2016 Presidential Horse Race

[wizards8507]

How and Why the Conservative Media Sold Its Soul To Facilitate Trump’s Nomination | Mediaite

 

[woolybug25]

How and Why the Conservative Media Sold Its Soul To Facilitate Trump’s Nomination | Mediaite

A must read. Reps.

 

[GoIrish41]

I think we will have riots on the streets if Trump is the nominee. Cleveland will look like Ferguson.

Funny, Trump says there will be riots if he does not get the nomination. Either way there will be riots. At least we have that to look forward to.

 

[wizards8507]

A must read. Reps.

It's the reason I respect Glenn Beck more than any of the other guys in "conservative" media. At least when he comes up with crazy theories and sensational headlines, he actually believes them.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

TAC's Daniel McCarthy just published an article titled "What Cruz v. Trump Means":

Donald Trump will go to the Republican convention in Cleveland with more delegates than anyone else. But it’s still possible he won’t have an outright majority. The mechanics of a contested convention have been covered at length in TAC and elsewhere. But what about the politics—who actually emerges as the Republican nominee?

The simplest answer is Ted Cruz. He’ll have the second largest number of delegates, as well as the symbolically important second largest number of popular votes. Although his Senate colleagues dislike and have been slow to endorse him, he has in fact assembled a broad coalition of support on the right, from former Jeb Bush advisors to the Senate’s most policy-minded conservative, Mike Lee. Cruz is the obvious pole around which to consolidate anti-Trump forces.

A two-man contest between Trump and Cruz is clarifying for movement conservatism. Cruz is what movement conservatism consciously created—somewhat to its own regret. The Texas senator checks every ideological box for the movement, from cutting government to talking tough in foreign policy to opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Cruz wants to restrict immigration, but he’s more favorable toward free trade than Trump is. That’s roughly where the center of gravity for movement conservatism lies as well. The trouble is that Cruz has used these issues to advance himself in a way that has embarrassed his fellow movement conservatives. Instead of being kept in line by his adherence to movement orthodoxy, he has exploited his mastery of that orthodoxy to make himself a star.

Trump, on the other hand, is what movement conservatism has unconsciously created—a populist, economically nationalist backlash against a movement whose priorities are chiefly those of wealthy and upper-middle-class whites. This is even true where social issues are concerned: the poorest white Americans may not be supporters of same-sex marriage or abortion rights, but when given the choice they prioritize other issues more fundamentally connected to their lives. In this, lower-class whites are similar to black and Hispanic Americans, who remain firmly part of the Democratic coalition—despite much talk from movement conservatives about black and Hispanic qualms over abortion and homosexuality—because economics and group status are the things that matter most.

The practical, short-term question for Republicans choosing between Trump and Cruz is not so much whether either of them can beat Hillary Clinton—that may ultimately depend on her legal troubles—as it is which of them will do the least damage to down-ticket Republicans. U.S. Senators Mark Kirk (Ill.), Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Pat Toomey (Penn.), and Rob Portman (Ohio) are all vulnerable, as is the Senate seat being vacated in Florida by Marco Rubio. Cruz is less toxic for the party overall—he may be widely disliked by his colleagues, but as controversial as he is, he’s nowhere near as controversial as Trump. Yet one might wonder whether Cruz is really the stronger top of the ticket for struggling Republicans in some of these battleground states, where Trump’s working-class demographic could be critical.

In any event, the long-term, existential question may supersede short-term calculations. This is the question of exactly whose party the GOP is supposed to be and how it can again win elections at every level. The lower-class whites who respond most favorably to Trump have been an indispensable but subordinate element in the Republican coalition for decades. Trump has revealed just how sharply at odds this group’s attitudes are with those of the GOP elite. And looking at the policies that the most elite Republicans support—policies identified with Marco Rubio, for example—it’s obvious that they are intended to build a new base for the party while the white working class is consigned to gradual decline. Trump voters’ jobs are being eliminated by technology and trade deals, while the voters themselves are to be replaced by a larger Republican share of the Hispanic vote.

Ted Cruz, despite his Canadian-Cuban background, hardly seems like the leader to usher the Republican Party toward a multicultural future. But if Cruz is only a halting step forward, in the eyes of the most enlightened Republicans, Trump would be a great leap backward. The Republican elite might have preferred Rubio, or anyone else but Trump, over Cruz. Yet it’s hard to see any other choice emerging at the convention. The notion that Cruz or Trump delegates—who together will make up the overwhelmingly majority—would switch to Kasich seems farfetched. A failed candidate from earlier in the presidential contest, say Scott Walker or Rick Perry, might be more plausible, but not by much. Again, why would Cruz people defect?

Leading Republicans who haven’t been candidates this cycle are no better prospects. Mitt Romney is a two-time loser already, and Paul Ryan, although he has not ruled out standing as a candidate at the convention, is not suicidal: trying to unite the party in July, then beat Hillary Clinton in November, would be quite a trick. Ryan resisted even taking up the House speakership, having seen how the party’s congressional schisms brought down Boehner. Would he take a greater risk with a presidential bid?

Movement conservatives and the Republican establishment are stuck together for now, and they’re stuck with Cruz, who represents the only prospective nominee who can claim legitimacy as the alternative to Trump. And however imperfect he might be, Cruz would do more to advance the elite plan to remake the GOP for the 21st century than Trump would—especially if Cruz loses in November. His defeat could then be pinned on his being too conventionally right-wing, too Trump-like himself, and on Trump voters bolting the party. That would give the establishment all the more reason to call for a return to the policies associated with Rubio and the 2012 Republican “autopsy.” The failure of Cruz’s Reagan-vintage conservatism would clear the way for a new kind of right in 2020.

