thebulwark--2020-08-29--Those Were the Days

Those Were the Days

While reading the introduction to The Press Gang—a gloriously enormous omnibus of writings by Godfrey Cheshire , Matt Zoller Seitz , and Armond White , the three primary film critics of the New York Press—one is struck by the fact that for a brief shining moment , a free alt-weekly was able to afford having three ( 3 ) full-time film critics on staff .
Yes , yes : the criticism in the collection is pretty great too .
I ’ ve only begun to flip through it , having just received my copy from Amazon yesterday afternoon .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little gems that jump out .
Here ’ s one line in particular that made me smile from the very first piece in the collection—a dual review by Cheshire of My Own Private Idaho and The Rapture : “ But assuming that ‘ Laurie Parker ’ is not a pseudonym for Laura Palmer and that David Lynch didn ’ t surreptitiously mount both films as a twin peek into the national schizophrenia , we might reasonably link the films ’ s dissimilar achievements to their makers ’ different backgrounds.
” Clever !
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his take on Pulp Fiction , which struck Cheshire in part because of the way it offered its characters second chances , paths of redemption .
“ The film ’ s really significant resurrection belongs to film itself , and explains the purposes of Pulp Fiction ’ s time-shifting structure , ” he writes .
“ More than midway through the story , one of the characters gets blown away .
Then in the very last scene , which takes place a few days earlier , he ’ s there again .
Sure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effect , he ’ s a dead man .
Yet the film ’ s final shot owes its exhilarating lift to our sudden sense that , no , he ’ s alive , not just again but eternally : resurrected.
” So yes , the critical writing is wonderful and thought-provoking .
But , again , it ’ s the chaotic spirit of the late NYPress—founded in 1988 , shut down in 2011—that impresses , the feeling of puckishness fueled by pre-internet hard-copy ad rates that allowed editor-owner Russ Smith to spend on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writers .
“ Part of the real magic of the Press in those days was that the office environment was as anarchic and funny and wooly bully as the paper itself , ” Jim Knipfel writes in the introduction , fondly remembering nightly excursions to the local bar where “ any staffers or freelancers who wanted to join them were free to do so , so long as they were prepared to deal with the free-flowing ( if lighthearted ) insults that marked the nightly cabal .
.
.
.
The office environment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a lot of drugs , a lot of sex on the ratty office couch , on the desks and behind the elevator , as well as occasional brief explosions of violence.
” It ’ s hard to imagine such an environment existing today , let alone being celebrated—the exposés would come quickly and generate much tut-tutting on Twitter—but it led to some great writing and great reporting and a film section worth memorializing for its cleverness and combativeness in a large trade paperback a decade after the paper ’ s demise .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ environment clearly worked : “ In May of 1997 , the editors announced they were bringing on a third film critic .
.
.
.
They were exciting times to be around the office .
The paper was still growing , and we ’ d even forced the Voice to go free in order to compete.
” There ’ s a whole book to be written about the seeds of decline planted in those words—the “ free ” model ’ s reliance on advertisements being the source of so much decline ( see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of ” ) —but at the time it clearly worked .
And The Press Gang is one result .
Any lover of smart writing about film should throw down the $ 30 this collection costs : the work is largely unavailable on the internet , and poorly formatted when it ’ s still around .
And editor Jim Colvill seems to have done a good job of presenting these three critics in conversation with one another : on the same page we find both the entirety of White ’ s brief item “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the decline of film projection standards , and the beginning of Cheshire ’ s epic “ The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema , ” tackling a similar idea at greater length .
Earlier we can find White and Seitz ’ s reviews of two Malicks back-to-back , White on The Thin Red Line and Seitz on Days of Heaven .

While reading the introduction to The Press Gang—a gloriously enormous omnibus of writings by Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Armond White, the three primary film critics of the New York Press—one is struck by the fact that for a brief shining moment, a free alt-weekly was able to afford having three (3) full-time film critics on staff. [See update below.]
Yes, yes: the criticism in the collection is pretty great too. I’ve only begun to flip through it, having just received my copy from Amazon yesterday afternoon. But even in my cursory examination there are little gems that jump out. Here’s one line in particular that made me smile from the very first piece in the collection—a dual review by Cheshire of My Own Private Idaho and The Rapture: “But assuming that ‘Laurie Parker’ is not a pseudonym for Laura Palmer and that David Lynch didn’t surreptitiously mount both films as a twin peek into the national schizophrenia, we might reasonably link the films’s dissimilar achievements to their makers’ different backgrounds.”
Clever! There’s something slightly more profound about his take on Pulp Fiction, which struck Cheshire in part because of the way it offered its characters second chances, paths of redemption.
“The film’s really significant resurrection belongs to film itself, and explains the purposes of Pulp Fiction’s time-shifting structure,” he writes. “More than midway through the story, one of the characters gets blown away. Then in the very last scene, which takes place a few days earlier, he’s there again. Sure, we know logically that, in effect, he’s a dead man. Yet the film’s final shot owes its exhilarating lift to our sudden sense that, no, he’s alive, not just again but eternally: resurrected.”
So yes, the critical writing is wonderful and thought-provoking. But, again, it’s the chaotic spirit of the late NYPress—founded in 1988, shut down in 2011—that impresses, the feeling of puckishness fueled by pre-internet hard-copy ad rates that allowed editor-owner Russ Smith to spend on something as indulgent as three full-time film writers.
“Part of the real magic of the Press in those days was that the office environment was as anarchic and funny and wooly bully as the paper itself,” Jim Knipfel writes in the introduction, fondly remembering nightly excursions to the local bar where “any staffers or freelancers who wanted to join them were free to do so, so long as they were prepared to deal with the free-flowing (if lighthearted) insults that marked the nightly cabal. . . . The office environment was fueled by a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs, a lot of sex on the ratty office couch, on the desks and behind the elevator, as well as occasional brief explosions of violence.”
It’s hard to imagine such an environment existing today, let alone being celebrated—the exposés would come quickly and generate much tut-tutting on Twitter—but it led to some great writing and great reporting and a film section worth memorializing for its cleverness and combativeness in a large trade paperback a decade after the paper’s demise. And what they were doing in that environment clearly worked: “In May of 1997, the editors announced they were bringing on a third film critic. . . . They were exciting times to be around the office. The paper was still growing, and we’d even forced the Voice to go free in order to compete.”
There’s a whole book to be written about the seeds of decline planted in those words—the “free” model’s reliance on advertisements being the source of so much decline (see also: “Village Voice, fate of”)—but at the time it clearly worked. And The Press Gang is one result.
Any lover of smart writing about film should throw down the $30 this collection costs: the work is largely unavailable on the internet, and poorly formatted when it’s still around. And editor Jim Colvill seems to have done a good job of presenting these three critics in conversation with one another: on the same page we find both the entirety of White’s brief item “Culture’s End,” about the decline of film projection standards, and the beginning of Cheshire’s epic “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema,” tackling a similar idea at greater length. Earlier we can find White and Seitz’s reviews of two Malicks back-to-back, White on The Thin Red Line and Seitz on Days of Heaven.
Update: Full-time is perhaps not quite the right way to describe the arrangement, as MZS noted on Twitter:
Well, none of us were “full-time” In the sense of actually being employed on staff with medical, etc. We got paid I think $150 or $200 a week or something like that. Sadly, however, that’s a very good rate by 2020 standards. — MZS (@mattzollerseitz) August 29, 2020
Still: Three people getting paid a decent amount of money for writing about movies for a free alt-weekly is a reminder of a different, better time.


