To Defend Trump, the GOP Is Becoming a Party Bill Clinton Would Love

Donald Trump’s supporters create endless alibis for him, just as Bill Clinton’s did for him.

.. He inspired such fanatical devotion (and gratitude for his key policy decisions) that men and women were willing to lie for him, sacrifice their principles for him, and in one notorious case even go to jail to protect him.

.. He inspired such fanatical devotion (and gratitude for his key policy decisions) that men and women were willing to lie for him, sacrifice their principles for him, and in one notorious case even go to jail to protect him.

.. This meant that they simply held him to a different standard. He could lie; his opponents could not. He got the benefit of the doubt despite admitted affairs, multiple credible claims of sexual harassment, and even one disturbing account of rape. But that’s just Bubba being Bubba, right? How can he help it if women love him, and besides, aren’t we Americans just a tad too uptight about sex? European politicians flaunt their mistresses and no one cares.

.. The question of the controversy morphed. The central question wasn’t “Did Bill Clinton commit the crime of perjury by lying under oath?” It was instead, “Who do you want to win this political battle? The president of peace and prosperity or the sneaky Linda Tripp and the obsessive Ken Starr?”

.. Think of the avalanche of vitriol against James Comey. Trump fired him, misled the public about the reasons, and then absurdly trashed his reputation. But how dare Comey fight back and defend himself? How dare he “leak” a memo?

.. The Clinton playbook left a party robbed of moral authority to confront Trump, and it indeed helped make his victory possible.

.. The Clinton playbook left a party robbed of moral authority to confront Trump, and it indeed helped make his victory possible.

The Exhaustion of American Liberalism

White guilt gave us a mock politics based on the pretense of moral authority.

Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.
.. the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

.. White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt.
.. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.
.. When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy. (Conservatism, focused on freedom and wealth, had little moral clout.) From that followed today’s markers of white guilt—political correctness, identity politics, environmental orthodoxy, the diversity cult and so on.
.. innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation’s past.
.. liberalism was a moral vaccine that immunized him against stigmatization.
.. The white guilt that lifted Mr. Obama did not carry her into office—even though her opponent was soundly stigmatized as an iconic racist and sexist.
.. Perhaps the Obama presidency was the culmination of the age of white guilt
.. liberalism’s old weapon of stigmatization shoots blanks—Elizabeth Warren in the Senate reading a 30-year-old letter by Coretta Scott King, hoping to stop Jeff Sessions’s appointment as attorney general.
.. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face.
.. Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome.
.. This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.
.. Let’s stipulate that, given our history, this liberalism is understandable. But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment.