"Worthy of Praise"

Once Muhammad Ali got sick, Joe Frazier liked to tell people: look at him and look at me and tell me who won our fights. In the end, Ali outlived him by four and a half years. Frazier was quite the character while he was still around. He also said, upon seeing a palsied Ali light the Olympic flame at the Atlanta games, that he wished he were there to shove Ali into the cauldron. By then it was refreshing to have that glaring exception to the reverence Ali enjoyed. Frazier had reason to resent him; he was probably as "street" as Ali was, if not more so, but got tarred as an Uncle Tom because he held the title that had been stripped from Ali and thus was seen as the establishment's pet. Also, a black person probably enjoys being called a gorilla no more when another black person does it than when a white person does. On some level, I suspect Ali enjoyed Frazier's hate, despite the occasional tales you heard of reconciliation. For much of his career, the former Cassius Clay enjoyed playing the heel. He was a pro wrestling fan (and even did some angles in the squared circle) and claimed to take some of his style from Gorgeous George, the paradigmatic arrogant heel of the early TV age. But Ali arguably created an archetype that looms large in pop culture today: the heel who turns babyface, to stick to wrestling lingo, because fans like him for being a badass. He was a heel early in his career, more or less, because his poetic boasting was conduct unbecoming a professional athlete. He turned face for his fight with Sonny Liston because Liston was a natural heel, white America's nightmare of a big, violent black man. You could almost believe that Clay changed his name and embraced the Nation of Islam in part because he wanted to stay a heel. The NOI seemed threatening fifty years ago and adopting such a foreign-sounding name must have seemed a form of treason, but in retrospect we should note that, for all the self-evident idiocy of Elijah Muhammad's theology, neither he nor his spiritual successor Louis Farrakhan has ever preached a jihad against the United States. If changing your name while repudiating the old one as a "slave name" seemed like treason, refusing to report for duty when drafted for the Vietnam War was the actual article as far as many Americans were concerned, but as things turned out Ali was just a little bit ahead of the curve of public opinion, and history has judged his resistance heroic, if only because it has also judged the war an error. He was the hero of a multiracial counterculture by the time he was reinstated as a boxer, but in dealing with Frazier he was determined to draw heat heel style, and it proved easy with someone who didn't seem to take ribbing well. For his trouble Ali was dropped on his ass in the fifteenth round and spent another three years in the wilderness before finding a different kind of perfect foil in George Foreman. It's difficult to see from our perspective, when Foreman is nearly as beloved as Ali himself, how frightening he seemed back in 1974, when he was just another big black man who just happened to annihilate Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, Ali's recent conquerors. Even then, though, there was something -- dare I say -- "whitebread" about Foreman, more benignly oafish than the authentically menacing Liston, that makes his type a perfect foil for the badass antihero. Ali's victory against the most impossible-seeming odds of his career kept him a babyface for the rest of his days, especially since Americans love nothing much more than a valiant battler against debilitating disease. In the final analysis, he really was a kind of epic hero, complete with his own Homer in Howard Cosell, whom technology enabled to spellbind audiences with tales of Ali's battles as they actually happened. And if you like your chroniclers more literary, I recommend to you Norman Mailer's brilliant accounts of Ali-Frazier I and the Foreman fight. In any event, Muhammad Ali was a hero of his time, and that tells us as much about his time as it does about the man. His death this weekend has been treated virtually as an apotheosis, with even Donald Trump praising him, but I wonder whether an Ali in his twenties today, behaving now as he did then and taking the kind of political stands he did, would be treated as a hero by today's media. Whether one is treated as a hero and whether one is a hero, after all, are two different things. Speaking for myself as a fight fan, I mourn him as one of the great athletes of my childhood, the best of a mighty generation of heavyweight boxers compared to whom today's fighters look sad. There's something decadent about his boasting that might be deplored, but at least he pulled it off with a panache beyond the reach of all his stylistic descendants today. Without disputing the reality of his achievements, we can call him the greatest sports entertainer of the 20th century.

The hate that hate produced?

I still don't think that Donald Trump is a racist in any meaningful sense of the word, but it's harder than ever to avoid the conclusion that he's bigoted against Mexicans. Either that explains Trump's railing against Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, who is hearing a case against the notorious Trump University, or else the candidate's instinct is always to go for the ad hominem attack. Either way, Trump asserts that Curiel is biased against him because the judge's parents were (legal) immigrants from Mexico. His tantrum might have been a "Have you no decency?" moment if such moments still were possible in the U.S. If Joe McCarthy and Joe Welch had been around today, and McCarthy had pulled his usual stunt, Welch probably would have hit McCarthy with a law book. That's where we're at, or that's where we're heading, to judge from the scenes outside the Trump rally in San Jose yesterday, where the candidate's fans were chased, punched and pelted by protesters. Way to surrender the moral high ground, whoever you are. Now the logic seems to be that if you're even interested in Trump, you're a racist. The Nation claimed in an editorial last week that, given all of Trump's deviations from ideological orthodoxy, the only thing holding the Republican party together, or the principal force animating the Trump movement, is hate. But hate may be the only thing holding the Democratic party together right now, albeit hate of one man rather than an entire group of people. Now that hatred of Trump extends to his supporters, which only confirms the implicit narrative among many of those supporters that the American left is defined by hatred of whites. Of course, leftist haters will say they only hate haters, but they, just as much as Republicans, are guilty of a defining fallacy of our time: to oppose is to hate. Few of us seem willing to concede any sincere basis, let alone any reasoned basis, for disagreement with our beliefs, our pet projects, our desires. If Trump wants to control immigration, he must hate foreigners; if Mexicans or other immigrants oppose his policy, they must hate America. As Americans grow more intolerant of contradiction, Trump provokes hatred by unapologetically contradicting people, yet seems intolerant of contradiction himself. So what's next? We started with Trump supporters attacking hecklers inside the rallies, and now we have Trump haters attacking the supporters outside. The next step could be still more provocative if police don't take control of the space outside political rallies. I can easily see self-appointed bodyguards forming to protect Trump and his followers, and I can just as easily see people calling them Trump's brownshirts or stormtroopers or something just as inflammatory. It would be all the more reason for many to fear Trump and some to escalate the confrontations further still. My hope is that law enforcement will make such an escalation by the Trump movement unnecessary, but even if they do so it's unlikely to alter our toxic dialectic of hate. That might take someone willing to risk everyone's hatred by telling them they're all wrong and acting accordingly.

The anti-interventionist consensus

By default, Hillary Clinton is the neocon candidate for President. Michael Gerson, a Washington Post columnist and purveyor of "Heroic Conservatism," is disgusted with the foreign policies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Gerson believes that President Obama's Syria policy has resulted in "a security debacle and a humanitarian catastrophe," yet both Sanders and Trump argue that the U.S. under Obama is "overcommitted" in Syria. Gerson himself has a very clear four-point program for Syria, premised on his belief that "any rapprochement with Assad would be both immoral and pointless." To sum it up, Gerson still wants the U.S. to pick a winner in Syria and back it with as-yet unquantified American resources. The argument, made by both Trump and Sanders, that the U.S. has already done too much in Syria, is "callous" and "foolish" in Gerson's eyes. For all his criticism of Obama's, Gerson's philosophical position is essentially the same as Obama's. Both believe that the Assad regime is the necessary and sufficient cause of the Syrian civil war, on the assumption that dictatorships are inherently unstable because they automatically provoke resistance. Since Clinton was still Secretary of State when the Syrian trouble started, we can presume that she agrees with this philosophy. Gerson is disappointed with Obama because the President appears chastened, and not cowardly as Gerson assumes, by the real-world consequences of the Syrian conflict, from the rise of the self-styled Islamic State to Russia's assertion of its strategic interest in Syria. Gerson assumes that Obama has only himself to blame for those consequences because he did not throw all resources available behind the "nonradical" opposition to Assad, his further assumption being that there ever was a viable nonradical opposition, or that a nonradical opposition could be made viable with sufficient American support. Beyond the Syrian specifics, Gerson tries to guilt-trip the American people by insisting on our national duty to do something about a "humanitarian catastrophe" of political origins. The idea that it is the specific duty, if not the exclusive privilege, of the U.S. to do something about such catastrophes is challenged by candidates and voters Gerson dismisses as "populists" of left and right, populism for him meaning a selfish, amoral concern for "our own" at humanity's expense. For all I know, Sanders may believe in a humanitarian duty in such cases, but not in the U.S. unilaterally claiming that duty for itself, while Trump may well not give a damn about anyone in Syria but might be able to make a principled argument justifying his stance -- or at least an argument as "principled" as any neocons like Gerson make for American world leadership. In any event, the opposition of the Trump and Sanders movements to neocon foreign policy would appear to add up to an American consensus, and you would think people dedicated to "democratization" everywhere would recognize that. But you get the feeling sometimes, like this time, that "democracy" for neocons means something different from what it means to anyone else.

