Folks on the Left really should watch this. It doesn’t sound insane, even if I disagree with parts. Note that I don’t disagree with parts of it, for example, killing the TPP trade deal.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 255 of 419
Fillon, who has said he will cut public sector jobs and rein
Francois Fillon
in government spending, won 44 percent of votes in Sunday’s first-round of voting for the center-right’s nomination. He faces a second-round vote against another former prime minister, Alain Juppe, who trailed him by 15 percentage points.
Polls had him in third place. He came in first. Maybe pollsters should stop polling until they figure out how they keep getting it wrong. Customers might wish to demand refunds.
Fillon thinks Thatcher is the best thing ever and wants to cut 500,000 government jobs.
A neoliberal’s neoliberal, in other words, who is also socially conservative.
Assuming he wins the nomination, he will likely wind up head-to-head against the neo-fascist LaPen.
Here’s how that works:
- If Fillon wins, his policies will hurt the French so much that LaPen will likely win the next election.
- If LaPen wins, well, LaPen wins.
- The left is not a factor because Hollande has betrayed everything they stand for and alienated the left-wing base completely.
Frankly, France should leave the Euro, at the very least, and quite possibly the EU. They are not winning from it any more. Because only LaPen will say that, and because the left continues to insist on irrelevance as they relate to real problems, LaPen is the future, whether Fillon wins this time or not.
This is the twilight of neoliberalism. As I have said for many years, what follows will be an age of war and revolution. This is where neoliberal policies inevitably lead, and we are now on the bleeding edge of that new era.
There will be a chance to do the correct, kind things starting in four to eight years, when the weight of demographics favors young people enough. In the meantime, the old will simply have to age out of politics.
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Okay, you should read this entire article. I’m going to excerpt one piece but it’s all there: the trade, jobs, the rhetorical style, the anti-war message, and so on. Most of you have never heard this, and I haven’t been able to get through to a lot of people.
Or consider the particularly emotional exchange Trump had with a father from upstate New York. “I lost my son two years ago to a heroin overdose,” says the father from off camera.
“Well, you know they have a tremendous problem in New Hampshire with the heroin,” says Trump. “Unbelievable. It’s always the first question I get, and they have a problem all over. And it comes through the border. We’re going to build a wall. ”
Then, instead of moralizing anger, playing against type, come compassion and respect: “In all fairness to your son, it’s a tough thing. Some very, very strong people have not been able to get off it. So we have to work with people to get off it.”
At this point it becomes clear that the bereaved father has started to cry. Trump shifts to tough-guy reassuring. “You just relax, OK? Yeah, it’s a tough deal. Come on. It’s a tough deal.” And, in a veiled reference to Trump’s own brother’s death from alcoholism, “I know what you went through.” Then, to the audience while pointing at the father: “He’s a great father, I can see it. And your son is proud of you. Your son is proud of you. It’s tough stuff, it’s tough stuff, and it could be stopped.”
Trump did not campaign the way you thought he did. Or, not entirely. You only got half the picture, which is why so many people can only screech: “Racism!”
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There are three themes emerging since Trump won the election:
(1) His embrace of people with rather unpleasant views. That’s being covered plenty by others, so let’s concentrate on the other two.
(2) Loyalty and a disorganized transition. Some folks are beginning to understand how much loyalty matters to Trump. Many of his early appointments and advisors are easy to understand in those terms. Kushner, his son-in-law, was always there for him. Bannon was there during the nastiest of it (i.e., the tape fiasco). He didn’t back down, he didn’t cavil. He doubled down on supporting Trump. Sessions was loyal all the way through. Flynn was loyal all the way through, even when other retired generals suggested he shut it.
Ex-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney once said, “You dances with them that brought you.” Trump is dancing with people who were loyal through the worst of it.
This is not unreasonable. He’s going to be under constant attack, and he needs people he can trust. I may not like the politics of some of these people, but they did prove they could be trusted to handle the absolute worst and not abandon Trump.
(3) All sorts of wailing about the notion that Trump and Putin talked before Trump talked to State and Defense, or how he met with Japanese PM Abe without going through State.
