Trump, hypocrisy and lies: the difference between "hypocrisy in democracy" and "hypocrisy about democracy"

David Runciman's Book Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power From Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond was first published in 2008. For the 2018 revised edition, he added an Afterword in which he addresses the current US President and his political style. (The name "Trump" appears only in the Afterword.)

I won't try to comment here on Runciman's main historical argument. The Afterword gives attention to the 2016 race and discusses the difference in a politician's being perceived as a liar rather than a hypocrite. This is his summary from the close of the main text:

Liberal societies have always attracted accusations of hypocrisy from the outside, because of their failure to live up to their own standards. But seen from the inside, it is clear that the problem of hypocrisy in liberal politics is a good deal more complicated than this. What matters is not whether liberals are worse than they would like to appear, but whether they can be honest with themselves about the gaps that are bound to exist between the masks of politics and what lies behind those masks. This honesty cannot be taken as a given - liberal societies, particularly once they have become bound up with the requirements of democratic politics, are as capable as any others of self-deception. But liberal politics, and liberal political theory, have the advantage that they are able to probe the gaps between political appearance and political reality without either overstating them, or seeking to deny them altogether. This then is one of the resources that a history of liberal political thought has to offer. Armed with a sense of historical perspective, we can see that many forms of political hypocrisy are unavoidable, and therefore not worth worrying about, and that some others are even desirable in a democratic setting, and therefore worth encouraging. But, as Hobbes says, when hypocrisy deprives us of our ability to see what is at stake in our political life, then it still has the capacity to ruin everything for everyone. [my emphasis]

An example that we could take would be American or European politicians celebrating the equal rule of law. That is a basic principle of liberal government, and their legal systems are structured so that the law applies equally to all. (Let's leave Hungary and Poland aside for the moment.)

On the other hand, social and economic factors, ranging from access to qualified attorneys to rascist police practices to official corruption and other factors besides, mean that in lived reality the rule of law does not apply equally to all. Labor unions have known since they have existed that formal equality before the law does not make real class factors disappear. But that doesn't mean that the formal equal rule of law should be abandoned. It also means that it is important for political leaders to support the formal rule of law. And they can and should use the principle of equal rule of law to address the actual impediments to realizing it in practice.

In his 2018 Afterword, he discusses both formal research and his own observations of the 2016 Presidential campaign to elaborate differences in public perception of policies who they take to be liars and those they perceive to be hypocrites.

Runciman argues that in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was probably more damaged by perceptions of her as a hypocrite than Trump was damaged by clearly and obviously being a liar. But he also discusses how voter perceptions of hypocrisy and dishonesty in serving officials is different than for political challengers.

He sees that the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump 2016 race "was the definitive embodiment of the clash between the honest hypocrite and the sincere liar; and ... the liar won." His concept of "honest hypocrites" refers to those practicing "a form of reserve or holding back in the spirit of avoiding untruths." On the other hand, politicians who are more comfortable with lying about their own positions or feelings can come off more sympathetic, because they are better at feigning empathy, concern, and agreement.

Here I find myself raising a caution. Because this line of analysis is uncomfortably similar on the surface to the lazy American pundits' focus on theater criticism in their reporting of campaigns. Particularly their silly obsession with "authenticity". Our corporate media pundits thought the plutocrat trust-fund-baby George W. Bush was "authentic," because he was "the kind of guy you want to have a beer with." Mark Shields alone must have used that line a hundred times during the 2000 campaign. It was also a weird thing to say about a guy who was open about having had an alcohol problem. The same establishment pundits also ridiculed Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 being "inauthentic" stiffs.

The pundit version of "authenticity" is painfully superficial. But even today, in a Twitter-and-YouTube political world, the corporate media is still a major influence on how politicians come across to the general public, especially in a Presidential race.

Runciman, though, is making a more focused argument. Clinton had been the target of relentless rightwing attacks since 1992 and a particular focus of Rush-Limbaugh-ish misogyny. And even more substantive commentators like Gene Lyons who were generally sympathetic to her noted with regret that she wasn't a "natural" politician in the glad-handing, "hey, man, how 'ya doing, how's your wife Martha?" mold. Joe Biden is a master of the traditional glad-handing style, e.g., his signature phrase, "C'mon, man!" Hillary Clinton always came off by comparison as a bit of a stiff to those who didn't adore her. And Runciman makes a good observation about her serving as Secretary of State, the chief US diplomat, under Obama: "honest hypocrisy is the diplomat’s calling card."

Clinton’s cool demeanor, her tireless attention to detail and her persistence made her an effective advocate for America’s interests abroad. But these same qualities came back to haunt her as a presidential candidate. Two incidents from her time in office - her use of a private email server and her conduct during and after the attack at Benghazi - left her fatally exposed. It did not matter that she was able to defend herself effortlessly when a Congressional select committee tried to nail her over the Benghazi affair during eight hours of testimony in 2015. On that occasion she came across as better informed and smarter than her critics. But on the campaign trail her attention to detail seemed like nit- picking, and nit-picking is not far from covering your tracks, which in itself is tantamount to having something to hide. [my emphasis]

On the other hand:

Above all, Trump could claim to be something other than a politician. He had the authenticity [!] that came with being an outsider to the game that Hillary had been playing much of her adult life. He was not, of course, an outsider to the elite social circles in which the Clintons moved (Bill and Hillary had both attended his wedding to Melania in 2005). But in public he used a kind of language— blunt, crude, impulsive, vicious— that was wholly alien to their manner of political performance. Trump often spoke on stage as though he were not on stage at all. It made his performances all the more compelling. Above all, Trump lied. He lied repeatedly, carelessly, with abandon. Hillary Clinton edged around the truth. Bill Clinton twisted it. Trump didn’t seem to care about it at all. [my emphasis]

He makes an argument that strikes me as counterintuitive but plausible. He argues that:

... lying is for many people less offensive than hypocrisy. As I argued in this book, hypocrisy is such an affront in democratic politics because of the implied tone of superiority that comes with it. The hypocrite seems to be saying that some things can only be discussed among the grown- ups, who do not include the voters. So what the voters get is the patronizing brush-off, dressed up as a solicitous concern for their welfare. They are treated like children. The essence of Clinton’s weakness was her inability to shake the impression that she was doing the real business of her politics behind the scenes. There is a kind of honesty to this: after all, that is where the main business of politics has always been done, even in a democracy. But it is fatal not to be able to give a different impression. Trump was the master of giving that impression. Everything about how he presented himself seemed to say: what you see is what you get. He did not try to hide the fact that he didn’t care about the truth. There was something transparent about his evasiveness. [my emphasis]

But he also explains that not trying "to hide the fact that he didn’t care about the truth" plays differently for Trump as President. Because, in Runciman's view, "the liar cannot govern without becoming a hypocrite." And Runciman was writing over two years before the COVID-19 pandemic:

Trump’s presidency has exposed the limits of his approach to politics, because as president he has made a mockery of the institutions of government that he leads. This is what I called second-order hypocrisy: Trump’s personal authenticity as a non-thinking non-politician might win him the campaign, but to govern in those terms is to operate at a far deeper level of inconsistency. The non-politician trying to do the real business of democratic politics - building coalitions, maintaining them, and ultimately passing legislation - risks getting nothing done. [my emphasis]

In other words, actual experience in politics and government counts for a lot in a President!

Trump’s hypocrisy does not lie in the fact that he said he was one thing and then he turned out to be something else. He is what he purports to be, a chancer and an opportunist (he has lied about who he is - successful businessman, doting family man, friend of the poor, etc. - but that’s what makes him such a chancer). The destructive hypocrisy of Trump’s presidency is that he said he would do things in office that he has no idea how to do, certainly not within the bounds of democratic politics. He pretends democracy is one thing - bombast and bullying - when it is in fact something else. As I have argued, hypocrisy in democracy is both inevitable and in many ways essential. But hypocrisy about democracy can be fatal. Trump is the second kind of hypocrite, which is the worst kind of all. [my emphasis]

Demobilizing the base - standard operating procedure for corporate Democrats

Jamie Galbraith did an essay for Jacobin's academic journal Catalyst 1:3 (Fall 2017) titled The Predator State that points to an important part of how the Democratic Party during the Obama-Biden Presidency consciously weakened itself as an organization willing and capable of responding to popular pressure against the policies associated with the neoliberalism that became the dominant economic paradigm in the US and Britain during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the early 1980s.

