Hillary only has "respect" from foreign leaders who are beholden to US interests and empire. She has no respect from those who are not already in the tank and obligated to toe the US line. Putin? Xi Jinping? Khamenei? No.
With Putin in particular, she seems to oscillate between cowed subservience and insane warmongering. That's not a good thing, either way.
She's just not a serious candidate on any level. She's made a complete mess out of every public office she's ever held. She has failed to demonstrate even rudimentary leadership ability at any point in her "career." Every major initiative she undertook as Secretary of State backfired horribly, some of them so badly that they have managed to threaten Europe's stability. The only thing she seems capable at is influence peddling through the Clinton Foundation and capitalizing on her role as Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend's wife. That's not a mark in her favor.
I remember Hilary stating that she was under sniper fire during her visit in Bosnia. Almost like Brian Williams and his helicopter crash. And im sorry Donna, but you are mistaken if you think she has the respect
As for Bernie, as appealing as his homespun nationalism and social democracy might be, he's just not capable of dealing with the international situation the US will be facing over the next four-plus years. He's got zero credibility for dealing with the complex power struggle that's shaping up in the post-globalist world.
Most of GOP candidates are also unhinged warmongers who seem to have no conception whatsoever of the limits of American power in the 21st century. Rubio is a community-college lightweight and empty suit who is nothing but a cipher for a corporate oligarchy of global capital that wants to strip mine the developed world for profit. Cruz is just a nut who has no idea what's actually happening outside of his little ideological bubble, and pays lip service to a horrifying eschatology in the process. Jeb should be running for President of Mexico, not the USA. Kasich and Fiorina make Dr. Strangelove look like a pacifist. Christie is just a two-bit, corrupt machine politician whose only interest is in whatever his latest grift is.
Which leaves Trump. Trump has shown himself to be a world-class deal-maker and negotiator. In the last six months, he has completely outmaneuvered the entire elite class and their apparatchiks, positioned himself as the front-runner for the Presidency, humiliated the dynastic ambitions of the Bush family, and reframed the national conversation about several very important topics. If anybody is capable of dealing with a fellow like Putin and coming out ahead, it's somebody like Trump, not Hillary.
Our country is in trouble. We're not too terribly far away from facing an existential crisis, both within and without. We're on our back foot and reeling from more than two decades of hubristic, incompetent "leadership." Our reputation in the world is garbage. Nobody takes us seriously anymore. Our economy is ailing as we bleed ourselves out to try and prop up a global order that is dead on its feet. We need confident, competent leadership which is unambiguously focused on the welfare of the United States and its citizens to make it through this. Is Trump the perfect answer to that need? Far from it. But he's light years ahead of every other option.
And more importantly, I'm not sure the country can survive another four years of misrule by the establishment of either party faction. As the Chinese would say, they have lost the Mandate of Heaven.
gwharton, funny (sad, really) how quick you are to dismiss Sanders, who - unlike Trump - has a solid progressive record in both houses of congress. Yet somehow you think some self-serving billionaire crook whose political experience amounts to buying politicians is somehow more qualified to be president.
You confuse crooked business deals with global geopolitical savvy and media exposure (with a highly willing accomplice that adores the advertising revenue that outrage brings) with smarts. Your positions range from xenophobic (immigration) to deluded (top tax rates reduced more than 50% - gee, I wonder who benefits from that?), to willfully ignorant (denies global warming).
That doesn't even qualify as lazy thinking - it's just plain stupidity.
hillary clinton was secretary of state. not sure if you know what that means, but there really isn't a better line on the resmue for directing foreign policy of the united states.
bernie sanders served in the house of representatives and the senate. while that may not be as good as serving as secretary of state with regards to foreign policy, it does give him some experience with the legislative process of our country.
trump developed some buildings and is on a reality tv show.
See, this is the problem. gwharton, I agree with you on the first two sentences, but think every other word afterwards is word salad Fox news bullshit:
Our country is in trouble. We're not too terribly far away from facing an existential crisis, both within and without. We're on our back foot and reeling from more than two decades of hubristic, incompetent "leadership." Our reputation in the world is garbage. Nobody takes us seriously anymore....
Then again, I agree with you that our country's business as usual is *also* bullshit. But Hilary is the enemy we know, as are some of the lower-end Republican candidates.. Trump and Putin - I am virtually certain - would get into a dick-waving contest and we'd get WW3.
And poop, maybe you don't know what I mean by respect. No one on the globe respects Putin. Everyone is a bit scared of him, and that fear can be read as respect, but it's not. I'm talking about the stability-keeping, Nobel-prize winning kind of respect, which, admittedly, is pure establishment. But, again, it's the establishment I know, that can be steered slowly from within, as long as reasonable people focus on discussing ideas rather than on pulling media stunts. Fuck the media, frankly.
I mean, I know even Miles won't agree with me on this, but: at almost 50 I'm old enough to know that wholesale scrapping of everything and restarting from the ruins is not a viable way to run a country, or a global community that the country is part of.
(And on another note, I can't believe I showed up in this thread and engaged at all. Election years make me wish a fast-spreading plague would take out the whole human race. But at the same time if I hear one more Progressive whine about moving to Canada if Trump wins, just like the Conservatives all whined about moving if Obama won, I'll scream. The entire point of this country is to do the work to make it better. It's like the AIA. If you don't like it, join in and make changes, don't flop down and fucking cry about it.)
curt, as Secretary of State Hillary "negotiated" a settlement to the IRS suit against UBS demanding info on hidden bank accounts. The result: less than 10% disclosure and millions in speaking fees, donations, etc. to the Clintons. In other words she is exceedingly well-versed in foreign affairs. None of her real constituents were revealed and the bank keeps doing it's business as an illegal tax shelter. The rich get protected by top government officials while citizens get royally fucked.
davvid - would you really vote for her? I'd write in a vote for A. Colostomy Bag before I voted for Hillary. It's the one bag of shit that isn't pretending to be something else.
davvid - would you really vote for her? I'd write in a vote for A. Colostomy Bag before I voted for Hillary. It's the one bag of shit that isn't pretending to be something else.
situationist....I don't exist in the eyes of NCARB. On another note, Donald Trump is not a leader, he is a CLOWN. If you just changed his makeup you would see the real Donald Trump. I would agree with Donna, he is a Dick swinging nut, who would lead us down a road of ruin.
"hillary clinton was secretary of state. not sure if you know what that means, but there really isn't a better line on the resmue for directing foreign policy of the united states."
This statement is definitive proof that you know nothing about how our government or political system works.
Hillary got State as a sinecure in return for doing a deal with Obama during the 2008 election. That's it. It was a payoff that had nothing to do with her "credentials." Like every single other thing in Hillary's "career" it was a quid pro quo driven by influence peddling. Nothing more.
As SecState, she mostly went on meet-and-greet junkets to show the flag in various American client states. The vast majority of the workings of the State Department were otherwise run by the permanent civil service. Even officially, the Secretary of State does not set foreign policy. The SecState oversees the implementation of foreign policy.
Those few areas where Clinton did get personally involved in trying to implement or influence foreign policy were all unmitigated disasters. The most significant of these was her leading role in fomenting the "Arab Spring," which has destabilized an entire strategic region and put Europe at risk, undoing literally decades of work toward maintaining the peace in an historically tumultuous region. Her duplicity and incompetence in the Benghazi fiasco was only part of that.
but she still did it. she was secretary of state. she held a high office in the united states government that dealt directly with foreign affairs. trump didn't. trump was not meet-and-greeting people under the american flag. he was starring in a reality tv show.
as your friend haidt already told you, you're simply looking for reasons to support the broken ideology you decided (subconsciously) to desperately cling to. case in point, you believe hillary clinton had no involvement in any foreign policy. except the foreign policy that went bad. the foreign policy that went bad was all her fault. doesn't that sound a little too convenient?
