Month: August 2016

Trump thinks the NSA is a political arm of the presidency

by digby

I wrote about his latest atrocity for Salon today:

We’ve been documenting Donald Trump’s scary authoritarian tendencies since he announced his run for president but it doesn’t seem to be something that’s really sunk in. One suspects that if he were to be elected some people would come to regret not taking seriously. A president can summon a lot of power in this regard if he chooses, particularly if he can create a sense of urgent danger among the population, something for which Donald Trump has a demonstrated talent.

From the very first week, he’s talked about forced deportation of millions of people and building the Great Wall of Trump both of which evoke images of totalitarian states. This has not been something that anyone in American politics seriously discussed until this campaign but it’s now a mainstream Republican policy proposal opposed by many, to be sure, but mostly on practical grounds. When asked how we would know who to deport, Trump routinely says, “the police know who they are.” Over the week-end he said “we are going to get rid of the criminals and it’s going to happen within one hour after I take office, we start, okay?” His campaign manager says the details are “to be determined.”

It doesn’t end there, of course.  There’s the promise to institute surveillance on Mosques, ban Muslims (recently changed to something he calls “extreme, extreme vetting) “take out” or otherwise use the families of terrorist suspects to extract information, reinstitute waterboarding and “much worse” (possibly even “chopping off heads” to fight fire with fire) summary executions, (sometimes with bullets dipped in pigs blood to scare the Muslims) and more. In a presidential debate he said he would order the military to torture and they would follow his orders. Days later he was forced by someone, we still don’t know who, to admit that he could not unilaterally order troops to commit war crimes. (We also know that there is some recent precedent for getting around that …)

You really don’t need to know anything more than this to understand what a dangerous authoritarian Trump is:

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works. And if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.

His obsession with police authority and intention to let them take off the gloves is well known going all the way back to the 1980s: “Let our politicians give back our police department the power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of “police brutality” which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save an other’s.”  He has not changed his view even slightly since then.

However, there is yet another dimension to Trump’s authoritarianism that’s just as chilling and perhaps even more sinister when you consider how much secrecy surrounds the programs he’s talking about. Daniel Marans at the Huffington Post reported:

“I hear the NSA maybe has the emails,” Trump said in a phone interview on Fox News’ “On The Record.” “A lot of people say the NSA would have the emails if they really wanted to get them.” 

“Obviously they don’t want to get them,” he added. “They’re protecting her, they’re coddling her. And it’s the only way she could even consider running.” 

“She knows what was on those emails and it was very, very bad,” he said. “And maybe somebody should, in fact, ask the NSA whether or not they have the emails.”

There were many reasons why civil libertarians were apoplectic at the revelation the NSA was storing all emails of American citizens when the Edward Snowden documents were published. Aside from general privacy concerns, the possibility of government authorities accessing the information without probable cause to suspect terrorism was alarming. But nothing was more threatening to the fundamental health of our democracy than the possibility of government officials accessing this information for political purposes. And here we have the Republican nominee for president in 2016 saying that the NSA is coddling his rival by failing to release copies of her personal emails to the public, emails he darkly insinuates must contain something “very, very bad.” Indeed, he claims she couldn’t possibly even run for office if they weren’t protecting her.  The mind boggles.

But then Trump’s mentor in life was Joseph McCarthy’s chief henchman Roy Cohn, a man Trump once called his most loyal friend, “a man who would brutalize for you.” Trump obviously also admired his friend’s  use of government power to investigate people’s personal lives for evidence of espionage and treason as well as personal sexual history and anything else worth blackmailing them over. He and McCarthy were best known for the smearing of people for alleged Communist sympathies which may have inspired Trump’s own personal character assassination of President Obama back in 2011 when he stoked the birther movement into a full-fledged crusade. The result of that insane smear is that according to a recent NBC poll, a shocking 72% of Republicans still doubt that the president was born in the US.

