First, some leftover (or late-breaking) links on Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and last week's Republican National Convention:
Matt Taibbi: Trump's Appetite for Destruction: That was the week that was. Some highlights, but not necessarily the best jokes:
It wasn't what we expected. We thought Donald Trump's version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess.
We expected thousand-foot light columns, a 400-piece horn section where the delegates usually sit (they would be in cages out back with guns to their heads). Onstage, a chorus line of pageant girls in gold bikinis would be twerking furiously to a techno version of "New York, New York" while an army of Broadway dancers spent all four days building a Big Beautiful Wall that read winning, the ceremonial last brick timed to the start of Donald's acceptance speech . . .
But nah. What happened instead was just sad and weird, very weird. The lineup for the 2016 Republican National Convention to nominate Trump felt like a fallback list of speakers for some ancient UHF telethon, on behalf of a cause like plantar-wart research. [ . . . ]
That the press seemed let down by the lack of turmoil on the streets was odd, given that the Trump convention itself was, after all, a historic revolt.
Thirteen million and three hundred thousand Republican voters had defied the will of their party and soundly rejected hundred-million-dollar insider favorites like Jeb Bush to re-seize control of their own political destiny. That they made perhaps the most ridiculous choice in the history of democracy was really a secondary issue.
It was a tremendous accomplishment that real-life conservative voters did what progressives could not quite do in the Democratic primaries. Republican voters penetrated the many layers of money and political connections and corporate media policing that, like the labyrinth of barricades around the Q, are designed to keep the riffraff from getting their mitts on the political process.
But it wasn't covered that way. What started a year ago as an amusing story about a clown car full of bumbling primary hopefuls was about to be described to the world not as a groundbreaking act of defiance, but as a spectacular failure of democracy. [ . . . ]
We could never quite tell what [Trump] was: possibly the American Hitler, but just as possibly punking the whole world in the most ambitious prank/PR stunt of all time. Or maybe he was on the level, birthing a weird new rightist/populist movement, a cross of Huey Long, Pinochet and David Hasselhoff. He was probably a monster, but whatever he was, he was original.
Then came Thursday night.
With tens of millions of eyes watching, Trump the Beltway conqueror turtled and wrapped his arms around the establishment's ankles. He spent the entirety of his final address huddled inside five decades of Republican Party clichés, apparently determined to hide in there until Election Day. [ . . . ]
But it wasn't new, not one word. Trump cribbed his ideas from the Republicans he spent a year defaming. Trump had merely reprised Willie Horton, Barry Goldwater's "marauders" speech, Jesse Helms' "White Hands" ad, and most particularly Richard Nixon's 1968 "law and order" acceptance address, the party's archetypal fear-based appeal from which Trump borrowed in an intellectual appropriation far more sweeping and shameless than Melania's much-hyped mistake. [ . . . ]
In the end, Trump's populism was as fake as everything else about him, and he emerged as just another in a long line of Republican hacks, only dumber and less plausible to the political center.
Which meant that after all that we went through last year, after that crazy cycle of insults and bluster and wife wars and penis-measuring contests and occasionally bloody street battles, after the insane media tornado that destroyed the modern Republican establishment, Trump concluded right where the party started 50 years ago, meekly riding Nixon's Southern Strategy. It was all just one very noisy ride in a circle. All that destruction and rebellion went for nothing. Officially now, he's just another party schmuck.
Rick Perlstein: Mr. Trump, You're No Richard Nixon: Paul Manafort promised that Trump's acceptance speech would be based on Nixon's 1968 speech, but as Perlstein says, "I've studied Richard Nixon. And you're no Richard Nixon." He goes on to explain:
And, contra Manafort, there was a hell of a lot of "happy talk" in Nixon's speech. That was the soul of its success. Nixon was fond of a spiritual ideal he learned in his Quaker youth: "peace in the center." This speech's very logic was saturated by it -- that a God-spark of grace lay buried underneath America's currently, temporarily degraded circumstances: the "quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting," heirs to "world's oldest revolution, which will never grow old."
Sure, it was in some respects a rhetorical con: Nixon identified that quiet voice with a certain type of American, the "good people," the "decent people; they work and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care." But his conception of this core -- which he later, with a more snarling tinge, tagged the "Silent Majority" -- was considerably more gracious than the angry, cornered victims, straining to lash out at their tormenters, that Trump had in mind last night. Nixon stepped back from that brink, granting them a charitable core and calling them to further charity: "They know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in." Later, he said, "Just to be alive in America, just to be alive at this time, is an experience unparalleled in history. Here is where the action is."