thebulwark--2020-08-29--“America First” is a Lie

“America First” is a Lie

At this year ’ s pathetic and embarrassing Republican convention , former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley was hailed as the grownup speaking on behalf of President Trump .
The presence of an adult would have been most welcome at this festival of delusional cultists paying homage to the president , but none was in evidence .
Haley proved not so much an exception in this convention of unabashed Republican courtiers , but only the most demure among them .
Haley opened her remarks by invoking a phrase of Reagan ’ s feisty U.N. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the Democrats ’ evolution away from the anti-totalitarian program that had characterized the party of Roosevelt and Truman , Kirkpatrick asserted that mainstream Democrats had bowed out of the global contest for freedom .
After Vietnam , Kirkpatrick argued , most Democrats lost faith in American power and came to view the “ long , twilight struggle ” as a foolish confrontation foisted on the world by predatory American imperialism .
The Democratic party no longer pledged to “ bear any burden ” in defense of liberty , but urged conciliation if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , whatever the cost to U.S. interests and the “ captive nations ” behind the Iron Curtain .
In every significant East-West confrontation , Kirkpatrick said , Democrats “ always blame America first.
” In her RNC speech last Monday , Haley reprised this view as if little had changed in the world since the collapse of the Berlin Wall .
But the latter phase of the Cold War is by now a distant memory .
Even the political atmosphere of the post-Cold War era—characterized by economic globalization and American unipolarity in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ manifestly no more .
Americans face an altogether bleaker situation today , with a fractured social order alongside a rapidly dissolving global order .
The forces of social and geopolitical decomposition are taking hold , and left unchecked they will wreck the American order at home and the liberal order abroad .
And the Republican party is—to put it no higher—no longer in the business of rallying the forces of composition .
It has not even bothered to fashion a platform for the upcoming election .
By all appearances , Haley has not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continues to operate on the assumption that the Republican party provides the muscle and sinews that enable America to exercise its global leadership .
“ Joe Biden and the Democrats are still blaming America first .
Donald Trump has always put America first .
He has earned four more years as president.
” It must be pretty to think so .
The more disturbing truth is that the Republican party , which long upheld the role of the United States as the guarantor of world order and relished America ’ s leadership of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sharp turn away from global responsibility .
The Republican nomination of Donald Trump as the nation ’ s commander-in-chief—not once but twice—would have been unthinkable in a party with a broad measure of faith in a grand mission of moral and political world leadership .
Notwithstanding Haley ’ s servile curtsying and outdated assumptions , there can be no doubt that under Trump ’ s tenure the United States has lost sway in the world .
( If , as Churchill said , the price of greatness is responsibility , then the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ influence . )
Although Trump ’ s foreign policy has not been the product of rigorous analysis , it has reflected certain assumptions about America ’ s role in the world .
Adopting the amoral program of “ America First , ” this administration has little use for coalitions and alliances , and has no interest—either strategic or moral—in building a more free world .
Without any special regard for democratic values , it has reliably made common cause with powerful and odious forces that hope to overthrow the liberal order .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ commerce and technology that animated U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War has given way to pervasive pessimism that in a zero-sum world all nations must go their own way .
Days after entering office , Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership , clearing the way for the People ’ s Republic of China to press its influence across the Pacific without much countervailing force .
Since then , the Trump administration has willfully betrayed partners in battle and openly kowtowed to menacing dictators .
Some enemies of civilization—from Omar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end , as they tend to do under presidents of either party , but larger strategic questions have been neglected and impaired to the advantage of America ’ s foes .
It is therefore impossible , on an astute analysis , to conclude that Trump has put America first .
Indeed , the claim is sufficiently risible to discredit anyone who makes it .
Trump incurred the dishonor of impeachment owing to his decision to make congressionally authorized military aid for Ukraine conditional on a commitment from Kyiv to fabricate dirt on his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ save one , incurred the dishonor of voting neither to impeach nor convict him .
Upon learning about Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan , Trump responded that the United States armed the mujahideen against the Red Army in the 1980s .
One might be forgiven for thinking that “ America First ” has become awfully hard to distinguish from “ Blame America First.
” It has always been apparent that Trump is not a man interested in serving any cause but his own .
Little wonder that the cause of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s daft surrogates hold to be mutually exclusive , atrophies every day he occupies the presidential chair .
Republicans who believe in American exceptionalism should ’ ve been the first to spot this danger .
For Trump has consistently impugned the concept , echoing Vladimir Putin ’ s contempt for the view that the United States was a nation unlike any other .
It ’ s no accident that this betrayal of American purposes coincides with the habit of contemporary Republicans to speak contemptuously of the “ Democrat ” party .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to learn that during the Cold War , many Republicans , including Ronald Reagan , were marked by their former association with the world ’ s oldest political party and its erstwhile belief that American power needed to be employed in its various dimensions—and not merely in defense of narrow interests to defend our way of life throughout the world .
In another period of crisis for U.S. foreign policy , President Reagan and like-minded internationalists of both parties hoped to restore American purpose and strength in the world .
The Reagan White @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offensive against Soviet totalitarianism , which did not end with increasing the defense budget .
Reagan supported the cause of democracy , helping to found quasi-governmental organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy , which encouraged political freedoms in autocratic countries .
He armed anti-Communist insurgencies across the globe ( including the one in Afghanistan that so offended Trump ’ s delicate sensibilities ) .
This was possible because Reagan , like Kirkpatrick , understood that the Democratic party had become unmoored from its proper place as a champion of human liberty and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of saying , “ I didn ’ t leave my party , my party left me.
” Reagan knew that if Republicans were to join Democrats in affirming that American interests were inherently incompatible with the world ’ s , it would spell the end of American global leadership .
In his engaging book The Strange Death of American Liberalism , H.W .
Brands writes that after the trauma of Vietnam , “ those rare liberals who were willing or able to remember that the American Cold War had originally been a liberal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cold War heroes as Harry Truman and Dean Acheson if the conservatives hadn ’ t long since claimed them for their own.
” The Trump-aligned right today would scarcely recognize , let alone venerate , the names of Truman and Acheson .
In contrast to Trump , Truman believed in American exceptionalism , and worked to fulfill America ’ s solemn obligation to promote and defend a decent world order .
In 1961 , a young academic named Henry Kissinger paid a visit to the former president in Missouri .
To the question @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him most proud , Truman replied , “ That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations as equals .
I would like to think that only America would have done this.
” Trump will never speak like this—he doesn ’ t have it in him—and , as long as he remains in executive office , America will not behave like the great power uniquely capable of such unsordid action on the world stage .
A former ambassador to the U.N. once instructed Americans to face @ @ @ @ @ @ @ matter how pleasant it is.
” To do that again , Americans must repudiate the president and his enablers who have sullied and profaned that truth , and who risk making it very unpleasant indeed .

At this year’s pathetic and embarrassing Republican convention, former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley was hailed as the grownup speaking on behalf of President Trump. The presence of an adult would have been most welcome at this festival of delusional cultists paying homage to the president, but none was in evidence. Haley proved not so much an exception in this convention of unabashed Republican courtiers, but only the most demure among them.
Haley opened her remarks by invoking a phrase of Reagan’s feisty U.N. ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Drawing attention to the Democrats’ evolution away from the anti-totalitarian program that had characterized the party of Roosevelt and Truman, Kirkpatrick asserted that mainstream Democrats had bowed out of the global contest for freedom. After Vietnam, Kirkpatrick argued, most Democrats lost faith in American power and came to view the “long, twilight struggle” as a foolish confrontation foisted on the world by predatory American imperialism. The Democratic party no longer pledged to “bear any burden” in defense of liberty, but urged conciliation if not outright appeasement of the Soviet Union, whatever the cost to U.S. interests and the “captive nations” behind the Iron Curtain. In every significant East-West confrontation, Kirkpatrick said, Democrats “always blame America first.”
In her RNC speech last Monday, Haley reprised this view as if little had changed in the world since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But the latter phase of the Cold War is by now a distant memory. Even the political atmosphere of the post-Cold War era—characterized by economic globalization and American unipolarity in a world of abundant friends but few enemies—is manifestly no more.
Americans face an altogether bleaker situation today, with a fractured social order alongside a rapidly dissolving global order. The forces of social and geopolitical decomposition are taking hold, and left unchecked they will wreck the American order at home and the liberal order abroad. And the Republican party is—to put it no higher—no longer in the business of rallying the forces of composition. It has not even bothered to fashion a platform for the upcoming election.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
By all appearances, Haley has not taken account of these changes. She continues to operate on the assumption that the Republican party provides the muscle and sinews that enable America to exercise its global leadership. “Joe Biden and the Democrats are still blaming America first. Donald Trump has always put America first. He has earned four more years as president.”
It must be pretty to think so. The more disturbing truth is that the Republican party, which long upheld the role of the United States as the guarantor of world order and relished America’s leadership of the free world, has lately made a sharp turn away from global responsibility. The Republican nomination of Donald Trump as the nation’s commander-in-chief—not once but twice—would have been unthinkable in a party with a broad measure of faith in a grand mission of moral and political world leadership.
Notwithstanding Haley’s servile curtsying and outdated assumptions, there can be no doubt that under Trump’s tenure the United States has lost sway in the world. (If, as Churchill said, the price of greatness is responsibility, then the wages of irresponsibility are diminished respect and influence.) Although Trump’s foreign policy has not been the product of rigorous analysis, it has reflected certain assumptions about America’s role in the world. Adopting the amoral program of “America First,” this administration has little use for coalitions and alliances, and has no interest—either strategic or moral—in building a more free world. Without any special regard for democratic values, it has reliably made common cause with powerful and odious forces that hope to overthrow the liberal order. The exuberant faith in the liberalizing powers of commerce and technology that animated U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War has given way to pervasive pessimism that in a zero-sum world all nations must go their own way.
Days after entering office, Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, clearing the way for the People’s Republic of China to press its influence across the Pacific without much countervailing force. Since then, the Trump administration has willfully betrayed partners in battle and openly kowtowed to menacing dictators. Some enemies of civilization—from Omar al-Baghdadi to Qassem Soleimani—have met their deserved end, as they tend to do under presidents of either party, but larger strategic questions have been neglected and impaired to the advantage of America’s foes.
It is therefore impossible, on an astute analysis, to conclude that Trump has put America first. Indeed, the claim is sufficiently risible to discredit anyone who makes it. Trump incurred the dishonor of impeachment owing to his decision to make congressionally authorized military aid for Ukraine conditional on a commitment from Kyiv to fabricate dirt on his chief political rival. Congressional Republicans, save one, incurred the dishonor of voting neither to impeach nor convict him. Upon learning about Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Trump responded that the United States armed the mujahideen against the Red Army in the 1980s. One might be forgiven for thinking that “America First” has become awfully hard to distinguish from “Blame America First.”
It has always been apparent that Trump is not a man interested in serving any cause but his own. Little wonder that the cause of American power and American principle, which Trump’s daft surrogates hold to be mutually exclusive, atrophies every day he occupies the presidential chair. Republicans who believe in American exceptionalism should’ve been the first to spot this danger. For Trump has consistently impugned the concept, echoing Vladimir Putin’s contempt for the view that the United States was a nation unlike any other.
It’s no accident that this betrayal of American purposes coincides with the habit of contemporary Republicans to speak contemptuously of the “Democrat” party. These boorish partisans would presumably be surprised to learn that during the Cold War, many Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, were marked by their former association with the world’s oldest political party and its erstwhile belief that American power needed to be employed in its various dimensions—and not merely in defense of narrow interests to defend our way of life throughout the world.
In another period of crisis for U.S. foreign policy, President Reagan and like-minded internationalists of both parties hoped to restore American purpose and strength in the world. The Reagan White House revived a broad ideological and strategic offensive against Soviet totalitarianism, which did not end with increasing the defense budget. Reagan supported the cause of democracy, helping to found quasi-governmental organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, which encouraged political freedoms in autocratic countries. He armed anti-Communist insurgencies across the globe (including the one in Afghanistan that so offended Trump’s delicate sensibilities).
This was possible because Reagan, like Kirkpatrick, understood that the Democratic party had become unmoored from its proper place as a champion of human liberty and universal rights. As he was fond of saying, “I didn’t leave my party, my party left me.” Reagan knew that if Republicans were to join Democrats in affirming that American interests were inherently incompatible with the world’s, it would spell the end of American global leadership.
In his engaging book The Strange Death of American Liberalism, H.W. Brands writes that after the trauma of Vietnam, “those rare liberals who were willing or able to remember that the American Cold War had originally been a liberal enterprise might have trotted out such early Cold War heroes as Harry Truman and Dean Acheson if the conservatives hadn’t long since claimed them for their own.” The Trump-aligned right today would scarcely recognize, let alone venerate, the names of Truman and Acheson.
In contrast to Trump, Truman believed in American exceptionalism, and worked to fulfill America’s solemn obligation to promote and defend a decent world order. In 1961, a young academic named Henry Kissinger paid a visit to the former president in Missouri. To the question of what in his presidency had made him most proud, Truman replied, “That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations as equals. I would like to think that only America would have done this.”
Trump will never speak like this—he doesn’t have it in him—and, as long as he remains in executive office, America will not behave like the great power uniquely capable of such unsordid action on the world stage.
A former ambassador to the U.N. once instructed Americans to face the truth about themselves, “no matter how pleasant it is.” To do that again, Americans must repudiate the president and his enablers who have sullied and profaned that truth, and who risk making it very unpleasant indeed.


