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Archive for 2016
November 15, 2016
THE NEW REPUBLIC: Thanks, Trump! What Donald Trump Got Right About American Democracy.
The Trump campaign, ugly as it was—and democracy is often an ugly, messy business—served as a social X-ray for our stultified political system. It revealed just how the swelling confluence of big donors, news media as entertainment, and our rancid consulting class has so appalled and disgusted much of the electorate that they were willing to vote for almost anyone, anyone at all, if he would “blow things up,” as one Trump supporter after another kept telling reporters. And in doing so, it compels us to examine how our system of political campaigns came to be, and how it might be upended yet.
To be fair, Wikileaks helped reveal that, too.
JONATHAN ADLER: Republicans Won’t Let Democrats Filibuster Trump’s Supreme Court Pick: Nor Should They. “Just one month ago, Reid indicated that Senate Democrats — were they to obtain control of the Senate — would not allow Republicans to filibuster a Clinton-nominated Supreme Court pick. . . . Given Reid’s decision to go nuclear in 2013 — and threat to go further, if need be — there is no reason for Senate Republicans not to eliminate the filibuster for nominations once and for all.”
ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN: There Is No Wave Of Trump-Inspired Hate Crimes. “The bulk of racist graffiti incidents appear to have happened around middle- and high-schools, which doesn’t make their messages any less hurtful, I’m sure, but does suggest a phenomenon driven by mean and immature kids rather than rogue bands of serious neo-Nazis. . . . The ‘hate acts reported across the country’ in the wake of Trump’s victory seem mostly relegated to graffiti at a few schools and one carjacking which may or may not have had anything to do with racial or religious prejudice. . . . Pushers of this ‘rampant racist crimewave’ in Trump’s America story will dismiss posts like this one, and anyone who challenges their narrative, as naive, enabling of racists, or unconscionably non-empathetic to non-straight, white, Christian Americans. But I’m not the one trying to stoke false terror in vulnerable people or over-hype America’s levels of hate for pageviews and Twitter faves.”
LEARN NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO COMPLETE SHUT YOUR VOICES OFF: It’s not about racism.
NOT EVEN IN THE SAME ZIP CODE AS HONESTY: No, Trump won’t roll back gay rights.
HOW CAN A PAPER “RE-DEDICATE ITSELF TO HONESTY” IF IT CAN’T ADMIT PAST ERRORS? The New York Times can’t improve until it admits bias.
IN THE EMAIL FROM KAL SPRIGGS: Renegades: Out of Time (The Renegades Book 3).
YOU CALL IT NEGATIVE; I CALL IT TRUTHFUL: Negative social media helped win it for Trump.
YOU’RE NOT UNEDUCATED; YOU’RE JUST STUPID: Die Schadenboner.
BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE SICK AND TIRED: Why celebrity endorsements didn’t help Hillary at all.
SNL HELD A FUNERAL FOR HILLARY CLINTON. IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY. As Mollie Hemingway writes, “This Civil Religion Sucks:”
But we must talk about the abomination that was Kate McKinnon in full Clinton drag playing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the cold open. Cohen died this week, so playing his most popular hit was part tribute to him and part tribute to — and here’s where it gets weird — Hillary Clinton.
* * * * * * * *
“Hallelujah” is a sexual and spiritual hymn. Putting Clinton in as the Messiah figure in this mix is particularly telling and cultish. When McKinnon finished her performance, she turned to the congregation and said, as Clinton, “‘I’m not giving up, and neither should you.’” Uh, okay? (The Atlantic does its civil religion take here, calling a woman with historically high unfavorability ratings “iconic.”)
The very idea that you would mourn something that fully half of the voters in the country voted against shows how insular “Saturday Night Live” seeks to be. It has doctrinal boundaries, and if you’re outside those boundaries, you are heterodox. Apostates and blasphemers aren’t welcome and will be shunned. Or just ignored. Note how NPR thought this preachy opening represented the views of the entire nation, all evidence to the contrary:
[Hemingway links to an NPR tweet that reads, “SNL Reflects a Nation’s Emotional Tone in Post-Election Episode.”]
“Saturday Night Live” does these ponderous openings following terror attacks. Because government is God to many on the left, this was a crisis of the soul and the cold open reflected that. But to equate your neighbors different political calculation on the referendum of Hillary Freaking Clinton, of all people, to terrorism is appalling and unacceptable. It belittles loss of life by creating a false political equivalence.
As Larry O’Connor notes today, the tone of the SNL episode’s cold opening immediately after 9/11 was much less funereal and actually funny, thanks to an assist from Rudy Giuliani, than their strange, stillborn wake for Hillary, which is a reminder that SNL has now come full-circle.
