Notes on a Political Shooting

based on what we know, James Hodgkinson had surprisingly normal political beliefs. He hated Donald Trump, he liked Bernie Sanders, he wanted higher taxes on the wealthy. He was not a Communist or a paranoid knight on a shadowy crusade, but an ordinary Midwestern Democrat with far more rage but the same frustrations as many decent liberals.

.. The turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s generated segregationist terrorism on the right and a revolutionary underground on the left, but it did not produce much partisan terrorism, violence inspired simply by fear and hatred of the opposition party. Now, though, we hate each other simply for being Democrats and Republicans more than ever — and violence inspired simply by the polarization of the major parties would be a unique and novel threat.

.. Part of what went wrong in America in the later ’60s was that the liberal establishment carried water for, protected or excused its far-left children’s rage. Part of what could go wrong today is evident in the way that violence in the left-wing core, the university campus, gets met with excuse-making, appeasement and halfhearted punishment from liberal authorities.

Hillary Lacks Remorse of Conscience

Oddly, she seems completely sincere, as if she believes the alternative facts she’s peddling.

 She lost because the Democratic National Committee didn’t help her. “I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. I mean it was bankrupt. . . . Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.”
.. She lost because she was “swimming against a historic tide. It’s very difficult historically to succeed a two-term president of your own party.” She lost because she was “the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win.” She lost because the news media ignored her policy positions.
.. It tells you something about our own power to hypnotize ourselves, to invent reasons that avoid the real reasons. It is a tribute to the power of human denial.
.. The truth is Bernie Sanders destroyed Mrs. Clinton’s chance of winning by almost knocking her off, and in the process revealing her party’s base had changed. Her plodding, charmless, insincere style of campaigning defeated her. Bad decisions in her campaign approach to the battleground states did it; a long history of personal scandals did it; fat Wall Street speeches did it; the Clinton Foundation’s bloat and chicanery did it—and most of all the sense that she ultimately stands for nothing but Hillary did it.
.. “when Clintonworld sources started telling us in 2015 that Hillary was still struggling to articulate her motivation for seeking the presidency.” Her campaign was “an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority . . . distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose.” “Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.” “Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”
.. Mrs. Clinton has shown herself to be largely incapable of honest self-reflection
.. People are always doing bad things to her, she never does bad things to them. They operate in bad faith, she only in good.
.. It is one thing to say, “I take responsibility,” and follow that up with a list of things you believe you got wrong. It’s another thing to say, “I take responsibility,” and then immediately pivot to arguments as to why other people are to blame. “I take responsibility for everything I got wrong, but that’s not why I lost,” is literally what she said Wednesday.

This Dangerous Moment

at this point in American history — a point at which large numbers of voters in both parties believe that the system is “rigged” – for the president to be undone by a small group of establishment Republicans and replaced with a career politician would be disastrous for the culture.

.. Chris Arnade, writing from the left, agrees. If you don’t know who Arnade is, he’s a liberal (and former Wall Streeter) who travels America photographing and talking to the poor and working-class folks. He’s been a particular scourge on his own side, dunning the Democratic elites for looking down on the white working class and its travails.

Unlike a lot of Acela corridor pundits .. Arnade has actually been out among the Trumpenproletariat, and sympathizes with their plight, if not their politics.

.. he has screwed up so badly in the past two weeks that he has some Republicans in Congress using the i-word (impeachment), he stood today before graduating Coast Guard members and whined about how mean everybody is to him:

Trump at Coast Guard Commencement: “No politician in history…has been treated worse or more unfairly”

 .. If one of my kids said that, I would chastise them for self-pity and excuse-making.
.. Chu’s expression of contemptible race and class bigotry tells a lot of people in this country what the elites think of them. It’s like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark. Trump hates those elites, and they hate Trump, therefore the deplorables feel solidarity with Trump. The actual truth of what Trump said or did as president does not matter as much as that emotional truth, any more than the actual truth of what Michael Brown or Alton Sterling did matters to black people who see them as symbols of a deeper truth about American society.
.. He may be a fool, but he’s our fool