And Trump has long had an affinity for Richard Nixon, the original “law and order” president who was disgraced and run from office for, among other things, using the power of the presidency to punish his political enemies. In fact, before Trump started suggesting that the NSA is covering for Clinton by failing to release their copies of all her personal emails to public, Trump also insisted that the Russian government must have them as well and he made his bizarre invitation to them to release them to the press which ,combined with his pleasure at the DNC hacking, had some disquieting echoes of the Watergate break-in itself.

This is a man who promises to put his opponent in jail if he wins the presidency: “I will say this, Hillary Clinton has got to go to jail. Folks, honestly, she’s guilty as hell.” I’m not positive but I suspect that may be unprecedented in presidential campaign history. These are the rantings of an authoritarian dictator.

If he loses we will probably chalk up his candidacy to some sort of tear in the electoral matrix. But shouldn’t it be just a bit troubling that these anti-democratic ideas are so enthusiastically supported by tens of millions of our fellow Americans?

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The press conference scandal


by digby

“A campaign is as close as an adult can get to duplicating college life and Bush wasn’t just any old breezy frat brother with mediocre grades…He was proud of it. Gore elicited in us the childish urge to poke a stick in the eye of the smarty-pants. Bush elicited self-recognition.” 

“As he propped his rolled-up sleeves on the seat back in front of me, his body leaning into the conversation, he waggled his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx, mugging across the aisle. There were Dove bars and designer water on demand and a bathroom stocked like Martha Stewart’s guest suite. Dinner at seven featured lobster ravioli.” 

“Gore wanted the snacks to be environmentally and nutritionally correct, but somehow granola bars ended up giving way to Fruit Roll-Ups and the sandwiches came wrapped and looked long past their sell-by date. On a lucky day, someone would remember to buy supermarket doughnuts. By contrast, a typical day of food on Air Bush…consisted of five meals with access to a sixth, if you count grazing at a cocktail bar. Breakfast one was French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon… Reporter Margaret Carlson in her book “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House”

For the record, I think Hillary Clinton should do more press conferences. As a matter of fact, I think she should do them every single day, and she should let them on her plane and she should feed them Dove bars and lobster and hang around with them reading People Magazine and talking about the Real Housewives (the “girl version” of being George W. Bush) or whatever else will make them happy. It’s not too much to ask.

As it happens President Obama angered the press with his lack of traditional access too:

Obama was stingy with newspaper interviews when he first came to the White House in 2009, but the well has nearly dried up since the 2010 midterm elections. He spoke with USA Today and the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk during the campaign last year and had an off-the-record talk (later made public) with the Des Moines Register’s editorial board in October.

Each of those interviews had strategic value. USA Today is a national paper with the second-largest circulation (after the Wall Street Journal). The Virginia and Iowa papers are in states that were critical to Obama’s reelection chances. (Despite the rare interviews, the Register endorsed Mitt Romney for president; the Pilot made no endorsement).

But most of the nation’s biggest papers, whose reporters cover the White House every day, have remained on the outside looking in. The Washington Post landed its last on-the-record meeting with the president nearly four years ago, as did the Wall Street Journal; the New York Times last got to him in the fall of 2010. The Boston Globe has never had an interview while Obama was in office, nor has the Los Angeles Times, according to the Nexis database and the newspapers. Even Obama’s hometown papers, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, have been stiffed.

What’s more, despite a string of interviews with ethnic broadcasters, including Telemundo and Univision recently, Obama has never consented to an interview with any member of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an organization consisting of 210 African-American-owned newspapers, said Robert W. Bogle, the organization’s former president. Obama and George W. Bush were the first presidents who haven’t done so since Franklin Roosevelt, notes Bogle, the chief executive of the Philadelphia Tribune.

The cold shoulder from the White House has led, predictably, to expressions of disappointment among newspaper journalists.

I don’t know why these politicians refuse to do more press. It seems like it’s just part of he job to me. But lets not pretend its all about about “getting information” ok?

Journalist Tim Fernholtz calls them chances for reporter showboating and doesn’t think they’re particularly illuminating. He also did something interesting. He went back to the last press conference with the political press corps (there have been more recent ones with black and Latino journalists which don’t count apparently) to see what important questions were asked that couldn’t have been asked in any other format.

