P.M. Carpenter

The CNN debate and Hillary's task

I have admired the work of The American Prospect's co-editor and Princeton professor Paul Starr ever since I read his magnificent history, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry. If you wish to learn how certain doctors became gods and their profession almost untouchably divine, read this book. For Starr's more current thoughts, on the state of the Democratic primary race, read his piece in Politico today, "I Get Sanders' Appeal. But …"

Starr's money quote, as such things are called:

Sanders tells us that the political system is rotten and corrupt. But anyone who believes that government is rotten and corrupt has to be worried about making it more powerful, especially in a way that has such personal effects as health care does. This is the contradiction at the root of Sanders’ rhetoric.

That isn't the most telling passage of Starr's assessment, but it's the funniest. It's also a prime attack line in waiting, for any Republican nominee. We know that, because Republicans have already used it to great effect in their attacks on the rather conservative Affordable Care Act, about which, Starr has another gem of political reality:

The passage of the ACA illustrates just how difficult it is to bring about institutional change in the United States. These difficulties are not just the devious work of Wall Street and other big business interests; they’re the result of the checks and balances in our constitutional system, the reservations many Americans have about grand schemes for change and the deep racial and class divisions in American society. You can’t blame everything on Wall Street, as emotionally satisfying as that may be.

What Starr omits here is that before a Democratic caucus you most assuredly can blame everything on Wall Street, which of course delivers the immense emotional satisfaction promised by populism. Tonight, Hillary's task is that of returning the self-satisfied to earth. I don't envy her.

***

Update: Not to be envied was the day I was having yesterday, which inflicted distractions that cause little horrors such as typing American Spectator rather than The American Prospect. Sorry. 

 

Who is Rick Perry talking to?

The poor man can't even memorize 60 seconds of script. (The new glasses have sure come in handy, though.)

 

With that, Sen. Cruz will pick up the same swell of support from Rick Perry enthusiasts as Jeb Bush did from Lindsey Graham's invaluable endorsement: one guy -- maybe -- somewhere behind the camera. 

 

Of Obama, Sanders, and luxuries

Ouch, and double ouch.

"One thing everybody understands is that this job right here, you don’t have the luxury of just focusing on one thing," said President Obama to Politico's Glenn Thrush about Bernie Sanders in defense of Hillary Clinton. Added Obama: "Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose…. You’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before — that’s a disadvantage to [Hillary]."

Bernie as a "luxury," twice, in two separate contexts — within the larger context of a presidential race, in which luxuries are ill advised. Such was Obama's assessment. The electoral map may be unyieldingly blue, but better that Democrats approach it as a formidable sea of red. In politics, luxuries are unaffordable.

Simply put, I can think of no more superficially acceptable yet searingly damaging word that Obama could have chosen to describe Sen. Sanders' candidacy. That had to hurt, that "luxury" thing. Twice, no less.

On one other note, when Thrush asked Obama "if Sanders reminded him of himself in 2008, he quickly shot me down: 'I don’t think that's true.'" I don't either, although it's the one similarly wrongheaded passage (inserted for years-later consistency's sake) in Paul Krugman's Clinton-endorsing column last week:

On the left there is always a contingent of idealistic voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up the better angels of America’s nature and persuade the broad public to support a radical overhaul of our institutions. In 2008 that contingent rallied behind Mr. Obama.

In 2008 I wrote daily about the presidential contest, and on most days I wrote about Obama's candidacy. What was vividly irrepressible about that candidacy was his "pragmatism" — not his "idealism." Elements of idealism abounded, of course — Obama was, after all, the candidate of "hope" — but in his overtures to independents and Republican-leaners and even lifelong Republicans, Democrat Obama hued to the pragmatically possible. It's what distinguished his idealism from the unachievably utopian.

 

Michael Bloomberg's alert

While reading the NY Times' Bogeyman-Blooomberg story yesterday morning, I couldn't help but hear the faint auditory stamp of "I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approved this message." At times I also noticed less than subliminal flashes of the awkward, right-pointing Hillary logo in the piece. Did Robby Mook, along with Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, have a hand in writing it?

