Cromwell

A few words on last night’s debate.

For Clinton, the whole thing was great.

Trump sounds like a nut.

Sure, he lies a lot, but

Insanity’s his biggest trait.

 

All of the discussion leading up to the debate revolved around lying and fact checking, but in the end, that didn’t really matter.  The bottom line is that Trump looked and sounded like an angry, unhinged, egotistical chimp on speed.

I would concede that anyone who believes that the country is rotten to the core, and needs to be blown up, probably approved of his performance.  I can’t believe that anyone who was truly undecided would want him within 100 miles of the nuclear codes, however.

We face a choice between someone who is flawed, but sane and competent, and an angry lunatic.  In the final analysis, it is as simple as that.  God help us all if he wins.

I’ve compared Cruz to a vampire, but it occurs to me that a more apt analogy might be to a bad guy in a Dickens novel:  harshly ideological; sanctimonious; and hypocritical.  Think of a  Victorian era schoolmaster who treats his charges brutally while sucking up to his social superiors–that’s him.

Everyone else is offering advice, so why shouldn’t I?

1.  Don’t lose sight of the ultimate objective.  This isn’t a forum in which to score debating points; you are trying to win over undecided voters.  Do whatever it takes to accomplish that.  If you come across as being unpleasant in winning a battle, you lose the war.

2.  Take Michelle’s advice.  You can’t win a race to the bottom with Trump, so don’t try–go high.

3.  Just the facts, ma’am.  If Trump, against my expectations, plays it straight in an effort to look “presidential,” be cold and rational and expose his ignorance, which shouldn’t be too hard.

4.  Take advantage of wedge issues.  Ask him about his comment during a GOP debate that wages are too high.  Talk about the minimum wage.  Make it clear that he thinks climate change is a hoax, and therefore cares nothing about the impacts of hurricanes to coastal areas.  Make the point that he will be one of the principal winners if his tax plan is approved, and workers will get little or nothing.

5.  Cross-examine wherever possible.  The more you inquire about the details of his ideas, the less substance there is.

6.  Don’t bang on about the wall.  You can’t get anywhere with that issue.  People either believe him, or they don’t.

7.  The best shots are counterpunches.   Don’t be the first one to launch a personal attack.

8.  Laugh off his more ridiculous assaults.  No elaboration is necessary.

One was a living legend who drank every drop from the cup of life and inspired his admirers for decades; the other was a largely unopened box of potential who could have been among the best ever.  Accordingly, we celebrate what was, and mourn for what might have been.

My wife and I spent most of last evening watching a film about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Netflix.  I came away from it with the conclusion that Petty was a seriously underrated, albeit conservative, songwriter.  I say “conservative” because there was no indication that he was ever interested in being on the cutting edge of popular music;  he just wanted to write memorable, simple tunes that would move average people.

It works;  just because you’re not Picasso doesn’t mean you suck.  Consider the following Petty lyric, which is the best, most succinct description of middle age I’ve ever heard:

I woke up

In between

A memory

And a dream.

From “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”

While Petty had issues with his record company throughout his career, it appears that around the turn of the century, he became disillusioned with changes in the music business (including radio) as a whole, and he devoted an entire CD to how things were better in his younger days.  I can sympathize; I’ve always said there is part of me that will always live in the late seventies, and I would maintain to this day that while there were plenty of things that were going seriously wrong in this country at that time, parts of the culture–most notably, popular music, sports, and movies–were better then than they are today.

Why are my memories of things that happened in 1979 more vivid than, say, my recollections of 2010?  I think the answer is that everything is new when you’re younger, while most of what happens when you’re older disappears into a fog of familiarity.  The fact that I remember all of our foreign trips in considerable detail is evidence supporting my hypothesis.

Petty got over it;  his 2014 release, “Hypnotic Eye,” was one of his best.  The message here is that Shakespeare was right;  as you get older, you want the world to slow down and remain familiar, but it doesn’t work that way, so while it is OK to value your memories, it’s a mistake to try and live in the past.

Are you listening, reactionaries?

I predicted months ago that Cruz would ultimately endorse Trump, purely for reasons of self-interest.  It took longer than I thought, but he has finally done it under circumstances that will do him, and Trump, the least possible amount of good.

Free the benighted prisoners of conscience!  They’re really just ambitious, opportunistic slimeballs, anyway.

I don’t apologize for being white; that was my parents’ choice, not mine.  My ancestors immigrated to Pennsylvania and Ohio after the Civil War; they never owned any slaves.  I am confident I never received any benefits that should have gone to a more deserving African-American.  I oppose some forms of affirmative action, and I’m not keen on rioting as a “solution” to problems with policing, at least where the political system is realistically open to change.

