To play the old guy for a moment — because it’s typecasting, that’s who Mister Jones is anyway — in response to the  Lee Camp “Stop Telling Me” list and video that Laska posted and reflected on, I say this:

I’m not “telling you” shit, and nobody cares what you celebrate or don’t celebrate. Being old, cranky, and full of necrotic guile, I see your copping this defiant attitude as a member of a supposedly oppressed class — oppression universalized here as nothing worse than being being bossed around by your elders — as a classic ploy of adolescents.

There’s only one thing I really do have over you: I was young , you’ve never been old, and you will be. It’s infuriating. I remember. Nothing makes it more infuriating than hearing some old guy say “I remember.” I remember that too.

Because that’s just the way fifteen-year-olds are: it’s all about you, desperately flailing to self-define, in endless reaction to the elders you pretend to disdain but can’t stop gazing at. Since you’re not fifteen, grow the fuck up and stop pissing, obsessively, on my parade. She’s obviously won the nomination as much as anyone else ever has who’s been in the position she’s in, which is the only point specifically regarding history, dimwit, celebrate it or no.

Or . . . is it the only point? Might she … get indicted before the convention!?

But no, because system. And because rigged.

There’s an interesting way in which she’s NOT the first, and I appreciate the way you use capital letters to get your point across there, because uppercase always makes things more persuasive. You have the sense of history to invoke ’08 and ’12, but let me rely on a classic privilege of age: telling you a rambling story with no real point. When I was a lad in the late 19th century, Victoria Woodhull — a member of the American Communist Party, a gender-rights and sex pioneer, a feminist so radical that you’ve never heard of her — ran for president. You wouldn’t like her: she was also the first woman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.  So a “corporate-funded big-bank employee.”

Anyway, face it. Really, HRC is — no, I mean “IS” — the first real female candidate, and with any luck she’s about to be the first female president. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, again, I don’t care, but then why would you invoke McKinney and Stein? See, this shouldn’t be a bullet list. I know the list thing is supposed to make your plaint seem unarguably hardnosed in its logic; intellectually, though, it’s a circle. There are things you could do to fix that, but they’d require effort, and some regard for clarity not only of expression but also of thought. Stuff old people like.

— “Corrupt kleptocracy.” Now here’s something I can get with. Cleanse the kleptocracy of corruption! Make it a clean kleptocracy!

— “Stop being sheep.” Oh. OK, I will. Is this good? Just tell me what to do. So I can stop being a sheep.

Get off my lawn.

[UPDATE: I’ll save this for a more serious post, but: Anyone yakking on TV about a corrupt kleptocracy with that “Russia Today” logo in the corner of the screen has got to be fucking kidding.]

Reagan and Nixon.  Speaking, as we were the other day, of distorting history, Michael Reagan, son of Ronald, a weird guy and no master of the written word, tweeted this, regarding Trump:

This most likely would be the 1st time if my father was alive that he would not support the nominee of the GOP

Along with the goofy use of “if my father was alive” (which way would he vote if he weren’t alive?) the remark is funny because until 1952 Ronald Reagan not only voted Democrat but also lent his prestige as a (fading) movie star to liberal Democratic candidates in California.  In ’50, he worked especially hard for Helen Gahagan Douglas’s U.S. Senate campaign. Her winning opponent Richard Nixon dubbed her “the Pink Lady” to suggest she was a Communist fellow-traveler, and in ’52, when Reagan decided to cross party lines and vote for Ike, his main misgiving was the evident sleaziness and vapidity of Ike’s running mate Nixon.

That’s it. This item has no real point. Except Michael Reagan is a weird guy.

Superdelegates.  A guy I follow on Twitter notes the irony of seeing an insurgent candidacy, beginning by criticizing the existence of superdelegacy as a component of unfair rigging, now floating the idea of turning superdelegates against the expressed will of a clear majority of voters based on polling purporting to show greater “electability” in the insurgent — electability, that quality so recently associated with voting out of fear, not hope. The irony doesn’t bother me. It’s politics, the ploy seems more narrative than real, and it shows brazenness and gumption, some sense of the game as a game. Intellectual honesty isn’t a quality I look for in these weird contests the parties have established for choosing nominees.

But the guy on Twitter also suggests that in addressing this irony, at least we might now begin to address the question of how to make the Dem nominating process more democratic. To which, in the mood I’m in today, I can only respond by noting that doing the same thing over and over (“reform”) and getting the same result (“rigging”) is the definition of insanity.