The white working class isn’t extinct yet, however, and Trump represents a radical alternative for the GOP: a 21st-century Nixon strategy. The racial polarization involved in this has been getting plenty of attention, but the economic dimension should not be overlooked. Trump is not only making promises to American workers that by opposing trade deals he’ll keep good jobs in this country, he’s also bidding for votes by refusing to make cuts to popular government programs. From Social Security to federal funding for Planned Parenthood, voters who want tax dollars to provide services are hearing a pitch from Trump. It’s clear enough where this leads: to a Republican Party that bids with the Democrats to offer voters the most benefits. And if the bidding starts among working-class whites, that doesn’t mean that’s where it will end. If the dream of elite Republicans is to win blacks and Hispanics by appealing to values, the Trump strategy may ultimately be to appeal to their economic interests in much the same way as Democrats have traditionally done.

In simple terms, the elite Republican plan is for the GOP to be a multi-ethnic party whose economics are those of the elite itself; the Trump plan is for the GOP to be a party that politically plays ethnic blocs against one another, then bids to bring them together in a winning coalition by offering economic benefits for each group. Neither of these approaches is guaranteed to succeed, of course: non-white voters who already prefer the Democrats may continue to do so despite a liberalization of the GOP’s immigration policies, while the Nixon-Trump strategy risks being outbid by Democrats—who are historically more accustomed to promising government services—and sacrificing a growing number of non-white voters for a shrinking number of working-class whites.

In a healthy party these factions, Trump and anti-Trump, might learn from one another, the anti-Trump side coming to recognize how it has failed the white working class and the need to provide for it once more; the Trump side acknowledging the demographic realities of the 21st century and the toxicity of strident identity politics. Alas, the GOP has shown no capacity at all for learning from the mistakes of the Bush era—the establishment’s support this cycle for another Bush and for the Bush-like Rubio is proof of that—and the same is likely to be true of learning from the Trump crisis, or of Trump learning from the candidates he has vanquished.

Perhaps Cruz might do what the Republican establishment and Donald Trump cannot, reconciling the demands of the white working class with those of burgeoning cohorts of Hispanic and Asian voters. If he hopes to prevent Trump from assembling a delegate majority ahead of the convention, Cruz will have to broaden his appeal beyond the most religious and ideologically orthodox blocs of the GOP. Those very conservative or devoutly evangelical voters have allowed Cruz to win caucuses and closed primaries in some deep-red states, but they cannot counter the sheer mass of voters that Trump brings out in larger and more politically mixed states. For Cruz, broadening his appeal will be no easy thing, when his entire political profile is based on being the most strictly orthodox movement conservative of all. Orthodox conservatism has served white working-class voters poorly, and now that they’ve been offered an alternative by Trump, they’re taking it.

Cruz’s window of opportunity to halt Trump’s progress toward a delegate majority is closing quickly. The Utah caucuses on March 22 give him a shot at another state-wide win, and the Arizona primary that day will put to the test the question of whether John McCain’s home state prefers an orthodox conservative or the very unorthodox Trump. No polls have been taken since last year, but Trump would seem to be the favorite to win Arizona. And after that, the race heads to turf that’s likely to be exceptionally difficult for Cruz: Wisconsin’s primary on May 5, then New York’s on April 19. Unless Kasich can bleed Trump in Wisconsin, the prospect of blowout victories for Trump loom in April.

Trump has overwhelmed all opposition so far on the strength of earned media. The disparity between Trump and Cruz as a ratings draw for cable television will only continue to favor Trump as the race inches onward. Cruz and Kasich risk losing all their media oxygen in the coming weeks, and without that, building momentum to cut into Trump’s winnings will be excruciatingly difficult. Almost as hard as creating a new order out of the chaos of a contested convention. The irony of Cruz’s position is that the party’s future now hinges on how well he can do with an orthodox conservative message drawn from its past.

 

[wizards8507]

TAC's Daniel McCarthy just published an article titled "What Cruz v. Trump Means":

tl;dr...

In simple terms, the elite Republican plan is for the GOP to be a multi-ethnic party whose economics are those of the elite itself; the Trump plan is for the GOP to be a party that politically plays ethnic blocs against one another, then bids to bring them together in a winning coalition by offering economic benefits for each group. Neither of these approaches is guaranteed to succeed, of course: non-white voters who already prefer the Democrats may continue to do so despite a liberalization of the GOP’s immigration policies, while the Nixon-Trump strategy risks being outbid by Democrats—who are historically more accustomed to promising government services—and sacrificing a growing number of non-white voters for a shrinking number of working-class whites.

In short, Republicans won't win by positioning themselves as Democrats-lite, because voters who want Democrats will just vote for Democrats.

In a healthy party these factions, Trump and anti-Trump, might learn from one another, the anti-Trump side coming to recognize how it has failed the white working class and the need to provide for it once more; the Trump side acknowledging the demographic realities of the 21st century and the toxicity of strident identity politics. Alas, the GOP has shown no capacity at all for learning from the mistakes of the Bush era—the establishment’s support this cycle for another Bush and for the Bush-like Rubio is proof of that—and the same is likely to be true of learning from the Trump crisis, or of Trump learning from the candidates he has vanquished.

This is a disheartening statement from an intellectual conservative publication, and the author glosses right past it like it's nothing. The notion that the Republican Party's charter is to "provide" for the white working class (or any other group) is appalling. "Ask not..." indeed.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

This is a disheartening statement from an intellectual conservative publication, and the author glosses right past it like it's nothing. The notion that the Republican Party's charter is to "provide" for the white working class (or any other group) is appalling. "Ask not..." indeed.

That's a pretty uncharitable reading of McCarthy's closing paragraph. He's not chastising the anti-Trump Republicans for failing to more effectively bribe the white working class with government handouts, but for completely failing to respond to their needs at all. You'd likely argue that the GOP was offering them "opportunity", "not a hand-out up a hand-up", etc. but that's not true either. Republican elites are as culpable as anyone for shipping the jobs these people relied on overseas. That's opposite of providing opportunity.

The white working class has been an indispensable piece of the Republican coalition for the last ~60 years. Unless the GOP can find a way to legitimately represent their interests, they're either going to have to navigate a dangerous paradigm shift as they seek to replace those voters with another demographic, or they're going to have to reconcile themselves with never winning a national election again.