On the other hand, I don’t have any trouble understanding why African-Americans have issues with law enforcement in some communities, and with the judicial system almost everywhere.  I can fully appreciate how irritating it would be to be the subject of an unwarranted stop-and-frisk.  I do support some forms of affirmative action.  Most importantly, I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that, by every available index, life in America is better for white people than for African-Americans, so I view complaints about the unfairness of the system by white people as being ridiculous and pathetic.

With that as background,  the questions I will explore today are:

1.  To what extent are American reactionaries entitled to our sympathy?
2.  What, if anything, should be done to help them?

Here are my reactions:

1.  Bigots:  No sympathy whatsoever.  There is no point in pandering to racial prejudices, period.

2.  Misogynists:  Ditto.

3.  Fundamentalist Christians:  Give them a break.   While support for gay rights in particular may seem self-evident to some members of the left, we need to recognize that it runs against thousands of years of tradition in the West.  You can’t reasonably expect that to disappear overnight.  Some accommodation to strongly held beliefs, at least for a transitional period, would reduce right-wing Christians’ sense of martyrdom.

4.  Victims of globalization and technological change:  Government support is essential.   The wealthy have enjoyed the vast majority of the benefits of globalization and technological change.  We need to find better ways to compensate the victims.  That is the discussion we should be having today; protectionism and the scapegoating of minorities is not the answer.

As I’ve noted previously, Erdogan puts a much higher priority on crushing the Kurds than he does on defeating IS, which creates a serious conflict with American interests.  I have to assume he takes that position because he believes that IS is an ephemeral problem, while the Kurds will always be there.  If so, he’s probably right.

Due in part to this divergence in interests and in part to his apparent desire to chip away at liberal democracy, Erdogan is flirting with Putin.  Given that the West has far more to offer him than Putin does, one imagines that his ultimate objective is to use Putin as leverage to get a better deal (i.e., extradition of Gulen, less criticism on human rights, and more sympathy with his Kurdish problem) from the West.

Unfortunately for him, the West has options, too.  The NYT ran an article a few days ago in which it was revealed that Obama is considering sending more weapons to the Kurds.  Articles like that don’t appear for no reason;  it was a clear attempt by the Obama Administration to send a message to Erdogan that he shouldn’t try to push us too far.

In all likelihood, when it is all said and done, the parties will muddle through, and both sides will get a little bit of what they want.  The only thing that Putin can give him in the long run is support for his strong man routine, which doesn’t exactly pay the bills.

The Economist ran a short but interesting article a few weeks ago in which America was reimagined as a parliamentary system.  The article divided what I would call the Reactionary faction of the GOP into two parties:  the “Christian Coalition” headed by Ted Cruz; and the “People’s Party” headed by Trump.  That obviously raises a question about my description of the GOP factions:  should the Reactionaries be kept as a single grouping, or divided in two?

I think the events of the last few months have proven me to be correct.  The Christian right has embraced Trump regardless of his colorful personal life, and the Cruz speech at the Republican Convention did not go over well with the rank and file.  In the final analysis, Christian or not, they are all just reactionaries.

A word now on next week’s debate.

We’ve only a few days to wait.

If Trump wins with lies

Countless people will die.

Will that make America great?

As we know, Trump didn’t invent Trumpism; it has existed in Europe for decades.  Today, from Brexit to Duterte, you see evidence of it all over the world. Here are my observations:

1.  Trumpism operates differently in presidential and parliamentary systems.   In Europe, virtually every nation has an anti-immigrant party which gets a fairly stable percentage of the vote, but never dominates the legislature, and is rarely included in the government.  As a result, the problems these parties create are chronic, but not acute.  In the US, the situation is the opposite;  by suddenly taking over one of the existing parties in a two-party system, reactionaries have created the possibility of wielding power with only the law and the judicial system to check them.  In parliamentary terms, it is as if the Conservatives and UKIP were running as a single party, with the UKIP leader as the choice for PM.  It would never happen, but the Brexit vote shows the potential result if it did.

2.  There is an analogy in the French system.  It is widely assumed (in my opinion, incorrectly) that all respectable opinion will coalesce around the moderate right-wing candidate after Le Pen gets the greatest number of votes on the first ballot in 2017.  Clinton is attempting to do the same thing by reaching out to old school Republicans and emphasizing the unpredictability and dangerousness of a Trump Administration in her campaign.  Will it work? That remains to be seen; some prominent GOP members are publicly supporting Clinton, but the vast majority have fallen in line behind their tribal leader regardless of their concerns about his ability to function as President.