Bellowed the fright-wig-bedizened Times story and Clinton press release: Were Republican rubes so accommodating as to nominate Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, and yet were Democratic dreamers so quixotically sozzled as to nominate Bernie Sanders in reply, then billionaire Mike Bloomberg might "be likely to run." Then came this: "Even a victory by Mrs. Clinton in the Democratic primaries might not preclude a bid by Mr. Bloomberg, his associates said, if he believed she had been gravely weakened by the contest" (emphasis somewhat mutual, but mostly Mook's).

We were also informed that in a Saturday conference call "Jennifer Palmieri, a top Clinton aide, told allies that she believed Mr. Bloomberg would only run if Mr. Sanders won the nomination." Good thing that belief was kept secret. As well, we were told by a bugabooing Clinton surrogate, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, that in any three-way contest that included Sanders, "I would certainly take a look at [supporting Bloomberg] — absolutely." One is of course meant to see lurid visions of a President Trump.

And we were informed that, in an email to the Times, a Bloomberg adviser wrote (remember, mum's the word): "The fact is Hillary Clinton is behind in Iowa and New Hampshire. That should scare a lot of people." Added, parenthetically, Burns or Haberman — or Mook: "Public polls have shown Mr. Sanders leading in New Hampshire, a close race in Iowa and Mrs. Clinton with a solid lead nationally."

In other words, what in hell is wrong with you Iowans and New Hampshirites?

The non-hallucinatory evidence hit high tide from there. "Mr. Bloomberg’s brain trust," continued the Times, "has examined previous third-party efforts dating to Theodore Roosevelt in 1912."

What's for a "brain trust" to "examine"? They all lost.

The story related that Mike Bloomberg — "a low-key and cerebral personality" — could feature "a series of detailed policy speeches backed by an intense television advertising campaign … introduc[ing] him to voters around the country as a technocratic problem-solver."

As the most successful, losing third-party candidate ever, T.R. placed a strong second (in popular votes) in 1912. But he didn't do it by delivering "detailed policy speeches" in a low-key manner. He did it by energetically eviscerating President Taft. And though I didn't serve with Theodore Roosevelt, though I didn't know Theodore Roosevelt, and though Theodore Roosevelt was no friend of mine, Mayor, you are — by your own admission as well as thundering empirical fact — no Theodore Roosevelt.

So what is Bloomberg's path? The better question is, What's his point? The answer is not only staggeringly unsubtle, it seems rather singular: Vote Clinton.

 

The futility of Bernie Sanders

Glenn Beck believes that our next president "must be Lincoln, and he may also have to be Washington," but he's willing to settle for Joe McCarthy. Thus, yesterday, did the lachrymose Mr. Beck endorse Sen. Ted Cruz, whose national accomplishments so far consist rather singularly of shuttering the government George Washington established and Abraham Lincoln saved. So, there's that.

In somewhat (but only slightly somewhat) more comprehensible endorsement news, yesterday the Des Moines Register endorsed Marco Rubio on the Republican side. "He represents his party’s best hope," wrote the Register in one of those relativity declarations that says far more than it says. The paper went on to praise the Floridian for his optimism, although, conceded the editorial board, he has taken to talking "gloomily about 'a nation in decline.'" As for those other establishment candidates, their "experience, pragmatism and thoughtful policies" are all quite nice; but, observed the Register, "most Republicans aren’t interested" in experience, pragmatism and thoughtfulness. "They want new and different." So, new and different they should have.

On the Democratic side, the influential -- question mark here -- Iowa newspaper opted for that which Republicans disdain. Which is to say, the paper endorsed Hillary Clinton: chiefly, her experience and her pragmatism. In terms of the new and different, well, you know where this is going. Experience means little when the pragmatically impossible is the objective. Hence the paper's reflections on Sen. Bernie Sanders -- who, though "a man of courage and principle who has the ability to rally others to his cause,"

admits that virtually all of his plans for reform have no chance of being approved by a Congress that bears any resemblance to the current crop of federal lawmakers. This is why, he says, voters can’t simply elect him president, but must instead spark a "political revolution"…. A successful Sanders presidency would hinge on his ability to remake Washington in his own image. It’s almost inconceivable that such a transformation could take place, even with Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress.