“Do you think banning gun sales to people on the no-fly list would have prevented any of these massacres [including] San Bernardino?”

Is this a dumb question? Yes. US officials already said the perpetrators were not on any watch list the day before; Clinton had long endorsed preventing gun sales to people on the no-fly list.

Did Clinton answer it? No. “I don’t know exactly what it would have or could have prevented.”

Did anyone follow up? No.

“Do you think the Fed is using the right criteria to assess the health of the job market? And is there anything else they should be doing? And are we ready for a rate increase?”

Is this a dumb question? No. It’s an important one. Politicians don’t talk enough about the Federal Reserve.

Did Clinton answer it? No. Most US politicians refuse to talk about the Fed, in a nod to the institution’s independence. Clinton is no different: “I’m not going to comment on their decision making.”

Did anyone follow up? No.

“[Are mass shootings] a mental health issue as well?”

Is this a dumb question. Yes.

Did Clinton answer it? Of course. “You’re absolutely right.”

Did anyone follow up? No.

“As a former secretary of state, are you confident enough in the system of checks and balances on that visa waiver program?”

Is this a dumb question? No. The potential for terrorists to take advantage of relaxed travel rules with friendly European countries is worrisome, and Clinton has relevant experience.

Did Clinton answer it? Yes. “If you look at the kinds of crimes that were committed by this woman and her husband, or the 9/11 hijackers, visas are a problem,” she said. “And we have to look at that, see what we need to do to tighten up requirements, do better information-sharing with other countries.”

Did anyone follow up? No. But the Obama information would tighten the rules around visas the following month.

“Could you briefly summarize how you would pay for your proposal to create jobs in the country?”

Is this a dumb question? Yes.

Did Clinton answer it? No. “I can’t briefly summarize, but I will certainly send you a long list, and a lot of it is on my website.”

Did anyone follow up? No. It’s on her website.

“You mentioned combating ISIS online in your speech today. Have we become too sensitive to civil liberty arguments post-Snowden, given what we saw happened in [San Bernardino]?”

Is this a dumb question? No.

Did Clinton answer it? Kind of. She referred to the balancing act between liberty and security, before noting that terror groups “run multiple Twitter accounts… I don’t know that we would let that continue if we were dealing with a criminal network. Why should we let it continue if we’re dealing with a terrorist network?”

Did anyone follow up? No.

“Do you regret calling for gun control in the wake of the attack now knowing what you know about the terrorists?”

Is this a dumb question? Yes. At that point, no new information had been revealed about how the terrorists had obtained their weapons.

Did Clinton answer it? Yes. “Not at all. We don’t know how they got that arsenal inside their house.” Later, the public would learn the San Bernardino shooters used legally purchased AR-15 style rifles that they modified in violation of gun-safety laws.

Did anyone follow up? No.

“Madam secretary, do you still have confidence in the mayor in the city where you were born?”

Is this a dumb question? No. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Clinton ally, was embroiled in a scandal around his handling of a young black man murdered by police.

Did Clinton answer it? Yes. “I do.”

Did anyone follow up? No.

So really, she shouldn’t avoid them and I frankly don’t see why she does. Just do it, Hillary. It will be fine.

The “Deep Story”
by Tom Sullivan

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

Arlie Hochschild crafted that narrative after spending years among poor, white T-party members in Louisiana. “You read my mind,” one of the interviewees told her. It’s their truthiness, their “feels-as-if-it’s-true” story of how and why Real Americans like themselves are struggling. For many, it is as if they are strangers in their own land, Hochschild writes at Mother Jones. (You need to read this.)

They feel shame at seeing their jobs and livelihoods slip away. They feel looked down on by the “liberal elite.” For the last-place averse, the privilege they themselves once had of having Others to look down on has evaporated with their jobs. Even the insurance salesperson Hochschild got to know is uneasy about her own relative comfort. That too could easily slip away.

Donald Trump offers them a way out or at least around seeing themselves as untouchables should circumstances force them to take government assistance. Since the 1960s, their incomes have gone flat, their marriages are in ruins, and they spend more time watching TV and sleeping. Conservative political scientist Charles Murray explains it as a loss of morals. Hochschild disagrees. That’s not a loss of morals, but a loss of morale:

Trump, the King of Shame, has covertly come to the rescue. He has shamed virtually every line-cutting group in the Deep Story—women, people of color, the disabled, immigrants, refugees. But he’s hardly uttered a single bad word about unemployment insurance, food stamps, or Medicaid, or what the tea party calls “big government handouts,” for anyone—including blue-collar white men.

In this feint, Trump solves a white male problem of pride. Benefits? If you need them, okay. He masculinizes it. You can be “high energy” macho—and yet may need to apply for a government benefit. As one auto mechanic told me, “Why not? Trump’s for that. If you use food stamps because you’re working a low-wage job, you don’t want someone looking down their nose at you.” A lady at an after-church lunch said, “If you have a young dad who’s working full time but can’t make it, if you’re an American-born worker, can’t make it, and not having a slew of kids, okay. For any conservative, that is fine.”

For Real Americans like me, but not for thee. Trump has presented them with a smorgasbord of Others to look down upon. And in so doing making Real America feel great again. Up against the wall, Deadbeat Other.

Two other treatments of this topic came to mind. In “The Great Derangement,” the often sardonic Matt Taibbi was surprising in the sensitivity with which he treated a woman he’d befriended while undercover at an evangelical church in Texas. As much as anyone else, he found, people he met (IIRC, can’t find my copy) were struggling for ways to process their pain. Annabel Park interviewed a father and son in Bakersville, NC for A Story of America. The preview clip ends [timestamp 4:20] with with the son wondering whether because of the stigma he himself attaches to government aid neighbors would look down on him if he accepted disability for his injured arm. This in a tiny town where there is no work anyway. He starts to condemn “the few out there” who are undeserving but catches himself. “Now that I think about it, I’m actually judging people that I don’t really know.”

That is a key takeaway. The majority of Trump’s support as Ryan Lizza reported is among people with “limited interactions with racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and college graduates,” according to economist Jonathan Rothwell:

This analysis provides clear evidence that those who view Trump favorably are disproportionately living in racially and culturally isolated zip codes and commuting zones. Holding other factors constant, support for Trump is highly elevated in areas with few college graduates, far from the Mexican border, and in neighborhoods that stand out within the commuting zone for being white, segregated enclaves, with little exposure to blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.

It’s a lot easier to hate faceless groups than it is people whose stories you actually know.

Update: A couple of catches by sharp readers have been corrected. Thx.

QOTD: who else?

by digby

Trump personally tweeted out this racist bilgewater to his millions of followers

Even in the 1970s the following was considered straight up racist. In fact, non-racists did not talk this way. Ever.

“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump at first denied the remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

There’s a long list of his racist statements and actions over the years.  Not that it isn’t obvious.  He’s a throwback. He sounds like someone who grew up in the 1920s.

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“Well, somebody’s doing the raping …”

by digby

A new poll by the Pew Research Center shows that 67 percent of Americans think illegal immigrants are more likely than citizens to commit serious crimes, data that may hearten Donald Trump given the Republican presidential nominee’s tough stance on illegal immigration.

The Republican National Convention in Cleveland earlier this summer featured speeches by parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants. 

It just stands to reason that all those horrible immigrants are criminals because it’s all you ever hear about. It’s wrong, of course:

—”Foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their life course.” (Bianca Bersani, University of Massachusetts, 2014. Published in Justice Quarterly.)

— “There’s essentially no correlation between immigrants and violent crime.” (Jörg Spenkuch, Northwestern University, 2014. Published by the university.) He did find a small correlation between immigration and property crime, but only a slight one.

— “[I]mmigrants are underrepresented in California prisons compared to their representation in the overall population. In fact, U.S.-born adult men are incarcerated at a rate over two-and-a-half times greater than that of foreign-born men.” (Public Policy Institute of California, 2008.)