Demagoguery in America

The Demagogue ’ s Playbook The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump by Eric A. Posner St. Martin ’ s , 310 pp.
, $ 28.99 Eric Posner is a practicing attorney , a professor at an elite law school , and now , with the publication of his latest book , The Demagogue ’ s Playbook , he adds ‘ authority on demagoguery ’ to his already considerable CV .
To be sure , that last distinction may well have been achieved by all of us in the era of Trump , as we have lived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in American history , but unlike most of us , Posner has decided to enhance his expertise on the topic of demagoguery by writing a book tracing demagogic impulses throughout American history .
His work helps us understand how we got to the sorry place we inhabit , and where we can go from here .
The purpose of The Demagogue ’ s Playbook , Posner writes , is The essential meaning of the term demagogue has , Posner says , not changed much across the centuries : Posner sketches out the tensions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elitism and populism .
The American Founders sought to establish a government that featured elements of both popular and elite rule .
They “ did not invent democracy , or even create a democracy , ” he writes .
“ Their accomplishment was to create a lasting system of government that combined elements of democracy and elite rule .
The elites would govern , but ordinary people would retain a residual power to check them if they ruled badly.
” Studying examples of historical regimes , the Founders—or at least some of them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rome collapsed not ( as so often argued at the time ) because the Romans had ceased being virtuous but because the Roman constitution had become unbalanced , giving too much power to ordinary people , who were vulnerable to the wiles of demagogues.
” Andrew Jackson , the earliest American demagogue Posner identifies , “ was able to win the presidency because by his time the original constitutional bulwarks against populist demagogues had eroded.
” Under Jackson , “ the new populist ideology could justify destruction of the institutions , not just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or lie outside the power of , the executive .
Only the president himself was powerful enough to lead this assault.
” In short , the new ideology justified “ a leader who derives his power from the people rather than from a set of political institutions , a demagogue.
” Nearly a century after Jackson ’ s day , democratic and popular impulses began to give way to something very like their opposite—a technocracy : Notwithstanding the creation of a technocracy—and the administrative bureaucracy that preceded , grew with , and enabled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ returned with a vengeance with the arrival on the scene of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy , to whom the press “ flocked ” because he was ( here Posner borrows from historian David Oshinsky ) “ bizarre , unpredictable , entertaining , and always newsworthy.
” Despite the fact that McCarthy was ultimately repudiated by his Senate colleagues , the demagogic strain remained , and found at least some resonance in the public career of Alabama governor George Wallace and the presidential candidacies and presidency of Richard Nixon .
Demagoguery in America reached @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presidency of Donald Trump .
Posner traces Trump ’ s shocking success in 2016 directly to the fact that “ he was a demagogue ” at a moment when the conditions were right .
His election was made possible by “ the erosion of the bulwarks against demagoguery , first put into place by the Founders and further developed by generations of American leaders .
The decline of the Electoral College , the extension of the franchise , the erosion of control by party leadership—all these institutional developments created the conditions in which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the worst instincts of the people.
” But , Posner says , it wasn ’ t just political structures that made possible the rise of Trump ; as any sentient observer knows , our political culture , transformed by new tools of communication , contributed , too : The Demagogue ’ s Playbook is a well-written and -sourced work of pop-scholarship , with a narrative style that moves briskly without skimping on important historical and cultural details .
Posner ’ s historical judgment , however , is sometimes lacking .
For example , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Posner concedes that Roosevelt “ used some demagogic tactics , ” but argues that those tactics were justified : One will not find many people nowadays who will deny that Roosevelt faced extraordinary challenges during his presidency , and that an extraordinary response was necessary .
But it is more than a little unsettling to read Posner claiming that those exigencies justified “ some demagogic tactics.
” Were we to confine the use of judicious demagoguery to Roosevelt ’ s presidency and his response to the likes of massive global recession and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not have much to fear from the prospect of demagoguery at the presidential level .
The obvious problem , however , is that while few presidents may encounter twin crises like the Great Depression and World War II , the emergency powers of the president are vast , and the combination of presidential demagoguery and the exercise of presidential powers at the merest suggestion of an emergency is frightening to contemplate .
It is worrisome enough that the powers of the presidency have considerably expanded through the decades and show no sign of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if we turned a blind eye to the unbounded ability of a president to engage in demagoguery in any circumstance he labels an emergency—even if no real emergency exists—because in part we are occasionally given to excusing “ some demagogic tactics.
” In the current Trumpian circumstances , we have seen real national crises , bogus declarations of national crises , and plenty of evidence of just how dangerous and destructive demagogic tactics can be .
Elsewhere , Posner tells us that “ Roosevelt largely avoided the negative emotions and the vilification of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the times .
The rich were widely hated , and while Roosevelt indulged the public with his attacks on Wall Street , his language was always vague.
” Mere sentences later , however , Posner writes ( in parentheses and , it seems , through gritted teeth ) that “ Roosevelt did , however , authorize the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens after war was declared , and took other harsh war measures , including censorship of anti-war activists , which have been heavily criticized.
” Yes , well , there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perhaps should not have been presented as the afterthought Posner appears to make it out to be , and which certainly does appear to undercut the claim that Roosevelt “ avoided .
.
.
negative emotions ” during his time in office and in the course of responding to the challenges and dangers posed by World War II .
Moreover , the notion that Roosevelt “ avoided the negative emotions and the vilification of opponents ” and that Roosevelt ’ s attacks on “ Wall Street ” and the rich were “ always @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Roosevelt ’ s renomination acceptance speech in 1936 , he made the following comments about the wealthy : Perhaps “ vilification ” and vagueness of language are in the eye of the beholder , but it is reasonable to submit that talk about “ economic royalists ” who exclude from royalty “ thousands of small business men and merchants ” —and who are also known to Roosevelt as “ privileged princes of these new economic dynasties , thirsting for power , reach [ ing ] out for control over Government itself ” who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ genuine vilification of political opponents .
Justifying Roosevelt ’ s attacks on the Supreme Court , Posner argues that “ the Supreme Court really was an ideologically rigid and geriatric institution , wholly out of date and unable to appreciate the challenges of the Depression and the inadequacies of the national administrative structure.
” But Posner also notes that Roosevelt attacked the Court for behaving like a “ super-legislature.
” Well , which is it ?
Was the Court wrong for acting like a “ super-legislature ” ?
Or was it wrong for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ appreciat [ ing ] the challenges of the Depression and the inadequacies of the national administrative structure ” ?
We are left without a reconciliation of Roosevelt ’ s and Posner ’ s respective critiques .
To be sure , America owes an eternal debt to Franklin Roosevelt for all he did to get the country out of the crushing grip of the Depression and through the war .
Along with Ronald Reagan , Roosevelt is surely the most consequential president of the 20th century , and he is indisputably one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Roosevelt could have achieved what he achieved without having engaged in demagoguery .
His greatness should not blind us to his mistakes and faults , or to the fact that acts of demagoguery by one president—however slight or even justified historians might later deem those acts to be—might open the door to even greater democracy-endangering acts of demagoguery by their successors .
Posner does not spare Richard Nixon the criticisms he deserves , but even in doing so , he argues that Nixon ( and Ronald Reagan ) “ mostly avoided the language @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of governing.
” In advancing the case , Posner states that “ Nixon ’ s most contemptuous remarks—about liberals , Jews , Democrats , civil rights leaders , just about everyone—were made in private.
” Presumably , this distances Nixon from demagoguery , but it is not unreasonable to think that private bigoted and demagogic comments can lead to public bigoted and demagogic policies .
The reader need only consider Trump ’ s deep-seated racism and the clear connection it has with his xenophobic immigration policies to see as much .
Speaking of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to note that our demagogic president is supported and enabled by a veritable league of demagogues and demagogic institutions .
Just as Franklin Roosevelt—for any of his dalliances with demagoguery—had nothing on demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin , who emerged in opposition to Roosevelt and his programs , Trump ’ s demagoguery is echoed and augmented by various public personalities .
This echo chamber of demagoguery has created an alternative universe for Trump supporters , a universe that in turn serves as the source for alternative facts to which Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president and his demagogic enablers , Trumpian portions of America do not even operate from the same basic set of principles and truths as does the rest of the country .
As a consequence , America is more deeply divided than at any time since the Vietnam War , and those damaging divisions are not going away anytime soon .
There is also the following astonishing comment from Posner : One might perhaps come up with a restrained , dry and witty response to this passage , but speaking for myself , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ read this bit of analysis were “ he ’ s kidding , right ?
” To be fair to Posner , his book went to press before Trump decided to tear-gas protesters in order to get a photo op near a church , before Trump decided to send unidentified paramilitaries to randomly arrest protesters without cause and place them into unmarked vans , before Trump decided to bring about massive amounts of electoral uncertainty by launching an unprecedented attack against mail-in ballots ( whose use dates back to the Civil War , when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cast their votes ) , and before Trump decided to speculate about delaying the presidential election—or speculate about doing it over , or signal that he might refuse to accept an unfavorable electoral outcome .
But it requires no leap of imagination whatsoever at this point , in the year 2020 , to consider Trump to be at least an incipient dictator .
Trump ’ s own attorney general is moving heaven and earth to augment Trump ’ s power ; the least the rest of us can do is to take note @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concerned about the extraordinary injury that would be inflicted on American democracy if William Barr ’ s machinations in expanding Trump ’ s authority are successful .
As Michelle Obama put it in her speech at the Democratic convention , when it comes to the incumbent president , “ if you think things can not possibly get worse , trust me , they can.
” Good advice , and when considering Trump ’ s dictatorial or authoritarian tendencies , it ’ s advice that would have served Posner well .
In another section @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he sees Trump for who he is ( making the reluctance to call out Trump ’ s dictatorial tendencies all the more mysterious ) : There is much we need to do to excise Trumpian demagoguery from “ the body politic , ” including thinking with care about how to change the political and cultural conditions that left us susceptible to it .
In doing so , we can take our cues from the first and greatest Republican president .
Posner is kind enough to excerpt the passage that most meets our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Posner writes that “ liberals in Europe called him a demagogue at the start of the war , but by the end they recognized him as one of the great statesmen of the era.
” We could do much worse than to have someone like him to rescue and uplift us now , and to save us from demagoguery , degradation and ( yes ) dictatorship—incipient or worse .

