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Javier E

Opinion | Republicans Are Ready for the Don Draper Method - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-republicans-tea-party.html

gop future 2020 politics trump

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”
  • It’s also the way that many Republican senators hope to deal with the memory of the Trump era
  • It means that many of them believe that Trump’s election was essentially an accident, a fluke, a temporary hiatus from the kind of conservative politics they’re comfortable practicing,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • You can see that readiness at work already in the internal Republican debates about the latest round of coronavirus relief. These debates are somewhat mystifying if you believe that the party has been remade in Trump’s populist image, or alternatively if you just believe that the G.O.P. is full of cynics who attack deficits under Democrats but happily spend whatever it takes to stay in power. Neither theory explains the Republican determination to dramatically underbid the Democrats on relief spending three months before an election, nor the emergence of a faction within the Senate Republicans that doesn’t want to spend more money on relief at all.
  • these developments are easier to understand if you see the Republican Senate, in what feels like the twilight of the Trump presidency, instinctively returning to its pre-Trump battle lines. The anti-relief faction, with its sudden warnings about deficits, is eager to revive the Tea Party spirit, and its would-be leaders are ur-Tea Partyers like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. The faction that wants to spend less than the Democrats but ultimately wants to strike a deal is playing the same beleaguered-establishmentarian role that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell played in the pre-Trump party — and of course McConnell is still leading it
  • the fact that neither approach seems responsive to the actual crisis unfolding in America right now doesn’t matter: The old Tea Party-establishment battle — a battle over whether to cut a deal at all, more than what should be in it — is still the Republican comfort zone, and the opportunity to slip back into that groove is just too tempting to resist.
  • Some of the Republicans rediscovering deficit hawkishness — including non-senators like Nikki Haley — are taking a Joe Biden presidency for granted and positioning themselves as the foes of a big-government liberalism before it even takes power, in the hopes of becoming the leaders of the post-2020 opposition
  • There is also that group my staffer friend mentioned, the senators who accept that Trumpism really happened, and who envision a different party on the other side.
  • You can identify the members of this group both by their willingness to spend money in the current crisis and by their interest in how it might be spent. That means Marco Rubio spearheading the small business relief bill. It means Josh Hawley pushing for the federal government to pre-empt layoffs by paying a chunk of worker salaries. It means Tom Cotton defending crisis spending against Cruz’s attack. It means Mitt Romney leading a push to put more of the federal stimulus payments in the hands of families with kids.
  • the trouble with both the Draper method and the “this happened, let’s learn from it” approaches to the Trump experience is that they assume not only that Trump will lose (a strong bet but of course not a certain one) but also that in defeat he will recede sufficiently to be willfully forgotten, or allow a more robust nationalism to supplant his ersatz, personalized version.
Javier E

The Grand Old Meltdown - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...ltdown-trump-convention-400039

