This is a special midweek edition of TWiA, because it's less than a week before the election, and there's too much going on to wait until Friday.
Follow us on Twitter: @ThisWeekAmerica
Be sure to vote!
This Week in Emails (Part 1)
Everybody who's panicked over Friday's letter from FBI Director James Comey to Congress about "new" "Hillary Clinton" emails (which might be neither new, nor Hillary Clinton's) discovered on a computer belonging to Huma Abedin and Anthony ("Weiner") Weiner needs to step away from the ledge and take a deep breath.
First, the polls were already tightening, before Friday's news. That was expected--they do that as we get closer to the election, as the undecided voters gradually make their decisions. A certain number of those will have decided to vote for Donald Trump simply because they're Republicans or Republican-leaning. Others will make the same decision, because Clinton is the de-facto "incumbent," and undecideds, by definition, have mixed feelings about the incumbent (or their choice would have been easy, and settled a long time ago). And some of the movement may have been because of the Comey letter; it's hard to tell for sure yet. Clinton's numbers haven't gone down significantly, but Trump's have been picking up a bit. Her lead was pretty large, her position in the swing states pretty strong, but Trump was edging a little closer, mostly because he had gone for a week or so without saying something incredibly stupid or offensive, and therefore, stayed out of the headlines.
Of course, we wouldn't be where we are if Republican voters had realized early on what the world would look like if it was so rare for the President of the United States to go for a week at a time without saying something incredibly stupid or offensive.
We here at TWiA World Headquarters don't think the revival of the email controversy will ultimately have a huge impact on the presidential race. There are several reasons for this belief:
- Trump has been harping on the emails for months and months, blowing their significance way out of proportion. Nothing about the Comey letter elevates the issue to the level of importance Trump has already been claiming, falsely, that they have. So his supporters are already as agitated about the issue as they can be, and Clinton's voters have already realized they're not really that important in the greater scheme of things. If the news pushes a few more undecideds toward Trump, they probably would have gone there anyway.
- The biggest risk Clinton faced at the polls was that her supporters thought she had it in the bag. If the most important race to you is the presidency, and you think it's already won, then come election day, you might just stay home instead of fighting the lines at the polls. A little touch of panic isn't a bad thing, because it's true that this will be a close election, and it's true that it's critically important to the country that Trump not be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. So if the Comey letter scares some Clinton voters to the polls, that's good. (On the flip side, Trump supporters demoralized by his seemingly inevitable loss might also be encouraged to vote, which will still keep the election close.)
- If people are genuinely uncertain whether the email issue means Clinton is some kind of security risk, they need only look at the fact that the vast, vast majority of the national security establishment is supporting Clinton, and others haven't endorsed her but have publicly rejected Trump. The list includes all of the former presidents (except George W. Bush, who's staying mum), and a huge number of Republican luminaries, like former secretaries of state (including Gen. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, her predecessors under George W. Bush, and George Shultz, who served under Ronald Reagan), deputy secretaries of state (like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick), former secretaries of defense (including Robert Gates, who served under both George W. Bush and Obama) former intelligence community heads (including former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell, former heads of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, former CIA and NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden, former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte), and so many more. Here's a letter from 50 Republican veterans of the national security establishment--people who have worked in Republican administrations going back to Nixon--denouncing a Trump presidency. The defense contracting community is overwhelmingly backing Clinton, too. If the email issue meant Clinton was a bigger security risk than Trump, these officials would not be refusing to support Trump, but they are.
- Trump has a bad habit of projecting his own faults on others. He calls Clinton a liar, but his campaign has left media fact-checkers scrambling and working overtime, trying to find some way to catalog the rampant dishonesty that tumbles from his lips with every paragraph. He calls her "crooked," but his business career is littered with the remnants of businesses he's cheated and customers he's ripped off. He attacks her for deleting emails, but this week, Newsweek reported: "Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records."
As literally the most famous woman in the world over the course of some 25+ years in the public eye, much has been learned about Hillary Clinton. Her and her husband's financial lives and tax records are available for anyone who cares to look. They've been investigated time and again, with no wrongdoing more significant to the national interest than Bill's sexual indiscretions ever found. Dozens of books have been written about them, by themselves, supporters, and foes. Now, campaign emails have been stolen and released to the world, thanks to the corrupt partnership of Russia* and Wikileaks. We know more about Clinton than we have about any presidential candidate in American history.
