporting, there are signs that it's just beginning — on the Democratic side.

Yesterday, at a rally in Springfield, Oregon, reports the Times, Bernie delivered his customary criticisms of Hillary — "her stances on trade deals, hydraulic fracking, taxing carbon emissions and taking an incremental approach to addressing problems." Though customary, "his criticisms were a bit toned down." For Bernie is riding a fresh hobbyhorse now: "his fiercest critiques" were aimed at the Democratic Party "as a whole."

Sanders criticized Democratic leaders on many of the core issues of his campaign. He questioned whether leaders were thinking about the concerns of voters rather than the economic fortunes of large industries…. "The Democratic Party up to now has not been clear about which side they are on on the major issues facing this country," [fumed Bernie].

The party's establishment, which includes voices such as Krugman's, doesn't quite see things that way (see above). Whatever. Bernie is arguing a Tea Party position: that the Democratic establishment should be routed because it has been playing a con game on it supporters all along, and by now, they should have finally had enough.

Thus appears Bernie's Political Revolution 2.0 — a full-throated assault on the Democratic establishment, which in Bernie's eyes is either a vividly traitorous bunch of fat-cat-schmoozing old bulls or a pusillanimous pack of weasels. This, it seems, is Bernie Sanders's desperately updated adventure: a Sarah Palinlike offensive against the entirety of The People's betrayal.

Bernie seems determined to at least take his offensive to Philadelphia. Thus while GOP leaders are going down meekly in Cleveland and securing a quiet convention, all manner of hostilities could break out in the city of brotherly love. We need not note the potential irony of an explosive Democratic convention attended by delegates who for months had believed Republicans would be doing the fighting.

Should Bernie take his tea-party revolution post-convention, Democrats could of course undergo a factional rupture of transcendent harm. It's not that Hillary — absent the young and idealistically delusional — would lose; no one but a self-avowed socialist could lose to The Donald. But the top of the Democratic ticket could win by far less than otherwise rather easily possible, which in turn could trim its down-ticket successes.

Simply put, at the hands of a Palinlike "Democrat," Democrats could blow their most massively winnable election since 1964 — "on principle." Krugman would then be the despairing one, though we'd both happily have a superabundance of imbecility to write about; and David Brooks would be spotted wandering the countryside, wearing a Bernie button.

 

Bernie's selective "wants"

In the litany of items that Bernie "wants" as peace concessions you will find his great indignation at the closed-primary system, which is horribly undemocratic in his opinion, so Bernie wants closed primaries gone. Writes Politico: "Making the case that Democrats need independents on their side to win general elections, Sanders has repeatedly suggested that more primaries should use an open format," which so far has favored Sanders.

You will not find the word "caucus" anywhere in the list of Bernie's complaints. Yet if you were looking for a word to describe the least democratically friendly procedure within the nominating process, "caucus" would be that word. With its intolerable demands on especially the Democratic poor — one doesn't just dart in and out of a caucus meeting, which can take hours; likely unaffordable time off work — eliminating caucuses should sit not merely among, but atop, the list of Bernie's "wants."

So why is it missing from the list? Because, of course, profoundly undemocratic caucuses happened to benefit Sen. Sanders — which makes his fresh and bold political honesty just old and very bold hypocrisy. Hell even I dislike the caucus system as undemocratic, and more "democracy" is scarcely among my leading wants.

Sometimes I wonder how the old coot keeps a straight face as he lectures his temporarily adopted party on what's good and what's bad, what's needed and what should be dismissed. I know I couldn't pull it off. 

 

Trump's FP may need a little work

Milbank on "Trump’s crazy attempt not to sound crazy":

He carefully read a speech somebody else had written, demonstrated both by his lack of familiarity with the content — he pronounced Tanzania as "Tan-ZANY-uh" — and by its un-Trumpian phrases such as "the false song of globalism" and "the clear lens of American interests." This speech was at an eighth-grade comprehension level, five years beyond Trump’s usual.

Most peculiar to me was Trump's invocation of "America First," the odious shibboleth of prewar hardcore isolationism which, in Trump's formulation, would nonetheless slay an army of demons halfway around the world: "ISIS will be gone if I’m elected president, and they’ll be gone quickly."

It was that sort of "inconsistency" in Trump's speech that has some foreign-policy mavens troubled. But of course they're not working on Trump's level. 

 

Lucifer responds to character identification

I just watched Ted Cruz respond to John Boehner's assessment of him as "Lucifer in the flesh' and, accordingly, a "miserable son of a bitch."

Cruz's response? First a hissssing giggle ...

then what seemed like an hour's worth of his godawful stump speech ...

and finally an unholy counterattack on Boehner for releasing his "inner Trump."

Thus may Mr. Boehner rest his case.    