Clinton's negatives: who, not what

Shortly before I read a summary of a State Department report criticizing former Secretary of State Clinton for her use of a private e-mail server, I saw David Brooks' oddly blind attempt to explain why the presumptive Democratic nominee for President seems so unpopular. Brooks is one of the New York Times' house conservatives, but I suspect that he can't yet bring himself to vote for Donald Trump this November. His column presumes that Clinton's unpopularity is more difficult to explain than Trump's. The difficulty, apparently, is his, since the best he can come up with is that she turns people off because they perceive her as an impersonal workaholic:

People who work closely with her adore her and say she is warm and caring. But it’s hard from the outside to think of any non-career or pre-career aspect to her life. Except for a few grandma references, she presents herself as a résumé and policy brief. ...Clinton’s unpopularity is akin to the unpopularity of a workaholic. Workaholism is a form of emotional self-estrangement. Workaholics are so consumed by their professional activities that their feelings don’t inform their most fundamental decisions.... At least in her public persona, Clinton gives off an exclusively professional vibe: industrious, calculated, goal-oriented, distrustful. It’s hard from the outside to have a sense of her as a person; she is a role.

Ironically, Brooks has actually described Clinton's strength. What popularity she has depends on the role she fills in the eyes of admirers, most obviously the role of feminist trailblazer.  If anything, people's willingness to identify Clinton with that role is her best protection against attacks that have absolutely nothing to do with any conception of Clinton as an impersonal workaholic. Clintonites have garbed their idol in symbolic armor that proofs them more than it proofs her from criticism of Clinton the person rather than Clinton the historic role-player. Many Clintonites, I suspect, are convinced that Clinton is only being attacked for what she is -- a woman politician if not the presumptive first woman President -- rather than for who she is. If so, their attitude is like those blinkered superpatriots who claimed that the U.S was attacked in 2001 for who we were, not for what we did. The claim amounted to a presumption of innocence for the U.S., and likewise Clintonites who claim that Clinton hatred is founded entirely on misogyny, from Trumpets or Bernie Bros, effectively presume their heroine innocent of everything. Worse yet, they seem to presume that every accusation against her is a partisan or misogynist lie.

There certainly are stupid and unfair reasons to oppose Hillary Clinton. My favorite of these is a recurring complaint about the sound of her voice, and even that set off a feminist overreaction that made it misogynist to describe a female politician "shouting." But the biggest lie of this political season is that there are no good reasons to oppose Clinton, but only misogynist lies and distortions. This lie can only be sustained only by refusing to see Clinton for who she is, and creating a myth of what she is in place of the actual person. Does that mean she's so awful that we had all better vote for Trump? I won't go that far. I'd rather see more people take up the NeitherTrumpNorHillary hashtag, though I fear it won't amount to much unless all those who do so rally around one candidate. More people might vote against both presumptive candidates if they didn't fear or despise one or the other so much. The sad part of the 2016 story is that most voters will still fear or despise one more than the other, and see the other as their only protection from the hated one, when the truth is that there's a surplus of reasons to at least despise both enough to demand an alternative at last, and as fast as possible, of our decrepit Bipolarchy.

The platform wars

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was embarrassed in Washington state over the weekend when all but one of the delegates chosen at the state's GOP convention were loyal to Senator Cruz. The outcome may look like a protest vote, since Cruz has suspended his campaign, despite his pathetic threat to resume the fight had Oregon gone his way. It seems an even more feeble protest, since Washington still holds a primary tomorrow and, according to this story, the delegates chosen over the weekend will be bound to support Trump should he win the primary, as expected in the absence of active opposition. However, their obligation to Trump presumably begins and ends with a vote for his nomination. These delegates presumably are not obliged to vote Trump's way, whatever that may be, on planks of the Republican platform. Cruz and other diehard Republican ideologues clearly hope to use the platform to reassure the regulars of the party's ideological soundness, regardless of what Trump has in mind. Supporters of Senator Sanders on the Democratic side have something similar in mind. Sanders remains determined to maximize his delegate count for the Democratic convention in order to push through a "progressive" platform, regardless of what Hillary Clinton has in mind. For both parties, the platform fights promise to be the main events of the national conventions, now that the presidential nominations, barring the unforeseen, are foregone conclusions. But what's the point of platform fights today?

If anything, platforms built with ideological carpentry more extreme than the actual candidates' positions can only hurt them with the general electorate. A Democratic platform shaped by Sanders or a Republican platform shaped by Cruz will only provide ammunition for the opposite party on the assumption that Clinton or Trump must agree with every plank on the platform. Yet who actually believes that either Clinton or Trump will govern in a manner governed by their party platforms? If Republicans don't trust Trump to govern within constitutional bounds, why should they trust him to respect the platform? If Democrats don't trust Clinton to govern consistently with any principle, why even care what the platform says? Once upon a time the platform was a party's principal campaign document, the thing people could read even if they never got to hear a proper campaign speech. It told you what the party stood for, but in this election perhaps more than ever the personalities of the major-party candidates will be all that matters to most people.The candidates' acceptance speeches, a comparatively recent innovation, now occupy the mental space once taken by the party platforms. How many people will actually read the party platforms, apart from opposition researchers looking for vulnerabilities? Yet the diehard opposition in both parties still reaches for planks of the platform as refuge from the popular tide. Their platform battles may ultimately be empty gestures, but I suppose they continue to justify a campaign's existence and keep the cash coming in from the donors, even though their eventual handiwork is unlikely to support the weight of the modern Presidency and all its pretensions and prerogatives. If platforms are to mean anything, they should be in place before the primaries, and party leaders should have the power to forbid anyone who doesn't endorse the platform from running for President. Instead, a candidate usually dictates a platform after his or her nomination has become a fait accompli. This year promises to be different because of entrenching ideological opposition to the presumptive nominees, but this year's conventions may only prove that platforms and platform wars make little difference in the actual governance of the country.

The other 1% (approx.)

Actually, according to a quick check of online statistics, only about 0.3% of the U.S. population is "transgender." On the other hand, if you ask progressives how many people actually control the U.S., their estimate might also go well below the more attention-grabbing 1% mark. I bring this up because someone called into our news office today to complain that, in his push for transgender rights, President Obama is catering to less than 1% of the population. I was struck by the symmetry of this complaint and the persistent progressive railing against "the 1%" who they see as the source of all our troubles. What worries me is that the transgender-phobic anger at an approximate 1% may have more political potency than the progressive polemic against their ever-underestimated 1% plutocracy. Ever since the Occupy movement broke out I've warned that "1%" rhetoric misrepresents the problem progressives face in the U.S., where their agenda has been checked not by a plutocracy but by a more extensive bourgeoisie and a bigoted lumpenproletariat, to borrow Marxist terms, all of whom claim a stake in the present social order, or an idealized earlier form of it which the left and its constituents are alleged to have corrupted. No left movement in this country can ever hope to rally or even represent 99% of the population in opposition to the richest one-hundredth. At the same time, "1%" rhetoric ignores the fact that many people in the statistical 1% share at least some of the progressive social or cultural agenda, from higher tax rates for the richest to greater tolerance and inclusiveness overall. By comparison, the transgender "1%" presents a less-slippery target for right-wing demagogues, and the Democrats' current obsession with public-restroom access has only shown that there are no limits to how much the Obama administration can infuriate the populist right. If anything, it seems like those people find transgenders even more disgusting and threatening than they do homosexuals. It seems clear from the samples I hear that they see the restroom controversy entirely as an attempt to empower perverts while endangering innocent children. I have a bad feeling this issue will only help Republicans this year. I can understand the justice of the progressive position on an intellectual level, but pushing this issue at this time seems likely to alienate more people than it may inspire. Progressives may envision a broad, diverse coalition of women and all minorities, all of whom presumably empathize with anyone who feels excluded from anything. But I'm not sure how many people who are not transgender will feel more motivated to vote Democratic because of the stand the party is taking for transgenders, while more people may be motivated to vote against Democrats because they see the country more than ever going the way of Sodom and Gomorrah. Again, I can sympathize with a progressive impulse to smash all barriers raised by ignorance and superstition, but something still seems impolitic about forcing this particular issue now. I don't want to dismiss all of this as "identity politics," but I'd like to think that if a political party's highest priority is to get as many votes as possible, that should determine the ranking of other priorities -- and with apologies to the 1% or so who do deserve better, I think Democratic priorities right now are a little askew.

Disaster sells

When I got up this morning I did a little channel surfing through the news networks. I was amazed to find none of them talking about Donald Trump. Instead, all were fishing for every tidbit of news about the Egyptian airliner that apparently had gone down last night, possibly due to terrorism. I wondered whether regular viewers resented the attention given this event. Did they consider it a distraction from the important stories of the day, the week, the year? I'd guess not, because otherwise the networks wouldn't all go to all-crash coverage, or at least one would break ranks to give people the latest political gossip. While the abrupt disappearance of an Egyptian airliner flying from France probably does seem relevant to larger narratives so long as terrorism can't be ruled out, it's also true that a morbid fascination with mass death transcends many Americans' ordinary indifference to foreign peoples and countries. It may be that a similar morbid fascination explains the media fascination with Trump and the apparently increasing likelihood of his presidency. If so, then the news networks weren't really changing their policy this morning. It's just that EgyptAir was just the flavor of the day.

What happened in Vegas ...