— “[D]ata from the census and a wide range of other empirical studies show that for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated. This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who make up the bulk of the undocumented population.” (Ruben Rumbaut, University of California, 2008. Published by the Police Foundation.)

— “Analyses of data collected from four Southwest states and the U.S. Census show that the perceived size of the undocumented immigrant population, more so than the actual size of the immigrant population and economic conditions, is positively associated with perceptions of undocumented immigrants as a criminal threat.” (Xia Wang, Arizona State University, 2014. Published in Criminology.)

In case you were wondering about the latest on Trump’s immigration “policy”:

His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said immigrants who entered the country illegally would likely first have to return home before applying through legal channels. A so-called touchback provision was floated during the 2007 Senate immigration reform debate.

“We need to have a fair and humane way of addressing the fact that 11 million — or we don’t even know the number — 11 million, or so it’s estimated, illegal immigrants live among us,” Conway told Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday.”

“What he has said is no legalization and no amnesty,” she said of Trump’s immigration stance. “He also said this week, Chris, if you go back to your home country, and if you’d like to come back to the United States as an immigrant, you need to apply through the many different channels that allow people to apply for citizenship or entry into the United States legally.”

Here’s a translation: “Yes Trump wants to deport millions of people, including children, but we know it’s controversial so we’re speaking gobbldygook in order to allow some voters to lie to themselves about what they’re voting for.”

.@realDonaldTrump defends inflammatory comments, asks @donlemon, “Who is doing the raping?” http://t.co/xLFHH0x6aC http://t.co/EueoBESuAp

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 2, 2015

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Pence and trade and Trump’s national pride

by digby

So I watched a program on CNN this week-end about the Carrier plant leaving Indiana for Mexico and it was very sad. More than a thousand people lost their jobs and they all seem to think they will not ever find another one like it. Trump has talked a lot about this on the trail, blaming NAFTA and Obama and Clinton for the job losses and declaring that he would immediately hit any manufacturer with huge tariffs who tried to do that which would cow them into staying in the future. The workers in the story all believed him.

Somebody really ought to ask Trump and his running mate about this (Which they probably will since it was flagged for the media by the DNC):

As Donald Trump’s running mate, Gov. Mike Pence is campaigning for a man who has promised to penalize companies that ship jobs overseas.

But since Pence became governor in 2013, the state has awarded millions of dollars in economic development incentives to companies that have moved production to foreign countries such as Mexico and China. Those production shifts have cost thousands of Hoosiers their jobs during Pence’s time in office.

An IndyStar analysis found that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation — which Pence leads — has approved $24 million in incentives to 10 companies that sent work to foreign countries. Of those incentives, nearly $8.7 million has been paid out so far.

During that same period, those companies terminated or announced layoffs of more than 3,800 Hoosier workers while shifting production to other countries, where labor tends to be far less expensive.

The state has clawed back or put a hold on some or all of the incentives in four of those cases, returning $746,000 in taxpayer subsidies. But in the other six cases, the companies faced no consequences.

The primary reason: The job creation and retention requirements in the state’s incentive agreements are usually narrowly tailored to a single facility, leaving workers at other sites owned by the same company vulnerable to offshoring.

Take, for example, handbag maker Vera Bradley. The company was approved in December 2014 for a $1.75 million, 10-year tax break to assist with a $26.6 million expansion of its headquarters and distribution center in Roanoke, near Fort Wayne. In exchange, the company agreed to retain 567 employees and add 128 jobs by the end of 2017.

But the following year, the company closed its New Haven design center and moved production to factories in Asia to save money. The factory’s 250 employees, who worked just 15 miles from the Roanoke headquarters, lost their jobs.

Vera Bradley has claimed about $118,000 in tax credits so far and remains in compliance with its state incentive agreement, said Abby Gras, an IEDC spokeswoman, in an email. The company now employs slightly more than 600 workers in Roanoke, a spokeswoman for the company said. That’s a net loss of more than 200 jobs across the company’s Fort Wayne area operations.