So?
This sort of stuff shows clearly that the usual suspects don’t get it. Trump ran as an actual outsider, despite his wealth. He said, “These people are fuckups. All the people who run the country are incompetent.”
So, people wailing that the Pentagon thinks Trump cozying up to Russia is wrong are missing the point. Trump ran on the premise that we should be friends with Russia. He proposed that people who think we should be enemies with Russia are wrong.
I agree with him, as it happens, but that’s irrelevant. He ran against the prevailing foreign policy consensus on Russia and he won.
Trump doesn’t think that State or Defense or whoever have been giving the right advice or doing the right thing. He thinks they have group-think, and this group-think’s conclusions are incorrect, and he ran against them.
Trump is doing what he said he would do. He has a mandate for being buddies with Putin. You may not like it (I do), but who gives a damn. He ran on it.
He ran on cutting DC elites out of decision-making, because they’ve run the country into the ground (yes, yes they have).
I make no claims that all of this mess isn’t partially incompetence. The team clearly did not have a good transition plan read (or much of one at all).
But hey, he fired the person who didn’t have a transition plan ready. That was Christie’s job, Christie did not do it. People are focusing on this as Kushner ousting Christie (because Christie prosecuted his father) and that’s part of it, but Kushner wouldn’t have been able to stop Trump giving him the job in the first place: He could only get rid of Christie after Christie completely screwed up the job.
There are a lot of issues about which I don’t agree with Trump, but whether you like it or not (and no, the popular vote count doesn’t change this) he’s actually running his transition in line with his campaign promises, in line with his mandate.
As for Kushner, we better hope he keeps winning his intra-Trump battles, because he’s one of the only powerful figures in the administration who doesn’t want to, say, deport Muslims.
Until people wrap their heads around why so many people (in the right places) voted for Trump, they aren’t going to be able to predict his moves or fight him properly.
Trump had a critique of how the country is run. His critique was essentially correct (I don’t agree with many of his solutions). He won on that critique, and so far he is doing what someone in his position should do: He is acting in accordance with what he said he’d do on the campaign trail.
What people are whining about, so far, are actual signs of integrity on Trump’s part. Integrity for a cause many disagree with, but integrity, nonetheless.
Like all candidates, even the best and most honest, Trump won’t fulfill all his promises. But he is acting in line with his meta-narrative: “DC is broken; those people don’t know how to run the country.”
Whether he can run the country is another matter, but it’s clear that DC elites can’t, because they’ve fucked it up for four decades, which culminated in a Trump presidency.
If Trump wasn’t right that DC elites are fuckups, Trump wouldn’t be President-elect.
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One of the main reasons we are here, today, where we are, is that people confused their fears, their loyalties, their greed, and their partisan tribal identifications, for truth.
The world does not care if you didn’t (or don’t) believe in climate change. Carbon and methane have specific effects on the atmosphere, and your opinion that they don’t is as relevant as that of a flat earther’s about the rotation of the sun around the Earth–it has real world consequences, to be sure, but is simply wrong.
Wrong.
It is nice that you don’t think that racism and racists get stronger when times are bad, and that people who don’t see a pay raise in 40 years are likely to turn to nasty politics, and it is even important that you think so, since your sheer stupidity and blindness makes it harder to stop, but you are wrong. You are, in fact, part of the problem, because problems happen and we need to be able to fix them, and you and your type are making it harder to do anything by muddying the water.
The inability to separate partisanship from a clear understanding of the world is at the heart of why we are where we are today. Clear consequences of action and non-action are dismissed wholesale until it is too late to do anything about it.
Yeah, we’ve got sort of a consensus on climate change, but, it’s basically too late, and hey, even with a consensus we aren’t doing even close to enough. It is laughable to me that people are running around saying, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” because Trump was elected and he says he doesn’t believe in global warming. Obama “believes” in it and made it worse.
“Ooooh, he might pull out of the Paris accords.” You mean the accords that virtually no one is fulfilling their pledges to already?
Then there is this: “Trump promises to deport between two and three million immigrants!”
You mean, about the same amount as Obama did (2.4 million)?