That last passage is telling; in fact, Mrs. Clinton has taken of late to telling it on the stump. Even when President Obama had a Democratically controlled Congress, she recalls, he couldn't get the competitive-healthcare idea of a "public option" through it. Such was the reality not of Republican politics, but of the Democratic sort (which is one of the many reasons Sen. Sanders remained an Independent for so long).

Yet more telling is the Des Moines Register's reference to the democratic socialist's "political revolution." Here, one should ponder the even more real.

President Obama brought us back from the brink. In 2008 we teetered on the most horrific economic collapse since the early 1930s, when unemployment soared, wages dived, consumer spending bottomed out, industrial production plummeted, farming went fallow, roughly half of all banks failed, homelessness struck millions, soup kitchens became commonplace, and shambolic Hoovervilles sprang up. There was, as many historians have noted, the very real possibility of the American system's total collapse — not just economic. What Americans suffered in 2008 was, relatively speaking, nothing compared to what Americans suffered in 1932.

If ever there was a time for a "political revolution," it was then. And yet whom did Americans overwhelmingly elevate to the White House? A non-ideological, conservative-progressive pragmatic Democrat who campaigned, in part, on a balanced federal budget. A political revolution did take place — 1932 evinced a massive realignment — but it was of the distinctly American variety; i.e., it was essentially conservative. And again, that was when "the system" teetered on utter collapse.

Which the system most assuredly does not in 2016.

So, I put it to Sanders' supporters: Whence the political revolution necessary for a successful or even workable Sanders presidency? If the American electorate opted for a conservative progressive in 1932, do Sanders' supporters genuinely believe the electorate will revolutionarily rise up in 2016, elect a socialist, and refashion Congress wholesale? Not even a leftist Lincoln could pull that off — which makes every political pragmatist wonder what all the fuss is about, or, rather, why all the fuss.

 

What is democratic socialism?

Time magazine's Joe Klein notes with no little amusement The Question of 2016 "being asked, mostly by Republicans, but also by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: What is the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist?" Klein's amusement arises because Democrats such as the awful Debbie Wasserman Schultz can't bring themselves to answer it. To instance the awful Ms. Schultz, however, is most unfair of Klein, since Schultz is so awful because she never answers a question. Still, on this question — the question of Democracy vs. Socialism — she's not alone.

Klein, then, attempts to answer the question on behalf of professional Democrats. Theoretically, says he, it is "not a difficult question to answer. Webster’s says socialism is 'a social system or theory in which the government owns and controls the means of production.' Democrats tend to believe in free enterprise. They think government should regulate the means of production, not own it."

So, simple as that, right? Not quite. One might as well look up the definition of "bad," or "good," or "evil" or "virtuous." You will find perfectly reasonable definitions of each, but not one will tell you precisely what is good or bad or virtuous or evil (unless of course you're consulting Jerry Falwell Jr.'s personal copy of Webster's). Categorizing their real-life phenomena is up to the observer, and thus what I find as virtuous — let's say, socialism — you might find as evil. Definitions are tricky things, which is what makes them so enjoyably frustrating.

Which, Q.E.D., is where Klein winds up — enjoyably frustrated; or, at least he does momentarily. After pondering socialism here and socialism over there the Time columnist concludes that "we’re talking about 50 shades of socialism here." Those Bernie Sanders supporters in Iowa who self-identify as socialists? "Well, they’re not really socialists," says Klein. "They’re European-style social democrats, who believe in a robust redistribution of wealth … and government control of some of the means of production — like the health care system." (Klein eventually winds up declaring both Republican know-nothingism and Democratic socialism as "reactionary" and "discredited ideas." So, good night, Joe, and sweet nightmares.)