Try imagining those words coming out of Donald Trump's mouth. Try to imagine them getting the warm, extended applause that they got from the Republicans of 1968. [ . . . ]
But the single most telling divergence between Trump's acceptance speech and its Nixonian model, and the easiest to forget, comes down to this: Nixon never said it would be easy. Trump says nothing else. It was the theme of his convention.
Nixon: "And so tonight I do not promise the millennium in the morning. I do not promise that we can eradicate poverty and end discrimination, eliminate all danger of war in the space of four or even eight years."
Trump: "I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end." (That was what the teleprompter said. Trump spontaneously added, "and I mean very soon.") "Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored."
Trump, again: "We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS." (Again, that was the teleprompter version; he added, "And we're going to defeat them fast.") And then these words on the teleprompter -- "we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terror" -- followed by his own hasty interposition: "Doing it now, doing it quickly, we're going to win, we're going to win fast!" [ . . . ]
It all came down to Donald Trump's own patented brand of alchemical magic: turning coal into diamonds, bending steel with his mind. After all, "Our steelworkers and miners are going back to work. With these new economic policies, trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country. This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans."
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Strangely Quiet Streets of Cleveland: As Taibbi pointed out in the piece above, protesters and counter-protesters in Cleveland for the RNC were vastly outnumbered by journalists, many evidently hoping for some street-fighting to fuel the notion that Trump's 1968 Nixon rip-off had some relevance to the real world. The fact is not many people showed up, and nothing much happened.
One feature of American politics right now is a sensitivity to the influence of the fringe. The campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the angry call-and-response of Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, have raised the possibility of new forces at work, and a popular anthropology has followed. People like the young white nationalist writers Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos have become ubiquitous, because they fit the general story and because they suggest something new. But in Cleveland the people who embraced the racial grievances of the Convention were not the bearded conspiracists of the fringe but the delegates themselves.
David Frum: Donald Trump's Bad Bet on Anger: Compares Trump's speech to Nixon's from 1968 and also mentions Pat Buchanan's in 1992, citing Michael Barone's observation that "Buchanan would no nowhere in politics because Americans aren't angry people, and they don't trust angry people with power." That observation will certainly be tested this year.
But unlike Richard Nixon, Donald Trump is not speaking for a silent majority. He is speaking for a despairing minority.
The range and reach of Trump's voice will be inescapably limited by all the people he does not speak to. He does not speak to those rising and thriving in today's America. He does not speak to entrepreneurs and business owners. He does not speak to people who work in creative industries or the sciences or technology. He does not speak to those who feel emancipated by the lifting of inherited cultural and physical limits. He does not speak to those who feel that this modern age, for all its troubles, is also a time of miraculous achievement and astonishing possibility.
I've compared Donald Trump to William Jennings Bryan, who forfeited the chance in 1896 to build an alliance of all those discontented with industrial capitalism because he only truly felt at home with rural people -- and could not refrain from inflammatory language about cities and city people. Tonight this comparison seems even more valid than ever. Trump's right about the shock of globalization and the disruption of migration. But it's not enough to be right to become president, as Henry Clay famously quipped. You have to be right in the right way and at the right time. You have to be the right messenger to carry the right message.
Actually, Trump's not even very right on "the shock of globalization and the disruption of migration" -- those are fairly minor problems (to the extent they are problems at all), ones that could have been handled by more sensible policies and a greater commitment to a "safety net" to help out those few people who were hurt. (Same for those unemployed coal miners and their depressed communities, although their plight was caused by something else entirely.) Still, one has to wonder how many people actually believe the Republicans' endlessly repeated message of America's economic and cultural and political decline under Obama. Compared to Bush, I can't find a single objective indicator of such decline: the economy has grown steadily, (as has been much commented on) crime rates continue to decline, and the number of American soldiers killed or maimed abroad is also down. Sure, none of these metrics are as good as they should be, but much of the blame there belongs with the Republican stranglehold on Congress (and so many state governments -- Wisconsin vs. Minnesota is an especially telling example).
