For the past sixteen months, roughly since Donald Trump’s insult of Senator John McCain (“I like people who weren’t captured”), the Republican Presidential nominee has been behaving in ways that were far outside the bounds of acceptable behavior for a Presidential candidate. For most of that time, it only seemed to make him more popular.
This changed with a series of events, beginning in the summer, that the Clinton campaign either orchestrated or exploited, and that caused Trump to become unhinged at a new, more self-damaging level.
.. Trump, who thinks of himself as a Seigneur surrounded by admiring and grateful servitors who call him “Mr. Trump” (at least until the moment when he tells them, “You’re fired!”), suddenly finds the social order reversed. The little people are attacking him, and he’s expected to grovel and beg for forgiveness. And that makes him blow up.
.. Clinton’s biggest mistakes, like setting up her private e-mail server, spring from excessive fear and caution, rather than excessive confidence
The Urge to Splurge
Why is it so hard to reduce the Pentagon budget? (Via TomDispatch.)
To put this figure in perspective: despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office.
.. What accounts for the Department of Defense’s ability to keep a stranglehold on your tax dollars year after endless year?
Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to do with its military, you won’t see Pentagon spending brought under real control.
.. Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: having subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying
.. In such periods, getting Americans behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has generally required a heavy dose of fear.
.. the U.S. aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.
.. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for a policy based on the global “containment” of communism and grounded in a plan to encircle the Soviet Union with U.S. military forces, bases, and alliances.
.. Senator Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to “scare the hell out of the American people” to win support for a $400 million aid plan for Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower would later describe as “a permanent arms establishment of vast proportions.”
.. the disastrous Vietnam War, which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the “Vietnam syndrome” by interventionists ..
.. perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an “arms establishment of vast proportions” came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly half-a-century
.. General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and the arms complex when he said, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.”
.. but the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a “peace dividend” could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the “rogue state” doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be focused on “regional hegemons” like Iraq and North Korea.
.. After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue state doctrine morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT)
.. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld evensuggested that Saddam was like Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the resources to conquer the globe.
.. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy, one might call Obama’s approach “politically sustainable warfare,” since it involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable number of private contractors.
.. Recent terror attacks against Western targets from Brussels, Paris, and Nice to San Bernardino and Orlando have offered the national security state and the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be useless in preventing such attacks.
The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with fighting terrorism.
.. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by acknowledging that more than half of the $58.8 billion war budget is being used to pay for non-war costs.
.. That slush fund is also enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down payment on the department’s proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines.
.. The size of a Clinton buildup is less clear, but she has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget. If that were done and the war fund continued to be stuffed with non-war-related items, one thing is certain: the Pentagon and its contractors will be sitting pretty.
.. fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is embedded in Washington.
What is the long-term effect of Donald Trump?
“He is distinct only in being someone of such prominence saying such things. I think the real change was Facebook and Twitter in 2009. Trump is just a symptom.”
.. In this view, the Trump effect is not unique to the man, but is a natural, almost inevitable result of economic and social forces unleashed by swift, powerful technological change that had, even before Trump’s candidacy, made the country meaner, more confrontational and more divided.
.. Previous bursts of populism have usually burned through in less than a generation, fading away as economic expansion, war or political reform eased people’s sense of insecurity.
.. The tea party, the Occupy movement, and Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign all demonstrated a popular hunger for thoroughgoing change and a realignment of the political parties.
.. Buskirk, 47, said Trump’s blunt rhetoric and coarse language would have been startling decades ago but today only mirrors a society in which many people feel stifled by new limits on what can be said at work or school. “We’d all like a high level of public discourse,” he said, “but a 3 a.m. tweetstorm isn’t among my worries about the next generation.”
.. Trump supporters see not his coarseness or vulgarity, but a sense that an ordinary person can rise up and make a difference.”
.. and in a way, it’s even better for Trump if he loses because then his policies never have to be tested.”
.. Pop music, which often reflects the mood of the country, has been trending slower and darker, following a period of much more energetic hits around the start of the economic recovery in 2009
.. “This was the summer of unhappy popular music,” Ross said. “There’s an almost complete dearth of up-tempo, major-chord happiness. There’s no tempo right now in country, pop, R&B, anywhere.”
.. Ross said the current popularity of slow, low-energy songs is the most striking run of such music since the early 1980s — also a time of severe economic stress.
.. “There will never be a sports talk show called ‘You May Be Right,’ no TV roundtables called ‘Point Well Taken.’ ”
.. “Early on, people were horrified by his offensive statements,” Luntz said. “But as time went on, they came to enjoy it and absorb it. There’s no filter anymore. I hear Trump’s words over and over: ‘We have to keep them out.’ Trump has liberated their inner voice, and I’m shocked at what I hear now.”