About Trump, by comparison, we know next to nothing except what he and his public relations machine want us to know. As the Newsweek piece concludes, "This review of Trump’s many decades of abusing the judicial system, ignoring judges, disregarding rules, destroying documents and lying about it is not simply a sordid history lesson. Rather, it helps explain his behavior since he declared his candidacy. He promised to turn over his tax returns and his health records—just as he promised to comply with document discovery requirements in so many lawsuits—then reneged. As a result, he has left a sparse evidentiary trail that can be used to assess his wealth, his qualifications for the presidency or even his fitness. Should voters choose him to be the next U.S. president, he will enter the Oval Office as a mystery, a man who has repeatedly flouted the rules. He has solemnly told the country to trust him while refusing to produce any records to prove whether he speaks the truth or has utter contempt for it."
His running mate, Mike Pence, confirmed on Sunday that nobody's going to be seeing Trump's tax returns before the election. What is Trump afraid the voters will learn?
The real impact of the new story (or the revival of an old one) might be further down the ballot. A couple of percentage points lower can mean Clinton doesn't get the landslide election she--and we--were hoping for. That slippage could also cost her the Senate, which was briefly within grasp, and Republicans will almost certainly retain the House. Which means say hello to endless "investigations," obstruction, and dysfunction.
*Speaking of Russia, these days Trump denies any relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Not so long ago, he was singing a different tune, claiming that he definitely does have an ongoing relationship with Putin. Which Trump is telling the truth?
Below the fold: More on emails, charity, the aftermath, lunch, and more.
This week in Emails (Part 2)
Still confused about the new emails? The New York Times and the Washington Post have both published Q&As explaining what's going on.
Justice Department officials are incensed about Comey breaking multiple DOJ rules by releasing the letter. He's already far overstepped his bounds--his job is to run the FBI, not make determinations on clearly subjective matters like whether Clinton's handling of email was "extremely careless." He also provided investigative materials to members of Congress, another no-no. If Clinton was going to be charged, a grand jury would have been empaneled. If the decision was not to charge her, the grand jury would have said so, and that would have been it. When people are not charged with crimes in the US, they aren't publicly lectured by the investigators who didn't come up with the evidence to charge them. Now, Comey has broken more rules--investigators aren't supposed to talk about evidence they don't have, which is what he did (tantamount to a detective going to a crime scene and telling reporters, "Well, there are some fingerprints at the scene. We don't know whose they are, but we're going to be looking real hard at John Smith to see if they're his, even though there's no evidence to support that."). And DOJ rules say that any such announcement that could affect an election is not to be made within 60 days before the election. Comey's letter came 11 days before the election, a blatant violation.
Former attorney general Eric Holder wrote an op-ed this week taking his ex-employee to task:
I began my career in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section 40 years ago, investigating cases of official corruption. In the years since, I have seen America’s justice system firsthand from nearly every angle — as a prosecutor, judge, attorney in private practice, and attorney general of the United States. I understand the gravity of the work our Justice Department performs every day to defend the security of our nation, protect the American people, uphold the rule of law and be fair.
That is why I am deeply concerned about FBI Director James B. Comey’s decision to write a vague letter to Congress about emails potentially connected to a matter of public, and political, interest. That decision was incorrect. It violated long-standing Justice Department policies and tradition. And it ran counter to guidance that I put in place four years ago laying out the proper way to conduct investigations during an election season. That guidance, which reinforced established policy, is still in effect and applies to the entire Justice Department — including the FBI.
Holder adds: "Director Comey broke with these fundamental principles. I fear he has unintentionally and negatively affected public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI. And he has allowed — again without improper motive — misinformation to be spread by partisans with less pure intentions. Already, we have learned that the importance of the discovery itself may have been overblown. According to the director himself, there is no indication yet that the 'newly discovered' emails bear any significance at all. And yet, because of his decision to comment on this development before sufficient facts were known, the public has faced a torrent of conspiracy theories and misrepresentations."