Meanwhile, we have people screaming about Russia backing an international neo-fascist movement.
Oh? Well, they’ve supported some, yes. But who supported the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine until they got into power? Yes, that would be the US.
The fact is that elites are quite happy to do business with neo-Nazis. It is people like Corbyn they are scared of. Fascists get along great with corporations: The Nazis slashed wages, locked up union organizers, and gutted workers rights–even before they went to slavery (which the US already has, in its prisons).
The warnings on climate change and about the rise of the racist right go as far back as the 80s, in my memory. Why? Because the evidence was already there for people to see. By the late 80s, we could see that the inequality data was going in a radically bad direction, for example, and people were already saying, “This will lead to the rise of bad people, like fascists.”
This was not hard to predict. It was obvious. You did not need to be some sort of special genius, you just had to ask yourself “What happened last time?”
What you had to be “special” to do was to ignore it, to hand wave it away, to spend your life (and many, many lives were dedicated to the project) saying, “Oh, no, inequality is no big deal. They aren’t really poor, they have TVs!”
Every person who did that is culpable in what is coming down the line, just as everyone who cut a check for climate denials (usually to protect their own business, a.k.a. oil) is complicit in mass murder.
Social science is inexact, but there are some parts of social science that are pretty close to physics.
Let me give you two.
People who are treated badly become bad people. (As a group. Yes, you are a special flower and it didn’t happen to you, OR if you were one of them, you would be the exception. You’re special. I know.)
People are unhappy or happy with leadership based on whether they perceive things as getting better or getting worse. It is not based on absolute standards, it is based on what they expect the future to be like.
Right after the Versailles treaty, Keynes was able to predict the gross outlines of history right through to World War II. He said, “Well if you do this to the Germans, they aren’t going to put up with it forever, and it will enable the rise of really nasty people.”
You had to be a special sort of idiot, or a partisan fool, not to see it coming once someone like Keynes had explained it to you (and many others knew it as well).
If you will not live in something fairly close to reality, reality will clock you upside the head for it eventually. As individuals, we may dodge this, we often do, which is why individuals often live in denial.
As societies, no. The bill is always paid, and it is always paid in full. It’s just usually not paid by the people who wrote the checks based on other people’s bodies. Which is why, if you aren’t powerful (and you probably aren’t), you can’t afford to live in fantasy-land.
It is now too late to stop the rise of the nasty right. It was, in fact, too late in 2009 when Obama completely decided to continue the bail out of the rich. That was the last exit-ramp. But oh, people love Obama. He was the last person with the ability to stop this, and he made an affirmative choice to make sure it would happen.
And for many people, he’s a great man, a hero. Especially to people on the left, who, if the nasty right gets out of control, are the ones who are going to die and be tortured and raped and imprisoned.
This is what Americans have been voting for, and that includes Democrats, for over 40 years. This wasn’t just a few elites. No, as a group, Americans kept taking actions to make it happen. (Yes, you may be an exception, but among voters, you are an exception.)
And so what has happened, has happened. Americans let those in the rustbelt rot. They have rebelled, and you now have Trump. Democrats voted for Clinton (yes, the DNC had its thumbs on the scale, but all evidence I’ve seen is that registered Dems really did prefer Clinton to the man who was against Iraq).
Clinton lost (she would have been terrible too).
And here you are. And meanwhile, climate change is roaring down the pike, and while Trump may be worse, no, Clinton wouldn’t have done enough to stop it. No reason to bother, her donors don’t want real regulation, and heck, she’ll be dead, and her daughter can live somewhere it won’t effect her much.
Consequences are paid. Your opinion that they aren’t paid is irrelevant, and if you don’t have power, the check is being written on your body and those of the people you claim to care about.
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Okay, Trump has appointed Bannon his chief strategist. Bannon is a straight up white supremacist. This is bad.
I am hearing screams of Nazi and fascism. I am hearing a lot of such screams.
Let’s cut to the chase. If Trump is a Nazi he will do very bad things. Let’s get specific.
Will he be as bad as a fairly standard nasty dictator: Pinochet?