Neoliberalism is characterized by its general orientation toward business deregulation, financialization of the economy, reductions in government services and social insurance, privatization of government property and key functions including education, a priority for reducing taxes on the wealthiest while accepting a radical increase in the maldistribution of wealth and income, and an negative emphasis on "individual responsibility," so that the weak and the poor are condemned for their failure to successfully manage their own personal "portfolio" of skills. It is associated with political demobilization and a dominant media with a strong affinity for oligarchical interests.

Galbraith gives us this summary:

This political dispensation [neoliberalism] was initiated in the late 1970s, strongly advanced under Reagan, and fully formed by the middle years of the Clinton administration. It was the heart of politics in the Bush years. There might have been some reason to hope, when President Obama was elected, that it would be contained if not reversed in the wake of the financial crisis. Unfortunately there was no such luck either in the financial sphere or in the way health care reform was designed. The result has been an embedding of predatory encroachment of corporate interests in government on a bipartisan basis, with intellectual consequences that include the subsumption of public administration into such topics as outsourcing, transparency issues, civic engagement, performance metrics, and the like - anything to disguise and distract from the erosion of an autonomous public power. Related phenomena include the public-private “trans-actors” - a wonderful word - and “shadow elites” which have been described by the anthropologist Janine Wedel. [my emphasis]

The Obama-Biden version of the neoliberal approach was not as grim, vicious, and lawless as that of Trump. Although Obama and Biden and their Attorneys General were adamant that there would be no priority on criminal prosecution of members of the Bush-Chene3y Administration for criminal actions they committed in office. And the Obama Administration was also famously unwilling to seek criminal prosecution of criminal actions by major bank executives that originated the financial crash of 2008 and left millions of people with the homes foreclosed.

And Galbraith describes how the Obama team consciously went about guarding against an activist party base being able to bring intra-party pressure against such policies. It's important to remember here that Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee 2005-2009 had pushed hard to develop a "50-state strategy" aimed at challenging the Republicans even in conservative congressional districts and building a new bench of Democratic office-holders, political leaders, and activists at the local and state levels.

President Obama was elected on a surge of pan-racial popular enthusiasm in 2008, and he assembled a very adept campaign at the time, effectively using new technologies with every prospect of building a renewed popular and participatory base for the Democratic Party. However, that prospect would have been lethal for Wall Street. It would have put in place a power base that was not prepared to tolerate the preservation or resurrection of conditions that had led to the financial crisis, and therefore for that and perhaps other reasons, it was not pursued.

Instead, over eight years the party was allowed, even encouraged, to wither away, abandoning whatever popular organization and base it could have developed or was developing in the last years of the Bush administration. What was left by the time Hillary Clinton assumed her role as the party’s nominee was largely a coterie of policy professionals, of in-and-outers from finance, law, the Ivy Leagues, and the think tank world, whose focus was largely on mission-specific, career-building trajectories, and backed by a political operation whose major focus was advertising and polling. [my emphasis]

Marshall Ganz, a longtime organizer for the United Farm Workers union, headed Obama's field operation in 2008 and took a movement-building approach that helped Obama successfully bypass much of the "coterie" of party operatives and cautious campaign professionals that Galbraith describes. But once elected, Obama quickly folded his "Obama for America" campaign organization into the regular party structures. And ousted Howard Dean as DNC chairman in favor of safe corporate Democrat Tim Kaine, who became Hillary Clinton's running mate on the 2016 ticket which they lost to the Malicious Orange Clown Donald Trump.

Back in late 2010, Ganz argued in How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back Los Angeles Times 11/03/2010 that the times in which Obama became President called for transformational leadership. But what the Obama Administration has provided had been transactional leadership: "The nation was ready for transformation, but the president gave us transaction. And, as is the case with leadership failures, much of the public's anger, disappointment and frustration has been turned on a leader who failed to lead."

Obama and his team made three crucial choices that undermined the president's transformational mission. First, he abandoned the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education. Next, he chose to lead with a politics of compromise rather than advocacy. And finally, he chose to demobilize the movement that elected him president. By shifting focus from a public ready to drive change - as in "yes we can" — he shifted the focus to himself and attempted to negotiate change from the inside, as in "yes I can." [my emphasis]

"Yes I can" instead of "Yes we can" is a good brief definition of the neoliberal ideological meaning of "personal responsibility."

During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a polldriven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within - within him and within us. In his Philadelphia speech on race, we learned of his gift not only for moral uplift but for "public education" in the deepest sense, bringing us to a new understanding of the albatross of racial politics that has burdened us since our founding.

On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president's speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of antigovernment rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. [my emphasis]

Hillary Clinton and the lingering ideology of the Democratic Leadership Council

Hillary Clinton is still throwing shade on Bernie Sanders: Caroline Kelly, Clinton doubles down on Sanders criticism, warns that he's promising 'the moon' CNN 02/07/2020.

Which I'm starting to find amusing. Could it be that Hillary knows that her criticism will Help Sanders more than hurt him in the primary contest? And is therefore playing the famous "three-dimensional chess" with this to boost his prospects?

Still, it's hard to see how the comments of the leader who won the popular vote for the Presidency in 2016 is effectively grappling with the current state of American democracy:

When asked by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres if she wanted to address her prior remarks about the Vermont independent, Clinton noted that while she originally made them about a year and a half ago, "I have a pretty clear perspective about what it's going to take to win, and as I said earlier, that's what I think the key calculation for any voter has to be."

"You've got to be responsible for what you say, and what you say you're going to do," Clinton added. "We need to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and in our institutions, and if you promise the moon and you can't deliver the moon, then that's going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can't trust each other." ...

On Thursday, Clinton followed up her comments on responsibility by pointing to health care, a key issue for Sanders, who is a well-known proponent of "Medicare for All." In October, Sanders said he doesn't need to come up with a detailed plan "right now" for how much his signature health care plan would cost individual Americans.

"I want quality affordable health care for everybody. ... But let's remember what's at stake. We have a current President who's trying to take away fundamental health care rights," Clinton said, referencing the Trump administration's support for a lawsuit looking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, including protections for people with preexisting conditions.

"So we can have a big argument about ideally what kind of health care we should want for everybody, because I'm on the front lines on that battle, but let's remember: If we don't win, people will lose what they have right now," she added. "So I just want everybody to understand how high the stakes are and to hold every candidate and every public office holder accountable for what they do or they don't do." [my emphasis]

I view those quotes as showing the extent to which Clinton is still fighting the DLC battles of the 1980s. Assuming the CNN quotes convey her comments fully enough there, what she seems to be saying is that not only should Democrats not even be talking about Medicare for All but instead should focus on the minimum goal of containing the damage the Trump Administration has already done to the health insurance system in the US.

This strikes me as a version of the Make American Boring Again message that is essentially one of mildly disturbed complacency.

Corporate Democrats generally aren't going to challenge drastic descriptions of the danger of the Trump Administration. But even during the Reagan years, Democrats had an advantage in national public opinion when it came to polls showing people were generally more attracted to Democratic positions than Republican ones. But the Democrats went into a defensive crouch in which they courted corporate cash more actively and they accepted Republican framing of issues from defense to fiscal conservatism to law-and-order. The corporate-centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was the chief organized expression of that political tendency.

But what at least as frustrating to Democratic activists as their centrist positioning on issues was their seeming unwillingness to fight for their own stated positions, in dramatic contrast to the steadily increasing zeal of the Republicans to fight for theirs.

Clinton's appeal to Democrats to Settle For Less that shows up in that article seems like a tired repetition of DLC centrism. Long after the DLC itself disbanded, which is did in 2011. (Ben Smith, The end of the DLC era Politico 02/007/2011)

And it's a reflection of the continuing asymetric polarization between the Democratic and Republican Party, with the former struggling to get past timid centrist and the latter having descended to an authoritarian party in a continuing process of radicalization. (See: Norman Ornstein, Yes, Polarization Is Asymmetric—and Conservatives Are Worse The Atlantic 06/19/2014: Edward Lempinen interviewing Thomas Mann, Impeachment puts GOP’s divisive tactics center-stage, says Berkeley expert Berkeley News 12/17/2019)

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 3 of 4)

The same month this book was published, the United States and Iran veered very close to immediate war over the ill-considered and likely illegal assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Obama’s drone wars and Clinton’s cavalier statement about Gaddafi’s death made it mor difficult for Democrats to make straightforward criticisms of Trump’s action – to the extent they wanted to do so at all.

The Emerald City Presidencies, continued

He also notes that the “armed intervention in Libya [was] nominally justified to prevent genocide, but actually intended to overthrow longtime Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi,” i.e., yet another regime change operation with a bad outcome.