 

Obama addresses the mythological right

In NY Times Magazine, President Obama unleashes a barrage of lucidity that could double as Hillary's campaign offensive:

If you look at the platforms, the economic platforms of the current Republican candidates for president, they don’t simply defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy. Slashing taxes particularly for those at the very top, dismantling regulatory regimes that protect our air and our environment and then projecting that this is going to lead to 5 percent or 7 percent growth, and claiming that they’ll do all this while balancing the budget. Nobody would even, with the most rudimentary knowledge of economics, think that any of those things are plausible.

If we can’t puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy — if we can’t describe that effectively, then we’re doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.

The challenge lies in piercing the right's fortified bubble of epistemic closure. Hillary's principal ally in this effort will be her "opponent" Donald Trump, however, who is systematically unmasking the right's many absurdities by being, so transparently, the campaigning absurdity in chief.

Perhaps "piercing" the bubble is the wrong verb. Shrinking it is the more realistic challenge — merely whittling down the throng of shrunken heads. And Trump more than anyone is doing what Mitt Romney would have called a "marvelous" job of it.

Which is why I'm just wild about The Donald. Only he can take the center-right to China, that sort of thing.

 

Joe Scarborough reveals Trump's "secret" weapon

Joe Scarborough (my apologies for rudely introducing a post with that name) advances the daring sociopolitical theory (but this is Joe, so of course it's daring) that "Washington insiders and media moguls" — you know, the "increasingly isolated political and media class" — have failed to "understand the causes and scope of Trump’s populist revolt" because …

… they don't watch enough TV.

I kid you not, Joe kids us not, and Jack Paar would have split a gut, as I damn near did while reading Scarborough's trenchant Washington Post analysis of Trump's "stunning rise." In depth, it goes like this:

Millions of Americans watched Donald Trump's "The Apprentice" just as millions of Americans, from the mid-1950s to early 1960s, watched General Electric Theater, hosted by Ronald Reagan. The latter went on to become president in a "landslide victory" that "shocked elites [who, we gather, didn't watch General Electric Theater] in and out of the political class and launched a conservative revolution that would last a generation." Ergo, the crowing cock caused the sun to rise then, and the cleverer among us discern the same cause and effect now.

The Reagan "revolution is being undone by another TV star," observes Scarborough keenly, "who has been underestimated by elites while being elevated by working-class voters."

That Trump the demagogue himself was underestimated by "elites" is unquestionable. What has been astutely and rather precisely estimated by elites since at least 1981, however, is the powerful, manifold symptomatology of Trumpism — the dark doggerel fed to white working-class voters; the simplistic solutions to complex problems; the cultivation of contempt for "the system" — "rigged" and "politically correct"; the scapegoating of shiftless "takers"; the "exceptionalism" of giving Americans of revised European stock; a virtuously caricatured America confronting a menacing globe of insidious "Others."

None of this powerful humbug has been underestimated by rational elites, and only the date of its genesis is under debate. One can breezily go beyond Reagan and back to Goldwater, then to McCarthy, then further back to the militant Republicanism under the New Deal, when conservatism began to go freakishly pseudo. Donald Trump, as many reputedly blind elites have been pointing out for months, is merely the suppurating boil on the ass of modern Republicanism.

Scarborough concludes his searching analysis with (speaking of television) the dramatic chord of a "Law and Order" episode:

The question now is whether Trump can prove his critics wrong again by winning the nomination and then defeating Hillary Clinton in the fall. The odds may be long for the New York developer and reality star, but no longer than the ones he faced last June when he first sought the GOP nomination.

Duh-duh!

Or, good grief. Scarborough's conclusion makes perfect sense … as long as one envisions Clinton as another Jeb Bush, and Trump's electorate as unchanged from Reagan's.

 

Ideological math

Thanks to reader C.C. for alerting and bringing me up to mathematical speed:

 

 

Trump's address - and unfortunate aftermath

In the last hour I have listened to two pundits — retired general Barry McCaffrey and Atlantic's Steve Clemons, on MSNBC — praise Donald Trump's foreign policy speech as a "powerful" example of "Reagan realism." McCaffrey also mentioned that Trump's foreign policy remarks had in the past been "irresponsible" and even "inane"; Clemons conceded that Trump's speech today was a "mishmash."  

I submit that past is prologue, and a mishmash of a speech not only attenuates but cancels out any powerfulness, which at any rate was canceled upon Trump's repeated insistence that President Obama's foreign policy has been a "complete and total disaster."

Was extricating the U.S. from a stupid, catastrophic war an element of "total disaster"? Was an agreement preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon a part of said disaster? Was Obama's rapprochement with Cuba not a long-overdue, historic, and positive move? Have Obama's attempts to orchestrate international agreement on climate change not been similarly positive?

To cast these and other Obamian foreign policy successes as but parts of a "total disaster" is merely another version of Trumpian inanity and a mishmash of needlessly hyperpartisan hyperbole. And what is "irresponsible" now is for any respectable foreign policy pundit to miss labeling Trump for what he is: the same reckless demagogue he was yesterday.

Shame on McCaffrey and Clemons for lending any respectability to Trump's mishmash.             

 

#TrumpForeignPolicy address

Trump's foreign policy address finally tenders a reason for me to look at Twitter:

More to follow.

