Democratic Party

As Hillary Clinton Accepts The Democratic Nomination, Donald Trump Leads The GOP To Its Armageddon

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

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As Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States, the Republican Party stares oblivion in the face

It wasn’t the best acceptance speech at a Democratic Party national convention by a long shot, but Hillary Clinton’s historic speech got the job done.

Personally, I thought that it started off quite well before getting bogged down into the kind of grinding, laboured pedantry that is often the hallmark of a Hillary Clinton speech. One could almost hear Clinton’s brain checking off the various points she felt obligated to touch on (i.e. absolutely everything) as the speech ground onwards. But the moment Clinton accepted the nomination itself was effective:

And yes, love trumps hate.

That’s the country we’re fighting for. That’s the future we’re working toward.

And so it is with humility, determination, and boundless confidence in America’s promise that I accept your nomination for President of the United States!

And one did feel that slight sense of history in the making that we last felt when a much younger-looking Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party nomination eight years ago.

This section was powerful too, inasmuch as it sought to make a virtue of the way that Hillary Clinton grinds away behind the scenes, seeking to make incremental progress (an approach which clearly frustrates the millions of Democrats who preferred Senator Bernie Sanders as their nominee):

I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house.

She told me how badly she wanted to go to school — it just didn’t seem possible.

And I couldn’t stop thinking of my mother and what she went through as a child.

It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough.

To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws.

You need both understanding and action.

So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities.

This blog hasn’t done a night-by-night analysis of the Democratic Convention as we did for the Republican Convention in Cleveland last week, but I have been watching closely – both the speeches, the mood of the hall and how it has all gone down in the American media. And right now, I think that the Republican Party should be feeling complete and utter stomach-churning, sweat-inducing dread. For all of the GOP’s political sins are about to catch up with them, and Republicans will be forced to pay for them in a hefty lump.

The Democratic convention was everything that the Republican convention was not, but normally is. Usually, one can expect the GOP to successfully co-opt and monopolise the flag, the military, the constitution and the founding fathers. But not this time. With Donald Trump as their standard bearer, de facto party leader and the ugly face of American conservatism (as far as most people are concerned), the Republicans have utterly ceded patriotic centre ground. Reagan’s “morning in America” has been replace by a darker, dystopian “midnight in America” in Republican rhetoric – a fact noted by Hillary Clinton in her speech. The sunny optimism and the shining city on a hill have been utterly banished, replaced by something insular, nativist, distrustful, selfish and wantonly cruel.

The Republicans used to be the Party of the Constitution (in rhetoric, if not always in practice). But one was hard stretched to hear any substantive mention of freedom, individual liberty and smaller government in Cleveland last week.

The Republicans used to be the Party of the Military. But now they are led by a thin-skinned, authoritarian, egotistical demagogue who has openly bragged that he intends to order the military to commit unconstitutional acts including torture, placing them in an impossible position. And so this week in Philadelphia, the retired four-star generals and distinguished veterans were on stage supporting Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

The Republicans used to be the Party of God, happy warriors for social conservatism. Now they are led by a twice-divorced adulterer who openly objectifies and belittles women, while the Democrats are led by a woman who (despite her many faults, and those of her husband) has kept her marriage together through thick and thin.

But more than anything else, the Republicans used to be a party of unabashed optimism and patriotism, always seeing the potential and the best in America and seeking to build on that progress in order to open the promise of America to more and more people. Now, they are led by a wannabe strongman who sees only the flaws in America, grotesquely exaggerating and distorting those faults for electoral gain while promising blunt and unsophisticated remedies without acknowledging the disruption and negative consequences of ripping up trade agreements and erecting protectionist and physical barriers against perceived threats. And now the Democrats are the ones with the positive, upbeat message.

Or as Clinton put it in her speech:

Our country’s motto is e pluribus unum: out of many, we are one.

Will we stay true to that motto?

Well, we heard Donald Trump’s answer last week at his convention.

He wants to divide us – from the rest of the world, and from each other.

He’s betting that the perils of today’s world will blind us to its unlimited promise.

He’s taken the Republican Party a long way, from “Morning in America” to “Midnight in America.”

He wants us to fear the future and fear each other.

Well, a great Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than eighty years ago, during a much more perilous time.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

In nearly every category where the Republican Party once dominated the political landscape, they are now in retreat. Donald Trump clearly believes that the level of unregistered pain and dissatisfaction in the country is great enough that he can be swept to power purely on the back of an anti-establishment backlash. But my word, it’s an awfully big gamble to cheerfully abandon the constitution, the military, patriotism and fiscal conservatism and assume that this will bring in sufficient new voters, and that the party’s existing voters – who sincerely believe in those things – will stick around even as the Democrats aggressively pitch for their support.