The second part of Haidt’s argument is that once you have subconsciously chosen your ideology (you don’t rationally choose what the important factors are) you also do not rationally and objectively weigh the evidence as to whether your ideological views are “correct.” Instead, people tend to subconsciously sift the information that they take in: you tend to overvalue evidence that supports your predispositions and dismiss evidence that is inconsistent with it. As a result, “evidence” becomes self-justifying.
i don't have to self-justify. i can change my mind, and my pride or feelings won't be hurt at all. maybe that's the real difference between conservatives and liberals? the liberals can change their minds when presented with new evidence contrary to their previously held beliefs?
"you're simply looking for reasons to support the broken ideology you decided (subconsciously) to desperately cling to"
That is an extremely funny thing for somebody who is making excuses for an incompetent sociopathic narcissist whose only virtue is ostensive allegiance to your tribe and its prejudices to say. I got a good laugh out of that. Thanks.
As a thought experiment, if Hillary was a Republican instead of Democrat (which is nowhere near as implausible as you might think, she already agrees with 95% of the Republican establishment program), would you still be all "RAH RAH HILLARY" and defending her? Be honest.
letting you know that hillary served as secretary of state, thus giving her more experience with foreign diplomacy on a national level, is just a statement of fact. i never even said she did a good job at it. no color. no exaggeration. no spin. it doesn't have the emotional overtone of saying 'anything that's gone bad was because of hillary. anything that went well was because hillary wasn't invovled.' that is not a true statement. it is an exaggerated statement you use because of your emotional investment.
I said neither of those things. You're just playing straw man games now and squirting squid ink to deflect attention.
What I did say is that Hillary was, for the most part, a figurehead filling a sinecure position she got because she did a deal with Obama in 2008. But where she did take a more activist role as SecState, it usually turned out very badly. In the case of the Arab Spring, this was particularly true.
Her track record on leadership failures goes way back too. Her healthcare taskforce effort in 1993 was so badly mishandled that it directly contributed to the Republicans regaining control of the House and Senate in 1994.
Trump has had his ups and downs, but he hasn't had the kind of consistent propensity to over-reach and catastrophic blowback that Hillary has shown for the last twenty-plus years.
And you didn't answer my question. Saying you have allegiance to Bernie is just like saying you have an allegiance to the Blue Tribe, only ten times more so. If Bernie doesn't win the nomination, which he very likely will not, you'll vote for Hillary like all the other Blue Tribe partisans, simply because she has a "D" after her name on the ballot, amirite?
Bernie would actually be my second choice out of all the current candidates after Trump. I have no party loyalties at all. Frankly, I wish both parties would die in a fire.
"if Bernie doesn't win the nomination, which he very likely will not, you'll vote for Hillary ..."
gwharton -- you seem very hung up on this idea, don't you? That seems to me a thoughtless "anybody but Hillary" stance - no matter how much of a buffoon the GOP candidate might be.
To answer this questions as a thoughtful person who tends to lean a bit left of center (but only a bit) I would first look at who the Democrats have nominated and then look at who the Republicans have nominated, then vote for the person I believe would be best (or less bad) for the country.
I've done this the past two election cycles and, because of the deeply flawed candidates nominated by the GOP, I chose to vote for the Democratic candidate. I stand by those two decisions, no matter how much conservatives choose to slander the President and his performance.
Given the performance of the conservatives currently running for higher office, I see virtually nothing happening in the GOP camp that might cause me to vote Red in the coming election -- although I have voted R many times in the past.
The GOP is wholly responsible for Obama's election (twice) because of the very flawed candidates forced on the party by the radical right wing of the GOP. I'm reasonably sure that same scenario is going to play out again in 2016 -- with Ms. Clinton becoming the eventual winner. That would not be my preferred outcome, but the GOP is likely to leave me -- and many like me -- with no other reasonable option.
"The GOP is wholly responsible for Obama's election (twice) because of the very flawed candidates forced on the party by the radical right wing of the GOP."
I agree with all of this sentence except the "radical right wing" part. McCain and Romney were both straight-line establishment candidates that the right wing base hated and did not support. The belief that they were somehow stalking horses for sekrit nazis and evangelikkkals is a paranoid delusion of the left. They were both horrible candidates (McCain in particular) and their badness was directly responsible for Obama, an empty suit with no qualifications whatsoever except his novel heritage, getting elected twice.
What you and many others here have failed to see, because you are wearing partisan blinders, is that Trump is a crossover candidate who does not exemplify either the GOP establishment or evangelical base's traditional hobby-horse candidates. You all keep trying to put him in that mold because it suits your factional prejudices, but the shoe doesn't fit. In fact, the GOP establishment and evangelical base don't like Trump very much, as was on full display in Iowa earlier this week.
I know Jonathan and others have this conspiracy theory that Trump is somehow in league with the Bush Family and Elders of Zion or something to almost-but-not-quite win the nomination and then hand it to Jeb on a platter, or that he's really the reincarnation of Ole Adolph back for Holocaust 2.0, but that just doesn't fit any of the facts. Trump is the most moderate candidate put forward by any party in the past several decades. The fact that so many people interpret that as extreme or fringe is very telling, and not in a good way.
What you and many others here have failed to see, because you are wearing partisan blinders, is that Trump is a crossover candidate who does not exemplify either the GOP establishment or evangelical base's traditional hobby-horse candidates.
hahahahaha
Among other things, Trump is anti-abortion, for repealing oBOMBaCare, against same-sex marriage, doesn't believe in global warming, is anti-tax and anti- minimum wage, thinks oBOMBa was born in Kenya, is a racist, etc., etc. etc.
In other words, the GOP hates him because he's stolen their platform.
A former Donald Trump adviser trashed the celebrity billionaire’s top rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, charging that the Texan’s “Elmer Gantry hillbilly act” wouldn’t net him many votes after Iowa.
“He’s entirely unappealing,” Roger Stone, the former adviser and veteran Republican consultant, told the Observer yesterday. “The Elmer Gantry hillbilly act may work in Iowa with people with few teeth, but when it comes to national politics, it won’t.”
Mr. Stone, known for his sharp-elbowed campaign tactics and sartorial flair, said “Yankee Republicans” would never go for him. “He’s too partisan, too sharp-edged and too polarizing to win a true Republican primary … he’s odious.”
Mr. Cruz, the winner of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, is a fierce conservative who believes the Republican Party has failed to win national elections because they’ve run too many milquetoast moderates. Mr. Stone, in likening Mr. Cruz to Elmer Gantry, an evangelical preacher from a satiric 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name, implied the Texan is a phony. Gantry rose to power as a spell-binding preacher despite his boozing and womanizing; Mr. Cruz, Mr. Stone said, is really an establishment Republican in evangelical’s clothing because he worked for George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign and attended Princeton and Harvard.
“I think he’s very Nixonian. He’s invented this persona for himself. It’s totally at odds with his background and history,” Mr. Stone, who worked in the Nixon administration, said. “Him acting like a prick [in Washington], that’s all artifice.”