Pence, who has been campaigning for Trump across the country since accepting the Republican vice presidential nomination in July, did not respond to interview requests for this story left with his office and campaign staff.

But his commerce secretary, Victor Smith, sent a statement to IndyStar defending the state’s economic development record and noting that 150,000 jobs have been added since Pence took office.

Carrier was among those companies that received incentive money although Pence got the company to pay it back once the video of the layoff being announced (which got Trump all excited) went viral. But there are a bunch of other companies in Indiana which have done the same and pocketed the cash.

The point is that this problem is not confined to the trade deals or to any politician. It’s much bigger than that. It’s easy to take a shot at government for failing to protect workers, and there’s plenty of blame there, but we are dealing with a complicated problem with a lot of moving parts (so to speak…)

Meanwhile, the Republicans are pulling the wool over people’s eyes as usual:

Pence has said in the past he supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump opposes. More recently, Pence says he would support renegotiating trade agreements with Trump in the White House because he believes Trump could negotiate better deals.

Political observers say Pence’s actions as governor raise new questions about the true extent of his support for Trump’s trade policies.

“To the extent that there is any daylight between them, one has to wonder what Mike Pence’s true thoughts are,” said Robert Dion, a political scientist at the University of Evansville. “In the event they disagree, you have to wonder, has Mike Pence changed his position or is he simply doing what a VP nominee must do to be part of a national ticket? That’s the million dollar question.”

The seemingly different approaches to companies that offshore jobs are also a study in what kind of constituency each candidate appeals to, Dion said.

“The real thing you’re getting at is the gulf between the chamber of commerce Republican crowd and the populist appeal of Trump,” Dion said. “What Trump is speaking to is that populist anger and frustration. I think what the evidence shows is that Mike Pence — like a lot of Republican governors and some Democrats have done — has worked with the chamber of commerce and business leaders. That’s where the gulf is at.”

Oddly, the one area in which Trump is sincere is his belief that the rest of the world is laughing at Americans because of our allegedly terrible trade deals. But keep in mind that his solution is to stick huge tariffs on American companies that manufacture overseas and drive wages down in the US to keep prices low so they can “compete.” It’s a huge mistake to believe this has something to do with the plight of the American worker. This has to do with “national pride” which isn’t the same thing at all.

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Friends, Romans, Alt-right countrymen …

by digby

In the New York Times today there’s a really fascinating article about Trump’s rhetoric. It compares him to Shakespeare’s Caesar and Mark Antony even — his appeals to the common man, “I am your voice” etc, etc. Great stuff.

But here’s where it gets interesting:

The quality to which every anti-rhetorician aspires is authenticity. But there is a big difference between proclaiming your authenticity and actually being true to yourself and the facts. So let me use a different term: authenticism, for the philosophical and rhetorical strategy of emphasizing the “authentic” above all.

Modern authenticism began as a reaction to the Enlightenment program to recast language to conform to the notion of Reason. Immanuel Kant’s friend Johann Georg Hamann was one of the first to make the case that, if you take ideas and words out of their behavioral and cultural context, they lose meaning and relevance. A purely rationalist language would no longer be able to express community or faith. Hamann’s contemporary, the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, made the critical link between language, culture and nationhood, and soon authenticity of language became associated with another product of Enlightenment thought: nationalism.

These ideas entered European thought through a chain of influence that stretched from Hegel to Kierkegaard to Nietzsche. By the early 20th century, Martin Heidegger was distinguishing not just between authentic and inauthentic modes of being, but between authentic and inauthentic language.
“Once you heard the voice of a man, and that voice knocked at your hearts, it wakened you, and you followed that voice.” That was Adolf Hitler, the man whom Heidegger would praise for helping the German people rediscover their authentic essence, addressing government and Nazi party leaders in September 1936. According to Hitler, the miraculous appearance of the “voice” — by which he meant the profound bond between himself and his audience that let him express their deepest feelings — allowed ordinary men and women, who were “wavering, discouraged, fearful,” to unite as a Volk, or national community. It was at once a political and a personal “voice” that, thanks to the invention of radio, could reach out not just to audiences at political rallies, but into any living room.