That is not to say that a Trump victory is impossible – far from it. But look at the type of things which would have to happen to make President Trump a reality – more Islamist terror attacks on American soil, driving scared voters toward Trump’s authoritarian appeal, or a further deterioration of the fraught relationship between America’s police forces and the black communities they serve. Trump benefits from this chaos and division, but none of the policies he has offered would make America tangibly safer. You can be assured that Hillary Clinton will be pushing that message through the fall into the general election.

If things remain as they are; if there are no further large extraneous shocks to the economy, to politics or to national security (admittedly a big “if” when Islamist terror attacks in Europe seem to be running at one per week) then Republicans should be very worried indeed. In their embrace of Donald Trump – a man who could never have become their leader had congressional Republicans acted in a more responsible manner throughout the Obama presidency – they have utterly jettisoned their commitment to the constitution, to individual liberty and to small-c conservatism. They have lost the support of this blog and millions of other thinking conservatives, all in the hope of riding a populist wave to the White House, based on promises which they know are largely undeliverable.

And while Hillary Clinton is undoubtedly a flawed candidate offering a continuation of America’s current trajectory, in a binary choice between the status quo and the void, she has effectively positioned herself as the de facto choice for anybody who is serious about protecting the American republic from unpredictable and often irrational constitutional, economic and political vandalism by Donald Trump.

The Republican Party should be afraid. And chastened. And if the day finally comes when the fever breaks and they realise just what eight years of hysterical opposition to President Obama followed by the nomination of Donald Trump hath wrought, they will face an almighty uphill climb to earn back the respect of small-c, constitutional conservatives.

 

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Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton: A Nauseating Choice But An Easy Decision

Samuel Hooper9 Comments

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Faced with a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, nobody will come away from this American presidential election looking very good. But there is still a right choice, and a wrong one

Faced with the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, I’m with her.

I do so with zero enthusiasm – certainly far less than Andrew Sullivan, once the most vocal of Clinton’s enemies, now seems to be displaying:

Some readers think I’ve been too negative, even cynical, tonight. Believe me, I am utterly uncynical about this election. I’m worried sick. We need to put behind us any lingering beefs, any grudges, any memories from the past – and you know how I feel about the Clintons’ past – in order to save liberal democracy. The only thing between him and us is her. So – against all my previous emphatic denials – I’m with her now. As passionately as I ever was with Obama. For his legacy is at stake as well.

I support Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump not in the expectation that a second Clinton family presidency will do anything to make America significantly better – she is nothing if not a continuity candidate, the living embodiment of a third (and quite possibly fourth) Obama term. I find myself supporting Clinton because the anti-establishment wave which helped deliver Brexit and the hope of return to self-government for Britain promises no equally great benefits for America so long as it is led by a charlatan like Trump.

However tawdry and oversimplified the mainstream Brexit campaign may have been, the dream of freeing Britain from a suffocating, steadily tightening political union with Europe was and remains a noble and vital goal. Trump’s goal for his own country consists of Making America Great Again (MAGA), which he plans to accomplish by building a massive wall and sending the bill to a country who will refuse to pay it, and by defeating the Islamic State and ending the scourge of Islamist terror attacks “very quickly” with a few harsh words from the Oval Office and no American boots on the ground.

Of course the United States has constitutional firewalls and checks & balances to prevent excessive overreach by the executive branch, but the man is just appalling – a shallow, vindictive egotist with almost zero attention span (as proved by his reputed offer to give John Kasich complete control of foreign and domestic policy, and nearly every speech he has ever given).

Many of Trump’s apologists in the Republican Party have been reduced to saying “oh, it’s just a persona” as if that somehow makes it better. Either he means what he says when he promises authoritarian, big government solutions or his populism is just a lie and he is going to massively let down his voters in office, creating an even more wild backlash which nobody will be able to control. Neither option bodes well for sensible conservative government.

And so while a Hillary Clinton presidency will be technocratic, soul-sappingly un-ideological, politically calculating and almost certainly stymied by furious GOP obstructionism, at least it buys time for the Republicans to wake up and try to engage with the public anger against the political elites in a more constructive way.