Mr. Trump finished second to Mr. Cruz in Iowa and has been constantly on the attack since the senator first emerged as a threat. In addition to claiming erroneously that Mr. Cruz can’t serve as president because he was born in Canada, Mr. Trump blasted the Texan in a series of tweets this morning, accusing him of stealing the Iowa caucuses because he sent out a fraudulent mailer and allegedly told a staffer to falsely claim Ben Carson, a Republican rival, was dropping out of the race.
“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
Mr. Cruz’s campaign did not return an immediate request for comment.
Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.
I dislike -- make that mistrust -- Trump because he's a loudmouthed egoist who cares for nothing besides himself. He'll say whatever he thinks will get him some votes, or - more often - media attention. He's an idiot and a windbag and would be a disaster for this country. He has demonstrated repeatedly that his ego and ambition cloud his judgment in a negative way -- he actually admits that's what happened when he didn't attend the last debate before the Iowa caucuses.
I could care less which party he represents. Labeling him a "crossover candidate" is delusional.
The GOP is wholly responsible for Obama's election (twice) because of the very flawed candidates forced on the party by the radical right wing of the GOP.
I wouldn't exactly call John McCain and Mitt Romney tea-party conservatives.
^ Won - I would agree. However, in order to win the nomination, they both were forced by the far right to take policy positions on issues that they otherwise would not have adopted w/o that pressure. That made those candidates unacceptable to enough independent voters that both elections swung to Obama.
babs, you do actually sound like you're coming from a very logical and independent mindset. I appreciate that, and gwharton when you label babs as having "partisan blinders" you're not reading her correctly.
I dislike the two-party system so much, in part because I'm realizing recently that I just cannot bring myself to ever vote for a Republican *because* of the party line: anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-science, pro-rule-by-the-bible. If crazy extremists on the right have pushed the party that far away from mainstream, which they have, it's beyond my personal ethics to vote for them, no matter who the candidate is.
I've voted Republican a few times int he past, once when the Dems in Philly put up a guy I didn't want for mayor so the other contender switched parties. These days I also don't think I could ever bring myself to vote for someone who switched parties for personal gain, like I did then.
It's such a clusterfuck. I dislike so much about Hilary too.
The two-party system isn't republicans vs. democrats, it them vs. us. They both work for the same people, it's the illusion of choice. You can have this one or you can have that one, but they're both the same and they will serve their masters well.
They are both the same in many ways, Miles, and I hate to think of myself as a one-issue voter, but the anti-abortion stance and the hardline religionism in which it's rooted is only the vision of one party, and it's not the Dems.
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
The candidates in this election cycle, more than any in recent memory, are distinguished far more by class loyalties and associations than any kind of ideological issues. Bernie is signalling hard at and pandering to a particular segment of the middle- and upper-middle classes associated with intellectual work (what, in a previous era, we would have called the Clerisy...and which generally includes Architects as a knowledge-work profession). They love him for it. Reasonably so. As a nominal member of that class, I definitely understand the appeal on an emotional level. But his appeal is pretty sharply limited to that class. Outside of it, he has little support. Since most members of the Clerisy don't really associate with people outside that class, they don't fully understand that to be the case. They find it mysterious that Bernie's ideological signalling about socialism is not being picked up by the Working Class or minorities and speculate about "false consciousness" and nonsense like that.
Hillary (and Jeb, LOL) is the candidate of the Elite, or governing, class. She and Jeb both use the tools of Elite rule in a conventional way to run their campaigns and build support. Foremost among these is money and their direct control of the government and its processes themselves, with special favors to rent seekers (i.e. influence peddling) as a corollary. This is how our oligarchy works at the political level. In a normal election cycle, where the other classes are willing to be bought off in order to assent to continuing Elite rule in return for favors, they would dominate for this reason. This is obviously not a normal election cycle. The middle and working classes are under extreme pressure right now, and much more focused on voting their interests than allowing the status quo to continue squeezing them.
Trump is an interesting case, because although he is a billionaire, and thus supposedly a member of the elite ruling class under stultified Marxist thinking, he clearly signals and displays strong cultural affinity for and allegiance to both the Working Class and Bourgeoisie (the non-Clerisy middle class, who tend to be small business owners and that sort of thing). The Clerisy absolutely HATE him for that, calling him a clown, etc. because he's not using rhetorical signalling that they recognize as being higher class. For members of the Clerisy whose class position might be a bit insecure for whatever reason, any hint of supporting lower-class behavior is anathema! If they support something lower-class, somebody might think they are a Prole! That would be a disaster in their social circle.
Trump has big patriotic rallies where he tells jokes and speaks in clear platitudes: e.g. "Make America Great Again." He's been a fixture on professional wrestling and reality TV shows for years. He has a personal style of flaunting his wealth and bragging about his abilities and successes. All of these things signal to the Working Class and Bourgeoisie that he is One Of Them and will protect their interests. They love him for it, and he's very popular.
The Clerisy and Elite see this and react very, very differently. They don't love him. They disdain and hate and dismiss him. He is low class. A braggart and a buffoon. Worse, he is a populist, a term which oozes with condescension toward those of lower station in our culture. In fact, it is this class divide which presents the single largest obstacle to Trump's success in this election cycle. The Clerisy will never support him. To do so would associate them with Proles, who they fear and loathe.
In fact, you could change around all the ideologies of all these candidates and it would not make one bit of difference in terms of who supports them. This is most obvious with Hillary, who is even more of a Neocon than Dubya or Cheney and an obvious tool of Davos globalist corporatism. But that's not what is driving people's political allegiances as our society factionalizes under internal and external pressures.
gwharton, I agree with a lot of your long post above. I'm definitely a Clerisy, however, I work daily with people making minimum wage with little job security. So I do associate constantly with people not in my "class" and I see very closely their financial struggles. I'm less clear on their spiritual/intellectual struggles, frankly, but it's very obvious to me - in the situation *I* am in, which doesn't mean it's universal - that their spiritual and intellectual challenges would be less severe *if* their financial struggles weren't so severe. Economic fragility is ENORMOUSLY stressful.
So, in my mind, drastic change to someone like Trump, or maybe Bernie, would make the big world markets so unstable that there would be negative economic trickledown to lower classes. Hilary would continue the general global economic disparity, but without risk of bloody revolution.
I'm a boring middle class mom. I don't want a bloody revolution; I want things to get better for the people I see struggling without change coming through violence. We're smart people, we need to have smart, civil discussions about these things, even though that is a LOT harder than it is to, like, Blame Canada or whatever. I do truly think Trump could lead to a WW3....on the other hand, I also thought Obama really *was* going to bring about revolution, and that clearly didn't happen, so I guess I'm too cynical now to think that Bernie could achieve a revolution, either.
Donna: Class is much more cultural than economic. You can easily have people from upper-middle class backgrounds working at minimum wage and it doesn't really affect their class position. It's a mistake to use income as a proxy for class. It doesn't work that way.
To your point about the global order and stability, that order started dying with the Downturn. I agree that economic fragility is very stressful, and that's a major reason the status quo is falling apart. It was unsustainable in the first place, and has been dying since it started coming unraveled in 2008. The elite class is desperately trying to shore it up and keep it going, because their power is predicated on its existence. But that's not going to work. They've pumped trillions of dollars more bad credit into the national global economies and got almost nothing to show for it. The Fed just tried to raise interest rates by 25 basis points and it triggered a global stock sell-off, forcing them to backtrack to Zero Interest Rate Policy and start talking about the possibility of negative interest rates (both of which are catastrophic for the middle and working classes, by the way).