This is the first I've seen of the Bryan comparison, and there is something interesting to it, but it's also a bit misleading. For one thing, the two major political parties in the 1890s weren't polarized by class like they are now: there were progressive movements in both parties, struggling against oligarchic control of each. Bryan led a revolt in the Democratic Party against extreme conservatives like Grover Cleveland, and the conservatives got their revenge by throwing the election to McKinley (something they repeated in 1972, and would have been tempted to do this year had Sanders won). So, sure, it's interesting that Bryan didn't have the temperament to rally urban workers and blacks (most of whom voted Republican back then). And, sure, neither does Trump, but one other similarity is that both embraced simplistic and ultimately non-credible solutions: silver for Bryan, and walls and barricades for Trump. Also, Bryan was a heroically decent politician (not unlike McGovern later, but much preachier), whereas Trump is a greedy self-centered asshole -- and while the latter may be a better fit for our times, it's still not clear how many people have sunk to his level.
Corey Robin: Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry: Feedback from Trump's foreign policy interview (which I wrote about last time) included a tweet from Peter W. Singer: "It is the most irresponsible foreign policy statement by a presidential nominee of any party in my lifetime." Robin notes that "Barry Goldwater said the US should consider using tactical nukes in Vietnam," but that was before Singer was born, so he concentrated on various outrageous Ronald Reagan pronouncements. Robin goes on to make some generalizations about "the Vox generation of pundits" that may (or may not) be insightful (I'm not sure), but his "Update" is worth quoting. There he's responding to Matt Yglesias attacking Trump for having "proven time and again he's much too lazy to do the job." Robin responds with four bullet items from Ronald Reagan, then adds:
Yglesias's complaint is a frequently heard among liberals. As Alex Gourevitch reminded me, they said the same thing about George W. Bush. Remember all those vacations he took? (879 days, or 30% of his time in office.)
But here's the thing: Ronald Reagan (or George W. Bush] wasn't terrifying because he was lazy. Do we honestly think that if he had worked harder he would have been less terrifying? When your entire belief system is jackboots and smiles, it doesn't get less scary because you work harder; the opposite, in fact. Honestly, I'm thankful Reagan was as lazy as he was. God only knows how much more havoc he might have wreaked had he been awake during those precious afternoon nap hours.
Likewise, Donald Trump. The notion here is that if he had more knowledge of the things he talks about, if he just worked harder at his job, his positions would be moderated. Like Ted Cruz?
On the other hand, laziness at the top allowed those they had (perhaps carelessly) appointed to lower positions to do considerable damage (as bit Reagan in the HUD and Iran-Contra scandals, although the machinations of Ed Meese's Justice Department were probably more damaging in the long run; Bush may have been the primary instigator of his war and terror regime, but he stocked his administration with people who would not only go along but would push him further). There is no reason to think Trump will pick better underlings. Exhibit A: Mike Pence.
As for the rest of the world, some scattered links:
John Quiggin: Anti-militarism: A short piece on definitions.
My case for anti-militarism has two main elements.
First, the consequentialist case against the discretionary use of military force is overwhelming. Wars cause huge damage and destruction and preparation for war is immensely costly. Yet it is just about impossible to find examples where a discretionary decision to go to war has produced a clear benefit for the country concerned, or even for its ruling class. Even in cases where war is initially defensive, attempts to secure war aims beyond the status quo ante have commonly led to disaster.
Second, war is (almost) inevitably criminal since it involves killing and maiming people who have done nothing personally to justify this; not only civilians, but soldiers (commonly including conscripts) obeying the lawful orders of their governments.
Quiggin allows an exception for "humanitarian intervention" which is neither well-developed nor well-critiqued. Most actual wars justified on "humanitarian" grounds have turned out to have bad consequences -- Iraq and Libya are pretty clear recent examples -- often because the motives of the "humanitarians" are never quite pure but also because no amount of good intentions ever really compensates for the criminal killing inextricably bundled into war. (As I recall, Noam Chomsky has cited two wars that he approved of: India's 1971 war with Pakistan which spun Bangladesh off as an independent country, and the 1999 UN defense of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor against forced annexation by Indonesia. Both resulted in independent states which were not subsequently controlled or dominated by interveners -- which isn't to say they didn't have their own reasons that were only loosely cloaked in "humanitarian" rhetoric.)