In the mid-1970s, the nascent (and often very funny) Saturday Night Live took a well-deserved wrecking ball to the earnest, mawkish showbiz culture of Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and the Rat Pack. Its first writers would reject any sketch they deemed as “too Carol Burnett.” But a few seasons into the show’s run, early writer Anne Beatts sagely warned, “You can only be avant-garde for so long until you became garde.” SNL became so garde they eventually reshaped the entire media world. David Letterman and the mock news broadcast that is the Daily Show were direct extensions of the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live, and the crude, snarking tone of MSNBC would be unthinkable without SNL’s seismic shift in the media culture.
Today, Lorne Michaels is the executive producer of NBC’s The Tonight Show, which was defined by Johnny Carson’s long-running era. Carson’s center-left politics were more or less in-line with those of SNL’s, but he loathed the ragged, countercultural tone of the show’s early years, and would be astonished if he knew that SNL’s creator was now calling the shots at his old redoubt. Carson wisely kept his political excesses in check, rather than alienate half of his potential audience. In sharp contrast, I wonder if Michaels whose shows, like him, wears their politics on their (Armani) sleeves ever ponders having any responsibility for the rise of Trump and the alienation so many of us now feel towards old media, the Democrat’s palace guard (or garde.)
As Steve Martin’s recurring Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber character would have said, “Naaaaah.”
November 14, 2016
What commentators term “identity politics” has now become normative, thanks to the Democrats indulging in it, and Trump is now aping them. It would be more correct to term this what it actually is: nationalism. Ethno-racial nationalism is an enormously potent political force; wise politicians know this and employ it cautiously. Nationalism arouses genuine passion and is a political motivator like no other, which it explains why a majority of white women voted for Trump, to the bitter consternation of outraged feminists.
Moreover, once nationalism becomes the main political factor, there’s no putting that troublesome genie back in the bottle. Politics become tribal, ethnic conflicts waged at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield. Having done most of my scholarly work on multiethnic societies like the Habsburg Empire and Yugoslavia, I can attest that the fires of nationalism, once stoked, are only put out with great difficulty—and that ethnically diverse societies that play games with nationalism are living dangerously. . . .
Trump’s winning our presidential election heralds a new era in American politics. The Democrats decided to bet everything on their emerging “new” America, and lost big. Obama’s two terms have overseen the destruction of the Democrats as a national party: they control nothing in Washington now and their performance at the state level is nothing short of dismal. Democrats dominate our big cities, California, and the Northeast—and little else. Barack Obama’s real legacy is putting Donald Trump in the White House.
There’s not much for Republicans to crow about, however, despite their enormous political windfall. Trump won precisely because he ignored or repudiated most longstanding “conservative” policies. Working-class whites have little interest in privatizing Social Security or open borders or engaging in endless losing wars in the Middle East. The GOP has changed, only their leaders seem not to have noticed. The Republicans are now the White party, de facto, whether they want to be or not. American politics will never be the same, and 2016 looks like a landmark election in the manner of 1980, 1932, or 1860, each of which transformed the United States.
Stay tuned.
TRUMP THE EDUCATOR:
Some Clinton supporters here said the election exposed a blind spot at Yale. As an elite institution, they said, it is not sufficiently attuned to the concerns of the massive bloc of white, working-class voters in small towns and rural areas who powered Trump’s election.
“A lot of people here are out of touch with what’s going on in communities that don’t look like their communities,” said Isis Davis-Marks, 19, a sophomore from New York City.
“This election made me realize how much of a liberal bubble Yale students live in,” said Zachary Cohen, 20, a junior from New York City who edits a political journal here. That isolation left the campus largely unaware of anger and resentment elsewhere, he said. “I definitely had to come terms with the fact that there was this other half of America I had hardly seen.”
Well, good.
OBAMA SAYS REPEALING OBAMACARE IS THE GOP’S HOLY GRAIL, AN ARTICLE OF FAITH: Such snitty and condescending phrasing, Barack, especially from a fellow who will go down as one of America’s most incompetent and politically-tone deaf presidents. Look Barack, elections have consequences, Barack…Oh wait…I believe you said that, didn’t you, sir?…How ironic. In retrospect brutally ironic. You will hear that phrase often, sir, as well as “get in their faces and punch back twice as hard.” You said something like that as well…OK, in your face…Get this: Of course the Republicans will repeal ObamaCare, and they darn well should. ObamaCare’s chickens have come home to roost.
STACY MCCAIN: Lessons of a ‘Sex Object:’ What can we really learn from Jessica Valenti’s memoir? “You have blood on your hands, sir, if you take any pleasure in a woman ‘looking sexy,’ and disliking Ms. Valenti’s brand of feminism is proof of your misogynist guilt. ‘The personal is political,’ as radical feminist pioneer Carol Hanisch said, and therefore any source of unhappiness in a feminist’s life becomes a political cause. This leads feminists to viewing the world through the warped lenses of ideology, and induces a sort of sexual paranoia in which the feminist succumbs to delusions of persecution, the victim of a male conspiracy she calls ‘patriarchy.’ Yet the question raised by Sex Object, if read with a critical eye, is whether Jessica Valenti has ever been a victim of anything except her own bad judgment. Dear God, what awful choices she has made in her life!”