The Republicans have tried riding the Tea Party tiger, and were consumed by it. Now they have hitched their fortunes to Donald Trump, who will (barring further Islamist attacks or police shootings) lead them to defeat with dishonour. It is difficult to imagine a rock bottom lower than being led to defeat against Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump. Hopefully this is that rock bottom, and the party of Abraham Lincoln will rise from the ashes of defeat in 2016 chastened and renewed.

But even if none of this comes to pass, even if the GOP learns absolutely nothing and goes on to nominate Herman Cain or Sarah Palin in 2020, at least we have bought four more years of relative stability. If you take Donald Trump at his word, he is a dangerous demagogue. If you belong to the school of thought which says that it is all an act, then he is perpetrating a fraud on those millions of his supporters who take his public utterances seriously. Neither option is good. This is not somebody fit for the presidency.

Many of the scandals hanging over Hillary Clinton have substance, and she undoubtedly has been dishonest in her handling of the email scandal – she was wrong to conduct sensitive government business over a bootleg server installed in her home, and she was most definitely wrong to be so evasive and even downright false in her subsequent explanations of her behaviour. In any other circumstance – and I mean any other circumstance – this alone would disqualify Clinton from the presidency.

But these are extenuating circumstances. I’m sorry Trump supporters, but I have searched and searched and I cannot see in Donald Trump the principled, fearless happy warrior fighting the elite on behalf of ordinary Americans which you see. I see a shrewd, calculating and undeniably effective demagogue, one who understands better than any other recent insurgent politician how to command public attention, and who was aided in this tawdry work by a debased American media class whose great crime in giving undeserved oxygen to the Trump campaign in the hunt for ratings surpasses even their craven and servile attitude toward the Bush administration in the years after 9/11.

And in these exceptional times, the only responsible thing to do is to pick the lesser of two evils. Hillary Clinton continues the dubious tradition of American presidential dynasties. She has a perpetual cloud of scandal hanging over her head which cannot all be dismissed as the fact-free imaginings of Newt Gingrich. And she is a political weathervane with seemingly no fixed political convictions or guiding ideology. But even for all of these flaws, at least she is not Donald J Trump.

However, this blog is concerned that the current Hollywood celebrity love-fest taking place at the DNC convention in Philadelphia, while buoying the spirits of Hillary fans (and disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters) is actually feeding the Trump campaign’s effective – and partially true – message that the American cultural elite is bullying ordinary people into feeling ashamed of their often perfectly legitimate political concerns.

And never more so than on the topic of immigration, where whatever racism and xenophobia exists at the fringe of the Republican Party is more than cancelled out by the gleeful subversion of law and language encouraged by many mainstream Democrats, with their embrace of the exculpatory term “undocumented immigrants” and repeated, tawdry attempts to ennoble the idea of living in America illegally.

As Jeremy Carl fumes in the National Review:

Witness what we have just seen: One candidate for president has been the first-ever candidate for president endorsed by the union of Border Patrol agents. The other candidate proudly features, on the first night of her convention, illegal aliens up on the main stage, while Democrats nationwide cheer.

If you wanted to understand the hold that Donald Trump has on a large swathe of conservatives and even fed-up Democrats and independents, the Democratic convention is pretty much a living explanation.

At this point, we’ve become so accustomed to the Democrats’ immigration lawlessness that too many of us accept it. We think there is simply nothing strange about one of our two political parties happily parading lawbreakers in a forum where they are celebrated for their law-breaking.

As a future American citizen (proudly married to a Texan, with the ultimate intention of living back in the United States) who will one day gratefully join the back of the line and emigrate the lawful way, nothing enrages me more than this holding-hands-underneath-a-rainbow celebration of people who either snuck into America illegally or otherwise outstayed their visas. But the Clinton campaign’s emotion-based, identity politics-ridden position on “undocumenteds” (whoops, where did their documents go? Never mind, no point being a stickler for the rules) should not just be offensive to current and future legal immigrants who played by the rules. It should be offensive to every single person who places value in the rule of law.

And still Clinton is better than Trump. Some of Trump’s ideas on immigration – such as defunding “sanctuary cities” which refuse to cooperate with federal immigration rules and officials, and ending the anachronism of birthright citizenship – are entirely sensible. But the sanctions with which Trump intends to threaten Mexico in order to coerce payment for building his wall would greatly hamper cross border trade and actually put people out of work, as would many of his other protectionist policies.