Advocates of "humanitarian intervention" point to the high death tolls in places like Rwanda where no military jumped in, or to Syria now (although how anyone could think there's been no intervention in Syria is way beyond me). The fact is that nobody knows whether fewer people would have died in Rwanda had outside powers intervened, because no one know what the effect would be of Euroamericans, with their long histories of racism and colonialism, coming in and shooting up the place, killing people on both sides ostensibly to keep them from killing each other. Nor does anyone have any idea what the invaders would have done after the shooting stopped (although with the US, UK, France and others, the temptation would have been to set up shop and recoup expenses; i.e., neocolonialism).
It's easy enough to conjure up a fantasy that some omnipotent foreign force could march through Syria and end the civil war there by killing anyone who resists (assuming, of course, you could keep all the other foreign forces from supporting their own favorite factions), but would such a force be willing to turn the spoils over to the Syrian people and let them decide to do whatever they wished with their country -- just without the resort to violence. We've seen the US in a position to do just that at least twice (in Afghanistan and Iraq) and neither time the US was capable of even feigning neutrality. The odds the US might do the right thing in Syria are even slimmer, given that the Americans who plot wars (and imagine them to be humanitarian) already see Syria as a microcosm of region- and world-wide rivalries with "enemies" like Russia and Iran and both Islamist and secular (socialist) tendencies in all Arab nations and "allies" having as many conflicting views and aims as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, France, the UK, and its former (but still reigning) emirates and vassals.
As Quiggin notes, we are now well into the hundredth anniversary of the original Great War. The reaction to that horror was to demilitarize, but that world was still driven by dreams of empire, and the inequitable settlement left Germany hungering for another shot and Japan and Italy thinking they were still on the rise, so there followed another, even more devastating and frightful war, capped by the emergence of a bomb capable of devastating whole cities in seconds. Again, nearly everyone hoped to render war obsolete and impossible. Some measures were taken, starting with declaration of a universal "rights of man" that if truly honored would render the old reasons for war -- chiefly, empire and plunder -- obsolete. It would be smart to revisit those ideas and try to reinvigorate them. Because clearly piling one armed outrage on top of another isn't working.
Matt Taibbi: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie: This came out after the California and New Jersey primaries in early June. I don't recall whether I saw it at the time, but it's still timely with the Democratic National Convention up this coming week.
Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.
Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.
This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.
But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.
Since then we have seen Sanders having some influence on the Democratic Party platform, although many issues remained firmly within Clinton parameters (Israel, for one). Clinton has even moved a bit toward free college, but with numerous caveats. On the other hand, picking Tim Kaine as her running mate showed no desire to reward or even acknowledge Sanders' voters -- not that Kaine is so awful, just that he offers nothing Clinton doesn't already have.
Michael Tomasky: Can the Monster Be Elected? It may seem like I should have filed this under Trump, but on the cover of The New York Review of Books this was titled "Will She Win?" with a less than flattering picture of Hillary Clinton. Inside it's nominally a review of two books: John Sides/Lynn Vavreck: The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, and Christopher H. Achen/Larry M. Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, not that he has much to say about either. Nor does he make a case that either candidate is a monsters (although Trump, and for that matter Clinton, are vivid enough you can confirm your own conclusions. Rather, his main argument is that not much actually changes in an election. He points out, for instance, that in December 2011 Obama was leading Romney in the polls by four points, and eleven months later Obama won by the same four points. "Nothing that happened seems to have made any difference. [ . . . ] The whole race, and all those billions of dollars spent on it, might as well never have happened." He attributes most of this to polarization, the process by which most people have locked themselves into one party/worldview regardless of candidate. One could take such an analysis and argue that Trump, at least, is something different, but Tomasky doesn't go there. He sees Clinton winning, narrowly but solidly, for the usual reason: there's just not so much so wrong that most people will risk such a seemingly radical change. Indeed, Sides and Vavreck argue that "Mitt Romney's crucial error was his relentless hammering away at the terrible economy," because that message then strayed so far from reality. Yet they don't draw the obvious conclusion, that Trump is painting a far more extreme picture, even farther from reality, and offering "solutions" that can hardly be described as anything but magic. So for me a key question is why so many on the left are so terrified by Trump. By all evidence, he is less trigger-happy than McCain, and less of an economic royalist than Romney -- those two were my idea of really scary candidates -- but he is racist like we've rarely seen in recent years, he seems excited by violence, he has extraordinary delusions of grandeur, but those are all things sensible candidates would ridicule, not fear. Those who fear him seem to think he has some special yoke on the white working class, a group they seem to fear and despise as if they've been locked in a theatre and force fed Richard Nixon speeches -- but also a group that they know New Democrats have screwed over and abandoned, something they should feel guilty for.