You can see the problem, potentially. According to Klein's definition of European social democracy (democratic socialism), Republican know-nothings are themselves European social democrats, since they too believe in a robust redistribution of wealth — upward. (With friends over victuals and I must admit excessive quantities of wine one evening I described this theory of socialist Republicanism as "Piss Up!" — for in supply-sidedness, trickles of golden leftover urine are meant to come down. They never do; the proletariat is left only with the plutocracy's plunking fecal matter; but, theoretically speaking, Piss Up! is still a priceless concept to be found in the bathroom reading material of epistemically closed know-nothings.)

Klein's definition of American democratic socialism — just one of socialism's "50 shades" in the real world, as Klein concedes — isn't really a problem after all, though. What is this creature we call democratic socialism? It is us. It's the roads we drive on, the city or national parks we visit, the protection we get from local, state, and federal law enforcement. It is your or your parents' or your grandparents' Social Security checks and Medicare coverage. It is West Point, it's the Naval Academy, it's the sprawling defense department. It is every member of the United States Armed Forces — the most socialist outfit in America. It is anything and everything that is the product of redistribution, which is to say taxation, some of which goes up, and some of which comes down.

Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and all the other know-nothings are democratic socialists, in that through a democratic election each intends to throw more of your tax money at an ever-larger defense department. Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist, as are Sanders' Iowa supporters, as are Hillary Clinton and her supporters, for reasons more traditionally understood.

Now some may find my ecumenical definition of democratic socialism — i.e., it is us — outrageous, problematic, or, at the very least, discomforting. Even I, a self-identifying democratic socialist, find it discomforting, since the thought of broad encampment with Marco Rubio is downright repellent. Yet pragmatically, it is what it is. What it isn't is what Joe Klein declares it to be: "reactionary" and "discredited." For stumble as we might through its more hellish iterations of Reaganism and Bushism, democratic socialism is the evolutionary essence of a civilized society. What, I ask, is the credible alternative?

 

National Review and blockbuster cluelessness

In its ripping, Trump-excoriating editorial, National Review can't get past the first paragraph before committing an explosive, empirical error:

Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Concluding National Review's editorial is the customer-survey question, "Did you like this?"

Are they kidding? I loved it. We all loved it.

Even National Review's terminology of a "conservative ideological consensus" is rejected by seminal philosophical conservatism, which rejects doctrine — that is to say, ideology. Otherwise, what is this conservative "consensus" of which NR writes?

Conservatives love their Social Security checks and Medicare coverage, while congressional conservatives labor to devastate both. Many rank-and-file conservatives see no problem with taxing the Rockefellers more, if it means protecting their safety nets. Conservatives are grievously splintered when it comes to social conservatism vs. economic libertarianism and Bushian internationalism vs. Paulian neo-isolationism. Some conservatives see America's demographics as an inevitable metamorphosis to exploit, and not to electorally alienate — though many do not. Most conservatives are with the American "liberal" majority on reasonable gun-control measures; congressional conservatives are solidly with Wayne LaPierre. Conservatives deride big government and yet desire ever-larger defense spending and intense bedroom monitoring. Conservatives preach fiscal responsibility while practicing ruinous, supply-sided imprudence. One could go on.

It suffices that there is no coherence within modern conservatism. It is, rather, a decadent grab bag of ideological conflicts, internal contradictions, hypocrisy, heedlessness, crudeness, infighting, mean-spirited populism, adolescent emotionalism, anti-intellectualism, the worst sort of political opportunism — an utterly unworkable mess of unsustainable, unrecognizable, non-consensual ideology.

Other than that, we have no argument with National Review's high-minded, blockbuster editorial — except to note the breathtaking irony of the editorial's final line: "Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself."

 

The vague roots of "mistakes." They just pop up?

I give you David Brooks' latest, hilariously passive-voice "mistakes have been made" moment:

[Political] institutions have been weakened of late.

I give you this as well, also from Brooks:

We have to discard the anti-political, anti-institutional mood that is prevalent [and that just sort of came out of nowhere].