There’s another point of view on this, also not mine, expressed by the penetrating liberal journo Jamelle Bouie. He says that 2016 has shown that the mix of majoritarian and anti-majoritarian elements in the Dem contests are working fine.

Anyone saying things are more or less “fine” will get a raised eyebrow from me — just consider this post from from Laska, or this one — but Bouie nevertheless makes the interesting technical point, again involving an irony, that the less democratic form of contest, caucus, is actually more likely to benefit insurgency. So reforming things by moving, say, to a one-day, all-primary, blanket-majority system, though hyperdemocratic, will always simply crown the most mainstream nominee, according to him.

Reagan again. It’s recently become clear to me that at its 1968 convention, the GOP essentially anointed Reagan the future of the party. It took some twists and turns and some whack-a-mole, but GOP liberalism basically died there, when Reagan was not quite two years into his first term as governor — and that was the only elective office he’d ever held. He’d been an actor and a corporate and right-wing spokesman before that, and that’s it. Whoever before Reagan got anointed the future president with nearly zero experience in gaining and executing office? In making that revolutionary change, Reagan set up something that Trump may now be taking to a logical conclusion: Reagan brought the party together behind an image supported by nothing, but because he had effective people around him, and because he was a kind of political animal, he made the party dominant. Trump is ripping the party apart the same way, and because he has no effective people around him, and not one political bone in his body, he may be bringing it down, at least temporarily. So while the rise of Reagan and the rise of Trump are in historical opposition, the idea of who a presidential candidate can be changed for good with Reagan, as early as ’68, and Trump may now be serving as Ronnie’s funhouse-mirror reflection.

Whither In at the End of the World? As we emerge, finally, from the primary season, things simplify, horribly, in that in our system there must always be only two candidates in the end, with the occasional third-party spoiler  — and this year one of the two will be Donald Trump, the other the first female to get anything like this far. This exchange began for me in bewilderment and interest in Sanders, horror at Cruz and Trump, amazement at the non-starter Jeb, potential GOP collapse, the class-and-race ironies of left-Dem insurgency, etc. It will be interesting to see what if anything we have to say now.

For my part, once more or less assured that Clinton will be the nominee, my cold eye for her many flaws will start to twitch. That’s what always happens to me. Not like it matters . . .

Just caught up with this from Jedediah Purdy and haven’t even read it all yet, but it seems potentially useful as a critique of Andrew Sullivan’s discourse on how “the excesses of democracy” — as the nation’s founders did indeed put it — have brought us Trump.

Adam Gopnik is a stunningly fluid and learned writer on most matters, but I think when he writes about the immediate political situation he indulges in special pleading and question-begging that he would never permit himself when writing about anything else. Tensions in the Gopnik piece relate to recent posts by my two fellow bloggers here, especially  Lasksa’s disappointment (in the post and in comments) and CVFD’s stark clarity (especially in a comment here) regarding the state that the 2016 election has reached this May.

Let me say that I agree with Gopnik (and CVFD, here) in imagining the election of Trump as President of the United States a uniquely grotesque disaster for the nation. But I was for Clinton anyway against Sanders. Don’t need Trump to force me to the altar now.

So it is I who, like Nixon in China, feel free to say this: the Gopnik piece reflects a worldview I associate with a privileged New York — and New Yorker — intelligentsia so complacent about the painful inequities of our history and politics that it can be inspired to militant rhetoric only when it sees its own complacency threatened. That intelligentsia’s cultural sway, over a small but influential readership, is now aiding liberalism in dismissing, as irrelevant to combating the destruction of the nation, any of the deeper questions about the American past and future that have been raised by this election, not only explicitly by Sanders but also by the emergence of Trump, conflicts within the GOP, hostility among many on the left for 1990’s Dem policies, African American support for Clinton, etc., etc., etc.

Those things have the virtue of being at the very least interesting — hence maybe this blog — and reflect powerfully on the history of leftism, conservatism, liberalism, racism, and populism in America. But in Gopnikland, they’re not only uninteresting but damaging even to give critical attention to.

Trying to keep length under control, I’ll cite a few of the lines from the Gopnik piece that have sparked these thoughts:

• “If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over.”
• “The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day.”
• “The radical progressives [in Weimar Germany during the Nazis’ rise] decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.”