Bacevich makes a Niebuhrian judgment on the mentality that led to the Iraq War, which could also apply to general hubris of the Emerald City US period he defines by neoliberal globalism, militarized global dominance, a privatized expansion of personal freedom, and the ever-growing significance of Presidential power:

... a conviction that God has bestowed on the United States unique prerogatives is deeply embedded in the nation's collective consciousness. Yet this particular variant of American Exceptionalism incorporated three distinctive themes: unvarnished militarism, missionary zealotry, and extreme nationalism. Prior American experience had offered glimpses of each. Distinguishing this particular recurrence [the Iraq War] was the chain reaction they produced as they came together.

Just as the neoliberal illusions crashed repeated in the 1990s and 2000s in the developing world and most spectacularly for America and Europe as well in 2008, Bacevich offers us a narrative framework to understand similar processes playing out in US foreign policy and the elevation of Donald Trump to the Presidency, which joined the most irresponsible version of narcissistic personal freedom (Trump’s general decadence and corruption) with the dangerous unilateral power of the US Presidency.

Bacevich’s political perspective

Bacevich is not a politician or an ideologue. He has a complex combination of perspectives. Although much of his analysis of the world is consistent with a progressive viewpoint, his also has perspectives that would fit into a reasoned conservative viewpoint. Though in the age of Trump and Citizens United, in practical politics such a viewpoint effectively doesn’t exist. As we see daily with the parade of Republicans and alleged conservatives cheerfully defending Trump’s violations of the Constitution, his contempt for American electoral laws, and his crass criminality.

But he definitely is not promoting some “third way” or “beyond left and right” perspective. Because people promoting those kinds of notions are most often promoting some variation of hard right politics or occasionally some feel-good fantasy that we can have democratic politics without conflict, controversy, or partisanship.

He has a forthcoming book called American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, featuring a variety of readings from American conservatives. Reinhold Niebuhr, much of whose perspective had such an influence on him, was in the 1950s a realist Cold War liberal who became very much a critic of the Vietnam War. In Bacevich’s earlier book American Empire (2002), he draws carefully on two critics of American foreign policy, the Progressive historian Charles Beard (who sadly in his later years became a dogmatic rightwing isolationist ) and the left historian William Appleman Williams , both of whom gave particular attention to the domestic sources of American foreign policy.

A Trumpist interregnum?

This book appeared in the final month of Trump third year as President, and the text of course dates from earlier. So Bacevich is cautious in in his assessment of Trump’s work-in-process Presidency.

He believes that Trump’s election was a rejection of the Emerald City conventions across the board, even though neither Trump’s campaign messages nor his actual policies can be described as particularly coherent:

Himself a mountebank of the very first order, Trump exposed as fraudulent the triumphalism that served as a signature of the post-Cold War decades. On this score, Trump mattered and bigly.

With Trump in the White House, claims that the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated an era of American political, economic, military, and cultural ascendancy became impossible to sustain. In fact, End-of History boosterism, backed by the conviction that America had perfected a system of political economy, mastered war, and discerned the true meaning of freedom, has turned out to be utterly wrongheaded, doing untold damage to Americans and others. The genius of Trump's "Make America great again" campaign slogan derived from its implicit admission that assertions of greatness made in the wake of the Cold War had turned out to be both empty and perverse. [my emphasis]

Democrats who style themselves as The Resistance critically miss the most important lesson that can be currently drawn from Trump’s Presidency. As he puts it with two of his book’s most important metaphors, “the Emerald City consensus is as defunct as the Boone City consensus that preceded it.” And, echoing the Book of Daniel (“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. 5:27), he makes this Owl of Minerva judgment:

The post-Cold War recipe for renewing the American Century has been tried and found wanting. A patently amoral economic system has produced neither justice nor equality, and will not. Grotesquely expensive and incoherent national security policies have produced neither peace nor a compliant imperium, and will not. A madcap conception of freedom unmoored from any overarching moral framework has fostered neither virtue nor nobility nor contentment, and won't anytime soon. Sold by its masterminds as a formula for creating a prosperous and powerful nation in which all citizens might find opportunities to flourish, it has yielded no such thing. This, at least, describes the conclusion reached by disenchanted Americans in numbers sufficient to elect as president someone vowing to run the post-Cold War consensus through a shredder.

His “Acknowledgements” at the book’s end is dated April 2019, so he might well word some of his assessments about the Trump Presidency a bit differently in January 2020, when it was published. Not many people would be writing at the time of publication, for instance: "Despite U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran and the other signatories to the agreement remained in full compliance with its terms. If Trump's action was intended to provoke the Iranian government into some action that could be construed as a casus belli, as Iranophobes clearly hoped, it failed."

Iran just announced it will no longer abide by the terms of the JCPOA. And on the first weekend of January, war with Iran looked like a distinct and immediate possibility.

But his point in this concluding chapter where those sentences appear is that democracy in America still has a immediate fighting chance and that even a clumsy pullback from some of intrusive military policies of the Emerald City consensus is not automatically the catastrophe that military contractors and their lobbyists might want us to believe. It’s always possible that in a couple of years, that might sound like false optimism, i.e., things aren’t all that bad, perhaps the most dangerous self-reassurance for a democracy under immediate threat.

But no one reading this book will think its author imagines Trumpism to be harmless. On the contrary, he’s making a point that Bernie Sanders supporters will recognize and applaud, that Trumpism isn’t a fluke or a singular threat: it’s an understandable and undesirable result of the failures of a neoliberal order and an excessively interventionist and hubristic foreign policy, which Clintonites and Cheneyites and Obamaites were very much part of constructing. And he also takes full account of the fact that much of what Trump claims as his accomplishments are puffery, bluff, and a large quantity of hot air.

In a Niebuhrian world haunted by Original Sin, nobody gets off the hook.

Yet Bacevich isn’t looking for some alternative utopia of easy harmony. In fact, he makes an argument that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (who advocate a 21st-century version of Madison's Federalist #10 theory of democratic polöitical conflict) would appreciate:

... the immediate need is not to impose a new consensus, but to allow serious debate. In a country as deeply divided as the United States, the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning. Americans deserve choices that go beyond Trump vs. Clinton or Republicans vs. Democrats or what currently passes for conservative vs. what gets labeled progressive.

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 2 of 4)

Bacevich implicitly uses 1991 as the end of the Cold War, a more clearly defined dividing point than the Owl of Minerva can usually identify. He takes the war that year to push Iraq out of Kuwait as the historical demarcation line, a conflict called at the time the Gulf War. (The beginning of the Cold War is conventionally dated somewhere between 1945 to 1948.)

The Emerald City Presidencies

The press and public perception of that war would prove to be a crucial element of the often miserable US experiences with wars the next three decades:

The conclusion of the Cold War showed that the U.S. military could win without fighting. The Persian Gulf War showed not only that America's armed forces could still fight, but that they were seemingly invincible.

So the nation's military narrative added a chapter: After Vietnam there now came Desert Storm. The latter did not expunge the former. Yet the military failure in Southeast Asia now lost much of its relevance. By putting a ragtag Iraqi army to flight, the United States had emphatically "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it at the time. With that, reticence about using force evaporated, especially in elite circles. In a post-Cold War world that awaited shaping, America's manifest superiority in all things military positioned it to do whatever needed to be done.

This is key to understanding Bacevich’s understanding of what the book’s subtitle describes as the US squandering its Cold War victory and the destructive hubris that was integral to it. Freed from the balance-of-power considerations of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the policy limits imposed by the negative public view of the Vietnam War, the US could now indulge in war after war without the prospect of a major domestic political backlash.

Bacevich quotes a prime example of the American Exceptionalist rhetoric characteristic of the Emerald City era, this one from Colin Powell in 1992:

No other nation on earth has the power we possess. More important, no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead. If the free world is to harvest the hope and fulfill the promise that our great victory in the Cold War has offered us, America must shoulder the responsibility of its power. The last best hope of earth has no other choice. We must lead.

In reality, the enormous popularity that President G.W. Bush enjoyed in 1991 after the successful conclusion of the war with Iraq did not prove sufficient to get him re-elected against Bill Clinton in 1992.

