Some conservatives who care about foreign policy above all other issues view Trump himself as a national-security threat. Bryan McGrath, a conservative blogger and former Navy officer, recently posted the text of the oath he took when he was sworn into the Navy, in which he swore to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and wrote, “Because I view Donald Trump as domestic threat to the internal stability and external security of the United States, I cannot be faithful to this oath and vote for him.”
.. Peter Wehner, a top adviser to George W. Bush, wrote, “Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it…. For this lifelong Republican, at least, he is beyond the pale. Party loyalty has limits.” (Wehner was careful to add that he would not support Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.)
.. It’s like Wolfgang Pauli’s famous crack, “That is not only not right, it is not even wrong.” He doesn’t even have a bad character. People with bad characters can have strengths. As far as I can tell he has no character. He’s a bully with subordinates. He does business in ways that good businesspeople despise—and he’s not even very good at that. He says things about people, especially his wives, that are so obnoxious that calling them obnoxious doesn’t come close to how awful they are. He constantly lies about things that can be checked. He brags incessantly—really unattractive in itself—but he doesn’t even brag about things that he could appropriately be proud of. The guy is pathetic.
The oddest thing about his popularity with white middle-class and working-class males is that if he lived next door to them, they would despise him.
.. Not backing Trump is one thing, but many anti-Trump Republicans may soon have to grapple with the question of whether they may actually need to support Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee. For ideological conservatives the question may come down to which candidate would be worse for their movement.
.. They may soon have to choose: Would they rather have as President an enemy they can oppose, or one for whom they are—in more ways than one—responsible?
The Clintons Have Lost the Working Class
Clinton lost among young voters by nearly 6–1, and among independents by 3–1. Most arrestingly, Sanders won voters with an income of less than fifty thousand dollars by 2–1.
.. There’s a lot of talk about Clinton’s campaign repeating the chaos and errors of 2008, but that year she had the white working-class vote. Clinton’s candidacy looks narrower than ever, more confined to those whose experience of life approximates her own. Last night, in New Hampshire, the rare demographic group she won was those with incomes of more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. For now, at least, Clinton has become the wine-track candidate.
.. Bill Clinton, once the Party’s great channeller of working-class pain, surfaced, gaunt and joyless and wearing lumberjack red plaid. But his speech on Sunday had little of the old empathy; it was just a nasty blast at Sanders, whom the ex-President called “hermetically sealed” from reality.
.. Perhaps residual working-class loyalties, and her own strengths, will be enough to carry Clinton through the primaries. But the enthusiasm for her candidacy increasingly seems concentrated among affluent, older voters who are already committed members of the Democratic Party. That is not the most promising platform from which to begin a general-election campaign in any year, and especially not in a vigorously populist one.
.. But, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the trouble seemed broader than that: it ran through all of those people who have not yet made it. During the nineteen-nineties, the Clinton coalition ran along aspirational lines, drawing a hard line between virtuous workers and welfare recipients, and between hard-working professionals and capitalists, to summon the upwardly mobile. But the revelations of inequality have meant that aspirational talk has fallen flat, and the experience of 2008 has fractured faith in established leaders to fix it.
Democracy Won in New Hampshire
In her concession speech, Hillary Clinton boasted of her small donors. More than 70 percent had given less than $100, she claimed: “I know that doesn’t fit with the narrative.” As Ken Vogel of Politico immediately tweeted, the claim also distorts the facts. Clinton may have a lot of donors, but the bulk of the value of her donations—85 percent—has come from the biggest givers. And her family’s personal wealth, and its foundation’s assets, can also be seen as built on the largesse of banks, corporations, and foreign governments. .. along with the coy secretiveness that produced an evasive promise to “look into” the release of speech transcripts contractually owned by Hillary Clinton herself, and that led her to store sensitive public email on a privately owned server... Republican presidential contests have operated as a policy cartel. Concerns that animate actual Republican voters—declining middle-class wages, immigration, retirement security—have been tacitly ruled out of bounds. Concerns that excite Republican donors—tax cuts, entitlement reforms—have been more-or-less unanimously accepted by all plausible candidates. Candidates competed on their life stories, on their networks of friends, and on their degree of religious commitment—but none who aspired to run a national campaign deviated much from the economic platform of the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth.
Hillary Has ‘Half a Dream’
.. The two scenes so close to each other drove home the point for me: Hillary Clinton has a threatening young voter problem.
.. As Clinton put it Thursday in a swipe at Sanders, “I’m not making promises that I cannot keep.”
But the pragmatic progressive line is not going to help her chip away at Sanders’s support among the young. That support is hardening into hipness.