There seems to be plenty of blame to go around for the debacle at the Nevada Democratic convention last weekend. There might not have been a debacle had all the Sanders delegates chosen at county conventions bothered to show up -- on paper they outnumbered Clinton delegates by a few hundred but in the room Clinton had a few dozen more --  but that doesn't take the Clinton forces, including the party chairperson, off the hook for dubiously interpreting some voice votes in Clinton's favor, and that in turn didn't justify Sanders supporters making a spectacle of their frustrated rage -- not to mention playing into the Clintonites' hands by inevitably insulting the party chairperson in violent, misogynist terms. The real problem is Nevada's archaic system of caucuses and county conventions. Much of the country adopted direct primaries generations ago, the idea being to empower the rank and file and prevent party bosses from effectively dictating who the candidates would be. While I won't tell political parties how to select their candidates, as long as they don't tell me to pay for the selection process, I would think that in a democracy a mass party's candidate-selection process should be as direct and democratic as possible. And for what it's worth, when the party selects a national candidate I see no good reason for the selection not to take place simultaneously nationwide, leaving delegates out entirely. It's too late to make such recommendations now, and the damage to the Democrats has been done. Clintonites feel more certain that Sandersites are sore losers and woman-haters, while Sandersites claim fresh proof that the system is rigged against them. The result leaves Democrats worried that disgruntled Sandersites may stay home in November or, worse, vote for Trump to spite Clinton. The more honorable option would be to field a third-party candidate -- Sanders or somebody else -- so they can play a responsible role in the election process. But the real fear is that they'll play an irresponsible role, facilitating Trump's election in the perverse hope that the blowhard billionaire will screw up or crack down so badly that he'll provoke a real revolution. Some might say that a third party would have the same effect, but at least the voters for such a party can remind people after the disaster that there was a better option. Given what the two major parties are going to offer us, there has to be.

Will Trump's nomination disrupt the media balance?

Part of my job at a newspaper office involves transcribing comments phoned in by readers. In the last week, I've heard two of them complain that all the columnists at our paper are against Donald Trump. They want the paper to restore some balance to its editorial page for the general election campaign. While Trump has dominated talking-head TV to an unfair extent in some people's opinion, so far he has few friends in newsprint. The problem for Trump fans is that while my paper has the typical mix of Democratic and Republican columnists -- mostly from the Washington Post syndicate -- the familiar conservative Republican writers remain adamantly opposed to Trump and will most likely prove slower than Republican elected officials to come around. None of them, to my knowledge, is endorsing Hillary Clinton, but they remain unconvinced that a Clinton presidency would be worse than a Trump administration. We can speculate on why they feel that way, but the immediate problem, at least for newspapers, is whether any aspiration to fairness or balance on their editorial or op-ed pages can be maintained when Republican columnists refuse to play their regular role. As noted, some Trump fans are already crying foul over opinion pages becoming #nevertrump zones, but what are papers and syndicates to do? Supposedly Pat Buchanan is available to write for Trump, but who else? Are the syndicates supposed to recruit new columnists whose only credential would be love of Trump? Should they persuade some of their Republican regulars to step aside for the summer and fall for a guest Trumpet? Or should they admit at last that "balance" only ever applied to the bipartisan rivalry within the political establishment, excluding opinions to the left of Democrats, to the right of Republicans, or, if possible, outside the whole left-right continuum? Should they finally admit also that they've never been obliged to represent all sides in political debates? Would doing so teach Trump's followers, and the rest of the electorate, any sort of lesson?  Do the Trumpets realize now how little room the opinion establishment allows alternative points of view, or do they think that Trump is entitled to editorial-page representation because he'll be the Republican nominee? Given one caller's complaint that Republicans who criticized Trump were not real conservatives, it's hard to say.

Sanders and the feminists: too radical or not radical enough

Katha Pollitt, the Nation magazine columnist, has been one of the most unapologetic die-hard supporters of Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. You might guess that Sen. Sanders never had a chance with her, but while admitting in last week's column that "in important ways his politics are closer to mine than Hillary Clinton’s are" Pollitt stuck with Clinton -- despite missing the deadline for her absentee ballot -- because "Bernie didn't ask for my vote." Here we go again, right? Translating herself, Pollitt explains, "He never convinced me that gender issues, specifically the persistent subordination of women in every area of life, were of much concern to him" What she means is that addressing these issues is, in some irreducible way, separate and not to be inferred from Sanders' consistent attention to class issues. In other words, solving the problem of class will not solve the problem of gender -- or race or sexual orientation, as Pollitt dutifully adds. To some extent, she sees racism and male chauvinism as causes of capitalism rather than effects. Sanders "doesn’t seem to understand that the economy, like society generally, is structured by gender and race," Pollitt writes, "If women and men are funneled into different kinds of work by race and gender, with men’s jobs valued more because men are valued more, and if women are hobbled economically by doing most of the domestic labor and having to contend with prejudice against working mothers to boot, equal pay alone doesn’t solve the problem." If Sanders really wanted her vote, Pollitt thinks, he should have "given a major speech about his plans to make women’s lives better—safer, fairer, less dominated by men."

If anything, Pollitt contemplates a far more radical transformation of society than Sanders does -- so far as Pollitt or I know -- in order to undo and prevent "domination by men" or by a dominant ethnic or religious group. And yet she entrusts this sociosexual agenda to Hillary Clinton, whose only positive attribute mentioned by Pollitt is that she "gets the awful reality we're facing" from a possible Republican presidency founded almost entirely, as far as Pollitt can tell, on bigotry. Clinton "gets it," presumably, because she's always talking about breaking barriers in a way that apparently doesn't come naturally -- the talking if not also the breaking -- to Sanders. But if Sanders is an incomplete radical in Pollitt's eyes because he doesn't seem to recognize the need of a revolution beyond socialism, Clinton is just as incomplete if, as some critics claim, her barrier-breaking agenda is all about opening the capitalist elite to both sexes, all races, etc., without doing away with elites. It may be that Clinton and Pollitt are two kinds of feminist, the latter possibly more radical than the former yet so convinced of the necessity of a revolution beyond socialism that she can pin her hopes on Clinton, because she says the right things sometimes, while deeming Sanders hopeless. If that sounds foolish, it could be worse if Pollitt seems to dismiss socioeconomic radicalism as inadequate to her purpose. After all, it may be that Pollitt's hoped-for sociosexual revolution against all forms of "domination" is possible only on a socialist foundation, yet to support Clinton over Sanders is virtually to say that socialism isn't necessary, no matter how many idiots see Clinton herself as socialist. The socialist and feminist revolutions ought to be complementary agendas, but the Democratic primary campaign seems to have forced them into rivalry, with feminists like Pollitt siding with Clinton because they're (to some extent) understandably fed up with having been told for ages to wait until after higher-priority revolutions are accomplished.

Rather than close with a curse on feminism, however, I have to concede that Sanders shares blame for the situation. Since it should have been clear to him long ago what feminists like Pollitt wanted to hear, it's fair to ask why it's seemed so hard for him to say it. If Paris is worth a Mass, as the French say, why can't Sanders sell himself to feminists when it should be so easy, and when women like Pollitt seem poised to abandon Clinton upon hearing the right words? Instead, Sanders disgusted Pollitt with an apparently tone-deaf disavowal of male chauvinism.“No one has ever heard me say, ‘Hey guys, let’s stand together, vote for a man.’" Sanders said, "I would never do that, never have.” To Pollitt this betrayed a "vast ... deep ... historically embedded [and] unconscious" sense of entitlement on Sanders's part -- a failure, if I get Pollitt's meaning, that Sanders is where he is only because guys have been standing together for a man without needing to be told to. It's quite an overreaction, but unless you want to say that there is nothing Sanders can do to win over women like Pollitt so long as Clinton is in the race you should concede that Sanders and whatever speechwriters he has could fix these rhetorical problems easily if they really wanted to. Maybe the fact that they don't is a truly unconscious admission that they aren't going to win, so why bother tweaking the speeches? If they weren't willing to compete for the feminist vote you might conclude that the whole Sanders campaign has been less about what he's for than about who he's against. If so, I suppose they shouldn't be surprised if feminists feel that Sanders is against them, too.

We are the establishment

Donald Trump is against the establishment. Bernie Sanders is against the establishment. Hillary Clinton is against the establishment. Ted Cruz is against the establishment. Each looks at the other three and sees the establishment. Trump rails against politicians in general. Sanders rails against the plutocracy of fundraising. Cruz rails against gutless officeholders. Clinton rails against the enduring old-boy network. I don't recall anyone defending the establishment over the past year, and Michael Kazin has a point, writing in The Nation, that the concept of "the establishment" is so vague that, as noted, no two people mean the same thing when they attack it. What's to defend, in that case? Kazin finds all the railing against the "establishment" to be vapid. If we define "establishment" in the broadest possible terms as the inertial force that resists progress, Kazin finds its essence to be structural, rather than the will of some cabal. Worse, the will to resist structural change isn't conveniently concentrated in any elite. He writes:

Railing against the establishment also ignores the mass resistance to ways of thinking that would have to undergird a truly democratic and egalitarian society. The hope that we can bring about fundamental change by exposing an immoral cabal and crushing its power fails to confront the deeply held belief in the essential fairness of capitalist society. The tenacity of this conviction helps explain why Americans keep electing politicians who promise a good job to anyone willing to work hard and blame the breaking of promises on a mere failure of political will. There’s a feedback loop between the political and economic institutions that sustain inequality and an ideology that forecloses alternatives like the social democracy that exists, albeit under stress, in much of Western and Central Europe. 