As the Owl of Minerva can now clearly see, the “successful” conclusion of the First Gulf War actually meant continuing low-level air war of the US against Iraq, punctuated by the big escalation of the very unfortunately named Operation Desert Fox in 1998. (See: Andrew Corseman, The Military Effectiveness Of Desert Fox: A Warning About the Limits of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Joint Vision 2010 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 02/16/1999)

It led further – by the conscious decision of the Cheney-Bush Administration with the explicit support of leading Democratic Senators including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry – to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose very deadly consequences are still playing out in 2020. The Iraq War also dramatically increased the regional power of Iran by removing the balancing power of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq. And, of course, at the time Bacevich’s book appeared in January 2020, the US was on the verge of war with Iran.

Bacevich traces the broad path of US wars and assertions of military dominance through the Clinton Administration and its interventions in the Balkan Wars:

In the ceaselessly updated chronicle of the American military experience, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns - Operation Deliberate Force, lasting just three weeks in the late summer of 1995, and Operation Allied Force, spread across seventy-eight days in the spring of 1999-have long since been crowded out. Both featured what military theorists were then calling "precision bombing." In both cases, American air forces operated at high altitudes and faced negligible resistance, with U.S. losses all but nonexistent.

... during Clinton's eight-year tenure as commander in chief, these were the only victories the U.S. military was able to claim. As such, at least for a time, they shaped American expectations regarding the use of force. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. [The military idea of] Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.

While stressing this feature of the Clinton Administration that continued the hubristic direction of Emerald City, he makes it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration took a qualitative (and bad) next step:

The central theme of Bill Clinton's tenure in office had been globalization. The central theme of George W. Bush's tenure became war, which some in his administration conceived as a sort of complement to globalization - another approach to bringing the world into conformity with American preferences. While Clinton had dabbled in war, the events of September 11 prompted Bush to embrace it wholeheartedly. Wars that still today follow their meandering course ultimately consumed his presidency.

The name devised to justify those conflicts-the Global War on Terrorism - amounted to an exercise in misdirection. … As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate. Indeed, much like the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861 or the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst. [my emphasis]

And he describes the various arrogant assumptions that flourished in the Bush-Cheney foreign policy that “went altogether off the rails”, a task which Bacevich was diligently performing in real time during that Presidency in his published work and public appearances:

The Bush Eschatology struck me even then as vainglorious, if not altogether blasphemous. Yet by no means did it signify a fundamental change in the trajectory of post-Cold War American statecraft. On the contrary, it reaffirmed in the strongest possible terms the premises underlying those policies. [my emphasis]

Noting that he himself voted twice for Obama as President, he carefully points out what he sees as Obama’s positive accomplishment. But Obama did not break from the four elements that Bacevich identifies as characterizing the Emerald City era, despite the symbolically transformative nature of the election of the first African-American President.

Obama “saved globalized neoliberalism”, he writes, but did not substantively transform it. “Sadly, the mendacity and malfeasance that had paved the way for the Great Recession went essentially unpunished.” Through policies like his escalation in the Afghanistan War, the failure to fully extricate American troops from Iraq, his extensive use of drone attacks, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, Obama modified but did not fundamentally alter the kind of militarized global dominance approach of the post-1989 era.

He has a particular criticism of this moment in the Libya intervention when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the torture-murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by rebels:

On March 19, Western air attacks on the Gaddafi regime commenced. By October, the regime had collapsed and Gaddafi himself was dead. On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, "We came, we saw, he died."

Yet liquidating Gaddafi no more settled the matter than the fall of Baghdad ended the Iraq War. His ouster merely paved the way for a years-long civil war. As Libya descended into anarchy, the United States largely washed its hands of further responsibility. Years later, Clinton was still insisting that the intervention she had done so much to promote exemplified "smart power at its best," the apparent measure of merit being not the results achieved but the dearth of U.S. combat casualties.

... I also found her premature and unseemly victory dance regarding Libya indicative of someone possessed of a dangerously deficient understanding of war. [my emphasis]

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

Again on the Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbard controversy

Since I mentioned the current Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbart flap in a long previous post, I'm going to follow up with a couple of links and some comments.

The Clinton statements in question came in an October 17 interview with David Plouffe on his podcast, Campaign HQ. The interview is around 45 minutes, and an interesting and informative one. Hillary is smart and has an incredible amount of experience in politics and law.

The Tulsi Gabbart moment comes in the second half. PolitiFact has provided a partial transcript that includes the Gabbart part. (Miriam Valverde, In Context: Hillary Clinton on Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump campaign and Russia 10/22/2019) This is from the transcript, talking about the 2020 general election and assuming that Trump will be the Republican candidate:

Clinton: "Well, I think there's going to be two parts and I think it's going to be the same as 2016: ‘Don't vote for the other guy. You don't like me? Don't vote for the other guy because the other guy is going to do X, Y and Z or the other guy did such terrible things and I'm going to show you in these, you know, flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they're on the dark web, and nobody can find them, but you're going to see them and you're going to see that person doing these horrible things.’"

"They're also going to do third party again. And I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, 'cause she's also a Russian asset."

Plouffe: (Inaudible)

Clinton: "Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally.

"And so, they know they can't win without a third party candidate and, so, I don't know who it's going to be it but I will guarantee you they'll have a vigorous third party challenge in the key states that they most need it."

The part that PolitiFact quotes begins in the podcast at around 33:00 minutes.

After listening to the whole podcast, my judgment is still that Clinton was strongly implying that Tulsi Gabbard is being groomed by Russia to be a spoiler third party candidate. She doesn't use Gabbard's name, but I've yet to see anyone suggest she was talking about Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Amy Klobuchar. Even in the quote included above, it also sounds like she's implying that Gabbard is a "Russian asset" like she specifically accuses Jill Stein of being.

Anyone can misspeak. But Hillary Clinton is not exactly new to giving media interviews. And as the rest of the interview shows, she's able to deliver her points articulately and convincingly. Earlier in the interview at around 22:00, she talks about Trump's campaign and Russian interference and how she expects it to happen again in 2020. After the interview is over, Plouffe also assumed that she was talking about Tulsi Gabbard in that section quoted above.

So that's my reading of what she was saying about Tulsi Gabbard without naming her explicitly. And I won't recap here what I said about why that's problematic in my earlier post.

But I would also encourage people to listen to the postcast. For one thing, it's an illustration of how impressive Hillary Clinton comes across in this format, as opposed to her stump speech style. And she's providing some well-informed political analysis here. She comes across very strongly on her criticism of voter suppression.

But I will add that, unlike what she presents in this podcast, I haven't seen the evidence from the post-election voting and polling analyses that the third party voting in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was decisive to the 2016 Electoral College outcome.

What's happening in northern Syria and whose talking points are what?

The political Twitterverse this weekend was buzzing about Hillary Clinton's strange, insinuated-but-clear accusation that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is some kind of tool of the Russian government.

I have big reservations about Gabbard as a politician. Her continuing friendliness to Hindu fundamentalism and her apparent Islamophobia add up to what looks too much like a "War on Terror" foreign policy orientation for my liking.

But if you're going to accuse someone of being a Russian agent or puppet or something similar, whether directly or by heavy-handed insinuation, you should be able to point to something more substantial than some foreign policy position that may not be in direct opposition to the Russian government's position of the moment. And since we know from what's in the public record about Russian political propaganda efforts in US elections that they try to spread confusion on all sides, it's likely that every member of Congress takes some political position that Russian bots propagate to someone on some platform.

The spread of political ideas and philosophies has never been limited to official political boundaries. And all of foreign policy from whatever ideological viewpoint involves with making choices about which other nations' political positions one approves or wants to work with and those one prefers to oppose. Every international treaty is a formal recognition of shared positions by the participating nations on the subject of the treaty.

That's why I find myself asking questions like this into the Twitter chaos:

When we are talking about direct violations of American election law, such as the one documented in the now infamous summary of President Trump's call with the Ukrainian President released by Trump's own White House, that really is pretty straightforward. Dubious business and financial arrangements, domestic as well as foreign, and self-dealing in violation of the Emoluments Clause, are real issues for the Trump family. (And the Bush family, too!)

In Hillary Clinton pushes theory that Russia is "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard — who hits back on Twitter Salon 10/18/2019, Igor Derysh writes, "CNN commentator Bakari Sellers declared that Gabbard is the 'antithesis' of what the Democratic field stands for and claimed 'there is no question that Tulsi Gabbard … is a puppet for the Russian government'." One would hope that people making such a charge can show more than vague suspicions to back that up.

On the other hand, lazy thinking about foreign policy is lazy thinking, whatever country's momentary position may happen to correlate with it.