The third item, a thinly disguised slam on a certain brand of Sanders supporter, wants to read 1930’s Europe through moods of the 2016 election and doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. Not saying anything like “it can’t happen here,” but while I can’t prove right here and now that the Gopnik reading is simplistic, slick, and tendentious, “the most thrilling thing imaginable” gives away the presentist bias (I know because I have it too), and a quick Wikipedia skim suggests that the apodictic tone is, shall we say, unearned.

That problem relates to the first two items, which mention “liberal democracy” and “the American experiment” as if they were fully known and agreed-upon quantities, inspiring wholehearted consensus in anybody worth talking to at a dinner party. The American experiment in what? Maybe not everybody does “believe in liberal democracy,” if that term means neoliberal capitalism unfettered: even here at the Jones house, where liberal complacency is what we do, rumors have reached us that there are other points of view on these matters. I gather some of them are actually rather cogent.

But Gopnik’s most problematic thought, for me, is here: “The nation may survive [a Trump presidency], but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak.”

Well, for one thing, yes, let’s go ahead and ask the Germans, maybe the leading European nation today and having no big deal in electing a female executive. That nation’s “hope and order,” though once “wounded,” seem more or less OK now. But more to the point is Gopnik’s weird suggestion — he makes it plain by his phrasing, though I think unwittingly — that the key thing now is to keep the American people (or the “psyche”) from “learning,” via a Trump election, just how weak our institutions actually are.

Man, if that’s something we’ll never get over, it’s too late to worry about it now: obviously (to everyone but Gopnik) Trump’s rise reflects longstanding tendencies and contradictions that have already revealed our institutions to be far other than what the ideology of liberal democracy might wish they were. In fact, the rise of Trump suggests that a lot of people are sick of people like Adam Gopnik telling them that if they care about the good, the true, and the beautiful there’s only one right thing to do and Adam Gopnik knows what it is. That’s an institution we might want to see fall. I well recall New Yorker liberalism finding it just unbelievable that a Sarah Palin could gain any traction with Americans; I remember the same type, a generation or so earlier, predicting that that manifest clown Ronald Reagan could never be elected president. . . .

Anyway, the “national psyche”? “Fragile institutions”? Has Gopnik never heard of settler colonialism and Indian removal? Internment camps? J. Edgar Hoover? The Bay of Pigs? Jim Crow?  Assassinations? The Tonkin Gulf? The entire bundle of things summed up in the word Nixon? The Church Committee findings? Mass incarceration? Cheney? The quiz show scandals (just kidding)? All deplorable, of course, from the liberal point of view that was in fact responsible for creating most of them, but now for Gopnik it’s time for us to believe something new: Trump and Trump alone, emerging in 2016, has the daemonic power to undermine belief in our institutions’ strength and goodness, supposedly recently inherent.

Which suggests to me that one of the most bizarre features of 2016 — along with having the first politically viable female presidential candidate (in this backward country, that is), with all of her own problems, and with competencies unusual in any presidential candidate; running against everything sexist, incompetent, and retrograde in human nature — is the convenience Trump provides Gopnikian complacency, by giving it a pretext for this sudden onrush of militant urgency in its own defense.

I know whereof I speak. This is Mister Jones posting now. Keeping choices simple is what I’m all about (explained in comments there). We Joneses have Hillary signs on both the front and side lawns, out of the way of the sprinklers. I know the pitch, and I can hear the falsehood behind it, because it’s always pitched right at me.

Here’s Noam Chomsky talking a few years ago about how the Dems are the single legit political party now, essentially a moderate conservative party. Salon seems to think this predicted Trump.

It also fits with my fantasy in which the Bush-Romney part of the GOP (if it exists) will lean toward Clinton and just face the fact that they really can all get along, restructure the fundraising, etc., around this new party: center-right on foreign affairs, moderate on the social contract (preserve some safety net, don’t do anything progressive), liberal on gender and sexuality.

But what I like best here are the Putin apparatchiks of Russia Today pretending to report and analyze the news.