Kazin could be more sweeping yet in his critique. While all four presidential candidates rail against the establishment, all arguably belong to it as wielders or wealth or power, yet each sees the others as the problem. This is no less true when people who have no apparent power rail against the establishment, when they also resist radical change. If they think that all that needs to happen is for "the establishment" to be brought down or replaced, without radical change on their own part, they contribute to that inertia that keeps an "establishment" in place -- that is, in effect, the establishment. There's more to this inertia than some faith in fairness; after all, "life's not fair" is practically an organizing principle for this inertial resistance to changes usually demanded for the sake of fairness. To make life more fair most likely requires a more "mobilized" citizenry than most of us want to be, because we no longer can imagine a middle ground between rugged individualism and the marching, chanting, uniformed hordes of the "totalitarian" nightmare. For too many of us, to move toward that middle ground is the first step down the slippery slope all the way to the other end. Ours is the political culture that results when we refuse to move. Despite all the protests about our powerlessness as ordinary citizens we remain a democratic republic, and if such a republic can't countenance radical change for the common good, whether out of complacency or fear of  Big Brother, then the masses are the establishment as much as the millionaires are. That goes as well for all the "populists" who say someone else has to change and not us. And that raises a troubling question: to be truly "anti-establishment" in this country -- to be truly committed to radical change --  do you have to be anti-democracy as well?

The toxic endorsement fallacy

One of the big arguments Democrats will use against Donald Trump over the summer and fall is that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is suspiciously attractive to white separatists and supremacists. The Trump campaign isn't exactly protecting itself from such attacks; the California operation apparently failed to vet a "white pride" independent who applied to be a Trump delegate to the national convention but has since withdrawn following his exposure. The narrative is already familiar: Trump's suspicion of Muslims and slanders against Mexicans endear him to people interested only in restoring a supposedly-lost white (throw in male, straight, Christian as needed) domination of the nation and its culture. That reflects poorly on Trump on the "if they like you something you must be doing something wrong" principle, the opposite of "if they hate you you must be doing something right." At the heart of the argument is a simple fallacy: if you are attractive to white supremacists, you must be a white supremacist. In Trump's case, this confuses xenophobia with racism, since I'm unaware of the candidate asserting the inferiority of blacks or Asians, or that the virtue of western or European civilization inheres in blood. I'm not even sure the opposition really cares to prove Trump a racist; the real point of this line of attack is more likely to persuade people to vote against Trump in order to spite the rednecks and ku-kluxers who supposedly like him. In any event, anyone familiar with Donald Trump should know better than to think of him as an espouser, much less an exemplar of any traditional culture; despite his Archie Bunker affectations he's too privileged and cosmopolitan a figure for "pride" to mean much to him. But "pride" types fall for his shtick in part because they like the idea of a candidate who seems more like them, despite his wealth and privilege, and is more viable than any politician who more exactly echoes their beliefs. If Trump himself is a consequence of the major parties' enforced openness to "outsiders," so is the embarrassment that comes when real outsiders embrace a major party or its candidates. Perhaps such embarrassments help explain why the parties acquiesce in a system that limits their ability to define themselves. It may burden the Democratic establishment with the need to suppress but also mollify the Sanders insurgency, for instance, but it also gives Democrats a weapon against the Republicans when Trump is identified with white supremacy, just as the Republicans can exploit any compromise the Democrats and Hillary Clinton may eventually make with Sanders and his "socialist" supporters. At the end of the day, of course, the Democrats still want those "socialist" votes, on the understanding that they'll have to accept whatever Clinton offers as they best they supposedly can get, but the poor Republicans can't appear to want "white pride" voters, even though they'd impose exactly the same terms Democrats impose on supporters to their left. If only such people would be quiet about their pride! But as it stands they may be more trouble in terms of "optics" than their votes are worth, and if their affection proves a handicap to Republicans, while remaining a disqualification in the eyes of Democrats, perhaps it would be best, to make a modest suggestion, simply to deny avowed white supremacists the right to vote. Then at least they'd know their feelings of persecution are not entirely delusional.

'Division is profit....There is no money in unity.'

The speaker is Rance Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, in an interview with Time magazine. He was trying to explain how, in the interviewer's words, "too many people, candidates included, have found ways to promote themselves by magnifying differences." Priebus pointed to cable news and fundraising organizations, some of which helped push Donald Trump to the forefront, while others now threaten to split the GOP out of hatred for Trump. Whatever the context, however, no reputed authoritarian or totalitarian could make a better argument against freedom of the press (or media) than Priebus did, perhaps without realizing it. He may have meant only that there's profit in exploiting division, bad as that sounds already, but it's easy enough to intuit that there's profit to be had in creating division. If the authoritarian/totalitarian nightmare of unity imposed at the expense of conscience is one unacceptable extreme, this anarchic abhorrence of the vacuum of unity -- unity being the absence of demand for dissent -- is the opposite extreme and should be equally unacceptable.  We want freedom to air dissent, but we should also insist that dissent be conscientious and not merely self-interested in the brutally mercenary sense implied by Priebus's comment. There should be a middle ground between tyrannical repression and an  irresponsible free-for-all, but I'm not sure liberalism can recognize such a ground in its hypersensitivity to slippery slopes. Civil libertarians' great fear is that governments can't deter the profit motive for divisiveness without acquiring the power to silence honest, objective dissent. Yet you can't give absolute immunity to dissent without inviting people to see dissent as an end unto itself, if not a business career. At least you can't in a culture like ours, where the claims of individuality and community are seen in zero-sum competition and appeals to unity are received with skepticism or paranoia. And now we may be starting to see the end result of a culture that seems to value the right to refuse -- something perhaps not equivalent to the right to dissent -- above all. We take it for granted that things were worse when kings or commissars ruled with iron hands, but wherever dissent required courage more than money, when it was a different sort of risk than the kind investors take, you could at least assume that dissidents were honest.

Captain Republican: Civil War

How can an institution stand for something if anyone can join? Both major parties have faced this question this year, as self-described independent Bernie Sanders has plagued Hillary Clinton on the road to the Democratic presidential nomination and celebrity outsider Donald Trump has effectively secured the Republican nomination. In the face of Republican leaders and elders withholding their endorsement from him, Trump has only escalated his defiance of GOP orthodoxy, reportedly proposing an increase in tax rates for the rich and in the minimum wage. Meanwhile, Sanders's dogged challenge may pull Clinton further to the left by convention time than she or the Democratic National Committee may deem convenient. Disaster seems to have befallen the Republicans, while the Democrats most likely will prove stupidly lucky in getting Clinton nominated in our turbulent anti-establishment environment. But why did Trump or Sanders even have a chance? It bears repeating that the two major parties have little power to prevent anyone from getting on their primary ballots as long as candidates state their intentions and/or get the necessary signatures by whatever local deadlines exist. No one on the national level has the power to disqualify candidates, much less people registering to vote, for going against the party platform. In one sense this actually reinforces our democratic habits, since the primary voter becomes the ultimate arbiter determining who a "real" Republican or Democrat is. But that's only the case if both parties respect democracy. The imminent schism between Trump and Speaker Ryan, among others, shows that some Republicans intend to put ideological integrity before the will of the rank and file, apparently preferring the devil they know -- Mrs. Clinton, not Senator Cruz -- to the uncertainty of Trump's intentions. If, as these leaders hope, they remain in charge after a Trump trainwreck, will they learn any lessons from this year?

The only lesson to learn for either party is that the only guarantor of ideological integrity is the privatization of the party, the removal of the candidate-selection process from the public realm of a government-funded election, at whatever expense to the party, and its liberation from government rules limiting the conditions parties can impose on candidates. Such a reform is obviously subject to abuse -- parties adopted state-funded primaries in the first place to keep party bosses from limiting party members' choices -- but it places responsibility for abuse where it belongs, with the party. Why don't the major parties do this? It can't be that they're cheap, given how much they spend on campaigns, though you can be profligate and still want someone else to pick up the tab sometimes, e.g. on primary day. For this persistent flirtation with self-sabotage to make sense, it might be wise on this occasion to think of the major parties as part of a single "establishment" whose interests are not exactly those of either party or both combined. To the extent that stability is a prime establishment interest, the fluidity of party identity that results from existing rules may serve that interest by providing a kind of steam control, allowing the two-party system to absorb discontent, at whatever cost to coherence, in order to prevent the consolidation of a persistent if not permanent alternative. Tempt the insurgents to take over a major party, the theory may go, and the sooner that insurgency will play itself out. The theory may prove valid for the Democrats if no permanent movement results from the Sanders insurgency, but some Republicans now seem uncertain about playing their side of the game to the end. For the theory to hold the status quo should be able to withstand even a Trump presidency, just as it has, to a great extent, survived the long insurgency that began with the Barry Goldwater candidacy and culminated with the generational triumphs of Ronald Reagan, the Contract With America, and the Tea Party without the insurgents carrying out their agenda to reverse the New Deal. The heirs of these insurgents are among the many Republicans who fear Trump. We presume it's because they fear that he will govern as yet another "imperial" President with perhaps less comprehension of, much less respect for the Constitution than his recent predecessors. But there may be more to it than that. Their opposition to their presumptive nominee ultimately may tell us more about them than about Trump -- and if they survive to reclaim the reins of the party, what they do afterwards to prevent another Trump-style takeover, or don't do, may tell us still more.