Donald Trump has the greatest potential to harm America in the sphere of foreign policy. When it comes to domestic matters, the ability of the executive branch to take drastic or radical action is fairly well constraint by the checks and balances built into the American system of government. But in managing America’s relationship with other countries, President Donald Trump would have wide-ranging abilities to antagonise or alienate other countries in a way which the Constitution is not designed to constrain. Now, some of those countries may well deserve a tongue-lashing from Donald Trump – that is a large part of his appeal, the ability to come out strongly against the indefensible. But if Donald Trump has a coherent foreign policy, it is a closely guarded secret. There is certainly no mention on his campaign website. Therefore, there is no guarantee that Trump will antagonise only those countries which America can afford to alienate.

One may disagree with many of Hillary Clinton’s decisions while serving as Secretary of State, but at least she knows her way around foreign policy and will not need to keep Wikipedia to hand as she takes congratulatory calls from world leaders if she wins the election. That matters. Leadership matters, even if the direction of that leadership is sometimes less than optimal. While the American presidency always involves on-the-job training with incredibly high stakes, to bestow that office on somebody with no record of or interest in public service prior to this point would be reckless in the extreme.

Yet Hillary Clinton can easily lose this election. More to the point, her supporters can lose this election for her with their sanctimonious moral grandstanding, finger-wagging lectures to Middle America and constant diminution of the issues and concerns which motivate Trump supporters. In Britain we have already seen how endless celebrity interventions accusing Brexit supporters of racism and evil intent quite rightly provoked a backlash against the bien-pensant clerisy who haughtily preached that Britain is no good and that we could not survive without the EU’s antidemocratic supranational government. Piling up the celebrity endorsements could end up harming Hillary Clinton more than helping her.

And so the need now comes hardest upon the Clinton campaign manager, Robby Mook, to be a skilled and fearless strategist. Trump will not be beaten easily. The gaffes and missteps which harm normal political candidates only further cement his popularity among his most ardent supporters. And Hillary Clinton is a famously weak political candidate, less effective on the campaign trail than she is when in office.

This blog takes absolutely no delight in making its choice for the 2016 presidential race. I would have leapt at the chance to support a smart, sane conservative alternative to Democratic Party occupancy of the White House. But eight years of hysterical, hyperbolic opposition to Barack Obama effectively put rocket boosters on the GOP’s crazy wing, and now there is no smart, sane conservative left to support. In fact, there is no small-c conservative running in this presidential race at all.

That failure is not the fault of Barack Obama. He did not spike the juice of every Republican politician with crazy powder over the past seven years. This is an entirely self-inflicted wound struck by obstructionist conservative politicians who chose to make American politics this angry and volatile, aided by the conservative-industrial complex of media and punditry who cynically portrayed what has been a frustratingly uneven economic recovery and an overly timid and contradictory foreign policy as an unprecedented American decline brought about by Kenyan socialism.

In short, it is the fault of the political-media class, and the opportunistic Republican Party in particular, that Donald Trump was able to take over the GOP so easily. It is their fault that the only semi-responsible choice on the ballot paper will be for Hillary Clinton’s predictable, uninspiring centre-leftism.

And it is their fault that this blog is left with no choice but to follow my conscience and support Hillary Rodham Clinton for president – very much the lesser of two evils.

 

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Republicans Are In No Position To Mock The Democratic Party Primary Debates

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYFPaU0581Y

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In his Morning Briefing email today, the National Review’s Jim Geraghty disparaged last night’s latest Democratic Party primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders with these words:

‘Yeah, There Was Another Democratic Debate.’ (Stifles Yawn)

Thursday night’s Democratic debate in Brooklyn basically amounted to Bernie Sanders’s repeating all of his familiar attacks against Hillary and her insisting they’re baseless; and her charging that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, at which point he would counter-charge, “THE GREED AND THE RECKLESSNESS AND ILLEGAL BEHAVIOR OF WALL STREET BROUGHT THIS COUNTRY INTO THE WORST ECONOMIC DOWNTURN” — sorry for the all caps, it’s the only way to accurately capture the volume of Sanders’ high dudgeon voice — “SINCE THE GREAT RECESSSION OF THE THIRTIES, WHEN MILLIONS OF PEOPLE LOST THEIR JOBS AND THEIR HOMES AND THEIR LIFE SAVINGS, YOU’VE GOT A BUNCH OF FRAUDULENT OPERATORS AND THEY’VE GOT TO BE BROKEN UP!”

Below are a couple of highlights, to the extent there were any:

Clinton, last night, defending her judgment: “President Obama trusted my judgment enough to ask me to be secretary of State for the United States.”