The entire piece is a stark rebuke of Comey's decision. And rightly so--Comey took it upon himself to do something that he knew could have a major effect on the presidential election. Doing so makes him look like a partisan hack, which is not a good look for the director of the FBI.
On Saturday, Richard W. Painter, who spent two years as the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, wrote a stunning op-ed of his own:
The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election.
Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election. That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election. The usual penalty for a violation is termination of federal employment.
That is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I spent much of my career working on government and lawyers’ ethics, including as the chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush. I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week.
(For the sake of full disclosure, in this election I have supported Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Hillary Clinton for president, in that order.)
It remains to be seen whether Comey will face any disciplinary action for his remarkable act. He was appointed 3 years ago to a 10-year term, but he has shown a profound disregard for the law and the rules of his department, so one hopes he won't serve out all 10 years.
This Week in Charity
Trump paints himself as a huge philanthropist. Recent research has shown that his giving is way overblown, and most of what he's donated has come from other people rather than from his own pockets (and has gone to such helpful causes as buying portraits of himself). Now the Washington Post has taken a deeper dive into his "philanthropy," and learned some startling things. From their report:
In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front.
There was then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and former mayor David Dinkins (D). TV stars Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who were major donors. And there was a seat saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had given generously to build the nursery.
Then, all of a sudden, there was Donald Trump.
“Nobody knew he was coming,” said Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais. “There’s this kind of ruckus at the door, and I don’t know what was going on, and in comes Donald Trump. [He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.”
Trump was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery or the Association to Benefit Children, according to Gretchen Buchenholz, the charity’s executive director then and now.
But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani.
“Frank Gifford turned to me and said, ‘Why is he here?’ ” Buchenholz recalled recently. By then, the ceremony had begun. There was nothing to do.
“Just sing past it,” she recalled Gifford telling her.
So they warbled into the first song on the program, “This Little Light of Mine,” alongside Trump and a chorus of children — with a photographer snapping photos, and Trump looking for all the world like an honored donor to the cause.
Afterward, Disney and Buchenholz recalled, Trump left without offering an explanation. Or a donation. Fisher was stuck in the audience. The charity spent months trying to repair its relationship with him.
“I mean, what’s wrong with you, man?” Disney recalled thinking of Trump, when it was over.
The Post adds:
Another unusual feature: One of the foundation’s most consistent causes was Trump himself.
New findings, for instance, show that the Trump Foundation’s largest-ever gift — $264,631 — was used to renovate a fountain outside the windows of Trump’s Plaza Hotel.
Its smallest-ever gift, for $7, was paid to the Boy Scouts in 1989, at a time when it cost $7 to register a new Scout. Trump’s oldest son was 11 at the time. Trump did not respond to a question about whether the money was paid to register him.
This Week in Lunch
Philip Galanes of the New York Times has one of the coolest jobs in journalism. He gets to invite two people--who may or may not be personally or professionally associated, but who have in common something they're fluent in--to lunch. He asks some questions to spur conversation, and then prints what happened. This week, he has historian/biographer Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin (Ph.d in government from Harvard) and MSNBC host/pundit/author Dr. Rachel Maddow (doctorate from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes scholar). These are two of the most intelligent women on the political scene today, and they discuss the presidential race here.
This Week in Voter Fraud
We often discuss how rare in-person voter fraud is, despite Republican efforts to make it look incredibly common. Now we have what appears to be the first documented case of the 2016 presidential race. A Trump supporter--having believed Trump's lies about fraud and a "rigged" election, voted for him twice, because she was afraid her vote would be stolen. People, it's easy--just don't believe a word that comes out of Trump's lying mouth, and you'll be much better off.
And this week, the Washington Post took a look at the long, sordid history of white suppression of black votes in America. And here's a piece from Slate about the ongoing white suppression of black votes in North Carolina, right now, today.
This Week in the Aftermath
With the election only days away, people are starting to think about what comes next--what Trump and his supporters might do if he loses, and what the long-term implications of the alt-right army he has dredged up from the racist sewers of America might be.
Elections expert Michael McDonald looks at the trouble that could arise from a close finish in USA Today:
If the race is exceptionally close, we can’t rule out an overtime period that, in this environment, could rip the country apart.
