New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman interviewed Mitt Romney’s campaign manager Stuart Stevens and they discussed a wide range of topics. At the end, they came to the subject of Donald Trump.
You write in the book that the cruelest lesson in life, and sports, is what if? So what if Donald Trump becomes president?
[Laughs.] He’s not. He’s not! This goes down to, how am going to play in the next Super Bowl? It’s not going to happen. For Donald Trump to win, everything we know about politics has to be wrong. And I don’t think it is. The timing of when it falls apart is always more difficult to know than inevitably that it will.It’s like that Hemingway quote: “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Yes. I think there’s a lot of that in politics.
That’s really a two-parter. I touched on this in the last post. If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination and especially if he becomes the next president, it really means that we’re a much worse lot of people that even the most cynical bastards have ever accused of us being. It’s not so much about what we think we know about politics as it is about what we’d like to believe about ourselves.
After all, for tens years of blogging, I’ve been pegging the conservative movement as having exactly the kind of appeal that Trump is exploiting now. I wasn’t surprised that he caught on. I wasn’t under the misimpression that his so-called screw-ups on John McCain and Megyn Kelly would hurt him and actually predicted that they would help him. But even though I may understand our political opponents better than the both-sides-do-it beltway commentators, that doesn’t mean that I think the country as a whole would opt for Trump’s act. I have too high of an opinion of the American people to believe that they’ve sunk that low.
But I could be wrong.
The second interesting part of that exchange is the Hemingway quote, and a political party can probably go bankrupt in the same manner as the average homeowner or businessperson: gradually, and then suddenly.
There really ought to have been a reckoning in 2009 after everything went to hell and turned to ashes in the mouths of Bush and Cheney, McCain opted for Queen Dumbass of the Northwoods, and we’d seen the Republican Congress evolve from its initial burst of energy in the first days of the Gingrich Revolution into the sordid and sad and appalling spectacle of Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley and Tom DeLay.
But, instead, they doubled and tripled down on the bullshit and idiocy.
So, that whole bit, and the tea parties and the Romney Lie-o-Rama and the drunk Speaker weeping into his cufflinks…
…that was the gradual part.
What we’re getting geared up for at the moment is the sudden part.
The sudden part is that “tipping point” thing. Things go along, go along, go along, then all of a sudden the accumulated mass is there and it just tips over.
Trump is pushing the immigration thing. I won’t bother to remind you of my position. My suggestion is that Democrats ask themselves “What can we do to gather some of those votes?”
Here is the answer. Stephen Breyer, Justice of the Supreme Court, has a new book out. In it, he states “persons either believe in the rule of law, or they are in with mob rule”.
If the Democrats believe in the rule of law, then illegals are not part of that. If they are with the mob rule, then the illegals are just fine.
You have to choose. It’s either the rule of law or it is not. I choose the rule of law.
You have to choose. It’s either the rule of law or it is not. I choose the rule of law.
This country doesn’t believe in the rule of law. If we did, bankers would be in jail. Non-white people wouldn’t have reason to fear the police. I could go on but I think you get my point.
As far as rule of law goes, the oenaltyies for hiring undocumented workers put this law breaking in the misdemeanor category.
Improper entry is a misdemeanor and unlawful presence isn’t even a crime.
Really, this problem of “illegals” is self-correcting, if one has the courage.
Simple: any illegal that turns in the head of their person ILLEGALLY employing them gets automatic citizenship!
One less criminal employer, one less illegal immigrant…in a few weeks, the problem will be solved, amirite?
Of course, the criminal-loving pantywaists of the GOP will whine about it. Sucks to be them.
So in order to win over Trump’s supporters we have to adopt his positions? I’ll pass.
As for the rule of law, this is why we wanted the immigration reform bill that would have already passed if Boehner had only allowed a vote. If we change the law, these people won’t be illegal anymore, now will they? That might sound glib, but it really is how it works.
And lastly, here’s the thing about all Americans: They do believe in the rule of law, except when they don’t. Sometimes laws are wrong.
Would the election of Donald Trump tell us anything worse about America than the (near) election of George W Bush did?
yes
If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination and especially if he become the next president, it really means that we’re a much worse lot of people that even the most cynical bastards have ever accused of us being.
Maybe it’s because I live in one of the dumbshittiest parts of America, where 75% of the populace (largely retired military officers) voted for Sarah Palin. But I also spend most of my time at my customer in a city that voted over 70% for Obama twice, so it’s not just that.
No, I totally think America is stupid, selfish, and shallow enough to vote Trump to a victory in a landslide.
Of course, I also think that 150 years from now the tiny fragments of humanity will be living in caves somewhere trying to survive the climate we are creating.
OTOH, on occasion somewhere near 60% of Americans have demonstrated the ability to think more rationally than almost all Republican politicians and a goodly number of Democrats even in the absence of strong and plentiful public voices persuading them. We saw that in the Schiavo case. And early on they were there on the question of GWB’s invasion of Iraq. They are there again on county clerks issuing marriage licenses; although public voices in support of this job duty have been much louder and more plentiful than in the other two examples.
On the issue of undocumented US residents, an incredible 72% don’t want them deported. Trump is appealing to that 44% of Republicans that want them to go and he’s yet to be favored by all of them in the polls.
The only way humans survive that long is if nuclear war or disease completely upends technological progress and destroys human civilization before 40-50 years pass.
Strong AI and/or genetic engineering will stop the dominance of the human race in its current form long before we pay the piper on climate change, assuming no nuclear war. So there is that.
The problem with that is the only people who survive will be the rich sociopaths because they’d be the only ones to afford the jump to transhumanity.
Well define bankruptcy. The system demands two camps and only two. Tremendous amounts of resources have been invested in both. Even if the GOP has become a decentralized oligarchy it’s still going to get its factions to.vote together every two years for the battle against the common enemy. And their voters are more dedicated than ours.
you know how there are predatory animals and insects that don’t build their own homes but instead steal one that it is already built?
Think about hermit crabs or certain kinds of wasps.
That’s what conservatives did with the GOP. They came in and invaded and killed off all the dissenters until they had turned the party into a uniformly anti-choice, anti-environmentalism, anti-federal government, know-nothing movement of religious freaks and small time hustlers.
Bankruptcy is when they grow so weak that others are allowed back in and eventually force most of them out.
That is going to be exactly true for the Democrats as well if we get the political revolution we need that Bernie is trying to launch. It happens for Republicans because of their embrace of bigotry and the stupid. It happens for Democrats for doing their part to rig the economy against the working people.
Also the cuckoo, who lays an egg in a nest of another bird, and the chick that is hatched pushes the other chicks out of the nest. That is a more appropriate example, I think.
The most severe form of bankruptcy would be for the Republicans to go the way of the Federalists and the Whigs.
You have no idea how much I long for this, not just because the GOP is scum, but because it would be a singular political event in my lifetime. It won’t happened, but I can dream!
A nation capable of cheer-leading the disastrous and ill-conceived invasion of Iraq is capable of anything; electing Trump would be a blip by comparison.
Interesting moral formulation there.
I had to think about it.
No, Trump is much more of a voluntary act of sin. The Iraq War was aggressively sold to a traumatized public that ought to have been able to trust their government, at least a little bit.
“I have too high of an opinion of the American people to believe that they’ve sunk that low.”
Whether Trump wins or loses badly, the American people really have sunk that low. No one else on the left wants to believe that, but just the emergence of Trump as a viable candidate is one more piece of evidence.
It’s not like the rest of the GOP Klown-Kar is that much better…
Trump almost seems laboratory-designed to demonstrate your point.
In the 1968 general election, Nixon/Agnew plus Wallace/LeMay received 57% of the vote.
Reagan was more or less gaga by 1984. GWB is more or less ignorant and dumb.
Granted none of them occupied the WH when the most ignorant and craziest RWNJs controlled Congress; so Trump in the WH would be an even bigger nightmare than the 2003-2007 period when congressional GOP ignorant and crazy fell short of 100%. However, the same would be true for all the other GOP candidates.