I further give you Wikipedia's entry on David Brooks' ineloquent cowardice:

"Mistakes were made" is an expression that is commonly used as a rhetorical device, whereby a speaker acknowledges that a situation was handled poorly or inappropriately but seeks to evade any direct admission or accusation of responsibility by not specifying the person [or persons] who made the mistakes. The acknowledgement of "mistakes" is framed in an abstract sense, with no direct reference to who made the mistakes….

The New York Times has called the phrase a "classic Washington linguistic construct." Political scientist William Schneider suggested that this usage be referred to as the "past exonerative" tense, and commentator William Safire has defined the phrase as "[a] passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it." A commentator at NPR declared this expression to be "the king of non-apologies."

OK, I'm done picking on Brooks (for this week). I dare say the poor man can't help himself. For that matter, had I been complicit in debauching half of America's two major parties — mine, own slightly younger than the oldest political party on earth — I probably couldn't help myself either. Broodingly I would only declare that "Mistakes had been made."

 

The Left's Tea Party

The unkindest thing one could say about the Sanders swell is that the left has finally assembled its own version of the right's Tea Party. Anti-establishment fury at America's oligarchs, corporatists, crony capitalists, bankers and other black hats who, however regrettably, will always be with us has achieved near parity in the earliest of Democratic nominating states with furious Trumpist and Cruzian populism. As George Lucas might put it, the force of electoral fantasies is strong in these activists.

The much kinder thing one could say about the Sanders tea-party swell is what John Maynard Keynes said about "animal spirits": "there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation." Keynes went on to note that should our animal spirits dim and "spontaneous optimism" falter, our "enterprise" — whether "moral or hedonistic or economic" — would "fade and die." Translating Keynes' formulation into leftist politics means that a certain element of happy, fantasized idealism is essential to a better tomorrow. And therein lies the split. For Tea Partiers and right-wing populists, idealism grimly equates to nativism and militarism; for Sandershiks and left-wing populists, idealism equates to progressivist utopianism: better, cheaper healthcare for all; ruthlessly tamed banks, and so on.

For the left as well as the right, mathematical expectations are ill pondered, for they are uncomfortable thoughts. The populist right won't or can't see that the presidential electoral map is far bluer than red (especially given the crimson degradation of modern conservatism), and the populist left won't or can't see that post-New Hampshire primary states are chronically unfavorable to its brand of idealistic populism. As of 10 February, the demographics shift. Outside of white Iowa and white N.H., Hillary Clinton holds a 13-point advantage over Bernie Sanders.

So, it is scarcely Panic Time for center-left realists, or even the socialist realist of yours truly. Nonetheless, it is well that prominent center-lefties and progressives such as economist Paul Krugman are almost frantically issuing premonitory dispatches on Keynes' animal spirits. "[W]hile idealism is fine and essential — you have to dream of a better world — it’s not a virtue unless it goes along with hardheaded realism about the means that might achieve your ends," observes Krugman this morning. That's his soft pitch; he concludes with a harsher one: "[T]here’s nothing noble about seeing your values defeated because you preferred happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends. Don’t let idealism veer into destructive self-indulgence."

One has to love the many ways in which the NYT's op-ed policy of no columnist-endorsements can be skirted — for there you have it, a virtually outright Krugman-endorsement of Hillary Clinton. I can't know if Prof. Krugman is as unenthusiastic about the still-presumptive Democratic nominee as I am; Hillary frightens me, what with her chronicled hawkishness and calculating changeability. But I do know one thing: In this presidential go-around, Krugman and I share a philosophical allegiance to what can only be called the primal idealism of political reality — the epicenter of Clinton's promise.

In brief, the Bernie Sanders swell frightens us more, for there is nothing more frightening to a pragmatist than a party gone idealistically, unrealistically wild. Just take a look at what the out-of-control, "idealistic" right is doing to itself.

 

The GOP establishment's biggest mistake

The knives are out in another of the GOP establishment's grisly, guffaw-provoking train wrecks:

Politico interviewed nearly two dozen Right to Rise donors and Bush supporters, and all blamed [Mike] Murphy for a super PAC strategy that has failed to boost their struggling candidate.