No one said Republicans were a democratic party

The news media are now reporting every endorsement of Donald Trump by a Republican elected official or celebrity like a milestone. You understand why, since just as much attention, if not more, is paid to Republicans who as yet refuse to endorse Trump, from the retired Bushes to Speaker Ryan and Senators McCain and Graham. The resisters suppose that they're standing up for the integrity of the Republican party, but they could just as easily be digging its grave deeper than they feared it would go. The question of whether or not Republican eminences will endorse their party's presumptive nominee for President should not be a matter of suspense. Trump, like it or not, is the winner. He may not have won a majority of votes nationwide during the primary season -- I haven't checked the stats, but I presume they're out there -- but he has stayed the course while Cruz has imploded and Kasich has chickened out. By the rules of the game, the people have spoken, and no matter what die-hards say about the convention serving as a "deliberative" body, the whole point of these exercises in the modern era is for the rank and file to determine, through the selection of committed delegates, who their candidate will be. What does it mean if the eminences of the party don't consider themselves bound to endorse the popular verdict? The answer has less to do with Trump than people think. The remaining dissidents may not realize it, but they're revealing as much of what they think of the rank and file as they have of what they think of Trump. The rank and file probably assumes that to be a Republican means to do your utmost for the candidates chosen by them,but it's clear now that many leading Republicans think otherwise. If they're unwilling to endorse and work for Trump, the only honorable option for the resisters is to bolt the party and form a new one. If Speaker Ryan is unable (even temporarily) to endorse by name the nominee of his party, he should resign his speakership. I won't go so far as requiring every dissident elected Republican official to resign, since each earned his or her spot personally, but none of them should seek a Republican nomination again. As for Trump, wherever local schedules permit he should put up someone to primary any congressman who doesn't endorse him, on the understanding that Republicans who don't profess personal loyalty to him now won't treat him much differently after Election Day, should he win, than they did Barack Obama. Yes, the cynic in me wants the Republican fratricide to continue, and not for their own good, but the small-d democrat in me is disgusted, regardless of my opinion of Trump, by the contempt Republicans are showing for democracy itself.

Republicans are in a New York state of mind

When George Pataki, the former governor of New York, announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, the scoffing was universal. There was no way, the experts said confidently, that a New York Republican could win a spot on the GOP's national ticket. At that time, Donald Trump was still considered a sideshow, but Trump's success seems to refute all the naysayers about New York Republicans. You can't deny that Trump has been identified with his home state, not to mention his home town. Senator Cruz clearly believed that Trump's "New York values" would handicap him in a national campaign, to cite the most blatant example. In retrospect, it might be argued that Pataki, who won three terms in Albany, was the wrong kind, and Trump the right kind of New York Republican. Paradoxically, it might also be pointed out that Pataki is exceptional among New York Republicans. Given their druthers, New York Republicans often go for Trump-type personalities: bombastic businessmen who promise unconventional governance based on their innocence of conventional politics. In 1990, before Pataki's ascent, Republicans despairing over a weak field of potential challengers to the then-mighty Gov. Mario Cuomo -- the father of the current governor -- turned to dark horse businessman Pierre Rinfret. In 2010, long after Pataki's retirement, an early manifestation of the Tea Party carried businessman Carl Palladino, now conspicuous among Trump's Empire State supporters, to an upset victory over a well-known conservative congressman at the Republican primary. For all that people want to think of the national GOP as increasingly a southern and western party, Trump's presumptive nomination may signal a New York-ification of the Republican party as populist cultural conservatives across the country, with certain exceptions where Cruz was strong, detach themselves from ideological orthodoxy to express their instinctual yearning for a Leader -- not a Führer, mind you, but someone they perceive to be decisive and, above all, tough. But if the likes of Rinfret and Palladino help us understand Trump's success, they may also show his limits. While boring, center-right Pataki won three terms, Rinfret's campaign was a disaster marked by frequent absence from the state and a mouth that still makes Trump look tame. I recall vividly a press conference at which Rinfret called a reporter a political prostitute, for instance. In the end, Rinfret finished barely ahead of a third-party conservative candidate, while in 2010 Palladino was crushed by Cuomo the Younger by a nearly two-to-one margin. Today, Trump boasts that he, unlike many previous Republican presidential candidates, can win the Empire State. It might happen, since anything can happen to Hillary Clinton in the next six months, but history seems to show that, in the state as in the nation, the type of candidate who appeals to the Republican base has a hard time in the general election.  Trump's claim that he can win New York can't be taken too seriously when his models are New Yorkers who only had New York to win, but failed badly.

Cruz makes news again

In retrospect, this morning's tirade against Donald Trump from Senator Cruz looks like the spite of someone who knows he's a beaten man but thinks it's all unfair. Cruz, who has suspended his campaign after losing the Indiana primary, can tell himself for the next four (or eight) years that Trump and the liberal media colluded against him, suppressing the worst truths about the billionaire while denying Cruz the equal time he deserved, but he'll spend those years on a river in Egypt if he convinces himself that primary voters didn't know who he was or what he stood for. In one respect, at least, this Republican primary season really has been much like the last two. In the end, the "movement" candidate, the supposed champion of an ideological base believed to be the tip of a hidden-majority iceberg, loses badly to a non-movement candidate. As Mike Huckabee went down in 2008, as Rick Santorum went down in 2012, so Cruz falls now. While we have every reason to discuss what's different about Trump, we shouldn't lose track of what remains the same. Movement conservatives, the people who think that they alone can lead the Republican party to victory, remain a minority within their own party. Something else will probably stay the same if Trump loses the general election; the movement conservatives will say that things would have gone differently had the GOP chosen one of them. But if the GOP itself never chooses them, how can they believe the larger electorate will? These ideologues fancy themselves big thinkers, but they'll probably continue to dodge the hard thinking they need to do now. It's easier to imagine another conspiracy, the latest of an infinite number, denying them their due. Conspiracy, in this case, means democracy that doesn't go their way.

Cruz makes news

As Bill O'Reilly patiently explained to people on Fox News last night, it's one thing when a Republican presidential candidate makes a speech, but when Donald Trump insults someone famous or smears whole classes of people, that's news. Senator Cruz must have been watching, and must have taken the lesson to heart. Trump had made news already today by mentioning an Internet legend, supposedly confirmed by a photograph, that Cruz's father, a Cuban exile who'd once fought against Batista only to turn against Castro, was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald. There seems to be no better way to get Cruz mad than to dis his family. He called Trump a coward when the front-runner appeared to insult and threaten Cruz's wife. Now, on the day of the Indiana primary, widely seen as make-or-break for Cruz if not the clincher for Trump, Cruz made news that the media could not ignore.



There's something about Cruz's voice and his preacherly manner of speaking that always threatens to make his anger sound insincere. I detected some real emotion in his previous tirade in defense of his wife, but this time there was something calculated about his philippic against Trump, as if he'd been waiting for an opportunity, which Trump inevitably would provide, to give a "Have you no decency?" speech in the manner of Joseph Welch facing down Joe McCarthy. It doesn't help that Cruz's squishy face seems incapable of strong emotion. In any event, it is most likely too little, too late for the Texan. It simply isn't the same when you do this on defense. When Trump insults people it isn't really personal; it's just his way of asserting dominance. People can hear him and believe that he's expressing their disdain and anger at the establishment and the state of things in America. By comparison, all Cruz is really saying here is that his feelings have been hurt. Had he written this on the Internet or social media, it probably would be dismissed as "butthurt." Cruz has found himself in a debate for which he was not prepared, in which all his vaunted training and talent have done him little good. This debate has not been a good thing for the country at all, but it probably couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, so to speak.

All the fits that's news, we print

It was in Mad magazine, I think, where I saw a parody of the New York Times with the motto above in mockery of the Times' own slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print." I was reminded of that while I was watching some of The O'Reilly Factor tonight. I surf the cable-news channels when I get home from work, and while I rarely linger on Fox News, I noticed that the O'Reilly show was picking up on our theme from earlier today: Sen. Cruz's complaint that the media was biased in favor of Donald Trump against the other candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Bill O'Reilly was defending Fox and his own coverage of the long buildup to the primaries against criticism from an editor of the Washington Times, the capital's conservative newspaper. The editor thought it unfair that Trump received far more coverage during 2015 than any other GOP candidate. O'Reilly's defense was twofold. First, he dismissed the other candidates for making the same prepared speeches with all the same talking points everywhere they went, while Trump was more likely to make news anytime he spoke. The Times editor clearly was unhappy with this explanation, probably thinking that all Republican aspirants, or at least all conservative Republican aspirants, were entitled to equal time from Fox News. O'Reilly's second line of defense was to dismiss implicitly the equivalence of Trump's performances and his rival's speeches. When Trump insults people, O'Reilly argued -- his example was the candidate's expression of contempt for Sen. McCain's war heroism -- "That's NEWS!" You can see what he means, but what a lesson for our future would-be leaders to learn! If you want the news media's attention, don't propose radical reforms or innovative policies. Instead, call your opponents or unpopular minorities names and make an ass of yourself. Actually, they may as well. The sooner we do, the sooner Trump's sort of idiocy won't be news anymore -- depending on what you think Trump's particular idiocy is. O'Reilly was breathtakingly cynical tonight about Trump's appeal to his sort of news media, and Cruz's fans would love to blame their man's misfortune on that sort of media cynicism. Whether they're justified in doing so -- whether Trump owes his popularity wholly to telegenic insult comedy -- is another matter entirely.