That struck me in this commentary on the current crisis in northern Syria from Maximilian Popp. He's one of the authors of a story in the current print addition of Der Spiegel (43:2019), "Der Machtwechsel". According to him,  Vladimir Putin now personally controls Syria. Popp gives a video commentary in Europas Versagen, that indulges in some surprisingly simplistic assumptions. Am I exaggerating? Here is my transcript and English translation from the German:

Eigentlich ist der Krieg jetzt für Assad und für allem auch für Putin gewonnen. Der Westen hat kapituliert, die USA ist zurückgezogen, die Europäer spielen ohnehin keine Rolle. Die Autokraten, spricht Putin, Assad und Tayyip Erdoğan teilen Syrien jetzt unter sich auf.

Bis vor eine Woche, bis vor dem Einmarsch der Türkei in Nordösten Syriens, kontrolliert die YPG, also die Kurden, ein Drittel syrischen Staatgebietes. And da sie war mit den USA verbündet waren, kann man sagen auch die USA hatten eine gewisse Kontrolle über diese Region. Das gilt jetzt nicht mehr. Die Kurden haben um sich vor Erdoğan zu schützen, Assad zurück zu Hilfe [gerufen?].

Assads Truppen sind einmarschiert, damit ist das Projekt der kurdischen Selbstverwaltung gescheitert. Und Assad ist wieder am Ruder, kann aber allein nicht regieren. Er ist abhängig von Putin, seiner Schutzmacht. Putin ist der eigentliche Herrscher über Syrien, und in Wahrheit passiert in Syrien was Putin will.

Das gilt für Assad aber auch für Erdoğan. Der Erdoğan bekommt seine Pufferzone, die er auch mit dieser Invasion anstrebte nur dann wenn Putin es zulässt. ...

Dann man muss sich erinnern, Assad ist der, wurde ich sagen, schlimmste Diktator, größte Massenmörder, des 21.Jahrhunderts. Und mit Hilfe Putins, und mit Hilfe einer rücklosen Kriegführung, eine Reihe von Kriegsverbrechen, ist den Beide gelungen, ihrer Macht zu konsolidieren. Assad ist jetzt stärker als je zuvor. Und das ist ein Trauerspiel, das ist eine Tragödie für die Menschen Syrien, aber auch alle die an Demokratie, Rechtstaatlichkeit und Gerechtigkeit glauben. [meine Hervorhebungen]

[In fact, the war is now won for Assad and, above all, for Putin. The West has capitulated, the US has withdrawn, the Europeans are not playing a role anyway. The autocrats, Putin, Assad and Tayyip Erdoğan are now dividing Syria among themselves.

Until a week ago, before Turkey invaded northern Syria, the YPG, i.e. the Kurds, controlled a third of Syria's territory. And since it was allied with the US, one can say the US also had some control over this region. That is no longer the case. The Kurds have called Assad back to help in order to protect themselves from Erdoğan.

Assad's forces have invaded, so the project of Kurdish self-government has failed. And Assad is back at the helm, but cannot govern alone. He is dependent on Putin, his protective power. Putin is the real ruler of Syria, and the truth is that what Putin wants is happening in Syria.

This applies to Assad, but also to Erdoğan. Erdoğan will get his buffer zone, which he sought with this invasion, only if Putin allows it. ...

Then you have to remember, Assad is the, I would say, the worst dictator, the greatest mass murderer, of the 21st century. And with the help of Putin, and with the help of a ruthless brand of warfare, a series of war crimes, both have succeeded in consolidating their power. Assad is stronger than ever. And this is a tragedy for the people of Syria, but also for all those who believe in democracy, the rule of law and justice.] {my emphasis}

The idea that the US had a certain amount of control over the self-administered Kurdish area prior to Trump greenlighting Turkey's invasion is probably a bit of a stretch. The US troops were there as a material sign that the US policy was for both Assad and Turkey to not attack the Kurds.

But Putin is the real ruler of Syria? This is fantasy land. As the Spiegel article reports, Russia has also been playing a complicated diplomatic-military game involving Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Syria has reportedly agreed with the Kurdish YPG to attack the Islamist-fundamentalist anti-Assad rebels in Erbil province, which can easily exacerbate the refugee problem for Turkey and potentially Europe. Erdoğan is scheduled to meet with Putin in Moscow this week. (Turkey's Erdogan to travel to Russia for talks with Putin Aljazeera 10/18/2019)

Russia has an economy around the size of Italy's. Its military budget is reportedly a little more than that of Germany and France combined. Their occupation of Crimea and support for separatists in Ukraine is straining their resources. They have a quite a long border with China, with whom they currently have peaceful relations but they also know they have to be prepared to defend that border. Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons, and the whole world urgently needs to take nuclear nonproliferation and arms reduction much more seriously.

But political commentators need to look at maps sometimes. Does it look like Syria is closer to the US or to Russia? EU and NATO members Greece and Bulgaria are kind of close. Greece, Italy, and other EU nations are affected by the massive refugee crisis the Syrian civil war has caused. So is Turkey, which is Syria's direct neighbor and a NATO member.

But whatever regional security interests Russia perceives that require involving itself in the multiple conflicts in Syria, it's certainly not controlling events there. The far more economically and militarily powerful United States found that remaking Iraq, Syria, and even Iran according to its liking - the dream of the neocons backing the disastrous Iraq War - has turned out to be remarkably complicated.

And when it comes to identifying what "Russian talking points" are, the current Syria-Turkey-Kurdish situation offers quite a few possibilities. The Russians have provided aid to the Kurds, and the Syrians who are supported by Russia are also teaming with the Russians to attack the Islamist anti-Assad rebels in Idlib. That may not entirely please currently Russia-friendly Turkey, which has provided support for just such anti-Assad rebels in the past. Plus, Russia-friendly Turkey is currently invading Russia-friendly Syria in violation of international law which all United Nations members including the US recognize as legitimate. Turkey is a NATO ally of the US. And the Kurds were informal US allies two weeks or so ago.

So I'm pretty sure that someone can be pro- or anti-Assad, pro- or anti-Turkey, pro- or anti-Kurds, pro- or anti- the anti-Assad rebels in Idlib that may be pro-Turkey and/or pro-US or used to be, and still manage to be using Russian, Turkish, Kurdish, US, and/or Syrian talking points at the same time.

And at the same time you might find yourself also agreeing with an awful guy like Pat Buchanan. And maybe disagreeing at the same time, too. (Is Putin Really the New King of the Middle East? The American Conservative 10/18/2019)

Also, a week from now, there could be a whole set of new talking points.

It's not an argument for ignoring the Syrian situation just because it's complicated. It's important for Americans, not least because it seems for the moment to have raised the possibility of actually impeaching Trump and remove him from office. I'm just saying we shouldn't be relying or dumb or simplistic assumptions about it. Unless you're Donald Trump, in which case you really can't make any different kind of assumptions.

That whole Jill Stein thing in 2016 again …

Ruy Teixeira has written a useful short article on the perennially important theological question of whether Green Party candidate Jill Stein cost Hillary Clinton the Presidential election in 2016: Did Third Parties Sink Hillary Clinton in 2016? American Prospect 08/29/2019.

He deals with the effect of third-party Presidential candidates more generally, which include Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) and Evan McMullin (Independent), not only Jill Stein.

Teixeira refers to a study, whose conclusions he summarizes this way:

Trump still wins the electoral vote [in an estimate without the two small parties], only by a larger margin, 309–229. This is because he still carries the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while also carrying New Hampshire by a narrow margin. This makes sense when one considers the actual distribution of the third-party vote in these states: Michigan, Johnson 3.6 percent/Stein 1.1 percent; New Hampshire, Johnson 4.9/Stein .9; Pennsylvania, Johnson 2.4/Stein .8; Wisconsin, Johnson 3.6/Stein 1.

So the third-party effect is not necessarily anti-Democratic. And Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 election because of it.

Yes, that sound you hear is the anguished screaming of corporate Democrats for whom Jill Stein will forever be a Putin stooge who put Trump in the White House by denying her the Electoral College votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

From the figures quoted above - Michigan, Johnson 3.6%, Stein; Pennsylvania J 2.4%, S 1.1%; Wisconsin J 3.6%, S 1.1%:

• If Johnson had not been in the race, and
• If Stein had still been in the race, and
• If all Johnson's voters had still voted, and
• If all of them had gone to Clinton,
• Then Clinton might have won.

Also:

• If neither Stein nor Johnson had been in the race, and
• If all Stein’s and Johnson’s voters had still voted, and
• If more than half of the Stein and Johnson voters had gone to Clinton,
• Then Maybe Clinton would have won.

I didn’t crunch the numbers any more exactly. But Teixeira’s figures put the Jill Stein question in the right context.