Now Ralph Reed casts Trump as a convert to social conservatism, thus especially beloved, blessed. Yet again forty years of hypocrisy is exposed, the moral majority mood galvanized improbably for Reagan somehow rejiggered impossibly for Trump. My thought that evangelicals were finally being openly sold out by the GOP and weird vision of an evangelical-left coaltion against HRC technocracy dies a-borning, unsurprisingly. All this bloc needs are “hints” that abortion will become illegal, gays never marry, etc., to get behind a figure who goes out of his way to appear cartoon-Satanic. Making  America great again means — once again — making Sunday School whiteboy Jesus smile down on us, and anything — even the high priest of Moloch in Manhattan — turns out to be better than a female president herself recently “converted” to marriage equality. I do think Bryan’s evangelicalism, however nativist and hidebound, was far superior — simply more sincere! — than this bullshit. Always knew Reed was a cleverly corrupt smarmmonger, but are we going to hear anything against Trump from sincerely conservative evangelicals? Or do they not exist?

Two articles try to explain, in a macro way, what’s gone on with the Trump thing,  Andrew Sullivan, thinking like an 18C Whig, blames excesses of democracy; Jacobin, thinking like some sort of post-Leninist Marx revivalist, defends its idea of democracy against Sullivan’s critique. I find both of these pieces naive in ways I won’t write a longwinded post about right now, but I also find it interesting that the 2016 election is raising these really elemental questions about the very idea of democracy in America.

This got too long for a comment on Laskas’s New Conspiracy Theory:

Something like what Laska’s talking about there must be happening. Not so much a conscious conspiracy but a conspiracy of themes/interests. Once the Tea Party came in, inevitable consequences of the “Reagan Revolution” were fulfilled, the party started falling apart — not losing elections but losing the organization and discipline to support its electoral successes. Nothing lasts forever. Conservatism may be long past ready to give up on abortion, gay marriage — for people like the Bushes and McCain, that was never real — thus casting off the evangelicals as worn-out tools. As Laska suggests, why wouldn’t establishment conservatives look at coalition with Hillary?

The irony for the left, this season imagining taking over the Democratic Party for socialism and peace, would be that in the absence of a (disciplined) right-wing party to oppose it, the Dem. Party doesn’t get more left, but the opposite, becoming instead the only party with real organization, technocracy, and appeal for elite (i.e., real) conservatism; naturally Dems move to pick up those people and that funding. In this reading, the Dem impulse — just as, I suspect, with DLC/New Democrat “reforms”  — is always ultimately partisan (save and strengthen the party), with ideology following on that imperative.

As certain lefty liberals have long believed that if only the GOP could be destroyed, the Dems, no longer then under rightward pressure, would be free to flower as a lefty party,  evangelicals have dreamed of a Great Awakening via a GOP dancing on the ashes of liberalism. Neither is going to happen. While we’re doing counterfactuals, the really interesting future opposition coalition — opposing what, in this fantasy, will soon become a hyperdominant, center-right Democratic Party, and opposing even party itself, as we’ve come to know it in the USA — will bring the socialist left together with evangelicalism. As it was in the beginning, 1750’s-1790’s.

I’m imagining the upcoming GOP convention as one of the weirder events in US election history. All former GOP presidents will stay away, along with the most recent GOP presidential candidate, along with a lot of their constituencies.

So not even a knockdown dragout floor fight, over the nomination of an incompetent insurgent, whose approval ratings (if elected) will be in the crapper on day one and go down from there, dragging the rest of the GOP electeds with him? Not with a bang but a whimper? Because “the people” have supposedly spoken via this goofball thing we call a primary system, and it would “look bad” to try to override them?

Please. (Or: Sad!) If this election were occurring when men were men, as it were, both Bushes’ organizations, Lindsey Graham’s and his ilks’, and all the anti-Trump forces in every state would show up at the convention — they’d be fanned out around the country right now — in relentless 24/7 activity for one or more alternative candidates, using money, clout, pork, seduction, and threats to deny Trump the nomination on the first ballot, then start working the wedge between him and the number he needs. Push the rules committee around, pressure state election lawyers to find loopholes, ignore the primaries in favor of polls (faked or tweaked as necessary) showing Romney (or somebody) doing better against HRC than Trump. Scare these delegates and other party hacks that they’re going down for good if they stick with this asshat.

This is turning into a counterfactual-history fanfic. Romney, GWB, and, like, Colin Powell take the podium together and speak passionately against Trump. Booing and throwing stuff ensues.

But wait … what’s this? Clint is at the podium! He reads a letter from Pop Bush deploring Trump, reviewing the glories of the party from the time of Lincoln. Now there are sobs and cheers mingled with the boos …

But no. A party-destroying insurgent will actually reap the benefits of the vacuous “party unity” style of contemporary conventions. Disunity will be expressed only by absence. That is, not expressed. It’s insane.