As for revolution and chaos, like war: you may not be interested in them, but that doesn't mean they aren't interested in you. Circumstances are forcing all of our societal contradictions and false beliefs into sharp relief. We can't paper over the problems and pretend they don't exist while we bathe in credit bubbles anymore. We have to deal with them directly, and that means hard choices and uncomfortable actions.
This statement is really emblematic of our national foreign policy since Obama. We are a country that holds a defensive posture on foreign policy. We will do anything (or in many cases nothing) to avoid "WW3." We will stand-by while Russia annexes Crimea; we will stand by while ISIS or Syria slaughters thousands or people. The baddies around the globe know this about America and are basically taking it as free reign to do what they will. Personally, while I believe in diplomacy, I think the rest of the world needs to have both respect and a little fear for what is the largest military in the world.
Does anyone remember when that Russian military jet was shot down over Turkey? That was the right thing to do. Russia was taking advantage of Turkish airspace, and Turkey rightfully reacted. There was some Putin bluster after, but Russia has respected Turkish airspace since. I sincerely doubt the U.S. would have had the courage to react the same way as Turkey out of fear of "starting WW3." I want a president who knows when and how to do the right thing and not make decisions based on fear of the consequences. I'm not necessarily saying that is Trump, but I think you need to objectively weigh that question with each of the candidates.
there isn't really one set of people pulling the strings of the established politicians. the 'davos' crowd, if you want to call them that, will peddle influence over either one, but the nra and the religious right aren't going to be paying hillary much for influence, just as the nea isn't going to be paying jeb much. the difference between the parties is mostly with which special interest group is buying influence, and the goals of hillary's groups are better.
hillary and jeb would not choose the same candidate to replace an outgoing supreme court justice. the 'davos' crowd doesn't really care who's on the supreme court. if you want sotomayor deciding the constitutionality of the legislator's bills, you pretty much have to vote for hillary. if you want thomas, you have to vote for jeb.
neither bernie nor trump would be able to fix corruption in the justice department or sec. if either of them get elected, it would continue to be more or less business as usual. bernie has a clear ideology which i'm sure he genuinely wants to implement, but his influence would still be limited. i think he's even said he wouldn't be able to get anything done; that a vote for him is the start of the revolution, not the revolution itself, people would have to replace congressmen and governors as well.
likewise trump isn't really going to be able to blow up russia if putin hurts his feelings the way the fox news lady did. military brass and the joint chiefs of staff will have enough influence to prevent the next president from doing anything too stupid, because they are genuinely concerned with the existential continuation of our country and our government. those military advisers will also know a hell of a lot more about the threats our country faces than trump ever will.
Nice post, curt. I do keep telling myself that my fears over a President Trump are very similar to the right-wingers' fears of a President Obama turning us into Socialist New Kenya. Neither side can see any of it unemotionally, but in the end it will all likely just keep chugging on.
curtkram: what you wrote above is fairly emblematic of the ideological system of false dichotomies the elite use to rule the country. They get you so emotionally worked up about trivialities and dog-whistles that it completely distracts your attention away from real, serious problems, such as how they've been strip-mining the US economy for decades and replacing everything of value with pyramids of bad debt.
it's just hard to tell with trump. i know that hillary is not going to go out of her way to defund planned parenthood. i'm pretty sure rubio would if he had the opportunity.
trump will tell republicans he will defund them more than anyone else, because he's the best at defunding planned parenthood, during the primaries, but if he needs his position to switch to attract more voters during the general election, then he'll be the best at not defunding planned parenthood.
he develops buildings and has a reality tv show. he doesn't have a legislative or political history. i don't see why anyone would believe he would do anything as president other than what he's done with the trump organization or with nbc. if you're really concerned with dumping bad debt gwharton, trump is happy to declare bankruptcy if it means he makes more money in the end right?
edited to add:
what do you think trump is going to do to fix the problem you outlined above? specifically - not some stupid one-liner tailored to low attention span people who can't think past the slogan on a baseball cap.
I see Trump as the ultimate Rorschach blot. Nothing more, nothing less. People see in him what they want to see in him, and he evolves like a chameleon to reflect his audience's perceptions. He's been blathering on for years on so many things, that he's really taken every possible position on every significant issue. Pro-abortion, anti-abortion. Pro-national health, anti-national health. He says what he thinks will achieve his most current goals. He has no morality, and no guiding philosophy except expediency.
Any kerfluffle over funding/defunding Planned Parenthood is a false narrative specifically used for social control. It's a red herring, and you shouldn't fall for it.
As for Rubio, he is almost literally the Republican Obama. So if you really like Obama, you should probably vote for Rubio to get four to eight more years of whatever that is. The only significant different between the two is that Rubio seems to be super-duper-ultra pro-Israel while Obama is kind of lukewarm about Israel. Other than that, same guy. Rubio is an empty suit cipher for establishment interests, nothing more, just like Obama was/is. Look how hard they're pushing him now that Jeb's campaign has been run over by the Trump Train.
Trump has proposed several things which will address the issues I've described. First among these is turning the immigration flood either off or down to a trickle. That's basic supply and demand, and even Bernie is on record saying that the levels of immigration we've been experiencing are hurting our labor economy in significant ways. If you're concerned about living wages and supporting the American working class, you should be 100% in favor of shutting down immigration immediately. This is something any President could do, since it is directly under the authority of the Executive branch, but only Trump has expressed the will and ability to actually do it.
The global corporatist elite LOVE open borders, of course, because it gives them the ability to engage in unlimited labor arbitrage to their own advantage while passing off all the negative externalities to others. All gain, no risk. Who cares if it's not sustainable. And this is why every single one of the establishment candidates is 100% in favor of keeping the flood gates open forever, no matter what negative consequences may come.
A similar set of considerations governs Trumps positions on trade with China. Again, this is something that he can directly impact with the powers of the Presidency.
Trump has proposed a package of tax reforms that would be much more beneficial to working and middle class Americans, while removing many of the loopholes and incentives to financial shenanigans which are currently in place. This is not something he can accomplish by himself, since it requires Congressional action. But it's a solid plan and would get through if enough people got behind it.
Those are directly from his position papers at his website. It's all pretty straightforward, and none of it is "extreme", except in that it is a sensible alternative to the status quo which is running completely off the rails.
Beyond that, Trump has yet to state a formal position on the banksters and financial fraud which are rife, encouraged, and unprosecuted throughout our system. That needs to be dealt with directly, and Trump has made some informal statements which suggest he's aware of that and intends to do something about it. But he hasn't given any detail yet. This is probably a strategic decision on his part. The money elites are already working hard to stop him. If he comes out with a formal position on that, they'll turn up their opposition to ELEVEN. In that case, it wouldn't surprise me if somebody tried to assassinate him.
Architects for TRUMP
Hillary only has "respect" from foreign leaders who are beholden to US interests and empire. She has no respect from those who are not already in the tank and obligated to toe the US line. Putin? Xi Jinping? Khamenei? No.
With Putin in particular, she seems to oscillate between cowed subservience and insane warmongering. That's not a good thing, either way.
She's just not a serious candidate on any level. She's made a complete mess out of every public office she's ever held. She has failed to demonstrate even rudimentary leadership ability at any point in her "career." Every major initiative she undertook as Secretary of State backfired horribly, some of them so badly that they have managed to threaten Europe's stability. The only thing she seems capable at is influence peddling through the Clinton Foundation and capitalizing on her role as Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend's wife. That's not a mark in her favor.