Several pieces on Turkey:
Mustafa Akyol: Who Was Behind the Coup Attempt in Turkey? Argues that it was, indeed, followers of exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, so Erdogan's insistence that the US arrest Gulen and turn him over to Turkey isn't so far-fetched.
The Gulen community is built around one man: Fethullah Gulen. His followers see him not merely as a learned cleric, as they publicly claim, but the "awaited one," as I have been told in private. He is the Mahdi, the Islamic version of the Messiah, who will save the Muslim world, and ultimately the world itself. Many of his followers also believe that Mr. Gulen sees the Prophet Muhammad in his dreams and receives orders from him.
Besides Mr. Gulen's unquestionable authority, another key feature of the movement is its cultish hierarchy. The Gulen movement is structured like a pyramid: Top-level imams give orders to second-level imams, who give orders to third-level imams, and it goes on like that to the grass roots.
What does the group do? Its most visible activities include opening schools, running charities that provide social services to the poor and maintaining "dialogue centers" that preach love, tolerance and peace. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. I personally have spoken many times at Gulen institutions as a guest, and met modest, kind, lovable people.
But, as one disillusioned Gulenist told me last year, "there is a darker side of the movement, and few of its members know it as it is." For decades, the movement has been infiltrating Turkey's state institutions, like the police, judiciary and military. Many believe that some Gulenists, taking orders from their imams, hide their identities and try to rise through these institutions in order to capture state power.
The Turkish army has long been a bastion of Kemalist secularism, but Akyol argues that an alliance of Erdogan and the Gulenists effectively purged the armed forces of secularists, and that the coup itself was precipitated by Erdogan's efforts to purge the Gulenists from the military.
Dov Friedman: The Causes of the Coup Attempt in Turkey: A History of the Usual Suspects: Much more on the history of Islamist movements in Turkish history, including the 1997 "postmodern coup" which deposed Welfare Party Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and send Fethullah Gulen into exile. When democracy was restored, Erdogan's AKP rose to power, and formed an alliance with the Gulenists to counter the secular bias in the military and government bureaucracy. That alliance fell apart after 2012:
The rift only widened. Gulen himself voiced criticisms of the government's handling of the May 2013 Gezi protests, when the government's grip on power momentarily appeared to wobble. In October of that year, the government proposed legal changes to close university entrance exam prep schools -- a key source of Gulenist revenue and youth recruitment.
In December 2013, the Gulenists revealed evidence of large-scale corruption that reached all the way to the highest ranks of the AK Party, implicating Erdogan himself, his family, and key ministerial allies. The attempted coup de grace failed. Erdogan survived the crisis and unleashed a backlash of sustained intensity that continues to this day. He purged Gulenist sympathizers from every part of the bureaucracy, closed Gulenist media organizations, punished Gulenist-owned companies, and orchestrated the insolvency and takeover of the formerly Gulenist-aligned Bank Asya. Since this eruption, Erdogan has taken every opportunity to accuse the Gulenist movement of functioning as an illegal parallel state subverting institutions and engaging in terrorism.
Another factor here is the breakdown of peace talks with the Kurds, increasing aggressiveness of the Turkish military against Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, and Turkey's own rather schizophrenic approach to Syria (promoting anti-Assad forces, allowing the US to bomb ISIS from Turkey, trying to undermine Syria's Kurds, and finding itself targeted by ISIS terrorists). It's just not clear how these factors play out, in part because the main effect of the coup attempt has been to allow Erdogan to greatly accelerate his power grab within Turkey.
Ever the opportunist, Erdogan has recognized an opening to amass the formalized broad powers he seeks -- and long sought, even before the failed coup. This is why the Erdogan loyalist-controlled judicial appointments board sacked 2,745 judges within hours of the coup. The government has been in the slow process of remaking the judiciary -- one of the last state institutions not entirely under thumb. The purges have only deepened -- with more than 50,000 suspended or detained, among them teachers, civil servants, and university administrators. The AK Party government has accelerated the process in a way that would not have been possible without the coup attempt.