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.

Lost in the circus maximus of Donald Trump’s Candidacy for President of the United States—it’s still impossible to write that and not believe that I’m living in an X-Men comic from the eighties, with a demagogue candidate running for president on an anti-mutant platform.  And, me not buying the story because it’s not believable.  Our politics has moved beyond basic verisimilitude.

Lost in all this, is that Trump’s candidacy is an ideal vehicle for certain elements of the Republican Party to complete their decades-long project of destroying the federal government. Grover Norquist once famously said that he wanted to shrink the federal government to a size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. That hasn’t happened, but that which can’t be made smaller, can be broken beyond repair.

We take our institutions of government for granted.  No matter how much we gripe about them or laugh at comedians who ridicule them, through war and peace, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have continued doing the nation’s business.

Until recently.  It’s well documented that the Republicans have broken the legislative branch, and I’ll probably do a longer post on this. The House is run by a so-called “Freedom caucus” that’s only agenda is to stop the government from functioning.

Breaking the senate required a series of maneuvers.  The senate only functions with the unanimous consent of its members. Legislation only moves forward without the objection of a single senator. When you read accounts of how the senate worked in the twentieth century, it’s remarkable that senators from both parties routinely provided unanimous consent to allow legislation that they opposed to move to the floor. It was a professional courtesy and an acknowledgement that the senate can’t function otherwise.

Republicans, desperate to stop Obama, abandoned unanimous consent without regard to the harm it would do to the institution of the senate.

This year, the GOP broke the Supreme Court. This week, the court declined to hear an important case that involved contraception under Obamacare. They sent it back to the lower courts because there was no point in a 4-4 divided court hearing the case. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing.

We will have a full year without a functioning Supreme Court.  Gee, what happens if this year’s presidential election ends up in front of the court?  Like Bush v Gore did?  Unlikely, but not impossible. What happens then?

It’s likely that Hillary wins the presidency and the Republicans narrowly retain the senate. Scalia’s seat needs to be filled. And we will enter the next four years with three justices over eighty-years old. At least one and probably more will need to be replaced. But, why would a Republican congress approve any justice that Hillary proposes?  What stops them from just refusing to approve or even meet with anyone she nominates? Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy will likely have to stay on the job until they expire. Think William O. Douglas post-stroke being wheeled into the chamber.

So, legislative branch:  wrecked. Judicial branch: wreckage in process.

Executive branch:  Mr. Trump, enter, stage right.

My world on Facebook recently got ugly.  I’ve recently been called weak, stupid, immoral, and unprincipled – but by my affluent, urban, Democratic friends, not by the bigoted, misogynist pro-life  xenophobes who occupy a range of the political spectrum.  I want to delete my account to keep me going from back, but, like Apple and iTunes, I have too much stuff there to leave.  But there’s a thought there:

My FB world contains four constituencies:

1. HS friends, re-connects, and curiouses – these are people with whom I grew up in a semi-depressed steel town in Western PA.  It was and is more working class than any of the towns 90% of my current colleagues have ever experienced outside of a movie or a visit upstate.  Politically they are (a mix of) New Deal Democrats holding on, skeptical Democrats who resisted Reagan Dems, straight up Republicans, and Trump supporters. Many move along the spectrum within a conversation and most are sympathetic to each other having grown up with all those views. That sympathy allows them to see friends who really hate HRC/theClintons/Dems and who support Trump as something other than racist xenophobes.
2. day to day friends – people that I stay in touch despite no longer having time or ease of access to stay in touch.
3. political friends – overlaps with day to day friends, but these are people with whom I was active in college, as a union organizer, congressional staffer, or volunteer.
4.  acquaintances or work associations – these are people who I know from work or connections to work circles.  This one is tricky, because I don’t really have friendships with them, but you don’t want to not be friends with them, and you don’t want to unfriend them if the friendship stems from early promiscuous days.  

A HS friend of mine once mentioned that he thought it was great how we grew up in one kind of town and work in a much more rarefied environment as it gave us different perspectives.  But it gets tricky on FB where I may be talking to one group (or the post has one group in mind) but others weigh in, misinterpret the post or simply want to get in that conversation.