3.  Where does Duterte fit in this?  Like the US, the Philippines were enjoying reasonably strong growth, but they elected a thug whose coarseness and disdain for opposition and due process are clearly reminiscent of Trump’s.  On the other hand, Duterte doesn’t have much to say about immigrants, which obviously sets him apart from Trump and the European anti-immigrant parties.  I think his success is due more to a new world-wide impatience with the democratic process that I will address in a subsequent post than to the anti-globalist zeitgeist.

There has been plenty of debate recently about whether false equivalence exists, what it means, and what obligations the MSM have to avoid it.  It does exist, and here are my thoughts about it:

1.  It is mostly a TV news phenomenon.  To illustrate it, imagine what happens on a typical day:  there will be one story in which a reporter shakes his or her head with wonder about some new outrageous statement from Trump which indicates that he plans to violate the Constitution, or blow up the world, or whatever; and then a second, equally long story in which another reporter comments on Clinton’s e-mail for the five hundredth time and makes note of her trust issues.  To the casual observer, and most are, this sends the message that the two candidates have essentially the same liabilities, which isn’t true.

2.  In print, it is just bad journalism.   The side-by-side problem doesn’t really exist in print;  here, the issue is whether the publication in question feels compelled to identify nonexistent scandals, to draw unwarranted inferences, or to blow facts out of proportion simply because it has previously run similar stories about the other candidate.  The bogus stories about the Clinton Foundation would meet this description.

3.  Gentility isn’t the issue.  Personally, I don’t care if the NYT uses the word “lie” to describe Trump’s false statements as long as the scope and nature of the untruth is exposed in the article in question.

During the Cold War, when the USSR truly was an existential threat to our country, we felt compelled to ally ourselves with a wide range of right-wing dictators.  We provided them with economic and military assistance, but we didn’t typically give them any kind of a public embrace.  They were, in short, a necessary embarrassment.

Unlike the USSR, ISIS is not an existential threat, but it presents enough of a problem that we have been required to behave in somewhat the same manner towards unsavory regimes, such as Egypt’s.  Donald Trump wants to take that to a new level, however;  strong men are his favorite kind of leader, and you could expect him to behave accordingly if he is elected President.  You can even imagine him sending American troops to prop up the Egyptian regime in the face of a genuinely popular uprising on the basis that any alternative to the status quo will inevitably be worse for American interests.

Leaving aside the inconsistency of that approach with American values, there are times when it fails, and with catastrophic results.  If you don’t believe me, just ask the Shah of Iran.

You can find reactionaries in every part of the country, of course, but they dominate the political landscape in four areas:  Appalachia; the Deep South; the Great Plains; and the Mountain West.  Here is my analysis of what motivates them on a geographic basis:

1.  Appalachia:  Rural Lifestyles and the “War on Coal”:  There was a time when the principal social division in these areas was between  coal mine owners and miners, the latter of whom were reliable Democratic voters, but no longer. Today, primarily as a result of economic forces, but partly due to environmental regulations, the industry is struggling, and capitalists and workers alike blame the federal government.

GOP candidates for office in Appalachia show respect for rural values and lifestyles and make bogus promises to revive the coal industry by eliminating regulations.  The Democrats consistently nominate candidates for President with no ties to or sympathy with rural lifestyles (guns, in particular) who promise handouts to the afflicted.  It is no wonder the GOP message sells better.

There aren’t enough African-Americans living in these areas to be a political threat, so I don’t think you can attribute the changing political climate to racism. The trend was clear even before Obama was elected, and in any event, his race was only part of an intellectual package that is unequivocally “urban.”

2.  The Deep South:  Racism:  In the Deep South, on the other hand, in addition to the painful history, there are enough African-Americans to be a threat to the white political establishment.  The result of the GOP primaries tells the story here;  Ted Cruz, who ran as a limited government/fundamentalist religion reactionary, was decisively beaten by Trump and his white nationalist supporters.

3.  The Great Plains:  Right-Wing Religion:  The Great Plains were Cruz country during the primaries, and for good reason;  the area is not struggling economically, and African-Americans and Hispanics do not present any sort of a threat to the establishment.  It’s all about conservative Christian values here; farmers credit God and themselves when they prosper, and blame the government when they don’t.

4.  The Mountain West:  Rugged Individualism and Federal Lands:  These are overwhelmingly rural states in which large areas are owned by the federal government.   Friction between ranchers and environmentalists, with the federal government caught in the middle and pleasing no one, is a major theme here.  As with the Great Plains states, race and globalization are not factors in this area.

 

The GOP nominee Don

Wants all Syrians here to be gone.

His son has made light

Of their undoubted plight.

He wants them less hither, more yon.