The Demagogue’s Playbook
The Battle for American Democracy
from the Founders to Trump
by Eric A. Posner
St. Martin’s, 310 pp., $28.99
Eric Posner is a practicing attorney, a professor at an elite law school, and now, with the publication of his latest book, The Demagogue’s Playbook, he adds ‘authority on demagoguery’ to his already considerable CV. To be sure, that last distinction may well have been achieved by all of us in the era of Trump, as we have lived through the demagoguery of the worst president in American history, but unlike most of us, Posner has decided to enhance his expertise on the topic of demagoguery by writing a book tracing demagogic impulses throughout American history. His work helps us understand how we got to the sorry place we inhabit, and where we can go from here.
The purpose of The Demagogue’s Playbook, Posner writes, is
to ask whether the “demagogue” is a meaningful political category, rather than simply a term we assign to politicians we don’t like. . . . My conclusion is that it is—the ancients got it right. It is a style of political action that—independent of the demagogue’s agenda—poses a threat to democracy and effective government. If the American president is a demagogue, the country faces a constitutional problem, well beyond the ordinary turmoil of acceptable politics.
The essential meaning of the term demagogue has, Posner says, not changed much across the centuries:
It refers to a charismatic, amoral person who obtains the support of the people through dishonesty, emotional manipulation, and the exploitation of social divisions; who targets the political elites, blaming them for everything that has gone wrong; and who tries to destroy institutions—legal, political, religious, social—and other sources of power that stand in their way.
Posner sketches out the tensions between demagoguery and enlightened leadership, between elitism and populism. The American Founders sought to establish a government that featured elements of both popular and elite rule. They “did not invent democracy, or even create a democracy,” he writes. “Their accomplishment was to create a lasting system of government that combined elements of democracy and elite rule. The elites would govern, but ordinary people would retain a residual power to check them if they ruled badly.” Studying examples of historical regimes, the Founders—or at least some of them; Posner here overgeneralizes—“believed that Rome collapsed not (as so often argued at the time) because the Romans had ceased being virtuous but because the Roman constitution had become unbalanced, giving too much power to ordinary people, who were vulnerable to the wiles of demagogues.”
The trick was to give ordinary people political power (‘self-government’) but ensure that they chose elites to rule them. Various institutions were put into place to ensure that the government could not be taken over by rabble-rousers or used in ways that advanced narrow political interests at the expense of the long-term good of the public.
Andrew Jackson, the earliest American demagogue Posner identifies, “was able to win the presidency because by his time the original constitutional bulwarks against populist demagogues had eroded.” Under Jackson, “the new populist ideology could justify destruction of the institutions, not just reform, including institutions that constrain, or lie outside the power of, the executive. Only the president himself was powerful enough to lead this assault.” In short, the new ideology justified “a leader who derives his power from the people rather than from a set of political institutions, a demagogue.”
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
Nearly a century after Jackson’s day, democratic and popular impulses began to give way to something very like their opposite—a technocracy:
As early as the 1920s, Progressive intellectuals like Walter Lippmann (in his 1922 book Public Opinion) were arguing that the masses must accommodate themselves to rule by experts. Lippmann, whose views reflected a new skepticism about democracy in intellectual circles, was simply updating the Founders’ view for the age of technology: the elite—now consisting of social scientists, area experts, and professional politicians—must rule because the masses cannot.
Notwithstanding the creation of a technocracy—and the administrative bureaucracy that preceded, grew with, and enabled it—Posner tells us that populist demagogic impulses returned with a vengeance with the arrival on the scene of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, to whom the press “flocked” because he was (here Posner borrows from historian David Oshinsky) “bizarre, unpredictable, entertaining, and always newsworthy.” Despite the fact that McCarthy was ultimately repudiated by his Senate colleagues, the demagogic strain remained, and found at least some resonance in the public career of Alabama governor George Wallace and the presidential candidacies and presidency of Richard Nixon.
Demagoguery in America reached its full flowering in the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. Posner traces Trump’s shocking success in 2016 directly to the fact that “he was a demagogue” at a moment when the conditions were right. His election was made possible by “the erosion of the bulwarks against demagoguery, first put into place by the Founders and further developed by generations of American leaders. The decline of the Electoral College, the extension of the franchise, the erosion of control by party leadership—all these institutional developments created the conditions in which a demagogue could prevail by appealing to the worst instincts of the people.”
But, Posner says, it wasn’t just political structures that made possible the rise of Trump; as any sentient observer knows, our political culture, transformed by new tools of communication, contributed, too:
Trump both benefited from the greater level of political partisanship exhibited on and enhanced by the internet—social media in particular—and contributed to it. Even when the news media was at its partisan height in the nineteenth century, it still served a gatekeeping function, excluding the very worst forms of deceit, defamation, and viciousness from public debate, though these forms certainly had their outlet in speeches, letters, pamphlets, and other more informal modes of expression. Those guardians are now gone, allowing a demagogue like Trump both to gain sustenance from and disseminate propaganda and lies that serve his purposes. We can be grateful that the virtual mob, unlike its historical predecessor, can’t beat up, tar and feather, hang, or set alight its victims. But it can be whipped up by a demagogue, and used to serve his purposes.
The Demagogue’s Playbook is a well-written and -sourced work of pop-scholarship, with a narrative style that moves briskly without skimping on important historical and cultural details.
Posner’s historical judgment, however, is sometimes lacking. For example, in discussing the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, Posner concedes that Roosevelt “used some demagogic tactics,” but argues that those tactics were justified:
First, [Roosevelt] acted during a serious emergency—actually two emergencies, the Great Depression and the start of World War II. The creaky American constitutional system inhibits executive action, and while that may be tolerable in normal times, in a national emergency a timid executive may spell doom. The Great Depression was already three years old when Roosevelt took office, and a new banking crisis had begun just months earlier. Hoover was not up to the task. Roosevelt also faced an extraordinarily complex situation in the run-up to World War II, when he sought to signal to Germany that America would come to the aid of the Western alliance while avoiding a domestic political backlash that could have hamstrung the eventual war effort.
One will not find many people nowadays who will deny that Roosevelt faced extraordinary challenges during his presidency, and that an extraordinary response was necessary. But it is more than a little unsettling to read Posner claiming that those exigencies justified “some demagogic tactics.”
Were we to confine the use of judicious demagoguery to Roosevelt’s presidency and his response to the likes of massive global recession and another world war, perhaps we would not have much to fear from the prospect of demagoguery at the presidential level. The obvious problem, however, is that while few presidents may encounter twin crises like the Great Depression and World War II, the emergency powers of the president are vast, and the combination of presidential demagoguery and the exercise of presidential powers at the merest suggestion of an emergency is frightening to contemplate. It is worrisome enough that the powers of the presidency have considerably expanded through the decades and show no sign of lessening. It would be worse still if we turned a blind eye to the unbounded ability of a president to engage in demagoguery in any circumstance he labels an emergency—even if no real emergency exists—because in part we are occasionally given to excusing “some demagogic tactics.” In the current Trumpian circumstances, we have seen real national crises, bogus declarations of national crises, and plenty of evidence of just how dangerous and destructive demagogic tactics can be.