It is absolutely fair for any candidate to exercise his rights to ask for a recount if the election is particularly close. We should have all confidence that the election results are accurate. When the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount he had requested in 2000, Al Gore graciously accepted the results. “For the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession,” he said.
However, Gore’s conciliatory tone is not Trump’s rhetoric of “rigged” elections, which he regularly uses to whip up his supporters. He talks of people casting fraudulent votes and stationing observers to “watch” the election. Trump questions the process itself, describing how election officials count ballots: “Oh here’s a ballot. Here’s another ballot, throw it away. Oh, here’s one I like. We’ll keep that one.”
This is where a real nightmare for America’s democracy could unfold. What if the initial tally on election night favors Trump but as more votes are counted in the following days, the results shift in Clinton’s favor? It does not take too much imagination to predict Trump would be outraged, with an emphasis on rage.
The Washington Post's Greg Sargent adds this:
What’s more, you cannot mull this possibility without also connecting it to the ongoing battle over the new emails discovered by the FBI. As I’ve noted, Trump is now explicitly arguing to his followers that FBI director James Comey has two choices — either he discovers new evidence of Clinton’s criminality in the discovered emails, or Trump will revert to casting Comey as a participant in a cover-up of that criminality that is designed to deliver the election to Clinton.
And there is no obvious way for Comey to resolve this problem. Or, at least, there is no obvious way to resolve it — short of turning up something new and incriminating in the emails, which can’t be ruled out — that would avert an outcome that Trump casts as corrupt and illegitimate. If Comey announces before the election that he has found no new grounds to revisit his July decision not to recommend charges against Clinton — and if Trump loses — Trump will claim that Comey’s finding was rigged to help elect her president. If Comey does not announce any new finding from the emails — and if Trump loses — Trump will claim that Comey’s failure to produce anything in time was rigged to help elect her president. And then, if and when Comey does eventually clear her, that, too, will constitute still more evidence that the system is rigged, and thus more grounds for grievance.
Many Republican voters will accept whichever of these explanations is relevant. See how this works?
At Vox.com, Matthew Yglesias points out that the media have spent so much time talking about emails and Trump's misogyny that vast numbers of voters have no real idea what the candidates' policy prescriptions are. A Trump win could offer plenty of surprises, he writes: "The result would be a sweeping transformation of American life. Millions would be forcibly removed from their homes and communities as new resources and a new mission invigorate the pace of deportations. Taxes would drop sharply for the richest Americans while rising for many middle-class families. Millions of low-income Americans would lose their health insurance, while America’s banks would enjoy the repeal of regulations enacted in the wake of the financial crisis. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gas emissions would end, likely collapsing global efforts to restrain emissions, greatly increasing the pace of warming."
Here, the Post's Jonathan Capehart draws a direct line from the Tea Party movement to the Trump revolution, pointing out that although the Republican Party tried to co-opt the Tea Party, the opposite happened. The more the GOP establishment tried to placate the radicals, the more radical it became, inevitably leading to the rise of Trump or some other Trump-like figure. Now the question is, will the Trumpists be brought into the party, or become the party?
And this much longer, but much more important piece by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine breaks down what might happen if Trump wins. It's scary reading--even for the Halloween season--but it's essential reading, if only to make clear the crucial importance of a Clinton victory. Chait takes a longer view than Capehart, putting Trump in the context of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party that began in the 1950s and led to the rise of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Chait writes:
The modern conservative movement was a revolt against the Republican Party’s leaders. When it began in the 1950s, it amounted to a minority faction operating only loosely within the party, somewhat like the relationship between today’s Democratic Party and the Bernie Sanders movement. Conservatives regarded the party’s leaders as traitors, and the leaders regarded the conservatives as kooks. Phyllis Schlafly’s popular conservative treatise from 1964, A Choice Not an Echo, posited that “secret kingmakers” employed “brainwashing and propaganda blitzes” to maintain their nefarious control of the GOP, in part to serve their own self-interest.