Yeah, that line may work really well in a Democratic primary, but you can apply the same “hey, if Obama picked me, I must know what I’m doing” argument to former HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, VA secretary Eric Shinseki, short-lived Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, all of those wealthy donor ambassadors who knew nothing about the countries where they would represent the U.S . . .

Hillary Clinton: “It may be inconvenient, but it’s always important to get the facts straight. I stood up against the behaviors of the banks when I was a senator.

I called them out on their mortgage behavior. I also was very willing to speak out against some of the special privileges they had under the tax code.”

Bernie Sanders: “Secretary Clinton called them out. Oh my goodness, they must have been really crushed by this. And was that before or after you received huge sums of money by giving speaking engagements? So they must have been very, very upset by what you did.”

I’m sorry, does a political debate no longer count as interesting or exciting unless a deranged mob of populist Republicans are flinging feces at each other or comparing the size of their junk?

Are Sanders and Clinton repeating themselves a lot? Yes – as someone who is deluged by campaign emails and briefings from both sides, that much cannot be denied. But at least the things that they are saying actually matter. They relate to foreign policy, trade policy, crime and punishment, campaign finance and the influence of Wall Street.

The argument in the GOP primary has devolved into little more than pledges to revoke ObamaCare faster than the other (“I’ll abolish ObamaCare by executive order at the beginning of my inaugural address!”) and competing visions for exactly how high the wall should be between the United States and Mexico.

Debates on both sides probably shed a lot more heat than light, but anyone who has watched a few of these things in the 2016 cycle would have to admit that more of substance has been learned on the Democratic side than the Republican side this time round – with the same going for 2012 too, when the Republicans treated us to Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain.

There is a group – and I can’t say how large it is, but I know it exists from my time living in America – of liberty-minded conservatives out there who are thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats’ record in office and the general direction of the country, but who will stay home or hold their nose and vote for Hillary Clinton before they see Donald Trump or even Ted Cruz in the White House.

(And to those Trump supporters who protest, I would simply say that fighting back at the establishment and sticking it to the man does not have to mean vocally supporting torture and eroding the constitution. In fact, as Britain’s Nigel Farage discovered, it is actually better when the establishment come at you equally hard for holding mostly reasonable position, as their desperation to kill the challenge to their power is then exposed for what it is).

Though I am not yet a US citizen, if I had voted in the 2008 election I would have voted without hesitation for Barack Obama over the John McCain / Sarah Palin freak show. Many others did the same. So forget trying to attract massive new demographic groups to the side of the Republican Party – maybe the GOP should focus more on simply not alienating those people who will reliably vote for any serious-minded conservative, but who are constantly chased away from the party by the carnival of idiots who keep making it to the primary debates.

You can sneer that it is cultural snobbishness at work (and a bit of it is – though not the majority), but it goes deeper than that. And the good news is that the Republican Party will soon have another chance to reinvent itself for a new era as they spend another presidential term in dreary opposition. Hopefully they will not repeat the mistake of 2008, and actually have serious discussion this time about who they want in the party and who they want out, and whether they want to appeal to the better angels or the darkest fears and prejudices of those who are invited to remain.

That process can begin soon. But in the meantime, let’s not get cocky about the Democratic Party primary process, which has seen left-wing politicians with substantially different worldviews tearing chunks out of each other on policy and substance – which is precisely what should happen.

That is the debate that the GOP should have been having this election cycle were they still a functioning party, and were they not now being forced to pay in a lump for every cynical act of alarmism, obstructionism and posturing they have taken since the inauguration of Barack Obama.

 

Donald Trump - Make America Great Again

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 13 – Identity Politics In The Dem Debate

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Bernie Sanders - Hillary Clinton - Democratic Party Primary - Sexism - Identity Politics

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When will Bernie Sanders learn? If Hillary Clinton interrupts him while he is speaking, his job is to shut up and listen to whatever she has to say with gratitude

Identity Politics crept in to the latest Democratic primary debate on Sunday night in a particularly harrowing episode for all American women.

From Janell Ross’s account in the Chicago Tribune:

On Sunday night, Bernie Sanders was in the middle of explaining his rationale for having reservations about the 2008 auto bailout — too much of the aid went to Wall Street — when former Hillary Clinton interrupted. Clinton got out a few words before Sanders, hand raised and moving in the (surprisingly tight) space between the two candidates and interjected.

“Excuse me, I’m talking,” he said.