Elsewhere, Posner tells us that “Roosevelt largely avoided the negative emotions and the vilification of opponents, to an extent surprising for the times. The rich were widely hated, and while Roosevelt indulged the public with his attacks on Wall Street, his language was always vague.” Mere sentences later, however, Posner writes (in parentheses and, it seems, through gritted teeth) that “Roosevelt did, however, authorize the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens after war was declared, and took other harsh war measures, including censorship of anti-war activists, which have been heavily criticized.” Yes, well, there was that whole internment thing, which perhaps should not have been presented as the afterthought Posner appears to make it out to be, and which certainly does appear to undercut the claim that Roosevelt “avoided . . . negative emotions” during his time in office and in the course of responding to the challenges and dangers posed by World War II.
Moreover, the notion that Roosevelt “avoided the negative emotions and the vilification of opponents” and that Roosevelt’s attacks on “Wall Street” and the rich were “always vague” is somewhat bizarre. In Roosevelt’s renomination acceptance speech in 1936, he made the following comments about the wealthy:
. . . out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
Perhaps “vilification” and vagueness of language are in the eye of the beholder, but it is reasonable to submit that talk about “economic royalists” who exclude from royalty “thousands of small business men and merchants”—and who are also known to Roosevelt as “privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reach[ing] out for control over Government itself” who “created a new despotism”—represents genuine vilification of political opponents.
Justifying Roosevelt’s attacks on the Supreme Court, Posner argues that “the Supreme Court really was an ideologically rigid and geriatric institution, wholly out of date and unable to appreciate the challenges of the Depression and the inadequacies of the national administrative structure.” But Posner also notes that Roosevelt attacked the Court for behaving like a “super-legislature.” Well, which is it? Was the Court wrong for acting like a “super-legislature”? Or was it wrong for not acting enough like a legislature by “appreciat[ing] the challenges of the Depression and the inadequacies of the national administrative structure”? We are left without a reconciliation of Roosevelt’s and Posner’s respective critiques.
To be sure, America owes an eternal debt to Franklin Roosevelt for all he did to get the country out of the crushing grip of the Depression and through the war. Along with Ronald Reagan, Roosevelt is surely the most consequential president of the 20th century, and he is indisputably one of America’s greatest presidents. But Roosevelt could have achieved what he achieved without having engaged in demagoguery. His greatness should not blind us to his mistakes and faults, or to the fact that acts of demagoguery by one president—however slight or even justified historians might later deem those acts to be—might open the door to even greater democracy-endangering acts of demagoguery by their successors.
Posner does not spare Richard Nixon the criticisms he deserves, but even in doing so, he argues that Nixon (and Ronald Reagan) “mostly avoided the language of the demagogue for the day-to-day business of governing.” In advancing the case, Posner states that “Nixon’s most contemptuous remarks—about liberals, Jews, Democrats, civil rights leaders, just about everyone—were made in private.” Presumably, this distances Nixon from demagoguery, but it is not unreasonable to think that private bigoted and demagogic comments can lead to public bigoted and demagogic policies. The reader need only consider Trump’s deep-seated racism and the clear connection it has with his xenophobic immigration policies to see as much.
Speaking of Trump, Posner would have done well to note that our demagogic president is supported and enabled by a veritable league of demagogues and demagogic institutions. Just as Franklin Roosevelt—for any of his dalliances with demagoguery—had nothing on demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, who emerged in opposition to Roosevelt and his programs, Trump’s demagoguery is echoed and augmented by various public personalities. This echo chamber of demagoguery has created an alternative universe for Trump supporters, a universe that in turn serves as the source for alternative facts to which Trump supporters cling. Because of our demagogic president and his demagogic enablers, Trumpian portions of America do not even operate from the same basic set of principles and truths as does the rest of the country. As a consequence, America is more deeply divided than at any time since the Vietnam War, and those damaging divisions are not going away anytime soon.
There is also the following astonishing comment from Posner:
It would be wrong to call Trump a dictator, or even an incipient dictator. If he’s a tyrant, it’s only in the old Platonic sense of a person who is a slave to his passions. It’s not clear how much he means what he says, and he has put relatively little effort into actually destroying institutions. His major political achievements—tax cuts, Supreme Court appointments, deregulation—did not involve any illegal or unconstitutional action. He obtained Congress’s approval of the tax cuts and the Senate’s approval of the confirmations, and he pursued deregulation using authority granted to the president by Congress in earlier statutes. If a demagogue is a politician who verbally attacks institutions and tries to shake public confidence in them, then Trump is a demagogue. But since he hasn’t yet succeeded in destroying or seriously damaging public institutions, he’s not a dictator, and doesn’t seem likely to become one.
One might perhaps come up with a restrained, dry and witty response to this passage, but speaking for myself, the words that came to mind while I read this bit of analysis were “he’s kidding, right?” To be fair to Posner, his book went to press before Trump decided to tear-gas protesters in order to get a photo op near a church, before Trump decided to send unidentified paramilitaries to randomly arrest protesters without cause and place them into unmarked vans, before Trump decided to bring about massive amounts of electoral uncertainty by launching an unprecedented attack against mail-in ballots (whose use dates back to the Civil War, when they were employed by Union soldiers to cast their votes), and before Trump decided to speculate about delaying the presidential election—or speculate about doing it over, or signal that he might refuse to accept an unfavorable electoral outcome.
But it requires no leap of imagination whatsoever at this point, in the year 2020, to consider Trump to be at least an incipient dictator. Trump’s own attorney general is moving heaven and earth to augment Trump’s power; the least the rest of us can do is to take note of that fact, and to be concerned about the extraordinary injury that would be inflicted on American democracy if William Barr’s machinations in expanding Trump’s authority are successful. As Michelle Obama put it in her speech at the Democratic convention, when it comes to the incumbent president, “if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can.” Good advice, and when considering Trump’s dictatorial or authoritarian tendencies, it’s advice that would have served Posner well.
In another section of the book, Posner makes clear that he sees Trump for who he is (making the reluctance to call out Trump’s dictatorial tendencies all the more mysterious):
While constitutional reform may be justified, my goal in this book has been more limited. It is to persuade the reader that in electing Donald Trump to the presidency, we Americans really did choose a demagogue, a political figure who was able to obtain power by exploiting the inherent vulnerability of constitutional democracy: the tension between elite control of the institutions of democracy and the ideological commitment to mass self-government. We need to see Trump not merely as a poor choice for the presidency, like Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, or Warren Harding. Most poor presidents have been forgotten, while Trump should be remembered. We need to see him as a political monstrosity who should be repudiated by the body politic, so that politicians who eye the presidency in the future will be deterred from using Trump’s ascendance as a model.
There is much we need to do to excise Trumpian demagoguery from “the body politic,” including thinking with care about how to change the political and cultural conditions that left us susceptible to it. In doing so, we can take our cues from the first and greatest Republican president. Posner is kind enough to excerpt the passage that most meets our current moment:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Of Abraham Lincoln, Posner writes that “liberals in Europe called him a demagogue at the start of the war, but by the end they recognized him as one of the great statesmen of the era.” We could do much worse than to have someone like him to rescue and uplift us now, and to save us from demagoguery, degradation and (yes) dictatorship—incipient or worse.