The most educated and sophisticated of these groups is the last. They are all graduates of prestigious colleges (and care about the colleges other people come from), are generally Democrats and call themselves liberals or moderate liberals.  And they are brutally dismissive of views as stupid, ill-informed, are able to quote lines about complicity to make insufficient hatred of Trump and insufficient support of HRC into something akin to those who allowed Hitler to come to power (seriously, the wording can’t be accidental).

Group #1 is a mix of education, income, and worldliness.    Within that group are strong Trump supporters/HRC haters and people who are truly disenfranchised/disconnected from the political system.  Many of them work hard, are frustrated at the diminishing return they get for that hard work.  They don’t see the connection between the all-important SCOTUS appointments and their lives that is an article of faith within Democratic orthodoxy (“it’s SCOTUS, stupid” runs one clever re-tread).  They associate with a racist Trump, though I don’t think they’re the enemy (and they might have some race and diversity challenges) out of party loyalty, Clinton distrust, and a fatalism that nobody is really going to make their work go farther toward a better life.  In more honest and elitist terms:  they are the least educated, least worldly, most small-minded (on average) of the groups.  And they are also the most open, most civil, and most compromising group of people in my admittedly narrow life.

Anyway, my point here is that the orthodoxy of the educated liberals in group 4, combined with a papal infallibility because they read more newspapers with college-educated minds has made them the savage ones in my life.

If this strikes any chords, let’s go with it.  I’m aware this might be re-treading old issues or merely complaining.

We’ve gone quiet. In addition to regular lives to lead, I’m wondering if you guys are sharing a depressed lull.  It feels like we’re watching the consolidation of HRC’s hold on the party get ugly and tedious.  There’s nothing Sanders can say to stay in that doesn’t sound bitter, force him to inadequately condemn delegate behavior that may or may not be understood, and there are enough polls out there to make even the friendliest HRC supporter call anyone who isn’t voicing full-throated support for HRC a collaborator with the new fascist.

On a personal note, I don’t talk politics with hardly anyone anymore.  There is only one reality in the new Democratic orthodoxy:  we must beat Trump, that means supporting HRC, keep any other thought to yourself.

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.

 

So we’re getting HRC and WJC again.  Some brain donor on HRC’s campaign decided she should put Big Bill in charge of economic revitalization “because, you know, he knows how to do it,” she said. “Especially in places like coal country and inner-cities and other parts of our country that have really been left out.”

Is this pure ego on Bill’s part?  They’re putting crime, welfare, NAFTA, blowjobs, perjury, superpredators, the recovery that may or may not have been a recovery, and all the stuff HRC supporters told us “that’s her husband, don’t be sexist” right back in play.  As Obama’s numbers go up, commentators start to place him among the greats, we’re putting this one front and center to re-fight the 90s.

Time to donate money to Trump.  I don’t want to be on the wrong side of this fight.

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.

So, Big Bill, WJC, the man who brought prosperity to us all, imprisoned excessive millions excessively, made welfare queens multiple jobs so others could raise their children in extreme poverty, and innovated the financial sector to all of our benefits and who still can talk to the people and win them over . . .

Yeah, he got booed by miners after his wife brought him “out of retirement” to shut these people . . . sorry, show these people . . . sorry, demonstrate compassion to people who have taken blow after economic blow over the last 30 years.

What do we call Big Bill’s role?  He’s not the black friend white liberals have and can check in.  He’s the guy who can go out and talk to those people.  He does our slumming for us.  Except he’s re-treading old lines from the 90s.  Back then, he told us the “future is coming, we can’t change that” and didn’t.  Now he’s telling them “The question is, are we going to get back in the future business, and are you going along for the ride?”  It’s almost hard to imagine HRC is suddenly looking soft in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsyvlania.

When we were playing that thought game about what kind of coalition HRC is thinking of building, Mr Jones asked “But if a big coalition emerges, what’s it a coalition *about*?”  That question was painfully hard to answer during WJC’s administrations, but it was muddled enough that we could convince enough of ourselves that it was indeed *about* us.

Now, while we still may not know what the coalition is about, some are pretty sure that it’s not about them and sending WJC in to charm them is only rubbing salt in the wound.

Does HRC have time to course correct?  Can she get out a message to convince those people?   They’re really gonna blow it.