Plus: “Feminists complain about the shortage of women in high-tech STEM fields, or in corporate executive positions, and yet continue directing tens of thousands of college girls into the absurd ideological cul-de-sac of Women’s Studies. The dope dealers on campus are engaged in a profitable venture, at least, and don’t demand that taxpayers foot the bill for their evil enterprise.”
Also: “Compare this description to what Ms. Valenti says about her ‘lovely’ husband, who is forced to keep the house immaculate merely to avoid her wrath, and then ask whether you’d rather be (a) the muscle man who banged her at 16, or (b) the poor fool who ended up marrying her when she was 30.”
And an important lesson: “One of the amazing things about the patriarchal oppression of women is how guys with too much money so easily locate women with an appetite for free cocaine.”
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED – OR AS ROTARIAN AS THEY WANNA BE!
Shot:
By the numbers: since President Barack Obama was sworn in, the financial markets have dropped to ten-year lows, housing prices are off by ten percent or more, nearly a million jobs have been lost, federal discretionary spending has doubled, the share of federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product is set to soar by 50% by the end of the year, and there’s to be a trillion dollars in new taxes, trillions more in new debts, and even more trillions due as interest payments. Oh — and Republicans are the bad guys.
I say: Yeah, OK, we can do that.
A few years back, television writer/producer/director/visionary Joss Whedon made a little libertarian-themed science fiction movie called Serenity. In it, our ragtag band of heroes make their way around the ‘verse by trading freely when they can and by stealing from the corrupt, oppressive central government when they must. Before launching a minor raid on a government stash of ill-gotten gold, Jayne, the hired muscle (played with an endearingly ignorant malice by Adam Baldwin), cocks his shotgun menacingly — is there any other way? — and suggests, “Let’s be bad guys.”
Yes. Exactly. Let’s.
—“My Fellow Conservatives, Let’s Be Bad Guys!”, Steve Green, PJ Media.com, March 6, 2009.
Chaser: Noam Chomsky: ‘The Republican Party Has Become the Most Dangerous Organization in World History.’
—EcoWatch, today.
And yes, Chomsky is excusing all sorts of history’s genuinely evil organizations by making such a preposterous quote, but then, that’s pretty much been his life’s work, outside of linguistics. Or as Tom Wolfe once said, “An intellectual is a person who is knowledgeable in one field but speaks out only in others.” And he was talking explicitly about Chomsky when he said it:
An intellectual feeds on indignation and really can’t get by without it. The perfect example is Noam Chomsky. When Chomsky was merely the most exciting and most looked-to and in many ways, the most profound linguist in this country if not the world, he was never spoken of as an American intellectual. Here was a man of intellectual achievement. He was not considered an intellectual until he denounced the war in Vietnam, which he knew nothing about. Then he became one of America’s leading intellectuals. He remains one until this day, which finally has led to my definition of an intellectual: An intellectual is a person who is knowledgeable in one field but speaks out only in others.
This whole business was started unintentionally by my great idol, Émile Zola, in the Dreyfus case. Zola was an extremely popular novelist. A popular writer writing fiction had never been considered a person of any intellectual importance before, but in the Dreyfus case he and Anatole France and others who were trying to defend Dreyfus were singled out by Clemenceau as “the intellectuals.” The term had never been used that way before-meaning people who live by intellectual labor. That was Clemenceau’s term.
When Zola wrote his great manifesto, J’accuse . . .!, it appeared on the front page of a daily newspaper. All 300,000 copies of the newspaper were sold out by afternoon. Suddenly the world of writers and teachers and all of these intellectual laborers realized that it was possible for a mere scrivener to be called an intellectual and be considered an important person.
Zola, incidentally, was very knowledgeable about the Dreyfus case. He knew it as well as anybody, as well as any law clerk did. That part was lost later on; it was considered not necessary to go that deeply into anything. All that was required was indignation.
Marshall McLuhan once said that moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity. I think that’s quite true these days.
Which neatly sums up the past week, doesn’t it? But the above passage is from a decade before 2016, a year that’s been so insane, even Tom Wolfe couldn’t have foreseen how crazy it would be in his most satiric novel.
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THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: CDC sending out an SOS over soaring rates of STDs.
MELTING DOWN: Sending Menstrual Blood To Mike Pence Is A Stupid Protest That Hurts Women. “There’s that 2016 schadenfreude again, where social justice warriors who hate Donald Trump compulsively do things that increase his popularity.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Four years makes a BIG difference! This Slate shot & chaser on the Electoral College is truly one for the ages.
Slate is the last online redoubt of the Graham family, which owned the Washington Post for decades, reducing its net worth so low in the process that Jeff Bezos could buy it in 2013 for pocket change. It’s good to see them continuing to let it all hang out.