1. About a month before the election, I found myself—don’t ask how or why—in an audience listening to a speech by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld. For those of you who are not CUNY insiders, Wiesenfeld is a former member of the CUNY Board of Trustees. He’s also an ultra-right Zionist who’s got a lot of nice things to say about Meir Kahane (“misunderstood”) and who’s been behind or involved in pretty much every dustup over Israel/Palestine that we’ve had at CUNY these last ten years or so. His most notable effort was trying to deny an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. (I was pleased to find out from his lecture that our massive pushback against him led him to lose a bunch […]

This is a confession. In the last few days, I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments asking me why I seem, in my Facebook posts and tweets, to downplay the threat of Trump. Why I resist the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, why I emphasize the continuities between Trump and previous Republicans, why I insist on attending to the fractures and cleavages within his coalition. Now, of course, nothing I say is meant to downplay the threat at all; it’s all designed to get us to see it more clearly (clearly, of course, by my lights), and while I don’t see my posts or tweets primarily or even secondarily as organizing tools, I’d like to think they give […]

I’ve been saying that one of the problems with the “Trump is like no Republican we’ve ever seen before” line is that it prevents us from consigning the Republican Party to the oblivion it deserves. In making Trump sui generis, by insisting that he is an utter novelty, you allow the rest of the party to distance themselves from him, to make him extreme and themselves respectable, and to regroup after November. Now a leaked email from DNC Communication Director Luis Miranda, which I stumbled across in Carl Beijer’s excellent discussion here, makes plain just how costly this strategy is. Writing back in May, Miranda protests that the Clinton campaign wants to separate Trump from the GOP so that it can point to all the Republican […]

I’m on record as saying that Clinton is going to win big-time in November. I’ve believed that for months (even when I was rooting for Sanders, I believed Clinton could beat Trump and said so). The latest polls only confirm what we’ve seen, with a few exceptions, for a year now: in a match-up between Clinton and Trump, Clinton wins. If, however, I were a big booster of Clinton and if were at all worried that she wasn’t going to win in November, here’s what I’d be doing: First, I’d get the hell off social media. This is the place where political persuasion goes to die. The whole point is argument and dissensus, conflict and opposition, often over ancillary matters that distract from the […]

Many people on social media tonight were puzzled why the Democrats at the convention in Philadelphia spent so little time laying out a positive agenda, focusing instead on the dangers of Trump. The Democrats, after all, are the party in control of the White House. Usually, that party’s candidate runs on the record of the incumbent or lays out a vision, if the incumbent is popular, of how she’ll continue that record into the future. I was less troubled or puzzled by this. Donald Trump is Clinton’s strongest argument for her election. Simply by running against him—as, let’s face it, LBJ did in 1964 against Goldwater—she shores up support not only within her base but among moderates who are legitimately […]

James Traub—last seen in the 1990s (when it was fashionable to shit all over public institutions that helped advance the cause of black and brown people) attacking Open Admissions at CUNY, which had done so much to make higher ed accessible to students of color—is back, calling, in the wake of Trump and Brexit, for a global realignment of political forces. In a blog post at Foreign Policy titled, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” Traub writes: One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union. … That is, chunks […]

Brexit’s got people nervous about a possible Trump victory in November. It shouldn’t. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Clinton opening up a double-digit lead over Trump, 51%-39%. Now that she has clinched the nomination, Clinton is beginning to consolidate and expand support—as many observers predicted she would. The poll also shows: First, Trump’s racism and sexism play well with a rump—though never a strong majority—of the GOP. Racism and sexism are a disaster, however, in the general electorate. Roughly two-thirds of those polled think Trump’s comments about Muslims, women, and racial minorities are racist and/or unfair, and an overwhelming majority strongly disapproves his recent comments about a judge whose parents were Mexican immigrants. Only 36% of the electorate thinks that Trump is standing up for their beliefs. While […]

I’ve been saying for months that Donald Trump is the George McGovern of the GOP, the fractious leader who so alienated the elders of his party that they deserted him in droves, handing the election to his opponent. We’re already seeing the signs. From Talking Points Memo: A former aide to John McCain, who served both as the Arizona senator’s chief of staff and a senior advisor on his 2008 presidential campaign, made clear Tuesday that he would vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the general election. “I’m with her,” Mark Salter tweeted, referring to Clinton’s campaign slogan, after noting the likely nomination of Trump, “a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level.” From the […]

Reading Samuel Freeman’s review of Roger Scruton in the latest NYRB, I had a mini-realization about my own work on conservatism, which features Scruton quite a bit. In the mid-1970s, conservatism, which had previously been declared dead as an intellectual and political force, began to have a major impact on liberalism. Politically, you could see that influence in the slow, then sudden, retreat from traditional New Deal objectives, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton. What that meant was a massive turnaround on economic issues (deregulation, indifference to unions, galloping inequality) and a softer turnaround on social issues. While mainstream Democrats today are identified as staunch liberals on so-called social or moral issues like abortion and gay rights, the truth of the […]

I’m going to float a series of vast and quick historical generalizations in order to try and get at something that is distinctive about the present moment in US politics. Beginning in Europe in the 19th century, liberalism has been engaged in an on-again, off-again, two-front war: against the right and against the left. Against the right’s revanchism and the left’s radicalism, liberalism has held itself up as the original Third Way. It is the reasonable and moderate alternative to the extremes, offering men and women the promises and profits of a capitalist, vaguely democratic, modernity but without its revolutionary perils and reactionary mystique. Though it has on occasion entered into a more productive, albeit tension-filled, front with the left, liberalism has always been […]

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Here’s my summary of these weeks that were. Merrick Garland 1. President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland as the replacement to Antonin Scalia was accompanied by this tweet from the White House. “Merrick Garland would take no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality.” —@POTUS #SCOTUSnominee — The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2016 Last Sunday I said we were still in Reaganland. Now I think we’re still in Nixonland. 2. That tweet was no errant message. When it comes to the rights of criminal defendants, Garland is no judicial liberal: The former prosecutor also has a relatively conservative record on criminal justice. A 2010 examination of his decisions by SCOTUSBlog’s […]

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 […]

One of the most jarring elements of reading Victor Klemperer’s diaries is how often he and his circle ask themselves whether Hitler, long after he’s come to power, is really going to last. They’re constantly wondering whether some diplomatic or domestic crisis isn’t going to be Hitler’s last. From hindsight, it all seems bizarre: we now how the story ends, we know how the story had to end. But at the time of its happening, that was not the case. You can see precisely why Klemperer and company thought as they did. The Nazi seizure of power and subsequent program was, for them, unprecedented. They could only think in terms of previous coups or crises. Not to mention that they had no […]