While Libertarian voters are closer to Republicans positions and Greens closer to the Democrats’, it would be wrong to simply assume that all the Libertarian voters would have gone to Trump and the Greens to Clinton.

But third party voters wouldn’t all have gone to their supposedly corresponding major party. Some of them wouldn’t have voted, or just wrote some candidate in. If either Stein or Johnson had not been there and the other was, some Johnson voters would have gone to Stein and vice versa. It’s likely that some Stein voters were confused enough to have voted for Trump. The Johnson voters would have probably gone more for Trump than Clinton, which is why Johnson’s absence from the race wouldn’t necessarily have put Clinton over the top.

The study to which Teixeira referred is now entirely new. Its publication date is April 2008, America’s Electoral Future Demographic Shifts and the Future of the Trump Coalition, authored by Teixeira, Robert Griffin and William Frey.

That’s not to say that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will attempt to play strategic games to use third parties against the other side. Politics is politics. But evidence-based analysis of politics is generally preferable to the alternatives.

Das ganze Jill Stein Ding im Jahr 2016 wieder ...

Ruy Teixeira hat einen nützlichen kurzen Artikel über die immer wichtigere theologische Frage geschrieben, ob die Kandidatin der Grünen, Jill Stein, Hillary Clinton die amerikanische Präsidentschaftswahl 2016 gekostet hat:Did Third Parties Sink Hillary Clinton in 2016? American Prospect 29.08.2019

Er beschäftigt sich mit der Wirkung von Drittkandidaten im Allgemeinen Präsidentschaftswahl, zu denen Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) und Evan McMullin (Unabhängig) gehören, nicht nur Jill Stein.

Teixeira bezieht sich auf eine Studie, deren Schlussfolgerungen er so zusammenfasst:

[in einer Schätzung ohne die beiden kleinen Parteien] gewinnt Trump die Wahl immer noch, nur mit einem größeren Vorsprung, 309-229. Das liegt daran, dass er immer noch die Schlüsselstaaten Michigan, Pennsylvania und Wisconsin trägt, während er auch New Hampshire mit einem knappen Vorsprung trägt. Das macht Sinn, wenn man die tatsächliche Verteilung der Dritt-Parteien-Stimmen in diesen Staaten betrachtet: Michigan, Johnson 3,6 Prozent/Stein 1,1 Prozent; New Hampshire, Johnson 4.9/Stein .9; Pennsylvania, Johnson 2.4/Stein .8; Wisconsin, Johnson 3.6/Stein 1.

Der Effekt Dritter Parteien hat also nicht unbedingt die Demokratische Partei geschadet. Und Hillary Clinton hat die Wahl 2016 dadurch nicht verloren.

Ja, dieser Ton, den Sie hören, ist das ängstliche Schreien der Demokraten, für die Jill Stein für immer ein Putin-Stooge sein wird, der Trump ins Weiße Haus brachte, indem er ihr die Stimmen des Electoral College von Michigan, Pennsylvania und Wisconsin verweigerte. Aus den oben genannten Zahlen - Michigan, Johnson 3,6%, Stein; Pennsylvania J 2,4%, S 1,1%; Wisconsin J 3,6%, S 1,1%:

• Wäre Johnson nicht im Rennen gewesen, und
• Wenn Stein noch im Rennen gewesen wäre, und
• Hätten alle Steins Wähler noch abgestimmt, und
• Wenn sie alle zu Clinton gegangen wären, dann Clinton hätte gewinnen können.

Auch:

• Wenn weder Stein noch Johnson im Rennen gewesen wären, und
• Wenn alle Wähler von Stein und Johnson noch abgestimmt hätten und
• Wenn mehr als die Hälfte der Stein- und Johnson-Wähler zu Clinton gegangen wäre,
• Dann Vielleicht hätte Clinton gewonnen.

Ich habe die Zahlen nicht genauer geknackt. Doch Teixeiras Zahlen stellen die Jill-Stein-Frage in den richtigen Kontext.

Obwohl die libertären Wähler den Positionen der Republikaner und den Grünen näher an den Demokraten sind, wäre es falsch, einfach davon auszugehen, dass alle libertären Wähler zu Trump und die Grünen zu Clinton gegangen wären.

Aber dritt-parteiliche Wähler wären nicht alle zu ihrer angeblich entsprechenden großen Partei gegangen. Einige von ihnen hätten nicht abgestimmt oder einfach nur einen Kandidaten hineingeschrieben. Wenn Stein oder Johnson nicht da gewesen wären und der andere war es, wären einige Johnson-Wähler zu Stein gegangen und umgekehrt. Es ist wahrscheinlich, dass einige Stein-Wähler so verwirrt waren, dass sie für Trump gestimmt hätten. Die Johnson-Wähler wären wahrscheinlich mehr zu Trump gegangen als Clinton, weshalb Johnsons Abwesenheit aus dem Rennen Clinton nicht unbedingt an die Spitze gebracht hätte.

Die Studie, auf die Teixeira Bezug genommen hat, ist nicht völlig neu. Das Veröffentlichungsdatum ist April 2008, America es Electoral Future Demographic Shifts and the Future of the Trump Coalition, verfasst von Teixeira, Robert Griffin und William Frey.

Das soll nicht heißen, dass weder die Republikaner noch die Demokraten versuchen werden, strategische Spiele zu spielen, um eine dritte Partei gegen die andere Seite einzusetzen. Politik ist Politik. Aber eine evidenzbasierte Analyse der Politik ist im Allgemeinen den Alternativen vorzuziehen.

Should Democrats pursue a duck-and-cover strategy on race-related issue in 2019-20?

Paul Starr provides kind of flashback to the Democratic politics of 1991 and the years of the Clinton Presidency in Reparations, Really? American Prospect 04/24/2019. It's a column basically saying the Democrats should never ever have publicly considered the idea of reparations for slavery.

He does talk about issues related to reparations in the context of insisting that the Democrats should discuss only "race-neutral" proposals.

Reparations for slavery is a complicated issue. And, aside from the political marketing worries, I've yet to be convinced that legally and admistratively that the US would be able to design a program that obviously reasonable and fair. Or maybe I should say, "obviously reasonable and fair in the view of Republicans." Because they don't even want black people to be able to vote. They might not want to roll back the 13th Amendment. But they're not so thrilled with the 14th and the 15th.

In fact, the 14th Amendment includes this provision, "neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."

If reparations continue to be a live issue, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some Republicans demand that this portion of the 15th Amendment be changed so that the US Treasury can pay the debts of the Confederate States of America. As long as it benefits mainly the already wealthy, of course.

Because the Republicans have finally morphed into a white nationalist party headed by Donald Trump, the President who regards neo-Nazis as "very fine people". They accuse the whole Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin of being socialists who want to give white people's money to undeserving blacks and Latinos. And they're not likely to stop any time in the future.

But that doesn't mean the Democrats should hide under the bed rather than discuss serious ideas and proposals, including reparations for slavery. What Paul Starr argues that duck-and-cover is the best approach on this issue. And he partly expressses it in vintage 1991 terms:

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon must be smiling from ear to ear and celebrating their good fortune whenever they hear one of the Democratic presidential candidates endorsing a bill to establish a commission to study reparations for descendants of slaves — a proposal that everyone will take as preliminary to support for financial reparations. It's the sort of idea Trump and Bannon can work with, to expand and lock down Republican support among white voters next year.

Not every idea with a moral justification has a political justification in an imperfect world. If Democrats fail to win the 2020 election, Trump will have an opportunity to bring about deeper and more durable change in his second term than in his first. For one thing, he’ll likely be able to add two more conservatives to the Supreme Court, replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and a 7-2 right-wing Court could radically alter legal doctrine in every sphere, including civil rights.

This is pretty much the state in which the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders have been for decades. It's symptomatic of the kind of historical trauma Rick Perlstein discusses in his interview with Isaac Chotiner, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future New Yorker 01/10/2019. The "Clintonian" mode of the Democratic Party was to accept the broad Republican framing of issues but presentiong a more compassionate version of them. Or a least a less mean version. Not normally stated publicly but implicit in that approach was that black voters would have no place else to go politically.

