Frankly, I don’t know how anything, much less anyone, can survive the next five and a half months. After spending most of last summer, fall and winter assuming/hoping Donald Trump would slither back under his gilded rock, we now have accept that he not only isn’t going away, but he’s going to be louder, cruder and more reckless than ever … because he’s convinced that’s what “his” Republican party wants.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has to figure how to sell competent management (zzzzz) through news cycle after news cycle dominated by the next ludicrous-to-offensive thing Trump says and the herd media loves to cover pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. Personally, I’m confident Team Clinton, arguably the best-oiled political machine of the last generation, already knows how it’s going to play the game ahead. But that doesn’t mean the vulgar absurdity of Trump will abate in any way.
Among the innumerable ironies of the past month or so, as Trump achieved inevitability and “presumptiveness”, are the persistent eulogies for the Republican party. It’s as though the GOP “establishment”, which I’m not sure but I guess means the Bush Family, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Grover Norquist and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, was this cherished national treasure, a font of high-minded enlightenment guiding the masses with unimpeachable Socratic logic and rewarding the faithful with effective, far-sighted governance and benefits of indisputable value to the forever “hard-working” middle class.
What a colossal crock. After Romney augered in four years ago, I wasn’t the only one who said that if the “Grand” old party truly wanted to remain relevant in national elections it had to make a handful of serious changes. There was the “Hispanic problem”, which in truth is also a problem with pretty much every other minority group as well. There was also “the woman problem”, even though the Mittster did pretty well with white women. But most of all, IMHO, there was the need to be something more than a careerist messaging apparatus for anti-government “public servants” and actually, truly, genuinely do something for the middle class. Hell, the party itself said essentially the same thing, with the exception of, you know, that doing something part.
But because modern conservatives have been in the sales game and out of the doing something game for so long, bloviating about “freedoms” and “Constitutional rights” and “limited government” while incessantly licking the boots of the donor class that keeps them in office, they have no street cred with the crowd Trump tapped in to. Other than gun rights, Trump’s people have about as much of a focus on Constitutional freedoms as a diabetic bonobo. But damn! They know what they despise.
More to the point, the “messaging” they were getting injected with every day had nothing to do with the Bushes or even the Wall Street Journal. Their “establishment”, the real Republican establishment, was led by Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, a pack of self-serving entertainers pushing a much more digestible product. Namely, “Everything is [bleeped]. We are the ultimate authorities and the only people you can trust. And, you are the real victims of the DC con game.”
McCain’s top advisor in 2008, Steve Schmidt, recently went off on a rant about exactly this.
In small part he said, “[Mark Levin] is series-A round investor in the demise of the conservative movement in the Republican Party. He, very famously, a woman calls up his show and has the gall to just disagree with Mark Levin, who calls himself the great one. Talk about a narcissist. Talk about self-aggrandizers. Mark Levin asked, ‘Do you have a gun in the house? Go find it and blow your brains out’. This is the tone that has emanated from talk radio and this cancer has spread and that tone has infected the whole of the party. And so this moment that we’ve arrived at, where there’s been a severability now between issues and conservatism, and the test of who is the conservative in the race is who has the loudest voice of opposition.”
(As for bona fides, never forget that it was Schmidt in 2008 who signed off on Sarah Palin.)
A lot of liberals I listen to are smug in their belief that that kind cloddish rage has appeal only to the usual low-information, angry white (aging) male crowd. But the fact is Hillary Clinton’s high “unfavorable ratings” are directly connected to the same dynamic. The woman has been accused of one scandal after another since 1992. From Travelgate, to Whitewater, to Benghazi to this e-mail nonsense, all of it stoked and relentlessly marketed by the same entertainment “establishment”, (with the Bushes, McCains, Romneys and Wall Street Journals happily nodding along).
Point being, when I hear ardent progressives and marginally liberal people both talk about Clinton’s “untrustworthiness” I have to ask, “What do you mean, exactly?” And after valid stuff like her Iraq vote and coziness with Wall Street, the bulk of the examples are utter crap, like Whitewater and Benghazi. False reality, junk facts and manufactured outrage force fed by conservative entertainment “messaging” like milk to credulous veal calves. But so much of this “message” has been shoved down the public’s throats for so long, it has become a DNA marker in the body of the general public, conservatives, liberals and agnostics alike.
“There must be something to it. They always talk about it.”
So follow the dots: The cynical fecklessness of the Republican establishment class meant it kowtowed to its entertainment mouthpieces. Those mouthpieces cultivated an enormous audience of lazy-minded cynics. Those cynics, after 25 years, have now ridiculed and booed the “establishment” off the stage in favor of an actual TV performer-celebrity. That performer is, big surprise, another self-serving populist demagogue. A character who manifests, mainly, not any grand issues or policies, but rather the disposition the GOP’s target audience acquired from their regular habit of tuning in to be reassured they were right to feel sorry for themselves.
Well done, establishment conservatives.
So, if you don’t mention Bernie Sanders, he doesn’t exist? Bwahahaha!
I’m saving my Bernie screed for another day. But, like it or not, he isn’t going to be the alternative to Trump.
I strongly agree with this – conservative infotainment normalized narcissistic louts and that created the demand for a Trump. Very true. None of this could have happened without them.
But this is the question with which I still struggle: What specifically could institutional Republicans have done to prevent the infotainers from getting so popular and influential?