ideas gop platform personality cult trump politics history

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”
  • You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable.
  • Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.
  • ...52 more annotations...
  • I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.
  • “You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”
  • Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”
  • “Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”
  • Every fourth summer, a presidential nominating convention gives occasion to appraise a party for its ideas, its principles, its vision for governing
  • Ronald Reagan’s party wanted to end the scourge of communism and slay the bureaucratic dragons of Big Government.
  • George W. Bush’s party aimed to project compassion and fortitude, educating poor Americans and treating AIDS-stricken Africans, while simultaneously confronting the advance of Islamic terrorism.
  • However flawed the policies, however unsuccessful their execution, a tone was set in these parties from the top-down.
  • Parties were supposed to be about ideas,” said Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman
  • “John Adams was an ornery guy, but he believed in his ideas. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson, he certainly didn’t live up to the ideas he espoused, but shoot, at least he talked about them. Nowadays, it’s just regression to the lowest common denominator on everything.
  • It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to
  • “Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”
  • Everyone understands that Trump is a big-picture sloganeer—“Build the wall!” “Make America Great Again!”—rather than a policy aficionado. Even so, it’s astonishing how conceptually lifeless the party has become on his watch. There is no blueprint to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the cost of housing or childcare or college tuition
  • None of the erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no plan to replace it. (Trust me: If they did, you’d hear about it.)
  • When I called one party elder, he joked that it’s a good thing Republicans decided not to write a new platform for the 2020 convention—because they have produced nothing novel since the last one was written
  • The party is now defined primarily by its appetite for conflict, even when that conflict serves no obvious policy goal.
  • Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters concede Buck’s point in this regard
  • The result is political anarchy. Traditionally, the run-up to a convention sees a party attempting to tame rival factions and unite around a dynamic vision for the future. Instead, Republicans have spent the summer in a self-immolating downward spiral.
  • This is not a party struggling to find its identity. This is a party in the middle of a meltdown.
  • The verdict I’m rendering here is both observable in plain sight and breathtakingly obvious to anyone who has experienced the carnage up close.
  • Most of the party’s governing class sees perfectly well what is going on. They know exactly how bad t
  • hings are and how much worse they could yet be
  • these Republicans rue their predicament but see no way out of it. Like riders on a derailing roller coaster, they brace for a crash but dare not get off.
  • Having written the book on the making of the modern Republican Party, having spent hundreds of hours with its most powerful officials in public and private settings, I cannot possibly exaggerate the number of party leaders who have told me they worry both about Trump’s instability and its long-term implication for the GOP
  • There’s a reason Lindsey Graham called Trump “crazy,” a “bigot” and a “kook” who’s “unfit for office.” There’s a reason Ted Cruz called Trump “a pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” There’s a reason Marco Rubio observed that, “Every movement in human history that has been built on a foundation of anger and fear has been cataclysmic,” and warned of Trump’s rise, “This isn’t going to end well.”
  • To be a Republican today requires you to exist in a constant state of moral relativism, turning every chance at self-analysis into an assault on the other side, pretending the petting zoo next door is comparable to the three-ring circus on your front lawn.
  • The rest of the right-wing universe—conservative media, think tanks, activist organizations, financial networks, civic groups, voters themselves—has largely gone along for the ride, and for the same reason: “What about the Democrats?”
  • What all of these incidents and so many more have in common is that not a single American’s life has been improved; not a single little guy has been helped. Just as with the forceful dispersing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park—done so he could hold up a prop Bible for flashing cameras—Trump and his allies continue to wage symbolic battles whose principal casualties are ordinary people.
  • The spectacle is unceasing
  • Unsavory fringe characters have always looked for ways to penetrate the mainstream of major parties—and mostly, they have failed. What would result from a fringe character leading a party always remained an open question. It has now been asked and answered:
  • Some in the party have embraced the extreme, others in the party have blushed at it, but all of them have subjugated themselves to it. The same way a hothead coach stirs indiscipline in his players, the same way a renegade commander invites misconduct from his troops, a kamikaze president inspires his party to pursue martyrdom.
  • That is precisely what will be on display at this week’s Republican convention—martyrdom, grievance, victimhood.
  • It’s not that America won’t hear from serious Republicans who have real substance to offer, people like Senator Tim Scott and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. It’s that these two, along with the remnant of other sober-minded Republicans, are the new sideshow at a time when the old sideshow has moved to center stage.