 

[wizards8507]

That's a pretty uncharitable reading of McCarthy's closing paragraph. He's not chastising the anti-Trump Republicans for failing to more effectively bribe the white working class with government handouts, but for completely failing to respond to their needs at all. You'd likely argue that the GOP was offering them "opportunity", "not a hand-out up a hand-up", etc. but that's not true either. Republican elites are as culpable as anyone for shipping the jobs these people relied on overseas. That's opposite of providing opportunity.

True, but he fails to portray the triangulation within the party in his summary. He clearly lumps everyone into the "Trump" and "anti-Trump" camps, as if anyone who is anti-Trump is a monolithic supporter of the party establishment, elites, or whatever you want to call them. I think that's the great tragedy of what's happening in the Republican Party. The schism is being drawn along establishment / outsider lines with no regard for principle. The solution to Trump's populism is not establishment pragmatism of vice versa. The answer to both is conservatism. Early in the essay, McCarthy touches on the fact that the party is none to pleased with Ted Cruz, but then in his conclusion paints it as the same Trump-or-BushRoveBoehner dichotomy that we've been hearing about for months. Cruz is the answer to both.

ETA: And that's what's so frustrating for the "movement conservatives" in this election. The mainstream media obviously hates Trump and in its haste to contradict everything the mainstream media stands for, conservative media has rushed to Trump's side. Limbaugh, Drudge, Hannity, and Breitbart are all in on him. Levin defended him for far too long before eviscerating Rubio and now ultimately endorsing Cruz (too little too late). The American Spectator is usually my blog of choice but somehow Jeff Lord is on the Trump bandwagon too. Jonah Goldberg at National Review has been a strong and consistent anti-Trump voice, but he hasn't offered much in the way of solutions.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

True, but he fails to portray the triangulation within the party in his summary. He clearly lumps everyone into the "Trump" and "anti-Trump" camps, as if anyone who is anti-Trump is a monolithic supporter of the party establishment, elites, or whatever you want to call them. I think that's the great tragedy of what's happening in the Republican Party. The schism is being drawn along establishment / outsider lines with no regard for principle. The solution to Trump's populism is not establishment pragmatism of vice versa. The answer to both is conservatism. Early in the essay, McCarthy touches on the fact that the party is none to pleased with Ted Cruz, but then in his conclusion paints it as the same Trump-or-BushRoveBoehner dichotomy that we've been hearing about for months. Cruz is the answer to both.

What is Cruz offering to the white working class?

 

[wizards8507]

What is Cruz offering to the white working class?

1. Border security, which is actually much stronger than Trump's bloviating about the wall. Trump wants to deport everyone and then allow the "good ones" to come back. That's nothing but touchback amnesty wrapped up in an administrative boondoggle.

2. Business flat tax (creates jobs)

3. Individual tax cuts (keeps money in families, eases headache of tax preparation)

4. Abolishing the IRS and eliminate four federal agencies (reduce the debt for future generations)

5. A balanced budget amendment (reduce the debt for future generations)

6. Repatriation of funds (mirror's Trump's plan)

That's just off the top of my head from his stump speech. I'm not the strongest Cruz supporter in the world, but in a world of Cruz and Trump, I'm all in.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

1. Border security, which is actually much stronger than Trump's bloviating about the wall. Trump wants to deport everyone and then allow the "good ones" to come back. That's nothing but touchback amnesty wrapped up in an administrative boondoggle.

2. Business flat tax (creates jobs)

3. Individual tax cuts (keeps money in families, eases headache of tax preparation)

4. Abolishing the IRS and eliminate four federal agencies (reduce the debt for future generations)

5. A balanced budget amendment (reduce the debt for future generations)

6. Repatriation of funds (mirror's Trump's plan)

That's just off the top of my head from his stump speech. I'm not the strongest Cruz supporter in the world, but in a world of Cruz and Trump, I'm all in.

None of those policies will bring back our off-shored manufacturing jobs, or meaningfully impact the lives of those living in Appalachian ghettos. Cruz doesn't represent them, and his preferred policies (even assuming he'll be able to implement them all, which won't happen) don't matter to them.

 

[wizards8507]

None of those policies will bring back our off-shored manufacturing jobs, or meaningfully impact the lives of those living in Appalachian ghettos. Cruz doesn't represent them, and his preferred policies (even assuming he'll be able to implement them all, which won't happen) don't matter to them.

There is no policy that will bring back our off-shored manufacturing jobs short of abolishing the federal minimum wage. Protectionism has never worked. Trump is running on the Smoot-Hawley Act, which would absolutely destroy the working poor. It'll do nothing to bring back jobs while, at the same time, sending prices through the roof. Tariffs are regressive taxes.

You don't get credit for SAYING you're going to help the working class if your policies won't ACTUALLY help the working class. That's liberal bullshit that judges policies based on their noble intentions and not their actual outcomes. Cruz' plan would create economic growth. Rising tides and all that.

 

[GATTACA!]

What is Cruz offering to the white working class?

Jesus

 

[Whiskeyjack]

There is no policy that will bring back our off-shored manufacturing jobs short of abolishing the federal minimum wage.

So the message to the white working class is: "There is nothing we can do to help you. Please shut up and die as quickly and inexpensively as possible."

Protectionism has never worked. Trump is running on the Smoot-Hawley Act, which would absolutely destroy the working poor. It'll do nothing to bring back jobs while, at the same time, sending prices through the roof. Tariffs are regressive taxes.

I don't disagree. But these people are supporting Trump because he acknowledges that their plight is at least partly due to affirmative choices made by our political class over the last several decades. And he's at least gesturing in the right direction when he talks about Chinese currency manipulation.

You don't get credit for SAYING you're going to help the working class if your policies won't ACTUALLY help the working class. That's liberal bullshit that judges policies based on their noble intentions and not their actual outcomes. Cruz' plan would create economic growth. Rising tides and all that.