It's hard to blame them. Their gripes include the $40 million ($60 million altogether) that Murphy has "spent on positive ads" for Bush, which, says Politico in a masterful stroke of understatement, "has yielded no tangible dividends."

For all that, the gripers are also honked that Murphy has "let John Kasich own the airwaves in New Hampshire," and that Murphy's shift to negative advertising has focused not on Donald Trump but on Marco Rubio "at precisely the moment the GOP could be rallying around an alternative to Trump or Cruz." In other words, while not helping his own guy, Murphy is laying waste to what little else is left of the GOP establishment.

Still, the most pertinent gripe among Bush supporters is that which has been downright awesome to nearly all others, including yours truly; which is to say, super-PAC Murphy failed to change "tactics immediately after Donald Trump entered the race and began stoking the groundswell of anti-establishment sentiment and defined Bush — lastingly — as 'low energy.'"

The last part of that passage is of little consequence. In addition to being awkward, tongue-tied, often borderline incoherent and ceaselessly uninteresting, Bush is low energy. Even $100 million can't change that. But many of us recognized months ago — here and here, for instance — that Mr. Murphy was merely engaging a fantasy when he intoned that "Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem."

By August (when Murphy said that) it was clear that Donald Trump was indeed not only Bush's problem, but the GOP establishment's chronic headache. Who, virtually alone, possessed the cash to do something about it? Mike Murphy, of course, and yet he sat on the money — and all of its potentially anti-Trump defamatory power. And so Trump grew, and grew.

Murphy might have at least neutralized Trump's power through a carpet-bombing campaign. That we can never know. Yet by late summer it was obvious to many that the GOP establishment was on the ropes; and, for Murphy's purposes, the only way to save Jeb was to save the establishment or rather save the establishment by saving Jeb. Either way, what was needed was a massive, Barney Fife-nip-it-in-the-bud slaughter of Donald Trump. Again, it might not have worked, but it would have been something. Instead, Mike Murphy's super-PAC money was nowhere to be seen -- and Jeb is about to join it in obscurity.

 

Leftist anger, to what end?

I'd like to highlight the first comment to come in on my previous post, not only because it features admirable intelligence (as do virtually all comments left on this site), but because, oddly enough, I'm sympathetic to the commenter's counterargument made to my argument. It goes without saying you should first read my preceding post. Writes the commenter:

The despair so many of us are feeling isn't due simply to a right-wing narrative. It's due to what we're actually experiencing in our own lives. Most of my close friends and family are liberal Democrats, and yet they're all bitter and disgruntled. For example, I get my health insurance through Obamacare, and it's awful. I have to settle for worse and worse health insurance each year because the premiums for my former plans continue to annually skyrocket. It's infuriating to hear Democrats brag about how many more people are now insured when the plans themselves are overpriced garbage. And yet health insurers are making record profits. Of course, all of our salaries have flatlined. Most in my social circle work in either education, medicine, or social services, and good Lord, the policies that keep getting heaped on us are clearly designed either to maximize profits or enable tax breaks for a few obscenely rich assholes. It's not just some dominant narrative that's warping our perceptions. We're living this.

I hear you. I would however parenthetically caution a more macro view of the state of Obamacare, which I'll offer on a micro basis. In those states where Obama voters turned out in sufficient numbers to secure Medicaid for the states' citizens, Obamacare has saved thousands of lives. Anecdotally speaking, I know of one Trump-supporting gentleman who abjectly detests President Obama and everything Obama has enacted; yet always unspoken is that this gentleman's childless, low-income adult daughter recently and successfully underwent cancer treatment through the auspices of her state's Medicaid program, which, not long ago, she would not have qualified for. So there's that — something rather magnificent to balance the human books.

Nonetheless I am, as noted, sympathetic to the commenter's plight, fraught as it is with disagreeable realities. But my question is this: How does supporting "anti-establishment" platforms on the left that are politically unrealistic and wholly unachievable in any way advance the cause of improving, among other things, Obamacare?