Conservatives, not yet in possession of much political power, rejected the expanded role of government in modern life on philosophical grounds. Whether any government program “worked” in any practical sense was immaterial. For the federal government to intervene in the economy and social welfare was by its nature “violence to the Constitution,” as Barry Goldwater put it. In supporting Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy for president, a young Ronald Reagan asked, “Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive surtax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation?” It is this moral opposition to government that set them apart from the pragmatic skeptics of bigger government who then controlled the Republican Party.
From the very beginning, however, the conservatives faced a predicament: Their belief that government is evil irrespective of whether its programs function as intended only had traction with a minority of voters. Americans may have opposed big government as an abstract notion, but they did not want to do away with their Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, minimum-wage laws, and progressive taxation. This misalignment between the conservative movement and the American people has, in fact, bred among conservatives a fundamental distrust of the American people. The welfare state, in the eyes of conservatives, was merely a government-sponsored mechanism by which the masses of voters could steal from the minority. (Russell Kirk, the influential mid-20th-century conservative, lamented that “taxation of the prosperous for the benefit of the less wealthy, through the votes of the benefiting crowd,” was “first cousin to theft.”) Since conservatives define liberty as the preservation of property rights, democracy — and its potential for legalizing theft via redistribution — poses a constant threat.
And yet American democracy was where the conservatives lived, and so a movement built on distrust of the majority set out to find a constituency. It found one in the segment of the country where conservative anti-government theory had deep resonance: the white South. Since the 18th century, most white Southerners had feared that a powerful federal government would override their system of slavery and white supremacy, and they opposed any expansion of federal power, from canals to colleges, as unconstitutional. Conservatives discovered they could attach their rhetoric to the appeal of white identity politics, as well as ally themselves with the religious right, which formed a powerful bulwark against all variety of social change.
...
Still, as the conservative movement has completed its conquest of the Republican Party, it has never resolved the dilemma that haunted it from the beginning. Conservative opposition to policies like business regulation, social insurance, and progressive taxation has never taken hold among anything resembling a majority of the public. The party has grown increasingly reliant upon white identity politics to supply its votes, which has left an indelible imprint on not only the Republican Party’s function but also its form.
Right-wing populism has had the same character for decades — in 1950, Theodor Adorno described the fear of outsiders, and the veneration of law and order, as “the authoritarian personality”; in 1964, Richard Hofstadter described a similar tendency as “the paranoid style” — but until recently, those movements lived outside both political parties. The political scientists Jonathan Weiler and Marc Hetherington found that, as recently as 1992, the Republican and Democratic parties had an equal proportion of voters with an authoritarian personality. By Obama’s first term, authoritarian personalities identified overwhelmingly with the GOP. In its preference for simplicity over complexity, and its disdain for experts and facts, the party has steadily ratcheted down its standard of intellectually acceptable discourse: from a doddering Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin. From this standpoint, Trump is less a freakish occurrence than something close to an inevitability.
Chait goes on to explain why Trump would not face a Congress determined to rein in his worst impulses, but instead a Congress anxious to put them into effect--because they believe the same things Trump espouses (whether he believes them is another matter--he seems to have very few enduring beliefs except in his own greatness--but he's saying them, and that's good enough for congressional Republicans).
Why, exactly, is [House Speaker Paul] Ryan, as well as senators Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, enduring the reputational damage and personal humiliation of endorsing a presidential candidate who has belittled and mocked them?
One reason is obvious: fear of the party’s voting base, which has fallen in line with its bullying presidential candidate and turned sharply against most Republican dissenters, who saw their approval ratings among their own base plummet. Another consideration, which has received far less media coverage, is something of the opposite of fear: lust. Republicans have had good reason to believe that a Trump-led government would grant them a degree of control over American government unprecedented in this nation’s history. To imagine the entire Republican leadership as nothing but a gaggle of sad-sack cowards is to create a personality-based explanation for a phenomenon that has a deeper, structural explanation. They support Trump not only out of character weakness but because his election would grant them transformational power.