I remember Hilary stating that she was under sniper fire during her visit in Bosnia. Almost like Brian Williams and his helicopter crash. And im sorry Donna, but you are mistaken if you think she has the respect
As for Bernie, as appealing as his homespun nationalism and social democracy might be, he's just not capable of dealing with the international situation the US will be facing over the next four-plus years. He's got zero credibility for dealing with the complex power struggle that's shaping up in the post-globalist world.
Most of GOP candidates are also unhinged warmongers who seem to have no conception whatsoever of the limits of American power in the 21st century. Rubio is a community-college lightweight and empty suit who is nothing but a cipher for a corporate oligarchy of global capital that wants to strip mine the developed world for profit. Cruz is just a nut who has no idea what's actually happening outside of his little ideological bubble, and pays lip service to a horrifying eschatology in the process. Jeb should be running for President of Mexico, not the USA. Kasich and Fiorina make Dr. Strangelove look like a pacifist. Christie is just a two-bit, corrupt machine politician whose only interest is in whatever his latest grift is.
Which leaves Trump. Trump has shown himself to be a world-class deal-maker and negotiator. In the last six months, he has completely outmaneuvered the entire elite class and their apparatchiks, positioned himself as the front-runner for the Presidency, humiliated the dynastic ambitions of the Bush family, and reframed the national conversation about several very important topics. If anybody is capable of dealing with a fellow like Putin and coming out ahead, it's somebody like Trump, not Hillary.
Our country is in trouble. We're not too terribly far away from facing an existential crisis, both within and without. We're on our back foot and reeling from more than two decades of hubristic, incompetent "leadership." Our reputation in the world is garbage. Nobody takes us seriously anymore. Our economy is ailing as we bleed ourselves out to try and prop up a global order that is dead on its feet. We need confident, competent leadership which is unambiguously focused on the welfare of the United States and its citizens to make it through this. Is Trump the perfect answer to that need? Far from it. But he's light years ahead of every other option.
And more importantly, I'm not sure the country can survive another four years of misrule by the establishment of either party faction. As the Chinese would say, they have lost the Mandate of Heaven.
gwharton, funny (sad, really) how quick you are to dismiss Sanders, who - unlike Trump - has a solid progressive record in both houses of congress. Yet somehow you think some self-serving billionaire crook whose political experience amounts to buying politicians is somehow more qualified to be president.
You confuse crooked business deals with global geopolitical savvy and media exposure (with a highly willing accomplice that adores the advertising revenue that outrage brings) with smarts. Your positions range from xenophobic (immigration) to deluded (top tax rates reduced more than 50% - gee, I wonder who benefits from that?), to willfully ignorant (denies global warming).
That doesn't even qualify as lazy thinking - it's just plain stupidity.
hillary clinton was secretary of state. not sure if you know what that means, but there really isn't a better line on the resmue for directing foreign policy of the united states.
bernie sanders served in the house of representatives and the senate. while that may not be as good as serving as secretary of state with regards to foreign policy, it does give him some experience with the legislative process of our country.
trump developed some buildings and is on a reality tv show.
See, this is the problem. gwharton, I agree with you on the first two sentences, but think every other word afterwards is word salad Fox news bullshit:
Our country is in trouble. We're not too terribly far away from facing an existential crisis, both within and without. We're on our back foot and reeling from more than two decades of hubristic, incompetent "leadership." Our reputation in the world is garbage. Nobody takes us seriously anymore....
Then again, I agree with you that our country's business as usual is *also* bullshit. But Hilary is the enemy we know, as are some of the lower-end Republican candidates.. Trump and Putin - I am virtually certain - would get into a dick-waving contest and we'd get WW3.
And poop, maybe you don't know what I mean by respect. No one on the globe respects Putin. Everyone is a bit scared of him, and that fear can be read as respect, but it's not. I'm talking about the stability-keeping, Nobel-prize winning kind of respect, which, admittedly, is pure establishment. But, again, it's the establishment I know, that can be steered slowly from within, as long as reasonable people focus on discussing ideas rather than on pulling media stunts. Fuck the media, frankly.
I mean, I know even Miles won't agree with me on this, but: at almost 50 I'm old enough to know that wholesale scrapping of everything and restarting from the ruins is not a viable way to run a country, or a global community that the country is part of.
(And on another note, I can't believe I showed up in this thread and engaged at all. Election years make me wish a fast-spreading plague would take out the whole human race. But at the same time if I hear one more Progressive whine about moving to Canada if Trump wins, just like the Conservatives all whined about moving if Obama won, I'll scream. The entire point of this country is to do the work to make it better. It's like the AIA. If you don't like it, join in and make changes, don't flop down and fucking cry about it.)
How do I change NCARB? I give them money and they don't return my calls or e-mails. Will Trump fix NCARB?
curt, as Secretary of State Hillary "negotiated" a settlement to the IRS suit against UBS demanding info on hidden bank accounts. The result: less than 10% disclosure and millions in speaking fees, donations, etc. to the Clintons. In other words she is exceedingly well-versed in foreign affairs. None of her real constituents were revealed and the bank keeps doing it's business as an illegal tax shelter. The rich get protected by top government officials while citizens get royally fucked.
davvid - would you really vote for her? I'd write in a vote for A. Colostomy Bag before I voted for Hillary. It's the one bag of shit that isn't pretending to be something else.
Trump has shown himself to be a world-class deal-maker and negotiator.
Just a POS with daddy's money
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-ted-cruz-twitter-iowa_us_56b20e77e4b08069c7a59077?oa3ba9k9
davvid - would you really vote for her? I'd write in a vote for A. Colostomy Bag before I voted for Hillary. It's the one bag of shit that isn't pretending to be something else.
Now that's a position I can support.
situationist....I don't exist in the eyes of NCARB. On another note, Donald Trump is not a leader, he is a CLOWN. If you just changed his makeup you would see the real Donald Trump. I would agree with Donna, he is a Dick swinging nut, who would lead us down a road of ruin.
Hillary sucks
curtkram:
"hillary clinton was secretary of state. not sure if you know what that means, but there really isn't a better line on the resmue for directing foreign policy of the united states."
This statement is definitive proof that you know nothing about how our government or political system works.
Hillary got State as a sinecure in return for doing a deal with Obama during the 2008 election. That's it. It was a payoff that had nothing to do with her "credentials." Like every single other thing in Hillary's "career" it was a quid pro quo driven by influence peddling. Nothing more.
As SecState, she mostly went on meet-and-greet junkets to show the flag in various American client states. The vast majority of the workings of the State Department were otherwise run by the permanent civil service. Even officially, the Secretary of State does not set foreign policy. The SecState oversees the implementation of foreign policy.
Those few areas where Clinton did get personally involved in trying to implement or influence foreign policy were all unmitigated disasters. The most significant of these was her leading role in fomenting the "Arab Spring," which has destabilized an entire strategic region and put Europe at risk, undoing literally decades of work toward maintaining the peace in an historically tumultuous region. Her duplicity and incompetence in the Benghazi fiasco was only part of that.
but she still did it. she was secretary of state. she held a high office in the united states government that dealt directly with foreign affairs. trump didn't. trump was not meet-and-greeting people under the american flag. he was starring in a reality tv show.
as your friend haidt already told you, you're simply looking for reasons to support the broken ideology you decided (subconsciously) to desperately cling to. case in point, you believe hillary clinton had no involvement in any foreign policy. except the foreign policy that went bad. the foreign policy that went bad was all her fault. doesn't that sound a little too convenient?