  • Similarly, the problem for the party isn’t that the aforementioned complaints are entirely without merit. It’s that they form no part of a broader construct on which voters can be sold. This continues to be the bane of the GOP’s existence: The party is so obsessed with fighting that it has lost sight of what it’s fighting for.
  • “I think I have brought tremendous strength back to the party,” the president told me last year, arguing that previous GOP leaders lacked the stomach for gruesome political combat. There is no denying Trump has transformed the party from a country club debater into a barroom brawler. But to what end?
  • “Our central mission is to stand up for America. It’s to say loudly and proudly that we choose America. When I go around talking to Texans every single day, what I hear is that they’re proud of this country. And they want us to fight for this country. That’s what ties it all together for Republicans,” Roy said. “The people I talk to—even the ones who maybe get a little frustrated with the president—they look at him as someone who fights for this country.”
  • Roy is as close to a plainspoken conservative Republican as there is in Congress. I was curious to know how he would define today’s GOP.
  • The problem for Republicans is that most of the fights they’re picking nowadays are futile at best and foolhardy at worst. NASCAR? Confederate flags? Goya beans? Face masks? To the degree any of these issues move the needle politically, Republicans are on the wrong side of them. What’s worse, there is no connective tissue. There is no focus to the GOP’s incessant appetite for fighting. That’s how they wound up with Trump in the first place
  • “The GOP has been here before with John Birchers and it didn’t end well,” said Ben Sasse, the Nebraska senator who has been a vocal if terribly inconsistent Trump critic. “The party of Lincoln and Reagan ought to have something big and bold to offer the country, but it’s got way too many grifters selling grievance politics.”
  • To be clear, these grifters aren’t just shady party operatives and obscure congressional candidates. They are some of the president’s closest allies, people like Matt Gaetz,
  • If there is one principle driving Republican politicians today, it is that traditional American values—faith, patriotism, modesty, the nuclear family—are under siege
  • what’s fascinating to observe is the shift in priorities and proportionality. What was once a source of annoyance and frustration for one sect of the party, social conservatives, has turned into the dominant life force for the GOP
  • The good news for Republicans is that “grievance politics,” as Sasse describes it, continues to be highly effective in motivating their base. The bad news? It has diminishing returns when it comes to the many millions of persuadable voters in the middle. It’s also especially difficult for an incumbent party to sell grievance to the masses, as it amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of powerlessness.
  • Instead of downplaying the social upheaval, treating it as a fleeting phenomenon that will pass with time and promising better days ahead, they are highlighting it at every turn, claiming it’s a sneak preview of Biden’s America when it is, factually speaking, the feature presentation of Trump’s America.
  • The pressure is now entirely on Trump. And he won’t have much help
  • leading Republicans won’t be speaking on behalf of their party this week. Kasich already defected, endorsing Biden during a dramatic speech to the Democratic convention. And neither Romney nor Boehner nor either of the Bushes would speak even if asked. From what I’ve been told, none of them plan to vote for Trump this fall, and the chief reason they won’t say so publicly is they fear it would diminish their influence over the party moving forward.
  • A Republican collapse this fall—Biden wins the White House, Democrats flip the Senate and hold the House—would trigger a reckoning within the GOP every bit as sharp as the one associated with Obama’s takeover of Washington in 2008. If that occurs, much of the party’s pent-up irritation with Trump (which often masks long-simmering disgust with themselves) will spill over, and the efforts to expunge this ugly chapter of GOP history could commence with stunning ferocity.
  • There is no guarantee of this, however. Trump claims an intensity among his following that stacks up against any leader in American history. (“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luntz said. “It’s like Elvis and the Beatles wrapped up in one.”
  • Overlooked is the real possibility that Trump could win. That Biden has not built a runaway lead despite enormous advantages—chief among them, the president’s poor playing of a terrible election-year hand—speaks to the effectiveness of Trump’s slash-and-burn mentality
  • “I actually find it kind of reassuring. With [George] McGovern in 1972, it was a colossal wipeout with a hugely mistaken candidate who was completely out of step with mainstream public opinion. Then in 1976, Jimmy Carter, an honest-to-goodness progressive, wins,” Brooks said. “I mean, Richard Nixon gets tossed out of office for blatant corruption. Everybody’s heading for the hills saying, ‘I never voted for him! I’m not a Republican!’ And six years later, Ronald Reagan wins and then gets reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history. These things can heal really, really fast.”
  • owever long Trump remains in office, whatever damage he does to the GOP, Brooks believes it will be temporary. It’s the “fundamental truth” of a two-party system, he said, that coalitions are constantly shifting, parties are continually renewing, politicians are eternally looking for ways to adapt and survive.
  • “Healthy parties need to build coalitions around a shared vision that speaks to all Americans,” Sasse told me. “Our current course is unsustainable. We’ve got a hell of a rebuilding ahead of us, whatever happens in November.”
Javier E