That's been the party line since Reagan's "Morning in America". The tide is definitely rising on the coasts (insert global warming joke here), but it hasn't reached the stagnant inlets where these people live. So Cruz' pitch amounts to little more than pissing on their legs and telling them that it's raining.

 

[ND NYC]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/o...our-trans-pacific-trade-deal.html?src=me&_r=0

Let Trump Make Our Trans-Pacific Trade Deal

Thomas L. Friedman MARCH 16, 2016
What if the United States had had a truly savvy deal maker like Donald Trump negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade accord instead of the wimpy Obama team? I mean, be honest, folks, would you let Barack Obama sell your house? I’ve researched the deal and concluded Trump would have gotten us this:
He would have begun by saying “a baby could figure out” that since 80 percent of the goods from our 11 TPP partners come into our country duty-free already, and so much of our stuff is still hit with tariffs in their countries, if we eliminate 18,000 tariffs we’ll be able to keep more production at home and sell more abroad. “We’ll export so much we’ll actually get tired of exporting,” Trump would say.
After all, America’s total manufacturing output was nearing an all-time high at the end of 2015. True, it was with more robots and fewer people, but we’ve still created nearly 900,000 manufacturing jobs since 2010 because we have cheap energy, skilled workers and good rule of law. Our workers can compete if we level the playing field, so Trump would have told opponents of the trade deal, “Just do the math, people.” Our average applied tariff is already only 1.5 percent while the tariffs of these Pacific countries can range much higher — Vietnam has peak tariffs of over 50 percent on cars and machines — so if we get rid of those tariffs our exporters are poised to benefit.
Since Trump cares about blue-collar workers, unlike the elitist Obama, he’d have demanded that in return for free access to our markets the 11 other TPP countries had to agree, some for the first time, to freedom for their workers to form independent trade unions, to elect their own labor leaders, to collectively bargain and to eliminate all child and forced labor practices. He’d also have insisted that they adopt laws on minimum wages, hours of work and occupational safety and health, again, precisely to level the playing field with U.S. workers.
Trump would also have required that the deal prohibit all customs duties for digital products, make sure companies did not have to share source codes in order to get into new markets and ensure free access for all cloud computing services in all TPP countries — all areas of growing U.S. strength.
Trump, because he respects women, surely would have demanded that this deal require all signatories — especially Malaysia — to take real steps to halt human trafficking from such countries as Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh and require each signatory to improve access for human rights groups to assist victims of trafficking. If you don’t comply, you lose your trade benefits. (Trump’s no sucker for a wink and a smile.)
Moreover, Trump would have made sure that the accord, in a first for any trade deal, put restrictions on state-owned companies that compete with our private businesses, like Vietnam’s oil company. These state-owned companies often get special benefits that enable them to undercut our companies. Trump’s trade deal would also have been the first requiring criminal penalties for stealing our industrial secrets.
“No more ripping off America,” Trump would have said.
He certainly would have insisted on strong intellectual property protections for America’s software industry, one of our greatest export assets, and taken an approach to pharmaceuticals that splits the difference between what the big drug companies want in the way of intellectual property protection time for their products and what the generic manufacturers want. Everybody would have gotten something but nobody would have gotten everything. It’s called “the art of the deal,” folks!
Trump would also surely have required that all signatories combat trafficking in endangered wildlife parts, like elephant tusks and rhino horns, and end all their subsidies that stimulate overfishing.
And Trump, who has a lot of Chinese restaurants in his hotels, would know that if we walk away from the TPP all our friends in the Pacific will just sign up for China’s R.C.E.P., or Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which will set trade rules in Asia and include weak intellectual property protections, no labor or environmental protections and no disciplines on state-owned industries.
So that’s the Pacific trade deal Trump would have struck! And by now I hope you’ve figured something out: This is the trade deal Obama actually struck.

 

[FightingIrishLover7]

Haven't looked into Cruz's flat tax / irs busting plans, but if he eliminates the IRS, who is regulating taxes at that point? Someone still has to be auditing, correct? Or by "eliminating the irs" does he mean thin it out?

 

[wizards8507]

So the message to the white working class is: "There is nothing we can do to help you. Please shut up and die as quickly and inexpensively as possible."

That's obviously a crass, tongue-in-cheek way to put it, but I don't believe the white working class is so desperate that they're incapable of doing anything for themselves. Entrepreneurship is the answer in those communities, but entrepreneurship isn't going to happen when people are told that the answer to all their problems is on the other side of election day.

That's been the party line since Reagan's "Morning in America". The tide is definitely rising on the coasts (insert global warming joke here), but it hasn't reached the stagnant inlets where these people live. So Cruz' pitch amounts to little more than pissing on their legs and telling them that it's raining.

So leave the stagnant inlets or improve them. Nobody is forcing anybody to stay in the hollows of Kentucky or West Virginia. "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" is a great song, but it doesn't need to be the destiny of every coal digger in the Appalachians any more than "Fast Car" has to be the destiny of every kid from the projects.

Haven't looked into Cruz's flat tax / irs busting plans, but if he eliminates the IRS, who is regulating taxes at that point? Someone still has to be auditing, correct? Or by "eliminating the irs" does he mean thin it out?

My best guess is that he'd want to completely eliminate the IRS to purge the corruption. There'd certainly need to be some new "Bureau of Revenue" to replace it in a much leaner, cleaner form.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

That's obviously a crass, tongue-in-cheek way to put it, but I don't believe the white working class is so desperate that they're incapable of doing anything for themselves.

The evidence says otherwise.

Entrepreneurship is the answer in those communities, but entrepreneurship isn't going to happen when people are told that the answer to all their problems is on the other side of election day.

Lots of them are well aware that Trump isn't a magic bullet. They're just voting to burn it all down.

So leave the stagnant inlets or improve them. Nobody is forcing anybody to stay in the hollows of Kentucky or West Virginia. "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" is a great song, but it doesn't need to be the destiny of every coal digger in the Appalachians any more than "Fast Car" has to be the destiny of every kid from the projects.