Cruz: Trump is the media's Manchurian candidate

Senator Cruz is losing to Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. That wasn't how it was supposed to be for the Texan this year, so naturally it's a conspiracy. Check out this transcript from the May 1 Meet the Press show for a rare moment when a host refuses to take his guest's crap. Cruz believes that the media should be pressuring Trump to continue debating him. Since he assumes that the media can make millions from more debate, he concludes that their failure to publicly pressure Trump to participate -- because they've had great success in making him do what he doesn't want to, haven't they? -- proves that they want Trump to win, since he would not win (it follows) if Cruz got to debate him more. They want Trump to win because they're all liberal, you see -- and this is where host Chuck Todd turned on Cruz -- and they're setting Trump up to be an easy target during the fall campaign. Cruz claims that the media isn't talking now about all of Trump's liabilities and vulnerabilities, when they can benefit Cruz, but saving them to ruin Trump in the fall. Taking the long view, Cruz believes that Trump has been a liberal-media creation from the beginning -- you know, going back to the period last year when everyone assumed that Trump would fade once the field was narrowed. Apparently the rabble are responding to Trump's rousing instead of Cruz's only because the media are favoring Trump. To be fair, Trump has received more TV time than he may have deserved originally because of his celebrity and his uniquely provocative rhetoric, but I'd guess that from a pro-Trump perspective a lot of that coverage has looked pretty consistently anti-Trump in its framing of him as a know-nothing stirring up ethnic hatred. Cruz sees it differently for two reasons. Firstly, he has to blame something other than himself or Gov. Kasich for continuing to lose to Trump. Secondly, as should be apparent, he sees the Trump candidacy as a media conspiracy against the Republican party and the conservative movement because he's convinced that Trump can't win the general election, while he could. Cruz is stuck in the 2008-12 mode of Republican grousing, which blames Barack Obama's victories on the GOP's failure to nominate an ideologically sound and sufficiently "hard-charging" candidate, one who would bring the presumably conservative hidden majority out to vote. 2016 has been a nightmare for the Republicans because it looks like a hidden majority, at least of Republicans, has emerged, only to reject both the officeholding establishment and the intransigent ideologues like Cruz. It must be galling for believers like Cruz to learn that the hidden majority can be so easily bamboozled, but they'd rather believe that than face the stronger possibility that the reason this potential majority remained hidden not because of high ideological standards, or apathy in the face of the perceived tepid moderation of McCain and Romney, but because only someone like Trump, and not the debating master Cruz, could reach them. So when reality doesn't conform to Cruz's expectations, inevitably there must be a conspiracy. People mock Trump for accusing Cruz and Kasich of cheating in various ways, but with this outburst Cruz proves that he's no better, while his demand for more debates sounds sadly like he wants Trump thrown into the briar patch, where Cruz will only outfox himself.

Lucifer's wedding

Just when Senator Cruz seemed to be settling into the role of the "establishment" candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, suddenly there comes John Boehner, the former Speaker of the House, with a personal attack of unprecedented vehemence. Driven from power by the Tea Party that forms Cruz's base, Boehner has called the Texan "Lucifer in the flesh" and "a miserable son of a bitch," which is the former Speaker's way of throwing poo on the metaphorical wedding of Cruz and Carly Fiorina, his newly designated running mate. In a gesture perhaps more futile than Ronald Reagan's naming of Sen. Richard Schweiker as his running mate before the 1976 Republican convention, where he would fail to topple President Gerald Ford. For once a Reaganite precedent isn't exactly a recommendation, as the Gipper's move was recognized as desperate from the moment he made it. If anything, Cruz's attempted coronation of Fiorina as his consort may prove more futile; it may actually hurt his already-dwindling chances of stopping Donald Trump. While Fiorina may be ideologically compatible with Cruz -- she told an interviewer this morning that "getting things done" in Washington is rarely a good idea -- she makes an unlikely rallying point for Trumpophobic Republicans and is unlikely to lure actual Trumpites away from their hero. Her problem is that she's seen as a loser after dropping out of the campaign early to endorse Cruz. Cruz's problem is the same one anyone faces who tries to advance the first woman into a formerly exclusive realm. No matter how reactionary Fiorina is, her deployment by Cruz is bound to look like an act of pandering, if not of political correctness, by the man supposed to be the most ideologically conservative, and hence presumably the most indifferent to identity politics, of all the Republicans who have run over the past year. At a moment when Trump is snarling that Hillary Clinton would be a marginal candidate were she not a woman, Cruz's stunt is bound to look exactly like a stunt, and a cynical one at that, whether the Senator believes sincerely that Fiorina is the person best qualified to be Vice President or not. By the standards of his own base, in all probability, it was not conservative, while women who actually care about getting a woman at or near the highest seat of power probably won't give a corporate creep like Fiorina the time of day. Cruz may hope to energize his campaign by anointing Fiorina, but it seems more likely now that it will prove his last gasp.

Trump: America first, Israel second

Time magazine's website has a transcript of the foreign policy speech Donald Trump made today. The Republican front-runner made "America First" his theme, which guarantees you another wave of editorials denouncing the man for isolationism. For generations that has been a toxic slogan because it was a slogan of the pre-Pearl Harbor opponents of American intervention in World War II. However, the isolationists of 1941 didn't copyright the phrase and people 75 years later ought to be able to use it without being condemned by association -- and in any event Trump himself has no problem characterizing World War II as a good war in which "the greatest generation beat back the Nazis and Japanese imperialists," while the true heirs of the old isolationists still question whether all the trouble was worth it. For Trump, "America First" means, in his own words, "Under a Trump administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of a foreign country." That doesn't sound unreasonable, and overall, despite his still-primitive rhetoric -- our leaders should be able to talk in complete sentences all the time and avoid using "beautiful" and other favorite adjectives too often -- his priorities appear mostly free of ideology. Trump's foreign policy would be conservative in the old sense of the word, out to "promote regional stability, not radical change" around the world. He boasts today of having opposed the invasion of Iraq -- a random comment to Howard Stern notwithstanding -- and points to that country and Libya as examples of what happens when democratization by force results in destabilization. He refuses to demonize either Russia or China, though he sees the latter as an economic adversary, but promises to make them respect the U.S. more than he thinks they do now. He wants the other NATO countries to pay what he points out to be their existing fair share for defense when most of them, he claims, are not. He didn't mention Vladimir Putin's name in the speech, and while he sees room for common ground in the fight against Muslim terrorism -- there'd be common ground there with China, too -- he warns that "If we can’t make a deal under my administration, a deal that’s great — not good, great — for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table." I actually like his lack of certitude about Russia when he says "Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out." I infer from that a lack of ideologically preconceived notions of what Russia wants or represents. If he can extend that open-mindedness around the whole world he might actually accomplish something.

Unfortunately, Trump has a couple of blind spots in the usual location: the Middle East. Understandably, his main concern in that region is defeating the self-styled Islamic State, which he promises to do sooner than anyone expects. But you would think that if Trump's number-one foreign policy goal -- apart from bringing jobs back to the U.S. -- is to destroy the Sunni Muslim terrorist entity that is provoking terrorist attacks in this country, that the self-styled master of the deal might hasten to make a deal with the IS's Shiite Muslim enemies. That doesn't seem to be an option, however, because if there's one nation out there that Trump sees as evil in the all-too typical American way, it's Iran. Why not? I don't think he's so dumb that he doesn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, and I don't think it's because he sees all Muslims as the enemy. In his speech he vows to work "very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence," though I wonder which countries he means by that. Could it be that Trump still carries a grudge over the hostage crisis of 1979? He definitely takes the recent incident involving American sailors to heart, seeing it as a huge humiliation for the U.S. But I can't help thinking that his animus against Iran -- a nation whose government admittedly gives you plenty of reasons to despise it -- is that Iran, more than the IS, remains the great existential threat to Israel's existence, the country most likely, in the Zionist imagination, to nuke the Jewish state. Trump can find a lot of reasons to legitimately criticize President Obama's foreign policy, but the fact that Obama has pissed off Israel is not really one of them. But when the subject turns to Israel Trump sounds just like a neocon.

Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East has been snubbed and criticized by an administration that lacks moral clarity. Just a few days ago, Vice President Biden again criticized Israel, a force for justice and peace, for acting as an impatient peace area in the region.[sic?]

By his own stated principles, or in line with his disavowal of ideological principles, Trump ought not to care whether Israel is a democracy or not. Meanwhile, describing Israel as "a force for justice and peace" borders on the delusional. Why he should think this way when he is neither an End Times believer nor in need of Sheldon Adelson's money is beyond me, but what else is new when it comes to the Middle East? Yet if an aspiring American president needs to show he's open-minded about foreign policy, that part of the world is where he has to do it, and that's where Trump's mind seems to be closed by prejudice and fantasy. He boasts of being willing to walk away from the table with Iran when Obama would not, but he should be willing to walk away from the table with any nation. If Israel is to be an exception to this, he should come up with better reasons than those that make him sound like every other mainstream American politician. And if he can't think originally about the Middle East you have to wonder how different the rest of his foreign policy actually will be. I'm not suggesting that he embrace Iran and throw Israel under the bus, but I would expect Donald Trump to talk about bringing those two countries to the table and making a deal, yet I didn't today. He's clearly going to take sides in the Middle East, it seems, and the consequences of that are a lesson he has yet to learn.

Ego trumps collusion

The big story yesterday was that Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich had formed some sort of last-ditch entente to stop Donald Trump from winning a pre-convention majority of delegates for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump immediately cried foul, claiming that his rivals' pact was morally equivalent to criminal acts of collusion in the business sector. He needn't have bothered, since Kasich appeared determined to sabotage the entente almost instantly. As he understands it, the arrangement between himself and Cruz allows each man to concentrate his resources on the remaining states where he fares best against Trump in the polls, so that neither man wastes money in a state where he's likely to finish a distant third. That sounds reasonable, but saving money isn't going to beat Trump. Either Kasich or Cruz has to win these states in order to force an "open" or "brokered" convention in which delegates will be free to vote as they choose (i.e. against Trump) on the second ballot. In Indiana, Cruz trails Trump but leads Kasich in the polls. The sensible thing -- from the viewpoint of the Republican party if not that of any sane person -- would be for the anti-Trump vote to rally around Cruz. Yet obvious stubborn pride, barely disguised as modesty, prevented Kasich from saying so last night. Asked repeatedly by Anderson Cooper on CNN whether he would tell his Indiana supporters to vote for Cruz, Kasich answered repeatedly that he didn't believe in telling anyone how to vote. He tried to make it plain that he would not contest the state, or at least would no longer spend money there, but it was painfully more plain that saying "Vote for Cruz" was like swallowing hot coals for the governor. Again, for any normal person that's exactly how saying "Vote for Cruz" should feel, but Kasich was supposed to be making some sort of strategic sacrifice in order to stop Trump, and the only way to stop Trump seems to be to do all he can to help Cruz win in states where Kasich has no chance, as Cruz supposedly will do for Kasich in Oregon and other places, where, as in tonight's states where it's too late to stop Trump, Cruz is rightfully despised. The problem for this new entente is that, as far as I can tell, Kasich himself still despises Cruz.  But perhaps he loves himself more than he hates either Cruz or Trump. At this point, Kasich is nothing but an oldschool "favorite son" candidate trying to run a national campaign on the spurious premise that the Republican base is longing for a reasonable man to lead them this year. His persistence throws his own reasonableness (by Republican standards, that is) into question. I hate to say it, but we probably have to blame the news media, which want desperately to have a "good guy" in the Republican race besides Gog and Magog. They can sustain Kasich with ego-fueling free publicity, but in doing so they perpetuate both his own delusions and the larger illusion that the Republican party is still animated by sanity at this late hour.

Populism and trade

For a few minutes yesterday I watched the President defend international trade from protectionists at the side of the German chancellor. On this subject Barack Obama, supposedly a flaming liberal and definitely a Democrat, is hardly any different from most conservative Republicans. You can hear the same argument from either party: individuals suffer but the nation benefits. For Republicans (and libertarians) it's a strangely collectivist argument to make, and for the GOP in particular it's arguably an even greater betrayal of the party's founding principles than its infamous Southern strategy. Donald Trump is made out to be a heretic (or an ignoramus) for seeking the Republican presidential nomination on a protectionist platform, while Senator Sanders is seen by many Democrats as nearly as heretical on the subject. Their common failing, the free-traders say, is their assumption that in global competition American companies and employees lose unfairly. The free-traders argue that we can't have the benefits or foreign markets opened to our products without accepting the reciprocal risk of competition with foreign products in our stores. In such an argument the "we" is the nation, but the cost-risk balance breaks down when we think in individual terms.

In what way, after all, does an American worker who suffers from foreign competition benefit from another American company selling more stuff abroad? For some, this is the wrong question to ask, the point of free trade being that every American benefits as a consumer from the lower prices and better quality of goods resulting from the widest possible competition. In other words, that unemployment check will last longer thanks to cheaper imports. It's all sophistry, of course, to cover up the true feeling of free-traders that economic competition means survival of the fittest, and that patriotism that protects the unfit is misplaced if not scoundrelous. I could almost buy this as long as price isn't a factor in fitness, but the most dogmatic free-traders seem determined to make it the primary factor. They definitely seem determined to make it appear oppressive to have to pay more than you might, when people are working cheaper than others say they should. They're also unbecomingly quick to decide when Americans deserve to lose.

Free-traders make a sophistic distinction between free trade and "trade war," while populist protectionists, from Trump on the right to Sanders on the left, may be more inclined to see trade itself as a form of war that Americans should win, victory meaning that Americans keep their jobs. Left protectionists like Sanders may be more inclined to wage a war of liberation, so to speak, by pressuring other countries to increase wages, while right protectionists like Trump, also recognizing low wages as a form of foreign cheating, are less interested in leveling that playing field than in defending the homeland with tariffs. Either way, the populist protectionist simply isn't as willing to write off the worker who loses to foreign competition as the free-trader appears to be -- and that resistance may help us a little more toward getting at the essence of populism.

While individual populists remain maddeningly selective about whom they include in their zone of solidarity -- "populism" and "humanism" are never quite synonymous -- they're still defined to some extent by that unwillingness to write off those toward whom they feel solidarity as losers in the game of life, whether through their own fault or through the breaks of the game. For the sake of analogy, Black Lives Matter is a populist movement because members refuse to write off anyone to whom they feel solidarity -- not even those who, to others, seem self-evidently deserving of death. Populism and its motivating solidarity don't seem to come as naturally to white people, given how readily they'll write off people of their own race or culture for "losing" in many facets of life. But white populism roars to life when whites perceive, as blacks arguably do more often, that shit doesn't just happen, that not all bad things are simply breaks of the game. Populism is a reaction to perceived unfairness, a perception that things are rigged by malicious or indifferent powers against the average person of populist self-regard. It assumes that it's not the loser's fault when he loses a rigged game, nor his responsibility, as the free-trader claims, to adapt to its rigged rules. The rules seem most obviously rigged in the labor market these days, so that's where populism makes its stand, whether by opposing the "race to the bottom" that results from global competition with unequal wages or by opposing the immigration of competitors for the dwindling labor market. By comparison, free-traders, be they ideological Republicans or progressive Clinton/Obama-style technocrats, insist that nothing is rigged, that the global market is an irresistible force of nature, its voice the voice of God. That might be hyperbole on my part, but they do seem to demand that we all accept the global market and its discipline on faith, while populism appears when faith is broken and appeals to faith ring hollow. Populism's opponents argue that the Trump and Sanders campaigns are also appeals to faith in their respective champions' ability to do the apparently impossible. While there may be cults of personality in play in these campaigns, they also seem to be, for good or ill, appeals to people's own power to change the rules that everyone says are immutable, including the rules of global trade. At least on that subject there's been a real debate this year.

Clinton vs. Sanders: who is the enemy?

Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in her adopted state of New York by a landslide margin generated mainly in the biggest cities. Where I live, Senator Sanders crushed her, amplifying an unexpected volume of left dissent first expressed two years ago when Zephyr Teachout ran strongly against Gov. Cuomo in the Democratic primary. The way some see it, however, we must be a bunch of whitebread Bernie Bros up here. To some, the Sanders supporters are the right wing of the Democratic party, precisely because they are, to whatever extent, socialist. That seems to be the premise of a piece written on primary day for the Quartz website. According to Marcie Bianco, Sanders and his supporters are backward, or worse, in their failure to recognize, as Clinton supposedly does recognize, that "the long arc of equal rights in America is primarily based on identity." Sanders' sin is to propose a "revolution" that is primarily economic in orientation.

And despite what he may say [Bianco adds] an economic revolution is not tantamount to a sociopolitical overhaul. To put a finer point on it: Achieving a $15 minimum wage will not stop racially prejudiced cops from shooting black people. It will not stop immigrants or refugees from being detained at our borders. Dismantling Wall Street, whatever that means exactly, will not shore up or extend women’s reproductive rights.

Marxism itself is on the right of Bianco's political universe because  "The universalism of the workers’ fight against “Wall Street” or the “1%” or whatever term is currently being used to describe the capitalist bourgeoise deliberately overlooks oppressed identity groups such as women, people of color, the disabled, immigrant communities." Bianco notes cryptically that "The Achilles heel of Marxism is humanity itself." I find it cryptic, at least, because I'm not sure what she means. I suspect she means something along the line of "humanity has a tendency to oppress itself prior to the introduction of class, and Marxism at its worst only further empowers some of the oppressors." Whatever Bianco actually means, she paints herself into an uncomfortable corner with her rhetoric. What she's saying, after all, is that "the banks" or "Wall Street" (or any particular economic class) are not the real enemy, and that those who say they are are fools or knaves. What does that leave us? It seems pretty clear from Bianco's rhetoric that there is an enemy out there, and if there is, it may not be the white devil of a slightly different political imagination, but it is definitely the Man in any number of senses of the word. Equality in American won't really be equal for Bianco unless it is equal along racial, gender and sexual-orientation lines, at a minimum -- and to oppose Hillary Clinton, she implies, is to oppose all of this. Can Bianco really believe that Bernie Sanders opposes all of this? Her only real evidence for such a belief is that Sanders opposes Clinton. Perhaps any male candidate opposing any female candidate would be equally guilty of standing in the way of history, but to interpret the Clinton-Sanders race in all its particularity in this broad manner is absurd if not downright sinister. After every victory Clinton crows about breaking barriers, a concept that clearly resonates with her multicultural base. But if the Clinton campaign is as essentially about identity politics as Bianco claims, and as implicitly accusatory toward those who don't get with the program, it may build as many barriers to progress as it breaks.

An American 'spring?'