My Never Trump Elegy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616917

elegy 2020 resistance history crisis authoritarian trump gop anti

shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • When my friends—including the few I have left among the conservatives—ask what the Never Trumpers will do now, I say with all honesty that I am not sure.
  • What I do know is that, regardless of what any one of us does individually, two aspects of the Never Trump movement will outlast Trump. First, we will always be able to say that when Trump and his thugs took over the Republican Party and then the elected branches of the United States government, we did not cut and run. We stood and fought.
  • Second, these four years have confirmed to us that Trump’s moral corruption of the Republican Party is total, from top to bottom.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • I believe that if all of us had caved, Trump would now be much closer to victory, not just at the polls, but over the Constitution itself. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe.
  • We all paid for our dissent, in various ways.
  • While some lost money, all lost friends. A few needed law enforcement to step in because of threats to their lives and to their families.
  • I spent decades studying repressive regimes, but I always did so with the swagger of a man who holds an American passport. Other people had to fight for their rights, not me. Now I was accused of legal wrongdoing for expressing my political views as a private citizen. For the first time in my life, I felt like a dissident.
  • That summer, I sat down with my wife and members of my family. Continuing to write about Trump could mean serious financial hardship. I had a lifetime contract with the Navy, but no contract is unbreakable. We were facing real risk, and I wanted to know their feelings.
  • The people I care most about in the world all told me the same thing: Fight.
  • As they did with all of us in the Never Trump camp, the president’s most fanatical supporters accused me of outright treason. They demanded my arrest. Some sent messages telling me that they looked forward to my official execution or other versions of my untimely death
  • If we’d been in it for our own enrichment, we’d have made the smart play and signed on with Trump, because that’s where the money was right from the start.
  • The experience of fighting taught the Never Trumpers how much the president had poisoned the Republican Party and long ago exposed the character of many of our former comrades. Some turned out to be as racist and authoritarian as Trump himself, while others merely confirmed that they were little more than vacuous opportunists who were capable of betraying the Constitution at will.
  • Whether it is Nikki Haley or Tom Cotton running for president or Fox’s prime-time lineup bolstering Trump’s underlings, for as long as I have a public platform, I will contend that these are people who betrayed the principles of our system of government for their own gain and that my fellow citizens should refuse to give them votes or ratings.
  • As Smiley said over his brandy, “if my past were still around today, you could say I’d failed.” But as the election approaches, I prefer to think about my time as a Never Trumper by recalling the old spy’s final words to those young students:“Never mind. What matters is that a long war is over. What matters is the hope.”
Javier E

The triumphant GOP is mired in crisis after crisis - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html

crisis gop trump presidency politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • There is a crisis of identity. Donald Trump now leads a coalition including the Republican establishment — and people who despise the Republican establishment. The insurgent president-elect — lacking relevant experience, adequate personnel and actual policy proposals — cannot exercise power without the help of those he ridiculed.
  • Trump has chosen to incorporate this conflict into the structure of the West Wing.
  • This is less a team of rivals than an ideological cage fight.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The biggest frustration reported by Republicans who have met with Trump is his inability to focus for any period of time. He is impatient with facts and charts and he changes the subject every few minutes. Republican leaders need policy leadership — or permission to provide it themselves.
  • this is also a governing crisis. Trump won office promising to undo globalization, bring back manufacturing jobs and fulfill “every dream you ever dreamed.” So expectations are pretty high. But Trumpism, for the most part, consists of cultural signals and symbolic goals, not a set of developed proposals.
  • Not everyone who helps a president become president is fit to help him govern. Bannon — whose Breitbart News invited the alt-right into the conservative mainstream and who has made a business model out of spreading conspiratorial nonsense — belongs in this category, along with Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski and the rest of the distracting campaign sideshow.
  • The final crisis faced by the GOP — and just about everyone else — relates to the quality of our political culture. Trump won office in a way that damaged our democracy. He fed resentment against minorities, promised to jail his opponent and turned shallow invective into an art form. If he governs as he campaigned, Trump will smash the unity of our country into a thousand shards of bitterness.
  • the long-term political crisis faced by the triumphant GOP. Trump won the presidency in a manner that undermines the GOP’s electoral future. He demonstrated that the “coalition of the ascendant” — including minorities, millennials and the college-educated — is not yet ascendant. But in a nation where over half of children under 5 years old are racial or ethnic minorities, it eventually will be.
  • Republicans may end up depending on a younger generation of leaders — Ryan, Ben Sasse, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Jeff Flake, Marco Rubio — to demonstrate the possibility of unifying aspiration and civil disagreement.
abbykleman

The three women of color Trump has appointed, so far - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...trump-cabinet-women

shared by abbykleman on 30 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 30 Nov 16
     
    As Donald Trump's Cabinet begins to take shape, the President-elect has selected three women of color so far to serve in top positions in his administration, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was a sharp critic of Trump during the 2016 Republican primary campaign.
marleymorton

The three women of color Trump has appointed, so far - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US

shared by marleymorton on 29 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 29 Nov 16
     
    As Donald Trump's Cabinet begins to take shape, the President-elect has selected three women of color so far to serve in top positions in his administration, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was a sharp critic of Trump during the 2016 Republican primary campaign.
Javier E