Working with President Trump, the Republican Congress would be only too happen to embrace massive tax cuts for the super-rich, kill the Paris climate treaty and any further efforts toward controlling climate change or promoting green energy, kill the Affordable Care Act (and then what becomes of the 20 million Americans insured through it? The under-26 crowd, the Medicaid recipients, those who don't have insurance provided by their employers but who bought it on the exchanges? And for those who do have employer-provided insurance, do lifetime caps return? What policies control the industry? Who, exactly, remains insured and who doesn't? Since 2010, the mantra has been "repeal and replace," but there has never been a coherent "replace" plan offered, and don't expect President Trump and Paul Ryan to come up with one.). Dodd-Frank would be gone, and financial businesses would be free to repeat the schemes that led to the 2008 recession.
Chait continues:
It is the tantalizing prospect of crippling the welfare state that has lured Republicans into endorsing a president who has threatened to jail his opponent, go after the business interests of news outlets critical of him, and praised dictators in North Korea, Russia, and China for crushing their opposition. They are willing to give Trump control of the military, the Department of Justice, and the domestic-security apparatus as long as Ryan controls the legislative agenda.
That congressional Republicans would submit to Trump even at the risk of compromising the basic security of the American government is not merely a hypothesis. It already happened. U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly grown concerned about links between the Trump campaign and the Russian campaign strategy of using cyberattacks to help elect him. Republicans in Congress conceded to Daily Beast reporter Shane Harris that they shared these concerns but nonetheless refused requests by their Democratic colleagues to launch an investigation, which would have had subpoena power to force witnesses to testify.
Then he gets to one of the most crucial parts of his piece, wherein a conservative power player gives away the game:
The likelihood that Hillary Clinton will win on November 8 reduces the possibility of total conservative control within the next four years. But Trump has revealed — and hastened — the Republican Party’s transformation. In June, Ed Conard, a former business partner of Mitt Romney’s and a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told a gathering of wealthy Republicans that they needed to find a way to appease Trump’s blue-collar supporters while still maintaining their grip on the party’s agenda, especially its fixation with reducing the top tax rate. “So the question is, how do we build a coalition with displaced workers like we did with the religious right after Roe v. Wade and which we used to lower the marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent … and that leaves us in control, us being advocates of free enterprise, in control of the coalition?” he asked. Conard explained, “The answer, I believe, is tough, and perhaps even odious, compromises.”
Conard was expressing in unusually blunt terms the strategic calculation that has preoccupied his party’s elite, which understands that its small-government message still does not attract a natural majority on its own. Trump has propelled the party onto a course that may sometimes be discomfiting but could satisfy every faction: libertarian ends achieved through authoritarian means.
Read those paragraphs again. We'll wait.
Conard describes the conservative plan in no uncertain terms. They used the abortion issue, after Roe v. Wade, not because they believed in the pro-life cause but because they needed a large enough coalition to pass tax cuts for the rich (i.e., themselves). They played the religious right for suckers, never giving them what they wanted but stringing them along for votes, in order to further enrich themselves. Now that the religious right is no longer a big enough subset of voters, they're doubling down on their appeals to racist, poorly educated whites.
And they're doing it by appealing to a subtle longing for authoritarianism--for a strongman who can ride in and sweep minorities from the country, restoring the white supremacy they pine for.
The conservative movement has spent decades preparing its flock for this moment: warning of massive, nonexistent voter fraud. Attacking the very legitimacy of our first black president. Shutting down the government and thereby creating the impression that to conservatives, the government itself is less important than the movement's causes (or cause, since the only one that matters, as we've seen, is protecting the wealth of the wealthy).
Chait's conclusion is not optimistic:
Trumpism (or Breitbartism) cannot win power without the Republican Party, just as the Republican Party can no longer win power without the extremists that define it. The overwhelming gravitational force of the American two-party system delivered to Trump an endorsement from a former rival he had once called “Liddle Marco,” taking care to spell out the insult to his jeering supporters. (“L-I-D-D-L-E. Liddle, Liddle, Liddle Marco.”) And it brought the endorsement of another whose wife he labeled ugly and whose father he insinuated may have conspired to assassinate JFK. A party that can contain, on the one hand, a presidential nominee who denounces shadowy global financiers and media elites and, on the other, Sheldon Adelson (who has donated millions toward his election) can withstand enormous internal tension.