But a signficant element of that was to try to show voters that the Democrats were not catering to black voters and were at least somewhat sympathetic to the concerns of whites racist. Bill Clinton presented a prototype version of this kind of performance with his "Sistah Soljah moment." (Rosie Swash, Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment tops year of political controversy Guardian 06/13/2011)

Here's a video of Clinton from Memoryretro at YouTube speaking in 1992 at a meeting of the Rainbow Coalition led by Jesse Jackson showing the actual Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment - JUNE 13, 1992:

I haven't heard the recording in a long time. And I'm struck at how crass and petty it comes across with Clinton attacking a young hip-hip artist that most white people in the US had never heard of at the time. It was a cheap shot. And not one against racist Republican politicians. There was no meaningful group of swing voters in 1992 who actually thought that Bill Clinton and the Democrats advocated randomly murdering white people, which the snippets from the singer's over-the-top words that Clinton criticized suggested. In fact, since most voters would never have associated Clinton with the hip-hop singer they didn't know existed ifl Clinton hadn't attacked her, I wouldn't be surprised if the effect wasn't to associate Clinton and the Democrats with her words in the minds of whites who wouldn't consider voting for Democrats anyway.

Here was Hillary Clinton in 1996, the next Presidential election year, continuing the approach (1996: Hillary Clinton on "superpredators" C-Span; uploaded to YouTube 02/25/2016):

Hillary there was speaking in support of the controversial Clinton Crime Bill, aka, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (Jessica Lussenhop, Clinton crime bill: Why is it so controversial? BBC News Magazine 04/18/2016) In a contemporary account, Tony Poveda described how, compared to previous decades, the bipartisan support for the Crime Bill was largely a result of Democrats adopting Republican positions which the Democrats had criticized for decades (Clinton, Crime, and the Justice Department Social Justice 21:3; Fall 1994):

... what is even more striking [than the bipartisanship] about the crime policy debate of the 1990s is that it has considerably narrowed in terms of the range of policy options on the table for discussion. Liberals of the 1960s often called for an examination of the root causes of crime, the rehabilitation of offenders, and for procedural safeguards in the administration of justice. Conservatives of that period, like today, emphasized punishment and crime control in their crime agenda. These poles (crime prevention versus punishment and due process versus crime control) of the traditional liberal-conservative dialogue have largely disappeared, as measures emphasizing punishment far overshadow any consideration of crime prevention.

Instead, the major policy debate in the 1990s, at least in the congressional arena and in the media, centers on the punishment/crime control end of the continuum. Both conservatives and liberals attempt to outdo each other in their posturing and proposals to be increasingly punitive toward criminals.

While the Democrats may have been more supportive of civil rights generally, there was a huge racial component behind this crime policy. As Jessica Lussenhop writes, the 1994 Crime Bill wasn't the only cause of the mass incarceration of black men that has produced the current situation. However, "At minimum, says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, the bill reinforced the popular thinking that the solution to crime was harsher punishments." (Jerry Brown, who didn't hold public office at the time, was highly critical of the Crime Bill.)

The Sacramento Bee editorial board recalled those days in 2016. The "three strikes" refernce is to a type of mandatory sentencing laws that were becoming an unfortunate fad at the time:

Those “three strikes” Clinton talked about were well on their way to becoming law in California in 1994, when the Legislature and voters were galvanized by the murder of Polly Klaas. Proposition 184 passed overwhelmingly.

“The majority of both houses of the Legislature and the overwhelming majority of the public are in a mind to put people away forever for jaywalking, period,” said then-[California lAsembly] Speaker Willie Brown, one of only nine Assembly members to vote against the measure. “That is the mentality that is going to prevail.”

A lighter version of “three strikes” also became the centerpiece of Clinton’s federal crime bill. It was that 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that pushed the nation over the edge, one of a string of tough-on-crime measures that bloated the prison system and disproportionately decimated poor communities of color.

It’s what people, particularly young people who grew up in the lock-’em-up era, remember most. This is definitely true in New York, where voters head to the polls Tuesday to pick a nominee for president, and in California, where voters will have their say in June. [my emphasis]

The argument to sell Clinton-style "triangulation" to Democratic constituencies was the one Paul Starr uses in the quote above: Democratic Presidents are at least a little better than Republicans. So vote for (so-called) electable centrists even in the primaries because judges. Between 1994 and today, the Republicans have chosen a big majority of the current federal judges. They control the Senate and were crass about just blocking Barack Obama's last Supreme Court nominee on partisan grounds. Given that reality, it's hard to argue that the Democrats' longtime duck-and-cover centrist posture has protected the federal judiciary from become a Federalist Society colony.

Starr cites an article from The American Prospect itself from 1990 by William Julius Wilson (Race-Neutral Policies and the Democratic Coalition Spring 1990) that argued for the distance-yourselves-from-black-people approach of the Democrats. Starr notes that Wilson had by 2011 decided that affirmative action programs were okay, putting him at least as far left as the Nixon Administration in 1972. Starr quotes part of this passage from Wilson's 1990 piece:

Many white Americans have turned, not against blacks, but against a strategy that emphasizes programs perceived to benefit only racial minorities. In the 1990s the party needs to promote new policies to fight inequality that differ from court-ordered busing, affirmative action programs, and antidiscrimination lawsuits of the recent past. By stressing coalition politics and race-neutral programs such as full employment strategies, job skills training, comprehensive health care, reforms in the public schools, child care legislation, and prevention of crime and drug abuse, the Democrats can significantly strengthen their position. As [Party] Chairman [Ron] Brown himself has emphasized, reinforcing Democratic loyalty among minorities and reaching out to reclaim white support are not mutually exclusive.

Such a change of emphasis is overdue. In the 1960s efforts to raise the public's awareness and conscience about the plight of black Americans helped to enact civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. However, by the 1980s the civil rights strategy of dramatizing black disadvantage was backfiring. The "myth of black progress" theme, frequently invoked to reinforce arguments for stronger race-specific programs, played easily into the hands of conservative critics of antibias policies. The strategy reinforced the erroneous impression that federal antidiscrimination efforts had largely failed, and it overlooked the significance of complex racial changes since the mid-1960s. It also aroused concern that Democratic politicians' sensitivity to black complaints had come at the expense of the white majority. [my emphasis]

Yet Wilson also argued in that article, "while income inequality widened generally in America during the 1980s, it widened even more dramatically among black Americans." He recognizes that the "myth of black progress" was in significant part a myth. So how is it a good thing for Democratic politicians and activists to try to ignore the underlying reality? Especially for such an important part of their own political base?

There will always be conservatives warning Democrats to beware of the "white backlash," a term to which the history of slavery and segregation gives a grim double meaning. The problem is, there has been a significant number of whites "backlashing" since the moment Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. The reality in 1990 and today is that Democrats can't successfully counter white backlash by adopting the "backlash" positions themselves. Or by pretending that the problems caused by white racism don't exist.

It would be more meaningful in 2019 to argue that the Democrats should be aggressive in addressing the problems affecting the base because judges. And because a lot more, too. But Starr argues instead that even suggesting that there's anything remotely substantive in the issue of reparations for slavery has practically doomed the Democrats' chances for 2020: "African Americans may or may not ever receive reparations, but the 2020 Democratic candidates who are moving in that direction have already given Trump and Bannon a priceless gift."

In other words, keep on with this version of the Democratic approach to fighting the Republicans. Or, too often, not fighting.

The Libyan intervention of 2011 and the ongoing results

Andreas Baumer in Business Insider Deutschland provides a good recap of the US-British-French NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, which failed to win a UN Security Council endorsement due to vetos by Russia and China, Wankelmütiger Riese: Die Libyen-Krise offenbart das ganze Dilemma Deutschlands 08.04.2019:

Was danach passierte, ist schnell erzählt. Die Nato griff tatsächlich in den libyschen Bürgerkrieg ein und zwar weitaus entschiedener, als Russland und China das wollten. Statt nur eine Flugverbotszone einzurichten, bombardierten Nato-Flieger Gaddafis Truppen. Auch mit Nato-Hilfe stürzten die Rebellen den Diktator und töteten ihn grausam.

Der Wiederaufbau des Landes ging danach gründlich schief, auch weil USA und Europa zunehmend das Interesse am Land verloren. Eine stabile nationale Regierung hat Libyen seitdem nie wieder bekommen. Im Osten des Landes ist General [Chalifa] Haftar der starke Mann. Im Westen hatte bislang die international anerkannte Regierung um Sarradsch das Sagen. Zwischendrin kämpfen lokale Milizen um Macht und Pfründe. Libyen ist das Sorgenkind in Nordafrika.

My translation:

What happened after that [the Security Council vote] is quickly told. NATO actually intervened in the Libyan civil war, and far more decisively than Russia and China wanted. Instead of just establishing a oo-fly  zone, NATO planes bombed Gaddafi's forces. And with NATO help, the rebels overthrew the dictator and cruelly killed him.