At least you're honest about it. But as I mentioned above, the GOP can't win national elections without these people, and they're not going to vote for a post-Trump GOP that refuses to offer them anything except patronizing instructions on how to reach their boot straps.

 

[phgreek]

So the message to the white working class is: "There is nothing we can do to help you. Please shut up and die as quickly and inexpensively as possible."



I don't disagree. But these people are supporting Trump because he acknowledges that their plight is at least partly due to affirmative choices made by our political class over the last several decades. And he's at least gesturing in the right direction when he talks about Chinese currency manipulation.



That's been the party line since Reagan's "Morning in America". The tide is definitely rising on the coasts (insert global warming joke here), but it hasn't reached the stagnant inlets where these people live. So Cruz' pitch amounts to little more than pissing on their legs and telling them that it's raining.

As to the bolded ...I've been engaged in federal contracting in some way since the early 90s. If you are a small white guy owned aerospace business...they aren't "waiting" for you to die. They are doing everything in their power to kill you. If you do not operate in a niche where you are delivering something no one else can, you are very quickly a school teacher or a Federal Employee.

 

[wizards8507]

At least you're honest about it. But as I mentioned above, the GOP can't win national elections without these people, and they're not going to vote for a post-Trump GOP that refuses to offer them anything except patronizing instructions on how to reach their boot straps.

It's not patronizing, it's empowering.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XJGLR2prMAM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I posted this a few days ago, but it's only two minutes long and worth the watch. If entrepreneurship is empowering freaking temporary refugee camps, it'll work in the hollows and rust piles. It's about human dignity.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

This 13-year-old TAC article, titled "America the Abstraction", describes what you're not grasping, wizards:

I will never forget the night I was called “un-American.” I sat at a bachelor friend’s birthday party, which he had thrown for himself, with several six packs of industrial-grade beer and a foil tray of take-out lasagna. A grim affair. But this was no ordinary night in Staten Island. Two of the guests were regular editorial writers for the Wall Street Journal. One, a brilliant young import from Eastern Europe, brought up the question of immigration. (He had heard that I hold unorthodox views.) Like his colleague, he supports the Journal’s proposed constitutional amendment: “There shall be open borders,” and he wanted to know if I agreed.

So I explained that I thought the U.S. needed to accept reduced numbers of immigrants for a decade at least to encourage those who are already here to assimilate, as my grandparents had, and to reduce the downward pressure on the wages of the working poor. It is hard for people to leave the welfare rolls, I suggested, when they face an onslaught of competition for low-skill jobs from legal and illegal immigrants.

He snorted. His native-born colleague smirked. Then they took turns explaining to me how superior Latino and Asian immigrants are to native-born American poor folk, especially blacks. They did not shrink from mentioning IQ, but their main focus was on the “mentality” of people who grew up inside the welfare system compared to that of recent arrivals from the developing world. They freely cracked jokes about the “shiftlessness” and resentful attitudes they had encountered with black Americans contrasted to the earnest, dutiful, eager-to-please behavior of domestic servants, busboys, and cooks from Latin America. As if to expiate the apparent racism of what they had said, they assured me that they also cherished Jamaican nannies and Haitian fruit-vendors, whose attitudes were ever so much more “co-operative” than the sullen, unionized minorities they found working at the Post Office.

“Even if all that were true,” I said carefully, “we can’t just leave people on the welfare rolls to rot.” How, I asked, do you re-introduce the work ethic in sectors of society where it has been lost, while supporting an immigration policy that pushes wages so low that they barely exceed welfare benefits? What will happen to those native-born Americans?”

They shrugged. The question did not interest them. They knew they would never live anywhere near “those people,” so what did it matter?

And then the émigré leaned forward, brow knitted, to confide a new insight. “They’re not real Americans,” he said in a thick Slavic accent. The people who show up wanting to work, who aren’t afraid of 12 hour days, who set up shops in Chinatown and put their whole families to work from childhood on—people who put their faith in capitalism, those were the real Americans. “Not those resentful parasites. Just because they happen to live here, that doesn’t make them Americans.”

I inquired, “So what does?”

He went on to explain that what makes someone an American, regardless of where he lives, is a belief in the unfettered free market, a support for secularism and mass democracy, and an optimistic faith in the future.

“I don’t accept all those things,” I said. “For one thing, as a Catholic …”

“Then you’re not a real American,” he finished.

That took me aback. I almost let it pass, let him natter on with his friend, to consider the argument won—as I am sure happens all the time to this sort of person, reinforcing his sense that he is infallible. But I have too much Irish blood in me for that.

“I was born here, pal,” I said through clenched teeth. “My father served under Patton, along with the fathers and grandfathers of plenty of those ‘resentful parasites.’ Didn’t that service earn their descendants a special stake in America?” I resisted the urge to bring up what I knew of this fellow’s background—how his grandfather helped Stalin implement the Ukrainian famine. “How about all the free labor their ancestors put in as slaves?”

The elder editorialist gave a chortle. “Oh, so I guess you’re in favor of reparations, too? Al Sharpton, call your office!”

I shook my head, realizing at last why so many people hate self-styled “conservatives.” I went on: “Don’t you think being born here, and loving the place and the people, along with the system of government, means something?”

“Where you’re born,” the ex-Soviet said, batting the air as if at a misconceived chess move, “it’s so arbitrary. It’s of no ideological significance.”

In a way, he was right. If you are trying to boil down citizenship to its philosophically respectable components, and if ideology is all you are interested in, then it does not really matter where you were born. Or who your parents were. Or whom you love. Or the hymns you know by heart, the folk tales you treasure, the God you worship. None of these merely human matters measures up, ideologically speaking. None of them can be enshrined in a manifesto, or beamed across the world via Voice of America, or exported in music videos. They do not raise the GDP, or lower the interest rate, or increase our command of oil reserves. They cannot be harnessed to drive the engine of globalization. Therefore, to some people, these things do not matter. Such pieties can be harnessed in the run-up to a war, can form part of the Army recruitment ads and propaganda campaigns, and may even find their way into presidential speeches. But essentially there is no difference between a fourth-generation American and an Afghan refugee who just landed at JFK—so long as they both accept the same ideology.