I don't know if the featured commenter supports the Democratic presidential candidate who is proposing vast unachievabilities as the answer to leftist disgruntlement. For all I know, the commenter does not. But much of the left does. Its anger dovetails with right-wing anger, it is part of our tempestuous political zeitgeist, and yet I simply cannot see how such programmatically untethered anger is helpful to what the left has so often called "the Struggle."

Almost by definition, struggles are incrementally executed. I can think of no American revolution — cultural, political, whatever — that proceeded on anything but a prolonged, rolling basis. We are, like it or not, a conservative people; even America's "left" historically has been rather conservative — and therein has lain the key to national progress. In short, I do not see a realistic alternative — and that which is unrealistic, I reject.

 

The haunting of Palin and Trump (and others)

The wrenching what-in-hell-is-happening therapy sessions on the NYT's disheveled conservative sofa hilariously continue this morning with Ross Douthat's searching purgation. The poor man wants to know why The Harpy is back, what in God's name she is doing with The Donald, and what it means for The Conservative Borg. His is a tear-drenched analysis flooded, characteristically, by a tragic misunderstanding of the modern conservative psyche.

Which, as you know, is predominantly male, with a dominant A for alpha. It prefers raw grunting, gritty emotions and savage anti-intellectualism over anything the philosophical Mr. Douthat might have to delicately offer, and therein lies his tragic misunderstanding of The Harpy's appeal to the basest of the conservative base.

Douthat confesses that a kind of defensive love struck him way, way back in 2008. In the intelligentsia's hostile reaction to Sarah Palin — "a mix of sneering social liberalism, fecundophobia, anti-evangelical paranoia and class contempt" — the columnist's protective urges kicked in. Aristocratic smugness "was being hurled at a candidate who seemed to fit exactly with" Douthat's vision of a new conservatism: "a kind of socially conservative populism, which would link the family-values language of the religious right to an economic agenda more favorable to the working class than what the Republicans usually had offered."

But then, writes Douthat, "well, you know what happened then." The real Sarah Palin happened, her "paranoia" happened, her "willful ignorance" happened in public display after Douthat-humiliating public display. It seems the real Sarah Palin's "real roots" were "not in Reaganism or libertarianism" or anything like it, continues Douthat, but rather in "the same kind of blue-collar" Jacksonianism that, he observes, "has carried Trump to the top of the Republican polls."

It should be noted however that Palin's peculiar brand of conservatism was evident right off. What Douthat missed in the priggish depths of his evangelical-Catholic Puritanism was that Palin was mostly admired by feral, forever-salivating white males (the GOP base) for her big, bold, beautiful boobs, her shapely ass and slender waist — all of which had National Review's Rich Lowry wanking furiously on the couch in 2008. Palin was and is to conservative politics what Lonnie Anderson was to television thespianism. The GOP's male base no more cares (cared) about the mechanics of philosophical Reaganism than it cares for an intelligible script delivered by The Donald — or The Harpy. Its primal urges come first — and last.

What Douthat also misses is even more fundamental, and it's precisely what David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer and George Will are missing.

He speculates that Trumpism — now supported by Palinism — is the product of a profound "disillusionment with the system" that has become "so strong that no wonkish policy proposal is likely to resonate anymore." Bingo. For this is precisely what's happening on the left, too. Seven remorseless years of right-wing doom and progressive disgruntlement (with the Obamian "system") have rendered a twofold base of unfettered distress. The electorate, perhaps even a majority of the electorate, sees nothing but national ruin ahead unless something really radical is done. The left, seduced by the right's unremitting narrative of darkness, is in an anti-establishment frenzy even though the Obamian establishment has saved the nation from the very ruin foreseen.

And just who launched this disillusioned, anti-wonkish frenzy? The answer, to be somewhat redundant, lies above: Douthat, Krauthammer & Co., along of course with our ever-present horde of congressional doomsayers, for whom — quite disingenuously — the United States has teetered on the desolate brink since January 2009. That is what Douthat is missing. Or, maybe he isn't missing it at all. Maybe he just can't bring himself to admit it.