No matter how many Republicans denounce Trump, the racism charge sticks - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...trump-the-racism-charge-sticks

gop racism conservatism 2016 crisis lincoln politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Since the 1960s, Republicans have had to battle against liberal elites’ accusations that the GOP is exclusionary, anti-immigrant, uninterested in the fate of minorities and downright racist because the party rejected top-down welfare state programs, opposed race-based quotas and did not have a lot of national nonwhite leaders. That changed somewhat under President George W. Bush, who championed education and immigration reform. He got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote and 43 percent of the Asian vote in 2004.
  • In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012. . . .
  • Although a bevy of nonwhite and/or female Republican leaders have stepped up in recent years (e.g., Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio), Republicans undid whatever progress they might have made with nonwhite voters when the House killed immigration reform and the party then nominated Donald Trump, who figuratively built his campaign on his wall, rounding up and expelling 11 million or 12 million people and banning Muslim immigration. His recent remarks about Judge Gonzalo Curiel are simply icing on the cake for Democrats, who have long claimed Republicans simply don’t like minorities.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Republicans may protest and condemn Trump’s comments all they like, but for every denunciation, a Republican surrogate offers up some contorted defense. And Republicans keep Trump as their nominee. Trump’s racist and misogynistic rhetoric makes him toxic to women and minorities, and it risks tarring the party for years.
  • Even more stunning: “What a large majority of Republicans do agree on, however, is that Donald Trump’s comments weren’t racist. Only 22% of Republicans say that the comments were racist. In comparison 81% of Democrats and 44% of independents say that the comments were racist. ” (Emphasis added.) Viewed from the vantage point of skeptical minorities, the conclusion here is likely to be that Trump is a racist and a majority of Republicans (who won’t acknowledge the “textbook case of racism”) are nearly as bad.
  • In short, a bad rap (Republicans’ opposition to the liberal agenda makes them racists) has been turned into an accurate, deadly analysis. (Too many Republicans harbor bigoted views of minorities and/or do not recognize racism when it’s in front of them.) Not all Republicans can be labeled as such, but far too many
  • The solution only comes with repudiation of Trump, success of diverse candidates and an empathetic agenda that demonstrates Republicans care about all Americans, not just rich, white males.
  • It is that problem that now hangs over the GOP. It’s why the GOP is likely to lose the presidential race and perhaps one or more houses of Congress. It is why many will conclude it is better to scrap the party and start anew. Ironically, they may have to kill off the party of Lincoln to save the spirit of Lincoln.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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oliviaodon

How America Shed the Taboo Against Preventive War - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...523833