It's only coming to my attention -- which probably isn't a good sign for the new "Democracy Spring" movement -- that more than 1,000 people were arrested in Washington D.C. last week for protesting outside the U.S. Capitol. It only came to my attention because some celebrities, most notably Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame, were among those arrested. Democracy Spring wants to start a mass civil-disobedience campaign across the country, disrupting campaign fundraisers and the like in order to force their two main issues, the reversal of the Citizens United decision and the rollback of perceived vote-suppression laws, onto the election agenda. While the group cites a number of American models for their movement, not all of which can be called successful, their name -- I asked myself why it isn't "American Spring" and my cynical answer was that someone must have thought that sounded like bottled water  -- is meant to evoke all the "Spring" movements, not all of which can be called successful, either, that have appeared around the world since the Prague original in 1968. In practice, the intent seems to be to combine the passive resistance of the Civil Rights Movement, embodied in members' willingness to get arrested, with the fervor of the "Springs," the "color revolutions" and other "people power" movements. It all seems very naive.

"People power" would have a hard time catching on in the U.S. no matter what the cause behind it, because the legitimacy of "people power" in other places is based on the absence of "rule of law," "civil society," etc. in authoritarian or totalitarian countries. That is, the legitimacy of people power is inversely proportional to the availability of other options for expressing and organizing dissent. Where civil society does exist, or is declared to exist, you'll find that any mob is just a mob. Such a mob can be dismissed by the casual observer and the determined opponent alike, each of whom can call the mob sore losers because they can't get their way at the polls or in the courts. It may call itself "Democracy Spring" but it will be seen as a threat to democracy itself, as many if not most Americans understand the term. The civil-disobedience side of the movement is meant, presumably, to shame Americans into recognizing an injustice so glaring that people are willing to be jailed, or worse, to protest it. But while many Americans outside the south in the Sixties could plead ignorance of the racist injustice down there until the footage from Birmingham and other places got on TV, many Americans now are well aware of the injustices Democracy Spring is protesting, and doesn't see them as injustices. They see the potential for fraud at the polls as sufficient reason to demand photo i.d. from voters and remain suspicious of those making excuses for those without i.d. They see the commodification of political speech as a necessary (if not necessarily harmless) counterweight to the self-interest of the state and the iron law of incumbency. They are unlikely to be swayed from their own beliefs by the sight of kids and celebrities in handcuffs. Groups like Democracy Spring need to realize that they're up against not just money and power but belief, and that nothing they do will amount to an argument against that belief.  If they're really radical, they may decide that the crisis is past the point of argument. They may decide that the belief that money is speech is not to be refuted but suppressed. If they're seen as a threat to democracy, and if they really believe in democracy, their main challenge is to show that democracy doesn't mean what the other side thinks it means, but more than Citizens United might get overturned in the process. Democracy Spring's agenda seems like small potatoes compared to the stakes involved in other people power movements, but let's reserve judgment until we see how ambitious they really are.

The three estates: workers, consumers, entrepreneurs

Medieval societies, France especially, were divided into estates: nobility, clergy, and the rest, each represented in the rare representative assemblies of the nation. While anyone in theory could join the clergy, with that exception you were pretty much locked into the other estates. American society is different. You can choose to which estate you belong, and while that doesn't determine how you're represented in government, it can determine how you vote. Much of our political culture actually discourages working class people from identifying as such. More specifically, most of the political establishment doesn't want the working class to think of itself as a class, much less a proletariat. Thomas Frank recognizes this. The April Harper's ran an excerpt from his latest book, a critique of the American liberal establishment as embodied by the Clinton family and their foundation. The Harper's piece was concerned with debunking the trendy global fad of microbanking, as promoted by the Clintons. It gave Frank a springboard for his main thrust against Clintonism. Hillary Clinton's drive to make history echoes her family's commitment to breaking barriers to achievement, particularly those created by discrimination; "no ceilings" is a popular motto in their circles. There's nothing wrong with that in isolation, but what Frank perceives is that the Clintons and liberals like them seem more concerned with making it easier, through remedies from microlending to affirmative action, for people to become entrepreneurs than with making life better for the working class, the people who most likely always will work for someone else. Frank fears that, amid their concern that there be no ceilings, liberals neglect the threat of "no floors," no limit to the immiseration of the permanent working class. I'm sure that Clintonites will say that Frank's portrait is at least selective, at worst unfair. They might claim that Frank betrays a bias against entrepreneurs. Perhaps they're right, but if we can't all be entrepreneurs, despite the utopian dreams of liberals, libertarians and others, then someone has to speak for the working class and affirm the primacy of their concerns.

Perhaps the Clintonian embrace of "opportunity" is another expression of the Neo-Lincolnism evolving in our time. Lincoln, we're told, was all about eliminating barriers to achievement; that was why he opposed a slaveholding oligarchy that retarded opportunities for whites, by monopolizing and wasting land, while oppressing blacks. Lincoln, of course, was also the man who said, refuting the concept of "wage slavery," that Northern workers had only themselves to blame, with exceptions for very bad luck, if they remained employees all their lives instead of becoming entrepreneurs. Perhaps the Democrats under the Clintons, rather than the Republicans, are the party of Lincoln now. But for those who see themselves as workers rather than thwarted entrepreneurs, there's still the party within the party, the party of Senator Sanders. There's even the party outside the party, the party of Donald Trump. Each candidate reaches out more to the American as a worker than his rivals within each of the major parties. Each is a critic of modern American trade policy, which each man blames for the loss of manufacturing jobs. While Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist, dismisses Trump as a misguided patriot, he regards Sanders and the liberals and progressives who support him as hypocrites of a sort. Assuming the progressives are "citizens of the world," he questions why they oppose free trade policies that have improved the lives of millions of manufacturing workers around the world. Does Bernie Sanders want these people to keep foreigners poor by denying them American markets? It's one thing for Trump to cry "America first!" but Goldberg thinks it odd for progressives to say the same thing -- forgetting the narrative that portrays Sanders and his supporters as populists. If that magical word means anything, then in this context it means that Sanders' first concern is with shoring up American workers' standard of living, while his second, at best, would be to improve working conditions for the rest of the world rather than their American market share, perhaps by using trade policy as leverage.

Even were Goldberg to abandon his sophistic argument against Sanders' alleged hypocrisy, he'd still say that Sanders is as wrongheaded as Trump about trade. When we come down to Goldberg's real argument for free trade, Trump and Sanders are wrong for the same reason. Each, on this issue at least, refuses to recognize Americans' primary identity as consumers. 'Free trade is good for most American workers and all American consumers, not just the “1 percent.”,' Goldberg writes. The columnist is a right-wing consumerist, as opposed to left-consumerists more concerned with quality than price (think Ralph Nader) and thus committed to a degree of regulation Goldberg abhors. For right-consumerists like Goldberg, only price matters -- or should matter. Any other consideration, presumably, distorts the workings of that all-wise singularity, the Market. It's also necessary for the citizen to think of himself as a consumer first and a worker second at best. Right wing consumerism differs again from the left wing variant by requiring you to define yourself as a consumer -- in effect, to renounce any solidarity with fellow workers that might require a sacrifice from the wallet. A consumer remains free to pay more for quality, but he should not feel pressured to subsidize "uncompetitive" fellow citizen when imports can be had for less. When Goldberg sneers in print that "American labor unions hate foreign competition," his hope that foreign competition will further  break down organized labor could not be more obvious. While union folk and many liberals will still tell you that organized labor swelled the ranks of the American middle class in the 20th century, Goldberg tells an alternate history according to which "it is largely thanks to trade that the average American worker is in the top 1 percent of earners in the world." In other words, you owe it not to yourselves but to consumers worldwide. In this narrative the consumers are always on the winning side of history, and to take the workers' side, probably superficially in Trump's case and perhaps more substantially in Sanders', is a chump's call. So there are your choices: liberal entrepreneurship and its risk of debt; conservative consumerism sacrificing all to competitiveness; or the world as it seemed to be not so long ago, when workers could make the market answer to them. Don't say you don't have any real choices in politics.

Goldberg closes his column on a curious note:

One irony to this all of is that despite all the textbooks that claim nationalism and socialism are opposites, the reality is that when translated into policy, they’re closer to the same thing. The rhetoric may be different, but the economic program of nationalism is socialism, and the emotional underpinnings of socialism boil down to nationalism.

The curious thing about this is Goldberg's implicit repudiation of nationalism. You'd think any self-styled conservative would be a nationalist, on the assumption that the conservative is loyal to traditions, and particularly cultural traditions, while distrusting cosmopolitanism and individualism. Of course, Goldberg may mean something more sinister by "nationalism" than a mere synonym for patriotism, as he is the man who wrote a book called Liberal Fascism. But what is he actually defending by casting these aspersions? The individual, presumably, and the consumer especially. Above all, Goldberg defends the principle that if I can make and sell a product cheaper than anyone else, I deserve to win -- and I can never sell too cheap or pay too cheap. He's defending the idea that no one has the right to say I sell or pay too cheap, much less penalize me for it. When he invites you to think of yourself as a consumer, this is what he expects you to believe. And if you imagine yourself an entrepreneur, with help from Clintonian liberals, you'll have to think this way to if you want to survive in Goldberg's world. If you don't think that way and don't want to think that way, you'd better hope that another world is possible, no matter how unfair or unfree that world may seem to other people. You have to choose which of the modern estates you belong to, and you have to act and vote accordingly.