Delaware Liberal

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “Mr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it’s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.” “Many Americans are not overly concerned about Mr. Trump’s authoritarian inclinations because they trust our system of constitutional checks and balances to constrain him. Yet the institutional safeguards protecting our democracy may be less effective than we think.”

Josh Marshall says the DNC race cannot devolve into score settling.

It seems to me that Democrats are now involved in a pointless proxy battle between what we might call a "deep causes" explanation of the 2016 loss (strategy, ideology, candidate) and one focused on illegitimate outside interventions: Russian hacking and subversion or James Comey's week-out intervention in the presidential race. Any effort to hold these two explanations as alternatives, as though one obviates the other seems either dishonest, pointless, distracting or simply silly. […] Everybody who wants to be vindicated by Clinton's defeat won't stand for anything that doesn't place the matter 100% on her shoulders and those who supported her. Much the same applies to Clinton's historically large popular vote margin for someone who lost the presidency. There's no reason you can't trumpet the fact that Clinton was the popular choice while also noting that consequences all stand or fall by engineering wins through the math and logic of the electoral college. Which brings us to the other clarifying point. Hillary Clinton will never be the Democratic presidential nominee again. The intricacies of her emails or James Comey's decisions about the investigation into them will never be campaign issues again. Whatever you think about the Clinton Foundation will never matter again in a presidential campaign. That means that figuring out the future of the Democratic party just has nothing to do with any of those things. I'm tempted to say Russian hacking won't happen again. But frankly, I'm not so sure. They already appear to be pulling the same thing with Angela Merkel. In any case, external subversion, cybersecurity just belongs to a separate conversation and realm. The truth is it shouldn't have been close enough for these outside interventions to have allowed Trump to win. But it was. Was that because Clinton was a terrible candidate and Sanders should have been the nominee? Maybe. But I doubt it. At a minimum I don't think it is so clear as to be treated as a given. Clinton always had serious liabilities - some tied to her personally and others of historical circumstance. Sanders lacked many of Clinton's liabilities. He also had numerous other liabilities that no money or real adversary was ever put up to exploring and exploiting. But again, personalities ... I guess it's somewhat more possible that Sanders will run for President than Clinton. But I highly doubt either will.

Hear Hear! It is time to move on from this fight. I know, I am one to talk, right?

Jonathan Chait: “Donald Trump’s surprising (though not unforeseeable) election has provoked a wave of fear and anger among his opponents. But much of it has been misdirected into denial or despair rather than effective channels of political mobilization. The clearest symbol of this misplaced energy is the campaign to persuade members of the Electoral College to deny Donald Trump the presidency.” “The first thing to note about this effort is that it is utterly hopeless… Second, and more important, denying Trump the presidency through an Electoral College coup is not a procedurally legitimate response… The final problem is that the campaign to prevent Trump’s election has turned the hopeless Electoral College gambit into a substitute for political organizing.” “But there are better measures of horror at Trump and Trumpism than support for a hopeless and questionable tactic. The correct response should involve the protection and engagement of normal politics.”

In the week after the election, I didn't listen to or read any national punditry. I still don't. As a result, I was late to the Hillary supporters "Bernie Bros" smear which identifies Sanders supporters as crypto-racists who want to throw POC, women, and gays under the bus in order to appeal to white nationalists who live in the rust belt. Entering late, I've been on my heals and frankly confused about the whole zero sum game that was underway. My fist reaction was, "C'mon guys, everyone can be a little right and a little wrong." But that didn't work. Collegiality seemed to have completely broken down. Here is my forensic take on what happened.

I have observed that Coons was setting out to present himself as the most spineless member of congress in terms of dealing with Donald Trump. I thought that might have…

Matt Yglesias:

Democrats have a deep, dark worry that they can’t express publicly. After long, frustrating years of trying and failing to get congressional Republicans to agree to do some fiscal stimulus to boost the economy, they’re worried that Trump is now going to get the cooperation they couldn’t. Enormous tax cuts will widen the deficit and stimulate the economy, and the cuts will be paired with a substantial infrastructure program that further boosts growth. “Well, sometimes you have to prime the pump,” Donald Trump told Time magazine, explaining blithely how he plans to brush aside years of conservative anti-Keynesian rhetoric. The hypocrisy here is truly stunning, though in a sense conservatives have consistently (since the Reagan Era) adhered to the view that big deficits are good if and only if there’s a Republican in the White House. But, beyond hypocrisy, the bad news for America — albeit good news for Democratic Party politicians — is that it won’t work. Which is too bad, because there is reason to believe stimulus could work and help raise wages and put a few million extra people back to work. It’s just that to make it work Trump would have to make some additional changes that there’s no indication he wants to make.