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.”