The reconstruction of the country went fundamentally wrong afterwards, partly because the United States and Europe increasingly lost interest in the country. Since then, Libya has never regained since then. In the east of the country, General [Chalifa] Haftar is the strongman. In the West, the internationally recognized government around Sarradsch has been in charge up until now. In between, local Militias are fighting for power and sinecures. Libya is the problem child in North Africa.

It's worth recalling how Obama's Secretary of State celebrating the seeming victory in Libya at the time, Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died CBS News 10/20/2011:

Not the most distinguished moment of the Obama Administration.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are together on supporting the Trump-Pence regime change operation in Venezuela. At least on Saturday.

If I were Al Bundy from Married With Children, this is where I would say, "Just shoot me now."

The 1980s reference is not an accident. That was the time of Reagan Administration. When Elliott Abrams and Ollie North were spreading death and disaster inCentrola America and screwing up royally and illegally on Iran.

I urge Nicolás Maduro to allow humanitarian aid inside Venezuela’s borders peacefully. People are in need of life-saving medicines, children are subsisting on one meal a day, and a peaceful delivery of food and supplies is to the benefit of all.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 23, 2019

The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 23, 2019

My God, even Shakira is joining the chorus.

I want to add my support for this initiative that aims to help the people of Venezuela, who are suffering one of the worst crises in their history. Shakhttps://t.co/phtYlIHbjT@VenezuelaAid #AidVenezuela #AyudaVenezuela #VenezuelaAidLive pic.twitter.com/zdOtFqmOXz

— Shakira (@shakira) February 22, 2019

No matter how many political or show business stars sign on to today's manuever that's very clearly aimed at creating a pretext for direct US military intervention, it's still a really bad idea.

Elliott Abrams is the Trump-Pierce Administration's special envoy in charge of this regime change operation. It.Will.Not.End.Well. It will not.

Some or all of those three may be looking at this as a "safe" position that doesn't explicitly endorse regime change. But echoing the Mike Peance-John Bolton-Elliott Abrams position at a critical moment is a bad move, nevertheless.

I covered some of the political calculations of Saturday's show in my previous post.

Here are some news reports for the Miami Herald from 02/23/2019:

• Maduro calls Guaidó a puppet, mocks Trump and vows he’ll never surrender
• Flaring tensions, defections at the border as first shipment of aid enters Venezuela
• National Guard fires tear gas amid Venezuela border tension
• Up to 20 injured as Maduro agents violently block aid from entering Venezuela
• The first trucks with humanitarian aid have arrived in Venezuela

Executive-dominated war policy and American Exceptionalism

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1999) was a historian who was outspoken in his activism for liberal Democratic candidates and in particular against the Vietnam War. He was known for his books like The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950) and Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). The latter expressed his continuing reverence for Enlightenment concepts of Reason. He also co-authored an influential American history textbook with Samuel Morrison and William Leuchtenburg.

Several of his essays from 1969-1974 were collected in The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character (1974). His writing made a big impression on me when I was an undergraduate. In his writing during the Vietnam War stressed how mistaken and disastrous American intervention there was. He also advocated Congressional restrictions on the President's war powers, not just in Vietnam but more broadly.

His criticisms were common among antiwar Democrats, who we might think of in retrospect as the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party at that time, during the Vietnam War. The War Powers Act was passed as a result of the Vietnam War experience, in particular. As we see in the debate over the Saudi war in Yemen, even today Congress hasn't completely forgotten that the Constitution gives Congress the decision power over war.

In theory, some conservatives and libertarians are in favor of restricting Presidential war powers. And during the Clinton Administration, the Republicans in Congress did make some effort to restrict American military action in the Balkans. Given the Congressional Republicans' responses to Trump's Presidency in 2017-18, one could be excused for doubting that Grand Old Party is all that serious about upholding the Constitutional order beyond the partisan pretence of doing so for positions they support at any given moment.

In The Defeat of America, Commager identifies two strong trends in thinking about foreign policy that he sees reaching back even before the American Revolution:

First is the assumption, or the myth, of American uniqueness - a myth which justified and encouraged the habit of isolation. Second is the assumption of the political, social and moral superiority of America - a myth which rationalized Manifest Destiny, mission, imperialism and, in our own time, the imposition on the rest of the world of something that can be called, without stretching analogies too far, a Pax Americana. [my emphasis]

These days, we talk about this cluster of attitudes as American Exceptionalism. In her campaign for President in 2016, Hillary Clinton declared in a speech to members of the archconservative Veterans for Foreign Wars (VFW), "I don't understand people who trash talk about America, who talk about us as being in decline, who act as though we are not yet the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history." (Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National Convention Telegraph) 07/25/2016 (just after 1:10 in the video):

Commager's criticisms have a radical sound today, as they did at the time. And there's nothing wrong with that, since American foreign policy has created some radical problems and made some radically bad assumptions, which by no means ended with the Vietnam War.

Referring in particular to various cases since the Second World War, including in his list the Korean War, the Truman Doctrine, and "pareticipation in the Vietnam War even before 1956", among others, he notes of those cases:

All are inspired by and directed to Communist threats, real or imagined. All are skirmishes or battles in the cold war. All are functions of our obsession with communism and of our notion that we have been chosen by providence to contain communism everywhere on the globe. Furthermore, almost all of the attitudes and gestures which distinguish the current claims for the outmost reach of the presidential power have, on closer examination, the same common denominator: namely, that when a threat of Communist conspiracy or Communist subversion is implicit or explicit in any situation, no limit can be or will be put on the executive power necessary to dispose of that threat.

If the pattern is clear, so too is its meaning. Until we can rid ourselves of our delusions of universalism and our obsessions with communism and other ideological threats which are, in last analysis, the inspiration for our war in Vietnam - we will not and cannot abate presidential abuse of power in foreign affairs.

The misuse of executive power where communism is, or appears to be, involved is not a phenomenon of the Presidency or of individual Presidents. After all, when we trace a harmonious pattern of the use of the executive power in Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, we are forced to conclude that what we have is not a manifestation of personal or even official ambition but something inherent in the Presidency and in the age in which these Presidents serve.

Nor have Presidents been alone, or even idiosyncratic, in their illusions about total power, or in their obsessions with communism.

The continuing relevance of these observations can be illustrated by employing the substitutions indicated with italics in the following to events of recent decades:

All are inspired by and directed to terrorist threats, real or imagined. All are skirmishes or battles in the War on Terrorism. All are functions of our obsession with Muslim terrorism and of our notion that we have been chosen by providence to fight terrorism  everywhere on the globe. Furthermore, almost all of the attitudes and gestures which distinguish the current claims for the outmost reach of the presidential power have, on closer examination, the same common denominator: namely, that when a threat of terrorism or Muslim extremism is implicit or explicit in any situation, no limit can be or will be put on the executive power necessary to dispose of that threat.

If the pattern is clear, so too is its meaning. Until we can rid ourselves of our delusions of universalism and our obsessions with terrorism and other ideological threats which are, in last analysis, the inspiration for our unending wars in the Greater Middle East - we will not and cannot abate presidential abuse of power in foreign affairs.

The misuse of executive power where terrorism is, or appears to be, involved is not a phenomenon of the Presidency or of individual Presidents. After all, when we trace a harmonious pattern of the use of the executive power in Ronald Reagan, both President Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump , we are forced to conclude that what we have is not a manifestation of personal or even official ambition but something inherent in the Presidency and in the age in which these Presidents serve.

Nor have Presidents been alone, or even idiosyncratic, in their illusions about total power, or in their obsessions with military intervention.

Particularly since the intervention of Russia in the 2016 Presidential election, Russia has become an image of The Enemy with more obvious resemblances to the days of the Cold War.

The point here is not that we should embrace "isolationism," which Andrew Bacevich rightly describes as more of a bogeyman than an actual policy option. That's also true of Trump's "America First" posturing, which has strong ideological echoes of Old Right Isolationism before, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Terrorism is a real problem and so is Soviet cyber-mischief. And we do have major treaty commitments to an expanded NATO, including the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that are more vulnerable to military action by Russia than were the NATO members prior to 1989.

The point is to recognize that American attitudes, fed and encouraged by some very material interests like arms manufacturers (aka, war profiteers) and energy companies, also look for a foreign policy to justify themselves. Inflated notions of an American world mission and unrealistic fears can distract from more realistic concerns. And, as Commager was very aware, they can and do create problems that could have been avoided with a little more caution and good sense.

Goya: The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters