Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–NBC News/SurveyMonkey–Clinton 49, Trump 43

Zack Beaucamp at Vox on White Riot. A must read:

Donald Trump is not an accident.

It’s tempting to see Trump’s rise as something sui generis: something so bizarre, so linked to his own celebrity, that it could never be repeated. Yet it is being repeated: Throughout the Western world, far-right populists are rising in the polls.

In Hungary, the increasingly authoritarian president, Viktor Orban, has started building a wall to keep out immigrants and holding migrants in detention camps where guards have been filmed flinging food at them as if they were zoo animals. In Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League, led by a politician who has attacked the pope for calling for dialogue with Muslims, is polling at more than three times its 2013 level, making it the country’s third most popular party. And in Finland, the Finns Party — which wants to dramatically slash immigration numbers and keep out many non-Europeans — is part of the government. Its leader, Timo Soini, is the country’s foreign minister.

These politicians share Trump’s populist contempt for the traditional political elite. They share his authoritarian views on crime and justice. But most importantly, they share his xenophobia: They despise immigrants, vowing to close the borders to refugees and economic migrants alike, and are open in their belief that Muslims are inherently dangerous.

These parties’ values are too similar, and their victories coming too quickly, for their success to be coincidental. Their platforms, a right-wing radicalism somewhere between traditional conservatism and the naked racism of the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan, have attracted widespread support in countries with wildly different cultures and histories.

The conventional wisdom is that the economic losses suffered by working-class people throughout the developed world explain the rise of this new right. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are estimated to have been lost due to free trade pacts in recent decades, with industries like manufacturing absorbing much of the pain.

That’s created an ocean of angry and frustrated people — primarily blue-collar and primarily white — who are susceptible to the appeal of a nationalist leader promising to bring back what they feel has been taken away.

This anger plays some small part, but it doesn’t tell most of the story. A vast universe of academic research suggests the real drivers are something very different: anger over immigration and a toxic mix of racial and religious intolerance. That conclusion is supported by an extraordinary amount of social science, from statistical analyses that examine data on how hundreds of thousands of Europeans look at immigrants to ground-level looks at how Muslim immigration affects municipal voting, and on to books on how, when, and why ethnic conflicts erupt.

This research finds that, contrary to what you’d expect, the “losers of globalization” aren’t the ones voting for these parties. What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards.

Jeet Heer on the once and future Donald Trump:

To predict the future of Trumpism, it helps to understand why [Pat] Buchanan and his peculiar brand of right-wing nationalist conservatism (called paleoconservatism) emerged in the late 1980s. American conservatism started splintering at the moment of its greatest political success, after the landslide election of Ronald Reagan in 1984, when all but one state went Republican.

Dissatisfaction with Reagan’s triumph emerged by a peculiar combination of success abroad and stalemate at home. By the late 1980s, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Cold War was drawing to a close as Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policies deprived America of the foe of five decades. But while anti-communism succeeded beyond expectations, social conservatives like Buchanan couldn’t help but notice that on other fronts, America continued to be liberal: Democrats still controlled Congress and won the Senate in 1986, feminism and gay rights continued to advance, Martin Luther King’s birthday was made a national holiday, and mass immigration—both legal and undocumented—continued to dilute the demographic dominance of the white majority.

As the Wall Street Journal noted in a 1989 editorial, “anti-Communism has been the glue that held the conservative movement together.” Without the unifying threat of a supposedly global enemy, the right began to splinter. The division was first evident in the battle between the neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. The neoconservatives, many of them former Cold War liberals and as a group skewing Jewish, were internationalists: Even with the USSR on its deathbed, they wanted America to pursue global hegemony and push an agenda of democratization abroad. This internationalism went along with support for free trade and generous immigration policies. Although small in number, the neocons enjoyed ideological dominance thanks to their outsized role in publications like the Journal and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

The paleoconservatives emerged in reaction to the neocon ascendency. Found in small magazines like Chronicles, Southern Partisan, and The Rockwell-Rothbard Report, the paleocons were a motley group made up of anti-war libertarians (Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell), Catholic reactionaries (Buchanan, Joseph Sobran) and southern nostalgists for white supremacy (Samuel T. Francis, Thomas Fleming). What united this sundry group was the belief that the “globalism” of the neocons had to be opposed by a new nationalism based on immigration restriction, trade protectionism, and a foreign policy that included withdrawing from many international alliances and agreements. Paleocons also believed that neocons were too deferential to liberal sensitivity on issues related to race, and were restricted by what Buchanan called “the limits of permissible dissent.” Or as Trump would put it, “We have to stop being so politically correct in this country.”

Former President George H.W. Bush is bucking his party’s presidential nominee and plans to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, Politico reports.

“President Obama is approaching the final weeks of the presidential campaign with an intense sense of urgency and concern amid a growing realization that the election could be determined by the narrowest of margins,” the Washington Post reports.

“Earlier this year, Obama seemed to regard the defeat of GOP nominee Donald Trump as a near inevitability, but in recent days the president has changed his tone.”

This is why athletes are protesting during the anthem. This is why an organization like Black Lives Matter exists. Because police are murdering unarmed black men for no reason. To criticize either the protest or the BLM, it means two things: 1) you are not an American, and 2) you are in favor of unjustified murder. Simple as that.

The Tulsa, Oklahoma police department released new video footage yesterday of the shooting death of Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old black man, on Friday. The footage from a cruiser’s dashboard camera and a helicopter overhead appears to contradict the police officers’ version of the incident and has sparked outrage nation-wide.

Crutcher was on his way home from a music appreciation class at a local community college in Tulsa, Oklahoma when his SUV stalled around 7:40 p.m. The footage shows Crutcher standing in the middle of the road with his hands in the air, and slowly walking toward the car and leaning against it at the direction of police. What happens next is obscured by the officers and the vehicle, but a shot is fired and Crutcher falls to the ground. Police say he was Tasered by Officer Tyler Turnbough, then shot once by Officer Betty Shelby.

Officers then waited nearly two minutes before offering him any kind of assistance. Crutcher died later at the hospital. Police say he was unarmed and had no weapons in the car.

Donald Trump “is saying ‘yes’ to Fox News almost every day but saying ‘no’ to most other major networks and news organizations — a highly unusual strategy for a presidential nominee,” CNN reports. It’s mostly because he is a coward who hates critics and questions.

“Rousing the base instead of reaching out to undecided voters may ultimately pay off for Trump. If nothing else, it limits the candidate’s exposure to hard-hitting questions — while fueling frustration among journalists.”

Richard Cohen at The Washington Post compares Trump’s mentality to Hitler’s:

I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is. […]

Just as Hitler’s remarks about Jews were deeply rooted in German anti-Semitism, so was Trump’s birtherism rooted in American racism — with some anti-Muslim sentiment thrown in. Trump’s adamant insistence on it raised issues not, as some have so delicately put it, about his demeanor, but instead about his rationality. It made a joke out of the entire furor over revealing his medical records. I’m sure that Trump is fine physically. Mentally, it’s a different story.

At Foreign Policy, Max Boot explains why Donald Trump is the dream candidate of ISIS:

The core of his approach is to keep saying the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism,” something that he (wrongly) claims Clinton never does. […] But there’s a good reason why both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have been reluctant to speak of “Islamic terrorism,” and it’s not because Obama is a closet Muslim, as Trump has insinuated in the past. It’s because they realize that in the battle against terrorism, the United States cannot win unless it can get the support of most of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. By seeming to insult Islam and Muslims as Trump does, he plays into Islamic State and al Qaeda propaganda, which posits that there is a battle between Islam and the West.

But Trump doesn’t care about winning Muslim hearts and minds. He seems to think he can keep Americans safe by keeping all terrorists out of the country, as if it weren’t the case that many of our post-9/11 attackers — such as Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter, and Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter — were homegrown.

Greg Sargent’s take on the RNC’s defense of Trump:

So it’s come to this: The institutional position of the Republican Party in the great birther controversy roiling the 2016 campaign — a consequential chapter in our political history — is now essentially that Donald Trump did the nation a service by forcing the first African American president to finally show his papers. […] The Trump campaign’s effort to whitewash his birther history — in which he fed racist conspiracy theories for years — is being widely called out as dishonest. And that’s good. But Trump’s new narrative is actually a lot worse than the rendering of it we’ve seen in most media accounts suggests, and now the party has institutionally joined in promoting it. […]

It is likely that many Republicans and conservatives — such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio — see it as a blot on the history of the modern GOP that the party nominated someone who launched a years-long racist campaign to delegitimize the first African American president in the explicit belief that it would appeal to the racist tendencies of many GOP primary voters. Those Republicans might even say so right now if asked. But Trump has compelled the RNC not merely to participate in helping him push lies designed to muddy the waters around his birther history, but also — and this is the really important part — to institutionally defend that history. Indeed, while many Republicans previously repudiated this history, the RNC is now helping Trump validate it.

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