The second part of Haidt’s argument is that once you have subconsciously chosen your ideology (you don’t rationally choose what the important factors are) you also do not rationally and objectively weigh the evidence as to whether your ideological views are “correct.” Instead, people tend to subconsciously sift the information that they take in: you tend to overvalue evidence that supports your predispositions and dismiss evidence that is inconsistent with it. As a result, “evidence” becomes self-justifying.
i don't have to self-justify. i can change my mind, and my pride or feelings won't be hurt at all. maybe that's the real difference between conservatives and liberals? the liberals can change their minds when presented with new evidence contrary to their previously held beliefs?
"you're simply looking for reasons to support the broken ideology you decided (subconsciously) to desperately cling to"
That is an extremely funny thing for somebody who is making excuses for an incompetent sociopathic narcissist whose only virtue is ostensive allegiance to your tribe and its prejudices to say. I got a good laugh out of that. Thanks.
As a thought experiment, if Hillary was a Republican instead of Democrat (which is nowhere near as implausible as you might think, she already agrees with 95% of the Republican establishment program), would you still be all "RAH RAH HILLARY" and defending her? Be honest.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AX111Q2/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb
didn't know it existed, have to read it now
allegiance to my tribe? i like bernie.
letting you know that hillary served as secretary of state, thus giving her more experience with foreign diplomacy on a national level, is just a statement of fact. i never even said she did a good job at it. no color. no exaggeration. no spin. it doesn't have the emotional overtone of saying 'anything that's gone bad was because of hillary. anything that went well was because hillary wasn't invovled.' that is not a true statement. it is an exaggerated statement you use because of your emotional investment.
" i like Bernie"
I said neither of those things. You're just playing straw man games now and squirting squid ink to deflect attention.
What I did say is that Hillary was, for the most part, a figurehead filling a sinecure position she got because she did a deal with Obama in 2008. But where she did take a more activist role as SecState, it usually turned out very badly. In the case of the Arab Spring, this was particularly true.
Her track record on leadership failures goes way back too. Her healthcare taskforce effort in 1993 was so badly mishandled that it directly contributed to the Republicans regaining control of the House and Senate in 1994.
Trump has had his ups and downs, but he hasn't had the kind of consistent propensity to over-reach and catastrophic blowback that Hillary has shown for the last twenty-plus years.
And you didn't answer my question. Saying you have allegiance to Bernie is just like saying you have an allegiance to the Blue Tribe, only ten times more so. If Bernie doesn't win the nomination, which he very likely will not, you'll vote for Hillary like all the other Blue Tribe partisans, simply because she has a "D" after her name on the ballot, amirite?
Bernie would actually be my second choice out of all the current candidates after Trump. I have no party loyalties at all. Frankly, I wish both parties would die in a fire.
Wow. Cultivated statistics from such above-the-board non-partisan sources as The Heritage Foundation and The Tax Foundation.
*snicker*
Wow. Attacking sources who disagree with your prejudices without offering any kind of argument.
*snicker*
"if Bernie doesn't win the nomination, which he very likely will not, you'll vote for Hillary ..."
gwharton -- you seem very hung up on this idea, don't you? That seems to me a thoughtless "anybody but Hillary" stance - no matter how much of a buffoon the GOP candidate might be.
To answer this questions as a thoughtful person who tends to lean a bit left of center (but only a bit) I would first look at who the Democrats have nominated and then look at who the Republicans have nominated, then vote for the person I believe would be best (or less bad) for the country.
I've done this the past two election cycles and, because of the deeply flawed candidates nominated by the GOP, I chose to vote for the Democratic candidate. I stand by those two decisions, no matter how much conservatives choose to slander the President and his performance.
Given the performance of the conservatives currently running for higher office, I see virtually nothing happening in the GOP camp that might cause me to vote Red in the coming election -- although I have voted R many times in the past.
The GOP is wholly responsible for Obama's election (twice) because of the very flawed candidates forced on the party by the radical right wing of the GOP. I'm reasonably sure that same scenario is going to play out again in 2016 -- with Ms. Clinton becoming the eventual winner. That would not be my preferred outcome, but the GOP is likely to leave me -- and many like me -- with no other reasonable option.
"The GOP is wholly responsible for Obama's election (twice) because of the very flawed candidates forced on the party by the radical right wing of the GOP."
I agree with all of this sentence except the "radical right wing" part. McCain and Romney were both straight-line establishment candidates that the right wing base hated and did not support. The belief that they were somehow stalking horses for sekrit nazis and evangelikkkals is a paranoid delusion of the left. They were both horrible candidates (McCain in particular) and their badness was directly responsible for Obama, an empty suit with no qualifications whatsoever except his novel heritage, getting elected twice.
What you and many others here have failed to see, because you are wearing partisan blinders, is that Trump is a crossover candidate who does not exemplify either the GOP establishment or evangelical base's traditional hobby-horse candidates. You all keep trying to put him in that mold because it suits your factional prejudices, but the shoe doesn't fit. In fact, the GOP establishment and evangelical base don't like Trump very much, as was on full display in Iowa earlier this week.
I know Jonathan and others have this conspiracy theory that Trump is somehow in league with the Bush Family and Elders of Zion or something to almost-but-not-quite win the nomination and then hand it to Jeb on a platter, or that he's really the reincarnation of Ole Adolph back for Holocaust 2.0, but that just doesn't fit any of the facts. Trump is the most moderate candidate put forward by any party in the past several decades. The fact that so many people interpret that as extreme or fringe is very telling, and not in a good way.
How, exactly, is Obama's heritage "novel"?
What you and many others here have failed to see, because you are wearing partisan blinders, is that Trump is a crossover candidate who does not exemplify either the GOP establishment or evangelical base's traditional hobby-horse candidates.
hahahahaha
Among other things, Trump is anti-abortion, for repealing oBOMBaCare, against same-sex marriage, doesn't believe in global warming, is anti-tax and anti- minimum wage, thinks oBOMBa was born in Kenya, is a racist, etc., etc. etc.
In other words, the GOP hates him because he's stolen their platform.
As to the evangelicals, he panders with the rest.
^ Trump or gwharton?
This tells me it is a Family Effort:
A former Donald Trump adviser trashed the celebrity billionaire’s top rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, charging that the Texan’s “Elmer Gantry hillbilly act” wouldn’t net him many votes after Iowa.
“He’s entirely unappealing,” Roger Stone, the former adviser and veteran Republican consultant, told the Observer yesterday. “The Elmer Gantry hillbilly act may work in Iowa with people with few teeth, but when it comes to national politics, it won’t.”
Mr. Stone, known for his sharp-elbowed campaign tactics and sartorial flair, said “Yankee Republicans” would never go for him. “He’s too partisan, too sharp-edged and too polarizing to win a true Republican primary … he’s odious.”
Mr. Cruz, the winner of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, is a fierce conservative who believes the Republican Party has failed to win national elections because they’ve run too many milquetoast moderates. Mr. Stone, in likening Mr. Cruz to Elmer Gantry, an evangelical preacher from a satiric 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name, implied the Texan is a phony. Gantry rose to power as a spell-binding preacher despite his boozing and womanizing; Mr. Cruz, Mr. Stone said, is really an establishment Republican in evangelical’s clothing because he worked for George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign and attended Princeton and Harvard.
“I think he’s very Nixonian. He’s invented this persona for himself. It’s totally at odds with his background and history,” Mr. Stone, who worked in the Nixon administration, said. “Him acting like a prick [in Washington], that’s all artifice.”