- Train dogs to rape women? Rape as a policy (more than it already is in the US, which, umm, it is.)
- Mass graves?
- Death squads striking at night either with government sanction or with government looking aside (this is, actually, the first thing to look for. If you start seeing it, GET OUT. GET OUT NOW.) But it happens in plenty of governments which aren’t Nazi or fascist.
Will he be worse?
- Actual concentration camps (remember, Obama already locks up illegals in camps for long periods without meaningful trial.)
I’ve heard people say things like “false flag attacks,” but those happen under non-fascist regimes.
If you think Trump is a Nazi, I sincerely encourage you to set up markers of Nazi (or fascist)-dom, so you can track the success of your prediction.
And I sincerely suggest you make one of them the red line where you flee the goddamn country. As a friend of mine wrote the other day, his grandmother, when she fled Hitler in the 30s, was mocked by her relatives. Every single one of them died under Hitler.
I don’t think Trump is Hitler, though he’s got some damn unpleasant people in his administration.
But if he is, you’d better know when you’re going to cut and run, or, alternatively, pick up a gun.
I note, also, that if he isn’t, all the people screaming are doing everyone a great disservice, because when the real thing comes, having been falsely warned before, they won’t believe it.
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I’m seeing a lot of people scared, angry or full of despair over Trump’s election, even now, five days later. If that’s you, please watch this (it’s about 12 minutes).
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Trump is going to rule as emperor, not president.
By this I do not mean that he’s going to overthrow democracy and become president for life; I regard that as very unlikely.
What I mean is that Trump isn’t interested most of what’s involved in running the Presidency. Even when he has definite ideas, he generally isn’t interested in the details.
So personnel will matter even more than it does in normal administrations. Who has Trump’s ear, and when, will matter a great deal. Trump is very persuadable. Issues may well go back and forth for quite a while until someone gets Trump to make a firm decision.
There will be fiefs. Given that Pence was given the transition, pushing aside Christie, he appears to be on the fast track to be the most important person after Trump, and in day-to-day operations probably more important. He may well be even more powerful than Cheney was in the Bush administration.
Trump has multiple factions in his government. Thiel is a libertarian and dubious about women, but he’s not a racist. Bannon is a racist. Pence’s main concern is crushing women into the dirt, and Trump will allow some of that, but his wife and daughter have a lot of influence on him and they’ll try to mitigate that. Remember that Trump has praised Planned Parenthood in the past.
There are issues Trump has made his own, and there are issues about which he doesn’t care too much. The wall will get built, even if parts of it are a fence. At least one trade deal will get rewritten (Canada has already said they’re willing to reopen NAFTA). Immigrants will be expelled. (If you’re worried about the two to three million, you should be. Just remember, Obama expelled 2.4 million. He just did it relatively quietly.) ISIS will be bombed to smithereens. Nice will be made with Russia–to some extent.
But beyond that, much is in the air, and much will depend on WHO gets Trump’s ear. Even within settled policy, details matter, and Trump is not going to handle the details (Bill Clinton was infamous for actually being on top of details. Hillary would have been the same way, it’s not a given the President hand-waves them.) Thus, who is given the job of executing policy will matter a great deal.
This is going to be a courtier’s administration. It is going to be an administration of fiefs and fierce internal infighting, both below the Emperor’s notice and for his notice. Who wins those fights will matter, a lot.
So far, outside his family, we have Pence managing the transition (woman-hating, Job #1). We have Bannon as his chief strategist (white supremacy and ministry of propaganda Job #’s 1 and 2), and we have Priebus as his chief of staff (career Republican apparatchnik).
Keep an eye on the people, and the appointments, BUT don’t count out the family. What they think (and by all accounts Ivanka is the toughest of the children), will matter a lot. Melania might have outsize influence, for all we know: Nancy Reagan wound up more important than Reagan himself when Reagan’s Alzheimer’s took its toll, and was vastly influential even before that.
Trump will make the big announcements. He’ll insist on cutting the deals (at least the final cut) with other leaders. He’ll have a few things he wants done, but beyond that, it’ll be those around him who matter.
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