.. Luntz sees no indication that the rougher rhetoric is a passing fad. “The more coarse language gets, the more coarse it stays,” he said. “We don’t go back. We don’t suddenly become civil and good to each other.”
In Luntz’s focus groups recently, the tone of disagreements has deteriorated into the kind of attacks that once would have silenced the room. “ ‘You’re an idiot’ has become relatively common,” he said. “It’s gotten to the point where I cannot stop people from yelling at each other.”
.. Luntz has seen a sharp increase in parents telling him that their children are using Trump-inspired smears at school. “It’s ‘Lyin’ Thomas’ and ‘Little David’ in fifth or sixth grade,”
.. One boy brought me his cellphone to show me Trump’s tweets. They know his insults by heart. hey’re scared.”
.. In a culture in which characters on reality-TV shows lash out at one another for sport, in a society in which bonds of trust have frayed as relationships become distanced from physical proximity, “along comes Donald Trump to give us permission to say out loud the things we’ve been saying anonymously online,”
.. “He’s closer to how a lot of people are living than Hillary Clinton. A lot of men talk exactly like Trump online; he’s just the first person to do that while running for president.”
.. “People are immersed in their own worlds now. We were already being horrible to each other on social media, so we were kind of ripe for someone to come along and further dehumanize us.”
.. Even before Trump came along, cable news had morphed from traditional reporting to “mainly people yelling at each other,” as McGrath put it.
.. “He has obliterated the idea that tone matters, . . . that there is such a thing as going too far. For the next person who tries it, it will seem less shocking because this has been accepted by the media who report it in detail (mostly without shock or complaint) and by the rest of us who grumble but keep watching.”
How Donald Trump Hacked the Politics of Foreign Policy
Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy proposals, like forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall or withdrawing from NATO, have drawn unprecedented condemnations as incoherent, contradictory and unrealistic.
Yet for all the boos they elicit from experts, they draw frequent cheers at his rallies.
Scholars of American politics say this is because Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is using international issues as a medium to connect with voters’ gut-level fears and desires
.. Studies show that most voters rank foreign issues low on their list of concerns, but they do listen and use those issues as a window through which they judge candidates’ values and ideology.
.. Mr. Trump has exploited this dynamic, offering ideas that experts consider unworkable, but that tap into some voters’ desire for a strong-handed leader.
.. “People tend to choose the candidate they like first,” and then take on that candidate’s views as their own, she added. “This is the way people make sense of a complicated world.”
.. Because foreign policy requires difficult trade-offs, conventional candidates are limited in how emotionally appealing they can make their plans while keeping them workable. They also need to appease the hard-nosed policy experts or party officials those candidates rely on to get elected — and, eventually, to govern. But Mr. Trump was under no such constraints.
The result: Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is not a foreign policy at all, but rather a vessel for reaching voters on a purely ideological level.
.. Mr. Trump’s message: “NATO requires cooperation. Cooperation is something you do if you’re weak. If you’re strong, people go along with you.”
.. Mr. Trump’s worldview demands and offers “a sort of Fortress America, or perhaps a gigantic gated community, separated from transnational dangers of all kinds by a series of walls.”
.. Mr. Trump alarmed those outside his rapidly growing base with proposals to kill the families of terrorists and with praise for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, as well as for China’s 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
But for supporters, these and other statements suggested Mr. Trump could be trusted to impose order on the chaos they see in a rapidly changing world.
.. when Mr. Trump promises to force Mexico to pay for a giant border wall or warns that Iranian boats will be “shot out of the water” if their sailors “make gestures” at American sailors, he is communicating that he understands that his supporters feel fearful and humiliated, and that he will punish those responsible.
.. Mr. Trump has tapped into what scholars call conservation values.
People who hold those values prioritize security, conformity and tradition. They also tend to fear physical threats and people they see as outsiders, whether that means foreigners or those of different races or religions. And they often express those values as a particular set of “hawkish” foreign policy views.
.. That hawkishness is very different from that of neoconservatives like President George W. Bush or interventionist Democrats like Mrs. Clinton. It is characterized by a desire to
- shut out the world,
- ruthlessly promote American interests,
- reject cooperation and
- meet threats with overwhelming force.
.. Voters who hold conservation values are drawn to such policies not out of a sudden interest in global affairs, but as a way to express their fear of change and desire for order at home, the researchers found. They desire a strong leader who will protect “us” against an ever-more-menacing “them.”
.. Mr. Trump, by redirecting voters’ anxiety about demographic, cultural and economic changes toward foreign policy, gives his supporters a clearer set of villains
.. Supporters do not primarily hear a policy agenda, but a promise: that Mr. Trump understands their fears and will protect them.