Mr. Trump finished second to Mr. Cruz in Iowa and has been constantly on the attack since the senator first emerged as a threat. In addition to claiming erroneously that Mr. Cruz can’t serve as president because he was born in Canada, Mr. Trump blasted the Texan in a series of tweets this morning, accusing him of stealing the Iowa caucuses because he sent out a fraudulent mailer and allegedly told a staffer to falsely claim Ben Carson, a Republican rival, was dropping out of the race.
“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
Mr. Cruz’s campaign did not return an immediate request for comment.
Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.
gwharton: ... "wearing partisan blinders" ... "it suits your factional prejudices" ...
You just can't stop yourself can you ?
I dislike -- make that mistrust -- Trump because he's a loudmouthed egoist who cares for nothing besides himself. He'll say whatever he thinks will get him some votes, or - more often - media attention. He's an idiot and a windbag and would be a disaster for this country. He has demonstrated repeatedly that his ego and ambition cloud his judgment in a negative way -- he actually admits that's what happened when he didn't attend the last debate before the Iowa caucuses.
I could care less which party he represents. Labeling him a "crossover candidate" is delusional.
The GOP is wholly responsible for Obama's election (twice) because of the very flawed candidates forced on the party by the radical right wing of the GOP.
I wouldn't exactly call John McCain and Mitt Romney tea-party conservatives.
^ Won - I would agree. However, in order to win the nomination, they both were forced by the far right to take policy positions on issues that they otherwise would not have adopted w/o that pressure. That made those candidates unacceptable to enough independent voters that both elections swung to Obama.
babs, you do actually sound like you're coming from a very logical and independent mindset. I appreciate that, and gwharton when you label babs as having "partisan blinders" you're not reading her correctly.
I dislike the two-party system so much, in part because I'm realizing recently that I just cannot bring myself to ever vote for a Republican *because* of the party line: anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-science, pro-rule-by-the-bible. If crazy extremists on the right have pushed the party that far away from mainstream, which they have, it's beyond my personal ethics to vote for them, no matter who the candidate is.
I've voted Republican a few times int he past, once when the Dems in Philly put up a guy I didn't want for mayor so the other contender switched parties. These days I also don't think I could ever bring myself to vote for someone who switched parties for personal gain, like I did then.
It's such a clusterfuck. I dislike so much about Hilary too.
The two-party system isn't republicans vs. democrats, it them vs. us. They both work for the same people, it's the illusion of choice. You can have this one or you can have that one, but they're both the same and they will serve their masters well.
Which is why Blankfein is afraid of Bernie, which is by far the strongest endorsement he's gotten so far.
They are both the same in many ways, Miles, and I hate to think of myself as a one-issue voter, but the anti-abortion stance and the hardline religionism in which it's rooted is only the vision of one party, and it's not the Dems.
If Bernie gets elected he will become a watered down version of Bernie...the machine yields for no one.
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Princeton University
In other words, Donna, nobody in a position to do anything gives a shit what you or I think.
ROI = 70,000%
Wow^
hardline religionism in which it's rooted is only the vision of one party, and it's not the Dems.
Its just a different religion; a religion of State...
The candidates in this election cycle, more than any in recent memory, are distinguished far more by class loyalties and associations than any kind of ideological issues. Bernie is signalling hard at and pandering to a particular segment of the middle- and upper-middle classes associated with intellectual work (what, in a previous era, we would have called the Clerisy...and which generally includes Architects as a knowledge-work profession). They love him for it. Reasonably so. As a nominal member of that class, I definitely understand the appeal on an emotional level. But his appeal is pretty sharply limited to that class. Outside of it, he has little support. Since most members of the Clerisy don't really associate with people outside that class, they don't fully understand that to be the case. They find it mysterious that Bernie's ideological signalling about socialism is not being picked up by the Working Class or minorities and speculate about "false consciousness" and nonsense like that.
Hillary (and Jeb, LOL) is the candidate of the Elite, or governing, class. She and Jeb both use the tools of Elite rule in a conventional way to run their campaigns and build support. Foremost among these is money and their direct control of the government and its processes themselves, with special favors to rent seekers (i.e. influence peddling) as a corollary. This is how our oligarchy works at the political level. In a normal election cycle, where the other classes are willing to be bought off in order to assent to continuing Elite rule in return for favors, they would dominate for this reason. This is obviously not a normal election cycle. The middle and working classes are under extreme pressure right now, and much more focused on voting their interests than allowing the status quo to continue squeezing them.
Trump is an interesting case, because although he is a billionaire, and thus supposedly a member of the elite ruling class under stultified Marxist thinking, he clearly signals and displays strong cultural affinity for and allegiance to both the Working Class and Bourgeoisie (the non-Clerisy middle class, who tend to be small business owners and that sort of thing). The Clerisy absolutely HATE him for that, calling him a clown, etc. because he's not using rhetorical signalling that they recognize as being higher class. For members of the Clerisy whose class position might be a bit insecure for whatever reason, any hint of supporting lower-class behavior is anathema! If they support something lower-class, somebody might think they are a Prole! That would be a disaster in their social circle.
Trump has big patriotic rallies where he tells jokes and speaks in clear platitudes: e.g. "Make America Great Again." He's been a fixture on professional wrestling and reality TV shows for years. He has a personal style of flaunting his wealth and bragging about his abilities and successes. All of these things signal to the Working Class and Bourgeoisie that he is One Of Them and will protect their interests. They love him for it, and he's very popular.
The Clerisy and Elite see this and react very, very differently. They don't love him. They disdain and hate and dismiss him. He is low class. A braggart and a buffoon. Worse, he is a populist, a term which oozes with condescension toward those of lower station in our culture. In fact, it is this class divide which presents the single largest obstacle to Trump's success in this election cycle. The Clerisy will never support him. To do so would associate them with Proles, who they fear and loathe.
In fact, you could change around all the ideologies of all these candidates and it would not make one bit of difference in terms of who supports them. This is most obvious with Hillary, who is even more of a Neocon than Dubya or Cheney and an obvious tool of Davos globalist corporatism. But that's not what is driving people's political allegiances as our society factionalizes under internal and external pressures.
gwharton, I agree with a lot of your long post above. I'm definitely a Clerisy, however, I work daily with people making minimum wage with little job security. So I do associate constantly with people not in my "class" and I see very closely their financial struggles. I'm less clear on their spiritual/intellectual struggles, frankly, but it's very obvious to me - in the situation *I* am in, which doesn't mean it's universal - that their spiritual and intellectual challenges would be less severe *if* their financial struggles weren't so severe. Economic fragility is ENORMOUSLY stressful.
So, in my mind, drastic change to someone like Trump, or maybe Bernie, would make the big world markets so unstable that there would be negative economic trickledown to lower classes. Hilary would continue the general global economic disparity, but without risk of bloody revolution.
I'm a boring middle class mom. I don't want a bloody revolution; I want things to get better for the people I see struggling without change coming through violence. We're smart people, we need to have smart, civil discussions about these things, even though that is a LOT harder than it is to, like, Blame Canada or whatever. I do truly think Trump could lead to a WW3....on the other hand, I also thought Obama really *was* going to bring about revolution, and that clearly didn't happen, so I guess I'm too cynical now to think that Bernie could achieve a revolution, either.
Donna: Class is much more cultural than economic. You can easily have people from upper-middle class backgrounds working at minimum wage and it doesn't really affect their class position. It's a mistake to use income as a proxy for class. It doesn't work that way.