thebulwark--2020-08-31--The Pathetic Both-Sidesism of Republican Inc.

On Sunday , President Donald Trump described a vigilante Trump Truck caravan whose purpose was to instigate # war on the streets of Portland through attempted vehicular homicide as GREAT PATRIOTS .
Later the day former Vice President Joe Biden issued a considered statement that unequivocally condemned the violence in Portland “ whether on the left or the right ” and called on us not to become a country that “ accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you ” or “ vows vengeance against one another.
” So there ’ s one candidate who wants @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There ’ s one who eggs on his most radical supporters and another who calls them out .
There is one candidate who repeatedly , time and again , speaks and acts responsibly .
Another who fires off screeds that demonstrate that he is at best mentally unstable and at worst attempting to incite violence against political foes .
All of this is an inconvenient truth for the Republican political class .
They avoid it at all costs because their livelihoods depend on ensuring that they remain seen in public as True Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ True Republicans are no longer interested in small government or balanced budgets or originalism .
True Republicans are defined—entirely—by their fealty Donald Trump .
This is not an exaggeration .
They actually put this in writing .
Last week .
And here ’ s what their assignment editor says the message is when it comes to Black Lives Matter , protests , and civil unrest : Now this is .
.
.
hard to parse .
So rather than deal with the particulars , the Republican political class just blows right by it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ days from now actually pits Trump against Antifa or against the mayor of Portland .
And—in fairness to the members of Republican Inc.—if those fantasy match-ups were on the ballot , they would have a point .
The agitators who set fire to Kenosha are acting unconscionably .
The mayor of Portland has bungled his response to the protests , which then grew into riots .
But here ’ s the deal : Antifa and Mayor Wheeler aren ’ t on the ballot .
And when it comes to both the protests and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the right thing at pretty much every turn .
You might be able to nitpick him on the margins .
Maybe you wish he condemned them louder , with bells on , in the attic , in the form of a rap .
But Biden ’ s righteousness in contrast to Trump ’ s recklessness is an observable fact .
If you don ’ t believe me , just put a transcript of Biden ’ s and Trump ’ s words about the civil unrest next to each other and compare .
Anyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Race Wars Fanfic for the last 12 years will come to the same conclusion .
Which—again—is a problem for those who are trying to make the violence a political issue for Biden so that they don ’ t have to acknowledge the guy who instigated some of it and is now presiding over all of it .
Ben Shapiro compared Biden ’ s unequivocal statement about this to an out-of-context line from the same Charlottesville speech in which Trump praised the “ very fine ” neo-Nazi protesters .
( Note : Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
Ted Cruz linked to a clever prank that linked “ Antifa.com ” to Joe Biden ’ s website .
( Case closed ! )
Tim Carney ’ s not convinced that Trump is actually stoking the fire because some unnamed people somewhere also said that Ben Shapiro is just as bad .
Dan Crenshaw tweeted that whatever Biden said was “ too little too late.
” ( If that ’ s the case maybe Crenshaw can make a comment on the right-wing vigilante justice from On High . )
Laura Ingraham @ @ @ @ @ @ @ issuing a statement three months too late .
But then she accidentally linked to a similar statement Biden made three months ago .
( I wish this were a joke . )
It does not matter to any of these concern trolls that Trump ’ s own assistant secretary for threat prevention at DHS has testified that Trump “ gave permission ” to white-nationalist and right-wing domestic terrorists .
It does not matter that Trump tweets ALL CAPS praise to people who are escalating the violence .
It does not matter that Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump has threatened them with “ vicious dogs ” and “ shooting.
” It does not matter that Trump refused to condemn vigilante murder when asked directly about it .
Or that Trump refused to weigh in on a video of a cop emptying his clip into a black man ’ s back .
It does not matter that Trump spent Sunday tweeting weird-ass conspiracies and “ black crime ” videos and golfing while this unrest that he and his Republican enablers are so concerned about continued .
It does not matter that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ literally parading through Portland with fucking Trump flags on their trucks or that the Antifa looters , like most of the radical left , almost certainly hates Joe Biden .
( When was the last time you saw a “ No Malarkey ” sticker on a truck that had dudes in tactical gear menacing a crowd .
I ’ ll wait . )
None of this matters because the middle managers at Republican Inc. understand that , no matter what , they can ’ t support Biden .
They can “ grudgingly ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They might even be able to pull off saying that they ’ re disgusted by “ both sides.
” But they can not —no matter what they will do privately on November 3—be publicly in favor of Biden .
And with that basic truth fixed in their minds , they work backwards .
The right ’ s commitment to the frame that Joe Biden is responsible for the violence then penetrates a broken legacy media that has still not yet figured out how to deal with having a sociopathic demagogue as president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outlets , if one “ side ” of the debate is consistently and loudly stating that the other side is in crisis/scandal/disarray , then the media just reports and analyzes around that claim .
As Brian Beutler writes , The result is a discussion framed as : “ How much is Joe Biden being hurt by these uprisings ?
” And they skip right over the responsibility to assess whether that question is at all fair or reasonable based on Biden ’ s actions .
Earlier this week , a friend to The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ point in the pages of the New York Times .
I don ’ t mean to pick on Labash but his framing is the most vivid depiction of this that I ’ ve seen .
Labash is correct that some Democrats have lied or dissembled in conflating peaceful protests with criminal riots .
But the presidential contest this fall is not between Donald Trump and the worst-behaving Democrat on Twitter .
It is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden .
If we ’ re actually talking about Trump and Biden , then the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same person .
The Bloods are led by a strongman who wants to see the other gang get the shit knocked out of them and Crips are led by a guy who wants to host a bipartisan caucus of senators discussing the David Brooks column they read in hard copy that morning .
You may not like bipartisan caucuses or David Brooks .
You may prefer to have the man-child with the AR-15 and an itchy trigger finger .
Or you may think both are equally bad .
That ’ s fine ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we must at least be honest about the choice that voters face and let them decide which path they want the country to take .

On Sunday, President Donald Trump described a vigilante Trump Truck caravan whose purpose was to instigate #war on the streets of Portland through attempted vehicular homicide as GREAT PATRIOTS.
Later in the day former Vice President Joe Biden issued a considered statement that unequivocally condemned the violence in Portland “whether on the left or the right” and called on us not to become a country that “accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you” or “vows vengeance against one another.”
So there’s one candidate who wants vengeance and another who wants not-vengeance.
There’s one who eggs on his most radical supporters and another who calls them out.
There is one candidate who repeatedly, time and again, speaks and acts responsibly. Another who fires off screeds that demonstrate that he is at best mentally unstable and at worst attempting to incite violence against political foes.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
All of this is an inconvenient truth for the Republican political class. They avoid it at all costs because their livelihoods depend on ensuring that they remain seen in public as True Republicans. And in the current climate, True Republicans are no longer interested in small government or balanced budgets or originalism. True Republicans are defined—entirely—by their fealty to Donald Trump.
This is not an exaggeration. They actually put this in writing. Last week.
And here’s what their assignment editor says the message is when it comes to Black Lives Matter, protests, and civil unrest:
When is Slow Joe Biden going to criticize the Anarchists, Thugs & Agitators in ANTIFA? When is he going to suggest bringing up the National Guard in BADLY RUN & Crime Infested Democrat Cities & States? Remember, he can’t lose the Crazy Bernie Super Liberal vote! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2020
….His problem is interesting. He must always be weak on CRIME because of the Bernie Sanders Radical Left voter. If he loses them, like Crooked Hillary did, he is “toast”, and many will vote for me because of TRADE (Bernie was good on trade). Joe MUST always be weak on crime! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2020
Now this is . . . hard to parse. So rather than deal with the particulars, the Republican political class just blows right by it and instead pretends that the election 64 days from now actually pits Trump against Antifa or against the mayor of Portland.
And—in fairness to the members of Republican Inc.—if those fantasy match-ups were on the ballot, they would have a point. The agitators who set fire to Kenosha are acting unconscionably. The mayor of Portland has bungled his response to the protests, which then grew into riots.
But here’s the deal: Antifa and Mayor Wheeler aren’t on the ballot.
Joe Biden is.
And when it comes to both the protests and the looting, Joe Biden has done the right thing at pretty much every turn. You might be able to nitpick him on the margins. Maybe you wish he condemned them louder, with bells on, in the attic, in the form of a rap.
But Biden’s righteousness in contrast to Trump’s recklessness is an observable fact. If you don’t believe me, just put a transcript of Biden’s and Trump’s words about the civil unrest next to each other and compare. Anyone who hasn’t been jerking it to Race Wars Fanfic for the last 12 years will come to the same conclusion.
Which—again—is a problem for those who are trying to make the violence a political issue for Biden so that they don’t have to acknowledge the guy who instigated some of it and is now presiding over all of it. Ben Shapiro compared Biden’s unequivocal statement about this to an out-of-context line from the same Charlottesville speech in which Trump praised the “very fine” neo-Nazi protesters. (Note: Biden did not compliment any members of Antifa.)
Ted Cruz linked to a clever prank that linked “Antifa.com” to Joe Biden’s website. (Case closed!) Tim Carney’s not convinced that Trump is actually stoking the fire because some unnamed people somewhere also said that Ben Shapiro is just as bad. Dan Crenshaw tweeted that whatever Biden said was “too little too late.” (If that’s the case maybe Crenshaw can make a comment on the right-wing vigilante justice from On High.)
Laura Ingraham agreed with Crenshaw and attacked Biden for issuing a statement three months too late. But then she accidentally linked to a similar statement Biden made three months ago. (I wish this were a joke.)
It does not matter to any of these concern trolls that Trump’s own assistant secretary for threat prevention at DHS has testified that Trump “gave permission” to white-nationalist and right-wing domestic terrorists.
It does not matter that Trump tweets ALL CAPS praise to people who are escalating the violence.
It does not matter that Trump had peaceful protesters gassed. Or that Trump has threatened them with “vicious dogs” and “shooting.”
It does not matter that Trump refused to condemn vigilante murder when asked directly about it. Or that Trump refused to weigh in on a video of a cop emptying his clip into a black man’s back.
It does not matter that Trump spent Sunday tweeting weird-ass conspiracies and “black crime” videos and golfing while this unrest that he and his Republican enablers are so concerned about continued.
It does not matter that the violent actors on the right are literally parading through Portland with fucking Trump flags on their trucks or that the Antifa looters, like most of the radical left, almost certainly hates Joe Biden. (When was the last time you saw a “No Malarkey” sticker on a truck that had dudes in tactical gear menacing a crowd. I’ll wait.)
None of this matters because the middle managers at Republican Inc. understand that, no matter what, they can’t support Biden. They can “grudgingly” be for Trump if they have to. They might even be able to pull off saying that they’re disgusted by “both sides.” But they cannot—no matter what they will do privately on November 3—be publicly in favor of Biden.
And with that basic truth fixed in their minds, they work backwards.
The right’s commitment to the frame that Joe Biden is responsible for the violence then penetrates a broken legacy media that has still not yet figured out how to deal with having a sociopathic demagogue as president of the United States. For these outlets, if one “side” of the debate is consistently and loudly stating that the other side is in crisis/scandal/disarray, then the media just reports and analyzes around that claim. As Brian Beutler writes,
The way mainstream journalism seeks to inoculate itself from bias accusations in situations like these is to emphasize lawbreaking and corruption most particularly when one of the parties gets mad or pretends to be mad about something. In those cases, the unwritten rules of journalism say that thing has entered the realm of controversy, and thus merits sustained attention.
The result is a discussion framed as: “How much is Joe Biden being hurt by these uprisings?” And they skip right over the responsibility to assess whether that question is at all fair or reasonable based on Biden’s actions.
Earlier this week, a friend to The Bulwark, Matt Labash, made this point in the pages of the New York Times. I don’t mean to pick on Labash but his framing is the most vivid depiction of this that I’ve seen.
Democrats lie about “peaceful protests,” as cities are torched and ransacked. Republicans lie about COVID-19, a virus we didn’t even know existed 10 months ago, but which is now our third-leading killer, having taken nearly 185,000 American lives. These are the choices, folks: bunco men vs. flim-flammers. Bloods vs. Crips, engaged in gang warfare for its own sake.
Labash is correct that some Democrats have lied or dissembled in conflating peaceful protests with criminal riots. But the presidential contest this fall is not between Donald Trump and the worst-behaving Democrat on Twitter.
It is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. If we’re actually talking about Trump and Biden, then the bunco man and the flim-flammer are the same person. The Bloods are led by a strongman who wants to see the other gang get the shit knocked out of them and Crips are led by a guy who wants to host a bipartisan caucus of senators discussing the David Brooks column they read in hard copy that morning.
You may not like bipartisan caucuses or David Brooks. You may prefer to have the man-child with the AR-15 and an itchy trigger finger. Or you may think both are equally bad. That’s fine; that’s your call.
But we must at least be honest about the choice that voters face and let them decide which path they want the country to take.