 

Krugman on Sanders: it's pretty harsh

Having been berned by his early criticisms of President Obama's tactical navigation of political realities, Paul Krugman is, these days, avoiding similarly treacherous waters. He has instead become the realist's realist, going after Sen. Sanders' assorted policy platforms with progressively critical aim.

If you missed it, Krugman's blog post yesterday was a direct broadside; he blasted not only Sanders's "lack of political realism," but the senator's "disturbing" positions on financial reform and healthcare, his "easy slogan[eering] and punting when the going gets tough," and his (healthcare) fiscal finagling that "looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up."

In argumentation theory, an "appeal to authority" (argumentum ad verecundiam) is often deemed an invalid approach to making one's case, assuming the authority is no certified authority (let's say, on the complexities of healthcare policy). So, I'll concede that my appeal to Krugman's argument against Sanders' argument on healthcare specifically is a fallacious appeal.

But politics is a field I do know something about, and I further know that Krugman's understanding of politics has vastly matured in the past seven years. And his maturation has led him to this conclusion about Bernie Sanders' candidacy: "[I]f the political theory behind supporting Sanders is that the American people will vote for radical change if you’re honest about what’s involved, the campaign’s evident unwillingness to fully confront the issues, its reliance on magic asterisks, very much weakens that claim."

Krugman's concluding argument stands alone; it is, at its core, neither anti-Sanders nor pro-Clinton. It is simply an independent statement of fact from a progressive columnist who's become something of an expert — the hard way — on political reality.

 

Trump, Cruz, war and Bob Gates

Former defense secretary Robert Gates on the GOP's presidential offerings — especially those of "outsiders" Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — and their plans to destroy ISIS:

They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Gates went to observe that "part of the concern that I have with the campaign, particularly when it comes to national security, is that the solutions being offered are so simplistic and so at odds with the reality of the rest of the world, with the way the world really works."

I put it to Trump's supporters and Cruz's supporters: Granted, Robert Gates is a national-security voice of what you see as the contemptible GOP establishment (he was, after all, appointed by President George W. Bush); but do you honestly believe that Gates' stated opinion is merely one of political hostility to the insurgencies of Trump and Cruz? Could it be that former defense secretary Bob Gates genuinely understands "the reality" of the world, "the way the world really works," and that he recognizes "simplistic" flapdoodle when he hears it, and, accordingly, condemns it?

In other words, in your minds, you Trump-Cruz supporters, is it possible, even remotely possible, that Bob Gates is speaking from an authentic understanding of war, foreign policy and international relations rather than partisan enmity? — that Trump and Cruz indeed "don't know what they're talking about"? — that, simply put, Gates is altogether right and your candidates are dead wrong?

Do you even allow for that possibility? Or is Trump right and Cruz right, no matter what the "establishment" experts say?

 

The puzzler of the parody of Palin

Yesterday the parody site Someecards.com rounded up some of the more sober reactions to Sarah Palin's endorsement of Donald Trump, which, of course, was such a transcendent parody in itself, it elevated Trump-Palin's act to pure awesomeness. You can see all the reactions here; I have culled but a few of the finer ones.

The last I've selected comes from the theologically contemplative Albert Brooks, perhaps the funniest creature on earth -- excepting, naturally, Sarah Palin:

***

I'm still discerning -- rather, trying to discern -- what possible benefit to Trump is the endorsement of a shrieking parody whose last-known favorability rating among Republicans was a withered 27 percent, which essentially overlaps Trump's preexisting support. Endorsement-prevention -- from its going to Ted Cruz -- was, one supposes, The Donald's thinking. Still, Palin's endorsement is of no real electoral benefit to Trump in Iowa's contest, and it would be yet another massive electoral demerit in the general. The Democratic nominee would hang Sarah Palin around Donald Trump's neck like the poisonous albatross she is. Just let us pray he gets far enough for us to enjoy that.