To your point about the global order and stability, that order started dying with the Downturn. I agree that economic fragility is very stressful, and that's a major reason the status quo is falling apart. It was unsustainable in the first place, and has been dying since it started coming unraveled in 2008. The elite class is desperately trying to shore it up and keep it going, because their power is predicated on its existence. But that's not going to work. They've pumped trillions of dollars more bad credit into the national global economies and got almost nothing to show for it. The Fed just tried to raise interest rates by 25 basis points and it triggered a global stock sell-off, forcing them to backtrack to Zero Interest Rate Policy and start talking about the possibility of negative interest rates (both of which are catastrophic for the middle and working classes, by the way).
As for revolution and chaos, like war: you may not be interested in them, but that doesn't mean they aren't interested in you. Circumstances are forcing all of our societal contradictions and false beliefs into sharp relief. We can't paper over the problems and pretend they don't exist while we bathe in credit bubbles anymore. We have to deal with them directly, and that means hard choices and uncomfortable actions.
I do truly think Trump could lead to a WW3.
This statement is really emblematic of our national foreign policy since Obama. We are a country that holds a defensive posture on foreign policy. We will do anything (or in many cases nothing) to avoid "WW3." We will stand-by while Russia annexes Crimea; we will stand by while ISIS or Syria slaughters thousands or people. The baddies around the globe know this about America and are basically taking it as free reign to do what they will. Personally, while I believe in diplomacy, I think the rest of the world needs to have both respect and a little fear for what is the largest military in the world.
Does anyone remember when that Russian military jet was shot down over Turkey? That was the right thing to do. Russia was taking advantage of Turkish airspace, and Turkey rightfully reacted. There was some Putin bluster after, but Russia has respected Turkish airspace since. I sincerely doubt the U.S. would have had the courage to react the same way as Turkey out of fear of "starting WW3." I want a president who knows when and how to do the right thing and not make decisions based on fear of the consequences. I'm not necessarily saying that is Trump, but I think you need to objectively weigh that question with each of the candidates.
there isn't really one set of people pulling the strings of the established politicians. the 'davos' crowd, if you want to call them that, will peddle influence over either one, but the nra and the religious right aren't going to be paying hillary much for influence, just as the nea isn't going to be paying jeb much. the difference between the parties is mostly with which special interest group is buying influence, and the goals of hillary's groups are better.
hillary and jeb would not choose the same candidate to replace an outgoing supreme court justice. the 'davos' crowd doesn't really care who's on the supreme court. if you want sotomayor deciding the constitutionality of the legislator's bills, you pretty much have to vote for hillary. if you want thomas, you have to vote for jeb.
neither bernie nor trump would be able to fix corruption in the justice department or sec. if either of them get elected, it would continue to be more or less business as usual. bernie has a clear ideology which i'm sure he genuinely wants to implement, but his influence would still be limited. i think he's even said he wouldn't be able to get anything done; that a vote for him is the start of the revolution, not the revolution itself, people would have to replace congressmen and governors as well.
likewise trump isn't really going to be able to blow up russia if putin hurts his feelings the way the fox news lady did. military brass and the joint chiefs of staff will have enough influence to prevent the next president from doing anything too stupid, because they are genuinely concerned with the existential continuation of our country and our government. those military advisers will also know a hell of a lot more about the threats our country faces than trump ever will.
Nice post, curt. I do keep telling myself that my fears over a President Trump are very similar to the right-wingers' fears of a President Obama turning us into Socialist New Kenya. Neither side can see any of it unemotionally, but in the end it will all likely just keep chugging on.
curtkram: what you wrote above is fairly emblematic of the ideological system of false dichotomies the elite use to rule the country. They get you so emotionally worked up about trivialities and dog-whistles that it completely distracts your attention away from real, serious problems, such as how they've been strip-mining the US economy for decades and replacing everything of value with pyramids of bad debt.
That sort of thinking is part of the problem.
it's just hard to tell with trump. i know that hillary is not going to go out of her way to defund planned parenthood. i'm pretty sure rubio would if he had the opportunity.
trump will tell republicans he will defund them more than anyone else, because he's the best at defunding planned parenthood, during the primaries, but if he needs his position to switch to attract more voters during the general election, then he'll be the best at not defunding planned parenthood.
he develops buildings and has a reality tv show. he doesn't have a legislative or political history. i don't see why anyone would believe he would do anything as president other than what he's done with the trump organization or with nbc. if you're really concerned with dumping bad debt gwharton, trump is happy to declare bankruptcy if it means he makes more money in the end right?
edited to add:
what do you think trump is going to do to fix the problem you outlined above? specifically - not some stupid one-liner tailored to low attention span people who can't think past the slogan on a baseball cap.
Interesting thread.
I see Trump as the ultimate Rorschach blot. Nothing more, nothing less. People see in him what they want to see in him, and he evolves like a chameleon to reflect his audience's perceptions. He's been blathering on for years on so many things, that he's really taken every possible position on every significant issue. Pro-abortion, anti-abortion. Pro-national health, anti-national health. He says what he thinks will achieve his most current goals. He has no morality, and no guiding philosophy except expediency.
Any kerfluffle over funding/defunding Planned Parenthood is a false narrative specifically used for social control. It's a red herring, and you shouldn't fall for it.
As for Rubio, he is almost literally the Republican Obama. So if you really like Obama, you should probably vote for Rubio to get four to eight more years of whatever that is. The only significant different between the two is that Rubio seems to be super-duper-ultra pro-Israel while Obama is kind of lukewarm about Israel. Other than that, same guy. Rubio is an empty suit cipher for establishment interests, nothing more, just like Obama was/is. Look how hard they're pushing him now that Jeb's campaign has been run over by the Trump Train.
Trump has proposed several things which will address the issues I've described. First among these is turning the immigration flood either off or down to a trickle. That's basic supply and demand, and even Bernie is on record saying that the levels of immigration we've been experiencing are hurting our labor economy in significant ways. If you're concerned about living wages and supporting the American working class, you should be 100% in favor of shutting down immigration immediately. This is something any President could do, since it is directly under the authority of the Executive branch, but only Trump has expressed the will and ability to actually do it.
The global corporatist elite LOVE open borders, of course, because it gives them the ability to engage in unlimited labor arbitrage to their own advantage while passing off all the negative externalities to others. All gain, no risk. Who cares if it's not sustainable. And this is why every single one of the establishment candidates is 100% in favor of keeping the flood gates open forever, no matter what negative consequences may come.
A similar set of considerations governs Trumps positions on trade with China. Again, this is something that he can directly impact with the powers of the Presidency.
Trump has proposed a package of tax reforms that would be much more beneficial to working and middle class Americans, while removing many of the loopholes and incentives to financial shenanigans which are currently in place. This is not something he can accomplish by himself, since it requires Congressional action. But it's a solid plan and would get through if enough people got behind it.
Those are directly from his position papers at his website. It's all pretty straightforward, and none of it is "extreme", except in that it is a sensible alternative to the status quo which is running completely off the rails.
Beyond that, Trump has yet to state a formal position on the banksters and financial fraud which are rife, encouraged, and unprosecuted throughout our system. That needs to be dealt with directly, and Trump has made some informal statements which suggest he's aware of that and intends to do something about it. But he hasn't given any detail yet. This is probably a strategic decision on his part. The money elites are already working hard to stop him. If he comes out with a formal position on that, they'll turn up their opposition to ELEVEN. In that case, it wouldn't surprise me if somebody tried to assassinate him.
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