thebulwark--2020-08-31--The Chaos President Has America in Chaos

Before he fancied himself the LAW & ORDER president , Donald Trump was the chaos candidate .
The guy who didn ’ t care about norms .
The guy who was going to break a bunch of stuff on purpose and even more stuff on accident .
They guy who was beloved by his cult of supporters not in spite of his penchant for demagogic incitement , but because of it .
So here is Question # 1 : Are you surprised ?
Answer : You shouldn ’ t be .
There is a straight line from this : There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And while we ’ re drawing lines , there is a another straight line that runs directly from this : These results are not accidents .
They are not random events .
And Donald Trump is not the man standing in the breach preventing America from descending into anarchy .
He is a pyromaniac campaigning for the office of fire marshal .
He did this .
He told us he was going to do it .
And for a nontrivial percentage of his supporters , this is why they voted for him .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a second Trump term would be a boon for either law or order .
Answer : The same thing that ’ s already happened .
Question # 3 : Before 2016 , when was the last time you saw pitched battles between armed , opposing political forces in America ’ s streets ?
Did you see it under Barack Obama ?
Or George W. Bush ?
Or Bill Clinton ?
Or George H.W .
Bush ?
Or Ronald Reagan ?
Or Jimmy Carter ?
Answer : By my count , you have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and even then for the most part you were seeing fights between radicals and agents of the government .
In the Jim Crow South , the violence was almost entirely on one side .
To find the type of mayhem we now have on the reg , with armed civilians clashing , you have to go back to the union-busting wars of the early 20th century—and even that ’ s probably not apt , since those were workers pitted against companies .
Yet , once Donald Trump arrived on the national stage , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American politics .
This is a thing that happens now , regularly .
Street fighting has become a feature of American politics .
Question # 4 : Do you think this would be happening today if Mitt Romney were president ?
Or Ted Cruz ?
Or Mike Pence ?
Or Scott Walker ?
Answer : Of course not .
And on the rare occasion it did happen , there would be a president who would have the clarity to tell both the skinheads and anarchists to cut it out rather than embolden them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the streets , people are going to be killed .
The first person murdered because of Donald Trump ’ s politics was Heather Heyer .
Just in the last week , we have added three more bodies .
One of the men currently running for president is trying to lower the nation ’ s temperature and has said that the violence from all sides—the left , the right , and the police , too—needs to stop .
The other man running for president is cheering on the people on his side who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Question # 5 : With this dynamic happening at the forefront of the presidential vote 64 days from now , and President Trump already saying that the only way he can lose is if the election is “ rigged , ” do you think we are likely to see more chaos and more violence and more death ?
Here I should clarify that I mean , in addition to the 183,000 Americans who have died—so far—from COVID-19 .
Answer : Almost certainly .
Because we are living in Donald Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because it was politically helpful to him .
And it still is .

Before he fancied himself the LAW & ORDER president, Donald Trump was the chaos candidate. The guy who didn’t care about norms. The guy who was going to break a bunch of stuff on purpose and even more stuff on accident. They guy who was beloved by his cult of supporters not in spite of his penchant for demagogic incitement, but because of it.
This—right now—is Donald Trump’s America.
So here is Question #1: Are you surprised?
Answer: You shouldn’t be. There is a straight line from this:
President Trump: Don't be too nice
Watch this video on YouTube
To this:
How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody | Visual Investigations
Watch this video on YouTube
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
There is another straight line from this:
Donald Trump Says He’d Like to Punch a Protester in the Face
Watch this video on YouTube
To this:
Protester attacked while leaving Trump rally
Watch this video on YouTube
To this:
….These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020
To this:
Teen Kyle Rittenhouse Accused Of Murdering Kenosha Protesters
Watch this video on YouTube
And while we’re drawing lines, there is a another straight line that runs directly from this:
President Donald Trump On Charlottesville: You Had Very Fine People, On Both Sides | CNBC
Watch this video on YouTube
To this:
….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how…. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019
To this:
Trump retweets racist video of supporter shouting ‘white power’
Watch this video on YouTube
These results are not accidents.
They are not random events.
And Donald Trump is not the man standing in the breach preventing America from descending into anarchy.
He is a pyromaniac campaigning for the office of fire marshal.
He did this. He told us he was going to do it. And for a nontrivial percentage of his supporters, this is why they voted for him.
There is no reason to believe that a second Trump term would be a boon for either law or order.
Question #2: What would happen?
Answer: The same thing that’s already happened.
Chaos reigns.
Question #3: Before 2016, when was the last time you saw pitched battles between armed, opposing political forces in America’s streets?
Did you see it under Barack Obama? Or George W. Bush? Or Bill Clinton? Or George H.W. Bush? Or Ronald Reagan? Or Jimmy Carter?
Answer: By my count, you have to go back at least half a century and even then for the most part you were seeing fights between radicals and agents of the government. In the Jim Crow South, the violence was almost entirely on one side. To find the type of mayhem we now have on the reg, with armed civilians clashing, you have to go back to the union-busting wars of the early 20th century—and even that’s probably not apt, since those were workers pitted against companies.
Yet, once Donald Trump arrived on the national stage, street fighting became a common feature of American politics.
Just look:
Pro-Trump, anti-Trump fights yields 21 arrests
Watch this video on YouTube
NYPD to pursue charges against 9 members of far-right group Proud Boys for violent brawl
Watch this video on YouTube
May Day fight between Patriot Prayer and Antifa breaks out in Northeast Portland
Watch this video on YouTube
Armed militia groups face off against counter-protesters in Georgia
Watch this video on YouTube
White nationalist rally brings clashes in Charlottesville
Watch this video on YouTube
This is a thing that happens now, regularly. Street fighting has become a feature of American politics.
Question #4: Do you think this would be happening today if Mitt Romney were president? Or Ted Cruz? Or Mike Pence? Or Scott Walker?
Answer: Of course not. And on the rare occasion it did happen, there would be a president who would have the clarity to tell both the skinheads and anarchists to cut it out rather than embolden them.
When you have armed gangs fighting in the streets, people are going to be killed. The first person murdered because of Donald Trump’s politics was Heather Heyer. Just in the last week, we have added three more bodies.
One of the men currently running for president is trying to lower the nation’s temperature and has said that the violence from all sides—the left, the right, and the police, too—needs to stop.
The other man running for president is cheering on the people on his side who are running toward the sound of guns.
Question #5: With this dynamic happening at the forefront of the presidential vote 64 days from now, and President Trump already saying that the only way he can lose is if the election is “rigged,” do you think we are likely to see more chaos and more violence and more death?
Here I should clarify that I mean, in addition to the 183,000 Americans who have died—so far—from COVID-19.
Answer: Almost certainly. Because we are living in Donald Trump’s America. He made it this way because it was politically helpful to him.
And it still is.