How did we get to this pass? How did conservatism, which once centered on the fierce defense of tradition, religion, and particularism, turn into an ideology—that is, a philosophy in arms, a political system shorn of its ties to real people and places, slimmed down by dropping historical baggage, packaged for export on the global market of ideas? The simple answer is the Cold War. With the end of World War II, the U.S. faced for the first time since 1812 a foreign enemy that could actually strike its shores, damage its cities, devastate its infrastructure. What’s more, we faced not just a foreign enemy, pursuing global domination at our expense and that of our allies, but something unprecedented at home: a political philosophy opposed to American democratic capitalism that appealed to many Americans.

In the early 20th century, there was mass support for socialist and Communist parties in America. This had dried up by the dawn of the Cold War—in the U.S., if not in Europe, where Soviet-sponsored parties came tantalizingly close to power in France and Italy. But the appeal of Marxism to intellectuals was strong—in part because it was more ideological than the mixed philosophy of governance found in our own Constitution and Declaration of Independence. As Peter Augustine Lawler explains in Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls, we find in our founding documents an impure compound: Locke’s Deist individualism, an elite doctrine accepted by leaders among the Founders, admixed with the Augustinian Christianity accepted almost unanimously by Americans at the time. (One could argue that a majority still do accept it, adding up the church-going Catholics, Southern Baptists, black church members, and other conservative Protestants.) In other words, our founding philosophy was a political compromise between two incompatible doctrines, which have functioned in a creative tension ever since. Not very satisfying to a political pamphleteer or coffeehouse radical and downright frustrating to the young intellectual. Marxism, on the other hand, has an immense theoretical machinery, carefully developed on the basis of rigorous Hegelian reasoning, ruthless in its consistency, easily harnessed to the analysis of every facet of existence. Grad students in the humanities find it almost irresistible—a sausage grinder through which you can feed any work of literature or art and produce a reliable A- paper on “The Economic Underpinnings” of fill-in-the-blank. Jane Austen. The Book of Job. Whatever.

The post-war conservative movement labored mightily to craft an alternative, a version of Americanism that could be promoted internationally, which Europeans and Asians, Latins and Africans alike could adopt as an alternative to Marxism. The best intellectual formulation this effort produced can be found in the work of Frank Meyer, whose “Fusionism” tried to bridge the gap between libertarian economics and traditional Christian conservatism. We ought not to sneer at what this “movement” conservatism achieved; our victory in the Cold War, never a foregone conclusion, may well be traceable in part to the hard work done over at the humble offices of National Review.

Nor should we overlook the contributions of neoconservatives, even when we find their foreign policy ideas wrong-headed or extreme. The hard-headed policy analyses, number-crunching, and empirical studies undertaken by converts from the Left added immeasurably to the force of philosophical arguments long offered by the Right against the growth of government and the appeasement of the Soviet Union. In domestic policies, some have argued that federal support for civil rights legislation in the U.S. was driven mainly by Cold War concerns: the ugly spectacle of Jim Crow and black disenfranchisement provided excellent propaganda for the Soviets. So the FBI got involved in the struggle against bigoted sheriffs and all-white juries. We should be thankful for at least this side-effect of Yalta.

That said, it is worth re-assessing some of the weaknesses of Americanism-for-export. For one thing, we are no longer in a Cold War. The misnamed “War on Terror” has been recast on the model of the Cold War, perhaps out of intellectual laziness or the strength of long-held habit. In fact, it could hardly be more different than the global confrontation with Communism. Then, we faced a heavily armed, centrally-directed enemy, with universities and intelligence services, with thousands of highly-educated American intellectuals in sympathy, which purported to promote a “progressive,” “scientific” political theory of modern Western origin. Their goal was conquest and domination of the West.

Today, we seek out renegades and bandits, armed with weapons aimed mostly at civilians, funded by secret transfers of drug and oil money, who cleave to a pre-medieval creed, a fanatical variant of a variant of Islam, repulsive to intellectuals, oppressive to women, inimical in every way to the Western tradition. Their weapon is sabotage (now renamed “terrorism”), a weakling’s tactic as old as war itself. Their goal is the expulsion of Western influence from a strategically vital region and the destruction of a valued American ally, Israel. While these outcomes are unacceptable, they are not of the same order as the Soviet conquest of Europe and North America or international proletarian revolution. Nor, in the light of America’s hunger for oil and Israel’s nuclear deterrent, are they remotely likely to be achieved.

The Cold War habits and language that still dominate in conservative circles distort this reality and lead to rhetorical absurdities such as the “axis of evil” and to such downright silly claims as President Bush’s assertion that Islamists want to “take away our freedom.” Respectfully, Mr. President, they just want to take away our oil.

In understanding the dynamics of Cold War conservatism, it is worth digging a little in the rubbish pile of Soviet history—since so many of the great thinkers on the Right are former Stalinists and Trotskyites. There is a key difference between them. Old Stalinists such as Whittaker Chambers were schooled to support “socialism in one country,” to promote the concrete interests of a given polity, the Soviet Union. This trained them in a kind of perverse particularism and made them ready to defend the concrete institutions of a given place—however evil. The Trotskyites, on the other hand, were bound by no such constraints. Because they supported a global Marxist revolution, and a system which had no national host on which it could feed, they were able to function much more in the mold of Jacobins, of “pure” revolutionaries unfettered by national interest and realpolitik. This—along with the un-speakable crimes of Stalin—made Trotskyism vastly more appealing to serious thinkers than simple Soviet loyalty. As a pure ideology, it attracted more intellectual converts—while dutiful Stalinism tended to attract more of the dim-witted “joiners” and “movement” types, who prefer a pre-digested creed. (Obvious exceptions to this rule include Chambers and Arthur Koestler.)