Trump will probably lose. That loss will provide little more than a temporary reprieve. The Republican-controlled House will be as conservative as ever, perhaps even more so. All the nice-sounding legislative programs Clinton offered up to soothe her restless base on the left — affordable child care and college, improvements to Obamacare, infrastructure — will be dead on arrival, making Clinton appear ineffectual. Or worse than ineffectual: Republicans will crank up the investigative machinery and produce endless media coverage of scandals, real or trumped up. (In fact, as the FBI melds its investigations into Clinton’s emails and Anthony Weiner’s sexting, we may be in for another Clinton administration defined by years of congressional sex investigations.) And then there is the likelihood that the current economic expansion, already one of the longest in American history, collapses into recession sometime during her term.
Just because the conservative movement will face long odds attracting a plurality of American voters doesn’t mean that those odds are zero. This year, Clinton has had the luxury of competing against a candidate who does not hide his grossness. In 2020, she will probably encounter a candidate who uses dog whistles rather than air horns and is trying to build a majority rather than a brand. Republicans won’t necessarily need to moderate their plans to beat her in 2020. To compete, they may only need Trumpism with a human face (and, perhaps, human hair as well).
And meanwhile, the version of the party that survives the likely wreckage of November will be a rage machine no less angry or united than the one that sustained eight years of unrelenting opposition to Obama. That rage will again shake the creaky scaffolding of the Madisonian system of government. Trumpism is the long historical denouement of a party that has come to see American democracy as rigged. And what one does to a rigged system is destroy it.
Finally (for now), conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin suspects that Trumpism will bring about a mass exodus from the Republican Party. "That’s the question that many center-right Americans are asking themselves. The answer is that they cannot lend political support or legitimacy to a party so lacking in fundamental decency. For that reason, many will refuse to vote for Trump. More important, after the election they’ll be looking for a way out of a party that is morally and politically compromised beyond repair."
What do we here at TWiA World Headquarters expect? In brief, we don't see Trumpism disappearing any time soon. The Republican Party has moved far, far to the right, abetted by the right-wing media machine, and now we've seen that what's really driving that shift is a combination of white nationalism, aggressive misogyny, and an impulse toward authoritarianism. That's a powerful combination, and we're seeing it play out in Europe as well as here. It won't go easily back into the bottle.
So the question is, will more moderate Republicans and true conservatives stay in that version of the Republican Party? It's hard to underestimate the Republican capacity for self-delusion--after all, the religious right (at least institutionally, though not all of its voters) still supports Trump, despite the fact that he's personally the antithesis of all they claim to stand for. And huge swaths of the party have continued to support its candidates even though, to an outsider, it's been obvious for ages that the only issue that mattered to those at the helm was pushing ever more of America's wealth toward the already wealthy.
So it's possible that the media machine will convince those trapped in its bubble that the party will enter a period of soul-searching, as it supposedly did after Romney's 2012 loss, and that a new, more welcoming party will emerge. We wouldn't be surprised to see the former happen, but it's highly unlikely that the latter will. Instead, we expect someone to emerge who delivers Trump's basic message, but without the obvious flaws of the current messenger. Then it'll be even more incumbent upon people who value American democracy to work ever harder to preserve and protect it.
This Week in Undecideds
Should there be any undecided voters left in America today, a quick read of this piece from The Atlantic--by a writer who's no fan of Clinton--should help you decide. If not, here's one from former George W. Bush speechwriter, David Frum, who reaches the same conclusion from a more conservative perspective.
This Week in Domestic Violence
October was Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The Trace reports on "seven major ways that measures meant to prevent perpetrators of domestic violence from owning guns fall short." This is the last part of a major reporting effort on their part. In their words, "Earlier in October, we examined how guns don’t actually have to be fired to play a critical role in abuse: An estimated 4.5 million women have been intimidated by an intimate partner wielding a firearm. One of those women, Leslie Morgan Steiner, shared her personal story of living in terror of an ex-husband who threatened her with his guns. Finally, we also compiled a statistical guide to firearms, intimate partner abuse, and the bystanders who become victims, too."
This week in Bears
It's pretty well confirmed that Pedals the Walking Bear became a victim of New Jersey's bear hunt earlier this fall. Fans of walking bears have a new hero, though--Boo Boo, a viral sensation from Maryland. Maybe one day we'll see him on that trampoline.
Comments