“Longing for ’03-’07? Vote X”
Viable at the moment means 30% of the GOP voters in Iowa and what in national polls (which are this far out very squishy).
So at the moment around 16% of the voters are ga-ga over Trump. He still has to clear the remainder of a large field that has some candidates with very deep pockets. And the McCain and Mittens dynamics point to an ultimate (though currently invisible) Jeb! nomination.
What Trump is is the media play-pretty of the moment. What Trump is doing is trying to be crazy without jumping the shark before Super Tuesday. The fascination about whether he can succeed at doing that is his very intentional strategy for attraction attention, sucking the media coverage, and expanding his base. It is as policy-less as one can get.
Oh come on. You at least have to balance that against whatever it says about us that we elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama to be our president.
May Godwin strike me dead, but that reminds me of a certain central European country in the 20th Century.
Only when he forges an alliance with the OathKeepers does this become more than a one-man band.
The tipping point is when someone says loud enough that it is precisely the principles of modern conservatism that has driven the failed domestic and national security policies that in turn have destroyed the economy and global respect for this country. What the GOP is selling has failed for 30 years and is making things worse. When that word goes out an the majority of Americans nod yes, then the tipping point occurs as it did in 1932.
That statement of ideological failure did not occur in 2009. That was the missed opportunity. We know politically why it did not happen but that was the missed opportunity. Despite the appearance of health in the economy, we are on much thinner ice with few of the weaknesses of 2007 repaired. The national security situation resembles the 1930s.
New Deal liberalism collapsed primarily because it institutionalized racism and urban corruption in the name of political pragmatism. Redlining of housing projects, destruction of thriving black commercial neighborhoods for freeways, white flight, unequal distribution of educational funding, eviction through eminent domain of farmers in order to get the land for state parks, national parks, scenic highways, Corps of Engineer reservoir projects and the interstate highway system created a lot of backlash to government. Ronald Reagan was speaking to a lot of these sorts of people when he mocked “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” New Deal liberalism also created the military industrial complex, but Reagan did not criticize that.
Modern conservatism has made government intentionally fail, including the most expensive military in the world, so as to continue to make Reagan’s point. Moreover an unregulated economy winds up destroying itself through fraud as it has done many times since 1819. And the neoconservative foreign policy has created so much backlash and blowback that we are both more secure and less sure of that security than any time in history. It is possible, if the US is willing, to eliminate entirely weapons of mass destruction, land mines, and cluster munitions as instruments of warfare. Most nations that have the resources to develop them have concluded that the the costs are not worth the benefits. It is a matter of the superpower deciding to give up those weapons and long and patient negotiation. We have had a global consensus not to use nuclear weapons for 70 years; even in the heat of the Cold War, the Soviet officer corps, if no one else, decided not to respond to provocations with launch orders. Conventional warfare has been used asymmetrically to suppress populations; nations have made strong attempts to avoid conventional warfare. What remains as warfare is subversion, terrorist attacks, civilian casualties, counter-insurgency violations of international law, air strikes, and drone strikes. None of these seem to do more than end in various multilateral stalemates. That best-of-times/worst-of-times global security situation could cascade into to something globally threatening at any moment. Modern conservative national security policy seeks to trigger that catastrophe through remaking the Middle East and pivoting to China. Delaying the tipping point increases the global danger.
Just as the Fed should not have pretended that the leading US financial institutions were not insolvent in 2008, Democratic politiicians and honest pundits should no longer pretend that modern conservativism is not at this very moment bankrupt and pretending. Is that not the reason that their primary has devolved into a clown show? Is that not the reason that they cannot agree in Congress on how to screw the American people?
Call it what it is. Trigger the avalanche that starts the real transformation of American politics.
Trump is still only polling about 30% of the 35% of Americans who will likely vote in the GOP primaries.
It doesn’t contradict your premise Boo. It may bolster it but in their last gasp the GOP faithful have perhaps put a death grip on the candidate who will honestly says what the faithful believe. The other candidates look weak and thin by comparison.
But like the businessman who keeps pointing to a cadre of loyal customers for which he either loses money on every sale or can’t pay his bills with their total revenue, one day he will have to close his doors.