So the Right was lucky to attract bright, disillusioned Trotskyites such as James Burnham, Sidney Hook, and Irving Kristol into its ranks. They brought with them vast talents, literary learning, and serious moral concern for universal issues of human rights. But they also carried a strong tendency towards pure abstraction, towards viewing national questions purely in ideological terms. They defended America bravely during the Cold War—but they did so not as our homeland, as the particular place where a people and their treasured institutions took root, but rather as the (almost accidental) spot where certain ideas had taken hold. Those ideas—unmoored from the institutions and historical realities that nurtured them— became the important thing. The country itself became secondary to the ideas it used to govern itself, which it lived in order to instantiate and spread around the world. As Irving Kristol famously wrote, the United States and the Soviet Union were alike in one key respect—they were “the only two large nations in the world today that were born out of a self-conscious creed, and whose very existence as nations is justified and defined in creedal terms.”

In The Neoconservative Mind, Gary Dorrien traces the origin of abstractionist Americanism to the work of James Burnham—the great theoretician of “rollback” anti-Communism. Formerly a leading member of Trotsky’s Fourth International, Burnham had become completely disillusioned with Marxism and turned into a vigorous anti-Communist and American nationalist—without really reconciling himself to most aspects of his native country. Ferociously committed to an all-fronts war against a Soviet Union still ruled by Stalin and inclined to expand in Europe, Asia, and even Latin America, Burnham made clear in his famous call to arms The Struggle for the World that he was more devoted to the abstract mission of America than to any of her concrete attributes. Examined by contrast with the well-oiled, fanatical machinery of the Communist empire, America simply did not measure up. Burnham professed himself disgusted with the flabbiness, short-sightedness, sentimentalism, and provincialism of American politicians—as evidenced by the brief resurgence of pre-war isolationism just after World War II and the reluctance with which many Americans moved from hot to Cold War.

As Burnham wrote: “It was the members of Congress, not the soldiers, who showed real cowardice and blindness when they responded to the complaints of the soldiers not by pointing out to them the responsibilities of world power but by yielding to the homesickness, and seeking demagogically to gain a few cheap votes by joining in the clamor to bring the boys home at whatever cost to the interests of the nation—and of the world.” Such a paragraph could have been written in 2002 by a civilian hawk appalled at the reluctance of many to invade Iraq. Indeed, the chasm dividing the conservative movement over the Iraq war and related foreign manifestations of the War on Terror mirrors in many ways the post-war split among Republicans between interventionists and small-government, “America First” conservatives—to personify the matter, between James Burnham and Robert Taft.

Historian David Gress cogently analyzes Cold Warriors’ addiction to abstraction in his study From Plato to NATO. Gress writes that the growth of ordered liberty in the West has always been made possible by the existence of particular institutions, without which the abstract defense of individual rights becomes impossible: in Switzerland, the fierce independence of the cantons, and the direct democracy practiced there since the early Middle Ages; in the U.S., the congregational structures of Calvinist churches, the town meetings of New England; in Italy, the free cities such as Florence and Venice; in Germany, the fractious nobles of the Holy Roman Empire and civic alliances such as the Hanseatic League; throughout Medieval Europe, the existence of the Church as an alternative locus of loyalty to the State; all these concrete, particular roots made possible the growth of liberal government in the West. Their relative absence in most of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East makes democracy hard to export to such alien climes. Such an export was possible in Japan only after a massive defeat of the nation’s elites, the discrediting of the national religion—Shintoist emperor-worship—and a prolonged military occupation in the midst of a nuclear-powered Cold War.

Some of the particularist Western institutions, which Gress labels the “Old West,” have distinctly illiberal elements: the rustic half-canton of Appenzell-Innerhoden—a venerable democracy where all citizens still vote, once a year, by show of hands in the public square—only gave women the vote in the late 1980s. Women are distinctly less powerful than men in most Christian denominations. The Constitution enshrined slavery. And so on. These elements interfere with making a purely ideological case for freedom in the West, and so they tended to drop out of Cold War accounts of the growth of liberty. Instead, Gress argues, Cold War writers gravitated towards a Jacobin reading of history, which focused on documents, slogans and abstractions, at the expense of the concrete realities, limits, and inconsistencies that marked the slow expansion of free, representative government.

The messy history and imperfectly liberal institutions that conservatives used to argue—following Montesquieu and Tocqueville—made freedom practicable in the West were swept aside. Increasingly, America was defined according to the most expansive, abstract reading of the Declaration of Independence, combined with a version of market economics well-suited to the unrestricted “pursuit of happiness.” Anything that did not fit that formula tended to fall down the memory hole: the Anglo-Celtic roots of the Founding, the specifically Christian (mostly Protestant) identity of America, the very existence of the Confederacy, and the profoundly Western roots of our culture. For this reason, Gress argues, Cold War conservatives have rendered themselves helpless against multiculturalism—and undermined the concrete foundations upon which the edifice of American freedom stands.

To conservatives schooled in this mode of argument, restrictions on immigration are simply insane; anyone, anywhere who will sign on to the Declaration of Independence is already an American. Keeping him out makes no more sense than building a Berlin Wall to divide Manhattan’s East Side from its West. Embittered blacks, or religious conservatives, or leftists who do not accept the Cold War ideology of America are not real Americans. An ideological litmus test becomes the standard of citizenship. American foreign policy must cease to pursue the concrete interests of a concrete, national community and become the tool by which an abstract creed is imposed across the world—hindered only by the resistance of the benighted and bigoted, who are fated to end on the ash-heap of history.

Such a creed is dangerous to the country that espouses it. It sets an impossible standard by which all its actions will be judged and invites well-founded charges of hypocrisy. It enrages and goads enemies. It alienates home-grown patriots. Most tragically, it invites the attacks of fanatical young men on American civilians—as it did on September 11, 2001, in my hometown, New York City.

Many of Trump's supporters have watched their towns decay and their communities fray over the last several decades, and you're offering them nothing but abstractions. Flippantly telling them that "the market" has deemed their ancestral homes unworthy of survival, so they'd best rent a U-Haul and gtfo (or die quietly, of course), isn't a "conservatism" I want anything to do with.