Authenticism was banished to the fringes of politics after World War II and the defeat of European fascism. Technocratic policy-making delivered relative prosperity and security for the majority, and many voters found the rationalist rhetoric of mainstream politicians credible. Authenticism does not even rate a mention in George Orwell’s landmark 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” But the uncertainty and division that have followed the global crash, mass migration and the West’s unhappy wars in the Middle East have given it a new opportunity. 

Today’s authenticists come in many different guises, from pure anti-politicians like Mr. Trump and Italy’s Beppe Grillo to mainstream mavericks as diverse as Britain’s Boris Johnson and Ted Cruz. None of them are Hitlerian in intent, but nationalism typically looms large (“Make America Great Again!”), as does the explicit or implicit contrast between the chosen community and a dangerous or unacceptable “other,” which in 2016 almost always means elites and foreign immigrants.

The “blue-collar billionaire” schtick sounds ridiculous to a lot of us (most of us I hope) but it does have resonance with millions. And as I’ve been writing, Trump is not just a garden variety racist demagogue in the mode of George Wallace. His nationalism isn’t isolationist — it’s aggressive militarism. He doesn’t care about continuing the post-war security consensus to be sure. Alliances are fine as long as they pay protection and he feels like they “deserve” it.  He’s got some other ideas. He will make America great again by making the world “respect” us again. Trump is all abut dominance. And anyone who doesn’t see what he means by that is being naive.

One little side-note about this piece is his observation that Trump’s “authenticism” is especially potent in comparison to the “cerebral, calculating” Clinton, a perfect example of the “technocratic, policy-making” that’s going out of fashion.

Of course, it must be noted, as Todd Gitlin does here:

#markthompson #toddgitlin But if #hillary didn’t sound “cerebral, calculated” she’d be accused of female hysteria. https://t.co/anALeU6y2k

— Todd Gitlin (@toddgitlin) August 28, 2016

It’s also interesting that the NY Times piece left out President Obama, widely considered to be one of America’s great presidential orators who is also very cerebral and possibly even somewhat calculating (although that’s a gender freighted term) and for similar reasons that Clinton might be — Obama cannot be too emotional because of the racist assumptions about angry black men. Similarly, Clinton cannot be too emotional because of the sexist assumptions about hysterical women. These are not necessarily determining factors, but they do exist, so the analysis is a little bit two-dimensional. Still, fascinating stuff.

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Mr Authentic

by digby

glorious montage of Trump flipping on every position he’s held-Iraq War, Libya, healthcare, amnesty, hillary… pic.twitter.com/HqcJJ1MUeF

— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) August 16, 2016

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Race to the bottom

by digby

So, this happened:

This morning on #MTP: My interviews with @davidplouffe and @Reince on #Decision2016 and whether the campaign has become a race to the bottom

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) August 28, 2016

That seems to be the gelling CW. By calling attention to Trump’s revolting racist, sexist, anti-semitic, xenophobic campaign officials, advisers and influences Hillary Clinton is racing him to the bottom. Both sides do it dontcha know?

Thank goodness for the cartoonists:

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Politics and Reality Radio: Rise of the Alt-Right | David Zirin on Rio After the Games | Quirky Stories with Wonkette

with Joshua Holland

This week, we’ll talk about Trump and the rise of the quasi-fascistic “alt-right” with Heidi Beirich from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Then we’ll be joined by The Nation’s radical sports editor, Dave Zirin, to look at the massive land-grab underway in the wake of the Olympic games in Rio.

Finally, we’ll look at some of the nuttier stories in American politics this week with Rebecca Schoenkopf, the proprietrix of Wonkette.

Playlist:

Travis: “Hit Me Baby One More Time”

Jamie Cullum: “Don’t Stop the Music”

Lissie: “Bad Romance”

Pink Floyd: “Dogs”

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