The Haley Barbour’s of the world did empower them for short-sighted political reasons, but even if they had been prescient enough to see all this coming and courageous enough to fight it, I frankly don’t know what specific steps the institutional GOPers could have taken to disempower the conservative infotainer class.
Well, nobody could have forseen Trump exactly. But the appeal for a demagogue was clearly building. We all remember Michele Bachmann. And in complete fairness, the “messaging” of people like Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum was only half-steps off Trump’s pace. They just weren’t as entertaining. But when I mention “kowtowing” I refer to the numerous GOP elected officials who, when they ran afoul of the Limbaughs, Levins, Hannitys, etc. invariably offered public apologies and mea culpas to restore themselves to … the radio hosts’ good graces. As you and everyone who follows the publicity/marketing game fully understands, it is nearly impossible to resist audiences so perfectly tailored to suit your professional ambitions. But did so many Republicans have to enable — sometimes with silence, sometimes with nervous laughter, the recklessness and dog whistle racism of these entertainers? That to me is gutlessness, pure and simple. Is it so tough to say, “I’m not going there”, or “I would not say that”?
Most of America would think more highly of GOP leaders if they had spent the years saying “what Rush/Sean/Mark/Laura just said was racist/misogynist/hateful and wrong and our party condemns it.” Instead of doing that, GOP leaders cheered them on and put Rush’s policy agenda into their platform.
BUT I am not convinced GOP leaders regularly condemning the broadcasters would have limited the popularity of those broadcasters among the ~40% of America attracted to what Hannity is selling.
I’m not convinced either. One guy has a microphone to 5-10 million people three hours a day and a license to say whatever he wants with impunity, the more over the top the better. The other … has to get reelected. Still, there was/is a startling, craven aspect to the GOP’s relationship with the entertainers. While I also doubt any among the donor class and wise men has a clue how to restore order post-Trump, they could begin with a divorce from the clown show they abetted.
Typically great piece, until the excuses for Hillary at the very end.
“After valid stuff, like her Iraq vote and coziness with Wall Street,…”
Really?
After valid stuff, like his psychoses and Nukes, Kim Jong-il is a helluva guy.
The “ardent progressives and marginally liberal people” I know are perfectly aware that Whitewater and Benghazi are genetically modified crap. But they are also aware that 30 years of pan handling pseudo progressive billionaires for money and ideas will carve deep scars in the cortex of even the best intentioned young Park Ridge progressive. That’s why they think $600,000 speaking fees, and a willingness to gamble away the lives of young Americans in the service of those who pay her those fees, can’t be so easily waved off.
Sure Trump sucks, and his enablers should be called out. But for my money the enabling of Donald Trump has come every bit as much from the “liberal” politicians and media who abandoned defense of their supposed values in favor of triangulation in the service of re-election, and entertainment in the service of profit, as it has from talk radio. They, after all, are the ones who once claimed to believe that asking not what you could do for yourself, but what you could do for others, was something other than a joke.
And even though their laughter at the increasing crudity and ugliness of talk radios jokes at the expense of that idea may have been only polite, they left politics and public service defenseless before the onslaught. That is what enabled Donald Trump.
To imagine that a snooze inspiring, semi-sold out policy wonk can turn back that onslaught is foolish. Armed with “arguably the best-oiled political machine of the last generation” we had best hope to God she can at least win one election. But for actual hope the ideas finally being presented to the public by men and women like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are all there is.
As I say, I’ll wait another day for my deep thoughts on Hillary, Bernie and “the real left.” Until then, here’s an excerpt from a piece by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones.
” … many of us who lived through this stuff have exactly the opposite view. Not only do we know there’s almost literally nothing to any of these ‘scandals’, we also know exactly how they were deliberately and cynically manufactured at every step along the way. We were there, watching it happen in real time. So not only do we believe Hillary is basically honest, but the buzzwords actively piss us off. Every time we hear a young progressive kinda sorta suggest that Hillary can’t be trusted, we want to strangle someone. It’s the ultimate proof of how the right wing’s big lie about the Clintons has successfully poisoned not just the electorate in general, but even the progressive movement itself. I bring this up because I had to blink twice to make sure my eyes weren’t fooling me this morning. Jill Abramson has followed Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than two decades, first in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, then at the New York Times, where she eventually became Washington bureau chief (and even later executive editor). Her perch gave her an unrivaled view into Hillary’s actions. Here’s what she had to say today in the Guardian:
I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.
Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.
…Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.
…I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold…Clinton distrusts the press more than any politician I have covered. In her view, journalists breach the perimeter and echo scurrilous claims about her circulated by unreliable rightwing foes.
Really good piece, Brian. I was having a similar conversation with a younger progressive couple yesterday. They hate Trump, will vote for Hillary, but were put off by all her supposed scandals. I had to remind them that most of the scandals around Hillary have been manufactured by the Right over the last 30 years. It’s all smoke. No real flame. When you get to the bottom of it, it’s just more…..Rush Limbaugh conspiracy crap, although some of it was aided and abetted by the NYT, which basically created Whitewater, just as the NYT also went all-in for George W.’s Weapons of Mass Destruction theory.
Most people believe what they want to when strongly affiliated with a party. I for one think that both of the candidates to come have “dirty psychopath” written all over them….then again, most do.
Interesting piece, but hard for me to see Hillary on the innocent side when I have watched the documentary on the machine that got Bill elected. Which goes to show Trump is right, he can say anything; and Hillary is correct when saying I’m just living in Bill’s shade.
No good can come of this election.