 

[wizards8507]

This 13-year-old TAC article, titled "America the Abstraction", describes what you're not grasping, wizards:

I don't have time to read this, but I will.

Many of Trump's supporters have watched their towns decay and their communities fray over the last several decades, and you're offering them nothing but abstractions.

You're ignoring agency. Towns don't decay nor communities fray on their own. If a town is decaying it's because people are doing things to unto the town to bring about its decay. And to suggest that the solutions to the problems of a decaying town must somehow come from outside that town just encourages inaction on the part of the residents. Call it apathy, indifference, or hopelessness, the end product is the same and it's inaction.

Flippantly telling them that "the market" has deemed their ancestral homes unworthy of survival, so they'd best rent a U-Haul and gtfo (or die quietly, of course), isn't a "conservatism" I want anything to do with.

Spare me. We're talking about the Presidential election. I understand problems and I understand that there needs to be solutions but there isn't a damn thing the President of the United States is going to do to directly bring about the change that Trump is promising.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

I don't have time to read this, but I will.

I'd be interested to read your thoughts if you have time to read it later. It seems to touch on a lot of the key differences between your brand of conservatism and mine.

You're ignoring agency. Towns don't decay nor communities fray on their own. If a town is decaying it's because people are doing things to unto the town to bring about its decay. And to suggest that the solutions to the problems of a decaying town must somehow come from outside that town just encourages inaction on the part of the residents. Call it apathy, indifference, or hopelessness, the end product is the same and it's inaction.

Of course poor working class whites have moral agency. And they bear a large share of the blame for the destructive culture that keeps so many of them in poverty. The Marxist argument that they're helpless victims of dastardly international financiers is (as with all things Marxist) dangerously reductive. But your argument is simply the flipside of that coin-- that their problems are mostly cultural, and that our elites don't owe them anything until they bootstrap themselves out of the dying towns they were unlucky enough to be born into. Neither of those responses is helpful, because we're all in this together. When the poor are suffering, saying "let them eat cake" (or in this case, "let them eat tax cuts") tends not to work very well.

Spare me. We're talking about the Presidential election. I understand problems and I understand that there needs to be solutions but there isn't a damn thing the President of the United States is going to do to directly bring about the change that Trump is promising.

As I said above, a lot of them know that. They're voting to burn it all down, regardless of whether things are going to get better for them. You and Cruz aren't offering them anything but the same old Republican bromides; if you're unwilling to find a way to include their interests in the GOP policy agenda--to incorporate some populist planks into the party platform-- you'd better find another large voting demographic who's willing to step into the breach and start pulling for the red team, or you won't see another Republican president for many years.

 

[Legacy]

Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction

The White Ghetto: In Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken.

 

[INLaw]

Whiskey thank you for your links. I always find the materials you reference to be worth the read.

 

[wizards8507]

Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction

The White Ghetto: In Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken.

Great stuff, especially in tandem. Really, really brilliant.

 

[pkt77242]

Conservatives gather to plot against Donald Trump - CNNPolitics.com

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction

The White Ghetto: In Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken.

Great stuff, especially in tandem. Really, really brilliant.

I've followed the debate between Williamson and Dougherty closely, and as you might suspect from my postings here, I think the latter makes a more compelling case. But Williamson gets a lot of things right as well; I'd respond to his arguments with the following: (1) a good society in one that makes it easier to be good; and (2) modern America does not fit that description, especially for the poor. Philosophical liberalism is hostile to the communitarian values that are necessary for human flourishing. Despite the radical individualism our culture promotes, the rich are often able to draw on deep (though dwindling) wells of moral and social capital to maintain healthy norms within their communities; but the poor do not have that advantage, so they suffer. The poor all succumb to the same destructive culture, regardless if they're the descendants of Appalachian Scots-Irish, African slaves, or Hispanic immigrants.

Williamson sees the more virtuous upper-class doing well, the vice-ridden poor struggling, and the decreasing cost of goods brought about by global capitalism, and concludes that the plight of the American underclass is their own doing. He doesn't see that the social pathologies of the poor are rapidly spreading up to our middle and upper-classes, that the short-sighted and growth-obsessed practices of global capitalism are unsustainable, or that the poor would be a lot better off if they hadn't been abandoned by everyone who had a chance to sacrifice and improve their communities.

Economics does not have "laws" like physics does. It's a social construct, and what seem like laws are actually just the logical outworkings of what we've chosen to prioritize. Liberalism privileges the individual over the communal, which is a huge boon to those with the social and material resources to free themselves from passion and prejudice. But it leaves the less privileged completely unmoored.

 

[NDohio]

I'd be interested to read your thoughts if you have time to read it later. It seems to touch on a lot of the key differences between your brand of conservatism and mine.



Of course poor working class whites have moral agency. And they bear a large share of the blame for the destructive culture that keeps so many of them in poverty. The Marxist argument that they're helpless victims of dastardly international financiers is (as with all things Marxist) dangerously reductive. But your argument is simply the flipside of that coin-- that their problems are mostly cultural, and that our elites don't owe them anything until they bootstrap themselves out of the dying towns they were unlucky enough to be born into. Neither of those responses is helpful, because we're all in this together. When the poor are suffering, saying "let them eat cake" (or in this case, "let them eat tax cuts") tends not to work very well.



As I said above, a lot of them know that. They're voting to burn it all down, regardless of whether things are going to get better for them. You and Cruz aren't offering them anything but the same old Republican bromides; if you're unwilling to find a way to include their interests in the GOP policy agenda--to incorporate some populist planks into the party platform-- you'd better find another large voting demographic who's willing to step into the breach and start pulling for the red team, or you won't see another Republican president for many years.

I've had a crazy day and have a lot of catching up to do, but the bold is absolutely correct.

 

[Irishman77]

Check out this msg from 2013. This leader has had a well thought out plan for quite some time and is waiting to show his hand until it is necessary (when he is battling the democrats for the ultimate election)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pJBDryAWq_U&time_continue=896