war america

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • A hidden assumption underlies the debate over North Korea. The assumption is that preventive war—war against a country that poses no imminent threat but could pose a threat in the future—is morally legitimate. To be sure, many politicians oppose an attack on practical grounds: They say the costs would be too high. But barely anyone in the foreign policy mainstream calls the idea itself abhorrent.
  • By historical standards, that’s astounding. Over the past two decades, American foreign policy has undergone a conceptual shift so complete that its current practitioners don’t even acknowledge how revolutionary their current views are. During the Cold War, the dominant figures in American foreign policy considered preventive war to be fundamentally un-American. A member of the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Reagan administration, transported to 2017, would wonder how their successors embraced a principle that they associated with the regimes America fought in World War II.
  • In the second half of the 20th century, when America’s leaders heard “preventive war,” they thought about Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And for good reason. Both regimes had used the doctrine to justify their attacks in World War II. In August 1939, on the eve of his invasion of Poland, Hitler told his generals that, “we are faced with the hard alternative of either striking or the certainty of being destroyed sooner or later.” In a 2006 journal article, University of Pittsburgh law professor Jules Lobel quoted the Commander of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Yamamoto, as writing that, “[i]n the event of outbreak of war with the United States, there would be little prospect of our operations succeeding unless, at the very outset, we can deal a crushing blow to the main force of the American fleet in Hawaiian waters.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Americans wanted a postwar system that outlawed such logic. In 1945, at the San Francisco Conference that founded the United Nations, the American delegate Harold Stassen explained that the United States “did not want exercised the right of self-defense before an armed attack had occurred.” Four years later, in August 1949, the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, ending America’s nuclear monopoly. Some in the military entertained the notion of destroying the USSR’s embryonic arsenal. But NSC 68, which in April 1950 famously outlined America’s strategy for fighting the Cold War, declared the notion unthinkable. “It goes without saying that the idea of ‘preventive’ war—in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies—is generally unacceptable to Americans,” it insisted.
  • The shift began after the Cold War. The generation of policymakers with first hand memories of World War II was passing from the scene. The 1991 Gulf War had boosted confidence in the American military. And the adversaries seeking nuclear weapons were no longer great powers like the Soviet Union and China but smaller “rogue states” like Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, with less capacity to retaliate against an American attack.
  • Now Donald Trump is perpetuating that assumption when it comes to North Korea. Referring to the potential for Pyongyang to test an intercontinental ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, he tweeted, “It won’t happen.” This week Mike Pence declared that, “When the president says all options are on the table, all options are on the table. We’re trying to make it very clear to people in this part of the world that we are going to achieve the end of a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula—one way or the other.”
  • To legitimize preventive war, Trump’s advisors are resuscitating all the bad arguments made about Iraq and Iran. Kim Jong Un’s ballistic missile tests, argues UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, prove that he is “not a rational person.” Really? Kim is a monster. But from the standpoint of regime preservation, his pursuit of nuclear weapons is highly rational. Since 9/11, the United States has deposed governments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It just bombed regime targets in Syria. What do these regimes have in common? They couldn’t deter an American attack because they didn’t have nuclear weapons. The North Koreans refer over and over to Muammar Qaddafi, who abandoned his nuclear program in a bid to win the West’s affection, and ended up being sodomized by Libyan rebels who were using NATO as their air force.
  • It’s hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed “to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.” For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war.
  • That humility has been lost. If asked whether China, Russia, or even France, has the right to launch wars against countries merely because those countries are building weapons that could one day pose a threat, Americans would quickly say no. They would recognize immediately that such a right, if universalized, threatens the peace of the world. Yet in both parties, policymakers grant that right to America. They do so even after Iraq. And even with Donald Trump in the White House.
  • It is now Americans who consider themselves a higher breed, capable of wielding powers that they would consider illegitimate and terrifying in anyone else’s hands. Are today’s leaders so much wiser and more moral than Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan that they can be trusted with a power that made those men shudder? Let’s hope Americans never find out.
Javier E

This Is the Next Generation of Republican Leadership - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...551657

GOP leader leadership

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • “The big thing that I think defines the struggle for the party is that a bunch of people want to define it by what we’re against, and a bunch want to define it around what we’re for,” observed GOP strategist Kevin Madden. “Right now, it’s about 70-30, with the ‘against’ crowd winning.
  • GOP strategists and leaders argue that you have to look beyond the bomb throwers and reality-TV-type characters to find the folks who’ll take Republicans forward.
  • ask around, and party players are happy to hold forth on their favorite comers. Some are seen as having White House potential, while others are regarded as better suited for long-term congressional or state leadership
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Nikki Haley and Ben Sasse are likely to ring bells; Josh Hawley and Charlie Baker, not so much. Bonus points for anyone outside Tulsa who has heard of G.T. Bynum.) All should be on the radar of anyone concerned about where the GOP is headed.
  • This is not to suggest Congress is devoid of leadership material. House member Will Hurd is making many, many Republican mouths water. The 40-year-old ex-CIA operative represents the Texas 23rd; it is the state’s largest and most competitive district, sprawling from San Antonio to El Paso, and its electorate is over 70 percent Latino. Hurd is young, sharp, media-savvy, tech-savvy, and ambitious. And he’s black—no small matter for Republicans looking to prove they aren’t the party of white nationalism.
  • many Republicans are especially enthusiastic about talented women rising through the ranks. House members Mia Love and Elise Stefanik are among those most often mentioned.
  • Multiple Republicans voiced optimism that Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn, now running for Senate, will turn out to be a force in the upper chamber.
  • Similarly, many GOP women are rooting for Arizona Representative Martha McSally
  • Over in the Senate, Nebraskan Ben Sasse has made a name for himself by being an early and consistent conservative critic of Trump.
  • Another name being talked about: Adam Putnam, the Florida congressman-turned-state agriculture commissioner now running for governor.
  • Then there’s Josh Hawley, the freshly scrubbed attorney general of Missouri, who is gunning for Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill’s seat
  • Oklahoma’s G.T. Bynum. A former Senate staffer and lobbyist, Bynum won a seat on the Tulsa city council in 2008. Fresh-faced and funny
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