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Obama's "foreign policy is a complete and total disaster," as opposed to merely a complete disaster. 

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I'm still sort of listening to his "address," but I can't take much more. This is worse than I expected. One of Trump's major foreign policy platforms, for instance, is to recognize our enemies and know them from our friends. And that is damn near a quote.

He just said it again: Obama's "foreign policy is a complete and total disaster." This time, however, he added that his foreign policy would "endure for generations." In that, he finally uttered an unmistakable truism.     

There are at least 200 people in the audience, and perhaps a dozen are clapping in response to Trump's crafted applause lines.

***

Mercifully, it's over. Now it can be said: That speech was a complete and total disaster.

 

Trump is playing the "idiot card" (again)

ThinkProgress watched CNN’s "New Day" this morning, on which presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump said, he actually said, notes ThinkProgress:

When I came out, I was competing against 17 very capable people … and a woman.

Breathtaking, isn't it?

Even more breathtaking is that any Democrat would think that Donald Trump is a presidential threat.

Compared to Trump, Barry Goldwater and Alf Landon were threats. Trump is a gift.

 

Ted & Carly's impending engagement?

Politico:

Ted Cruz said that he will be making a "major announcement" at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, and proclaimed he will keep on fighting despite Donald Trump's decisive wins on Tuesday night. The Texas senator indicated it could be an announcement for a vice presidential pick, but he refused to reveal the exact subject.

The announcement likely comes down to this: Republican primary voters don't want Cruz, but sidekick Carly Fiorina — whom they already dismissed — will turn things around, right? 

Perhaps Cruz will surprise us, although offhand I can't think of anyone else as desperate for a last 15 minutes of fame as is Ms. Fiorina — or, more indispensably, anyone else who could even tolerate Cruz for another 15 minutes.

 

Trump? Seriously?

Go West! you middle-aged Menschen, Kasich and Cruz, go West to Indiana and Oregon to seek your fortune. It won't help, though it can't hurt, you can cheaply fuel your Sandersesque sailing into electoral impotence with little more than hot air, and best of all, you can coddle your egos by staying on the winding trail. It's a useless, targetless journey, to be sure, but it's something at least — exactly what, nobody knows, but presidential fever is an understandable affliction.

All those fundraising calls, all those town hall meetings, those mind-numbingly undifferentiated stump speeches and inexplicably fawning crowds — all of it had to mean something, and the latter, especially, would surely last. Wouldn't it? It's hard to let go; it's hard to utter Dwight Eisenhower's last words: "I'm ready." So, for whatever it's worth, sally forth, Kasich and Cruz.

Just know — somewhere, deep in your indefatigable little hearts — that your journey is already over. For it is, by now, inconceivable that Donald Trump hasn't already struck Cleveland gold. As Politico's Glenn Thrush frames yesterday's results: "the developer-reality-star-frontrunner did something in five big races Tuesday night that he’s never done before: He consolidated the GOP base behind him with a succession of slam-dunk wins that will make it hard for his opponents to argue he’s not the party’s legit choice."

That is to say, the party itself has struck no gold, but it has hit rock bottom. The Donald is inevitable. He won't be, or rather can't be, denied. He can go to Cleveland with 1,237 delegates or 1.236 or 1,150; each adds up to the nomination, for the base has finally decided on its biggest bully and most grotesque demagogue.

The moderates are, of course, still despairing. And as despair-mining luck would have it, the richest despondency I have yet seen is that, this morning, of Kathleen Parker's in the Washington Post, titled "Plato would be horrified by Trump’s rise." I'm a bit unclear as to why Parker hauls out what Trump's unfailingly anti-intellectual base (now, broadly, the GOP base) would recognize only as a Disney character grappling with Trumpian horrifications, but what the hell. Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say, so Parker desperately reaches back to antiquity to make some sense of the modern horror: "Plato [believed] that rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, in the wrong hands was dangerous and likely to be abused to appeal to people’s base motives. He foresaw the unethical, dishonest uses that a skilled but immoral speaker could put his persuasive powers to, with credulous people eager to believe or buy whatever he was selling."

Or, as Plato's approximate contemporary, Aristophanes, put it with greater economy, "I am the dog, for I bark in your defense."

I would differ with Parker's assessment of Trump on two points. Is he practicing the "art of persuasion"? It seems he is only mirroring preexisting prejudices, which his party cultivated for decades. One can't lay that on Trump. Is he "immoral"? Amoral would seem to be the better descriptive fit.

And therein lies, it further seems to me, the singular danger for Trump's Democratic opposition: It is likely to adopt a paranoid, Hofstadterian view of the political "enemy," who is "clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving."

Trump may be some of those things, but a superman he ain't. He's just a clown, a demagogic dog barking in the defense of a very white electoral sliver. Trump may be an overwhelming force obstructing Kasich and Cruz's paths, but in the general he'll be an electoral non-entity. Democrats, however, are likely to lose perspective and start treating the demagogue seriously — though mere ridicule is the best attack.