This Is the End

Until this election , I ’ ve never felt as if everything was on the line , that if my preferred candidate lost , something devastating and irrevocable would occur .
In the past , when I met people who felt this way , their mindset puzzled me .
How could my conservative friends seriously have believed that four years of a Hillary Clinton administration could somehow end America as we know it ?
How could my liberal friends really have thought that Mitt Romney ’ s presidency could do the same ?
This impulse always seemed like a naivety @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the longer arc of American history .
Believing in liberal democracy means accepting a very particular bargain : that your team will lose some , win others , and that by and large , the world won ’ t end either way .
Sure , you might not love what happens to your marginal tax rate .
You might favor stricter or looser environmental regulations .
You might like or dislike certain judges appointed to the federal bench .
But you also get to make a course correction two or four years later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one election to another .
And the truth is that adopting a sky-is-falling view undermines the every-day workings of politics .
When you view your policy opponents as the devil , you refuse to engage in the compromises necessary for liberal democracy to function .
Instead , you buy into a mindset that you must stop at nothing , adopt any tactic , and make common cause with any ally , no matter how noxious , in order to defeat evil .
Liberal democracy depends on a give-and-take across parties .
But when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opposed to each one of your values , how can you possibly trade horses with them ?
It ’ s not entirely the voters ’ fault that they tend to see every election as monumental : We ’ re a country that brands anything as “ historic ” —from the Super Bowl to Labor Day car sales .
Most of the time , though , presidential elections aren ’ t “ historic ” in the sense of defining events for years to come .
They ’ re just referendums on a particular set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , will nudge the polity in one direction or another .
I know all of that .
I believe all of that .
And yet , this time , I can ’ t shake the feeling that the election has us on a looming precipice that ’ s pretty important .
Historic , even .
I have a sense that if Donald Trump wins , the American project as we know it may not fully recover .
The Republic will limp along , some pale echo of former glory , but it won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offering “ the last best hope of earth.
” So why is it that this time seems different ?
The reason is actually pretty simple : After his acquittal in the Senate , Donald Trump has fully internalized just how much the American constitutional order runs on the honor system .
And Donald Trump couldn ’ t care less about honor .
So he ’ s willing to torch the basic bargain of liberal democracy , just to get reelected : He has openly mused about postponing the election and acknowledged that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in order to prevent people from voting by mail , which would disenfranchise large swaths of Americans .
He has said , over and over , that the election is rigged against him .
He has refused to say that he will accept a loss .
He ’ s figured out that , though he can ’ t use the military domestically , he can deploy various federal law enforcement agencies to assault protestors .
From his official perch in the White House , he has toyed with the idea that the opposing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ run for office .
He has dismissed the intelligence community ’ s conclusions that Russia is interfering in this election on his behalf .
Meanwhile , if the lastgo around is any guide , his campaign will eagerly seek assistance from Moscow or other foreign powers .
( Actually , they already have . )
Trump finally knows that he really does have a free hand to do whatever he likes because 40 percent of the country will support him , whether or not it ’ s legal .
And his responses to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evasions or shaky rationales into—this is quite literally what his own chief of staff just said— “ nobody cares.
” On top of all of this—and I didn ’ t even imagine this was possible—Trump and his surrogates have somehow managed to lean even further into a strategy of dehumanizing his opponents , making it all the easier to convince his supporters to permit extraordinary measures against ordinary Americans .
Repeatedly chanting that Biden will “ destroy suburbia ” with an “ invasion ” doesn ’ t even pretend to hide the ball @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t be so surprised .
Embracing bigotry has been Trump ’ s modus operandi from “ Mexicans are rapists ” through “ ban all Muslims.
” I honestly just didn ’ t realize it would reach this level of constant dehumanization so quickly .
These are authoritarian impulses , plain and simple , and they are dangerous precisely because they seek to undermine the social compact at the heart of liberal democracy : Even when you lose , you obey the result because the process was fair and you can try again the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans , your neighbors , have just as much of a right to govern the nation as you do .
But now one side is not-so-quietly saying , “ Maybe not.
” With this election what ’ s at stake isn ’ t policies so much as the basic bargain that governs our political system .
And for the first time in my life , I ’ m genuinely fearful that , should the other side win , I might not be able or allowed to right the national ship in the next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this really is a defining moment for the country .

Until this election, I’ve never felt as if everything was on the line, that if my preferred candidate lost, something devastating and irrevocable would occur.
In the past, when I met people who felt this way, their mindset puzzled me. How could my conservative friends seriously have believed that four years of a Hillary Clinton administration could somehow end America as we know it? How could my liberal friends really have thought that Mitt Romney’s presidency could do the same? This impulse always seemed like a naivety that prized an artificially short-term view over the longer arc of American history.
Believing in liberal democracy means accepting a very particular bargain: that your team will lose some, win others, and that by and large, the world won’t end either way.
Sure, you might not love what happens to your marginal tax rate. You might favor stricter or looser environmental regulations. You might like or dislike certain judges appointed to the federal bench. But you also get to make a course correction two or four years later. Nothing can be fundamentally broken from one election to another.
And the truth is that adopting a sky-is-falling view undermines the every-day workings of politics. When you view your policy opponents as the devil, you refuse to engage in the compromises necessary for liberal democracy to function. Instead, you buy into a mindset that you must stop at nothing, adopt any tactic, and make common cause with any ally, no matter how noxious, in order to defeat evil.
Liberal democracy depends on a give-and-take across parties. But when you see the other side as inimically opposed to each one of your values, how can you possibly trade horses with them?
It’s not entirely the voters’ fault that they tend to see every election as monumental: We’re a country that brands anything as “historic”—from the Super Bowl to Labor Day car sales. Most of the time, though, presidential elections aren’t “historic” in the sense of defining events for years to come. They’re just referendums on a particular set of policies that, give or take, will nudge the polity in one direction or another.
I know all of that. I believe all of that.
And yet, this time, I can’t shake the feeling that the election has us on a looming precipice that’s pretty important. Historic, even.
I have a sense that if Donald Trump wins, the American project as we know it may not fully recover. The Republic will limp along, some pale echo of former glory, but it won’t ever fulfill the promise of offering “the last best hope of earth.”
So why is it that this time seems different?
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
The reason is actually pretty simple:
After his acquittal in the Senate, Donald Trump has fully internalized just how much the American constitutional order runs on the honor system.
And Donald Trump couldn’t care less about honor.
So he’s willing to torch the basic bargain of liberal democracy, just to get reelected: He has openly mused about postponing the election and acknowledged that he would like to defund the Post Office in order to prevent people from voting by mail, which would disenfranchise large swaths of Americans. He has said, over and over, that the election is rigged against him. He has refused to say that he will accept a loss. He’s figured out that, though he can’t use the military domestically, he can deploy various federal law enforcement agencies to assault protestors.
From his official perch in the White House, he has toyed with the idea that the opposing vice presidential nominee can’t legally run for office. He has dismissed the intelligence community’s conclusions that Russia is interfering in this election on his behalf. Meanwhile, if the lastgo around is any guide, his campaign will eagerly seek assistance from Moscow or other foreign powers. (Actually, they already have.)
Put another way:
Trump finally knows that he really does have a free hand to do whatever he likes because 40 percent of the country will support him, whether or not it’s legal.
And his responses to breaking the law have devolved from dissembling evasions or shaky rationales into—this is quite literally what his own chief of staff just said—“nobody cares.”
On top of all of this—and I didn’t even imagine this was possible—Trump and his surrogates have somehow managed to lean even further into a strategy of dehumanizing his opponents, making it all the easier to convince his supporters to permit extraordinary measures against ordinary Americans. Repeatedly chanting that Biden will “destroy suburbia” with an “invasion” doesn’t even pretend to hide the ball.
In truth, I shouldn’t be so surprised. Embracing bigotry has been Trump’s modus operandi from “Mexicans are rapists” through “ban all Muslims.” I honestly just didn’t realize it would reach this level of constant dehumanization so quickly.
These are authoritarian impulses, plain and simple, and they are dangerous precisely because they seek to undermine the social compact at the heart of liberal democracy: Even when you lose, you obey the result because the process was fair and you can try again the next round. You know your fellow Americans, your neighbors, have just as much of a right to govern the nation as you do.
But now one side is not-so-quietly saying, “Maybe not.”
With this election what’s at stake isn’t policies so much as the basic bargain that governs our political system. And for the first time in my life, I’m genuinely fearful that, should the other side win, I might not be able or allowed to right the national ship in the next election.
That’s new. That’s different.
And it’s why this really is a defining moment for the country.