If you are still waiting for the scandalous part, you just missed it. That was it. Hillary Clinton interrupted Bernie Sanders while he was talking, and Sanders tried to continue his point by saying “excuse me, I’m talking”.

But something which to normal people might look like the bread and butter of political television debating is instead being whipped up into a narrative of Bernie Sanders’ deep-rooted, festering misogyny and his barely concealed contempt for Hillary Clinton on account of her gender.

Ross continues:

Clinton is the first woman with a serious shot at the Democratic presidential nomination, and therefore the first woman to spend this much time on debate stages with competition. And this is the age of Twitter, where what feel like the independently formed opinions and reactions of ordinary voters are super easy to access. And indeed, there were many reporters who wrote about this moment by quoting and pulling in other reporters’ totally serious tweets.

It all seems a bit light on substance and heavy on reaction — and reactions to reactions. And no one can climb inside Sanders’ mind and say with utter clarity what was swirling inside it. We do know that Clinton was the more experienced presidential debater on that stage. She also, by now, knows about Sanders’, shall we say, tendency to respond to Clinton with curmudgeonly chastisements and finger wags. He has said and done a few things in previous debates that people have described as chauvinistic. By that logic, Clinton may have interrupted Sanders on purpose in hopes that something like the “excuse me” moment would happen.

One could speculate a great deal about that. But then there is this: Why, at this late date and this many debates into the 2016 presidential election cycle, has Sanders made demonstrably little to no effort to alter the way he interacts with the woman he at least strongly suspected would be running against him from the day he declared his campaign? He has almost certainly had the same advice and information that every male candidate gets about the need to be constantly mindful about coming across like a chauvinist or a bully when on a debate stage facing a female competition.

“A bit light on substance” is an understatement for the ages. There was a time not so long ago where if either of the two candidates were to be admonished for anything, it would have been the candidate who interrupted, not the one who firmly but politely continued to make their point. But of course that was before the corrosive Politics of Identity began to eat away at our culture and our political discourse. And now, what each candidate thinks, says and does is far less important than who they are and into which identity categories they fall.

Now, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton both happen to be white, so that already puts them near the top of the Hierarchy of Oppression, vicariously responsible for all of the ills and misfortunes suffered by those beneath them. But Clinton has a slight advantage in that she also happens to identify as a female. And because the patriarchy (no further explanation needed), Sanders squeaks above Clinton to the top of the Oppression Pyramid, which means that our sympathies and bias must rest with her, whether she happens to be right or not on any given issue.

Only by viewing the exchange through this distorting lens of Identity Politics can one watch the exchange and come away with the impression that Hillary Clinton has been oppressed by a “chauvinistic” Bernie Sanders. Yet this is indeed what some people believe, and because they perceived Sanders to be behaving in a sexist way, under the Law of Identity Politics it is the responsibility of Sanders to modify his behaviour to correct that perception, even though it is a demonstrably false one.

In other words, as Janell Ross reminds us, something can be sexist simply because another person – even someone totally unconnected with the event – perceives it as being so:

Does Sanders have the capacity to recognize the way these moments look or think deeply about the degree to which sexism propels his debate-stage performances? Whether that chauvinism is real or imagined or even toyed with by his opponent for political gain, why can’t Sanders find a better way to manage these moments? And is some combination of all of the above something that a 21st-century presidential candidate has simply got to consider and manage effectively?

Does the inability or unwillingness to examine his body language, tone and actions for hints or indicators of sexism — if not real but perceived by some women — tell us all what we really need to know?

Yes! Doesn’t Bernie Sanders’ failure to modify his entire manner of speaking and body language in order to address perceptions of a sexism which doesn’t even exist tell us all that we need to know about just what a horrible person he is?

Though this seems (and is) utterly ridiculous, it is neither new nor unexpected. Modern hate speech laws and the actions of Western governments to suppress or discourage the exercise of free speech are based on the same principle – that it is the perceptions of the offended party which matter most of all, and which must be flattered and mollified at all costs.

But who is really demeaning and belittling women here? Is it Bernie Sanders, who clearly views Clinton as a formidable opponent (she is the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, after all) and debates her with gusto, or is it the virtue-signalling feminist “allies” who go riding to her defence after a debate because they believe that women cannot withstand being contradicted with firm but polite words and one of Bernie Sanders’ ubiquitous (and non gender-specific) dismissive hand gestures?

Of course it is the people now crying “sexism!” who are themselves guilty of behaving in a truly sexist way, by treating a rich, powerful, well-connected 21st century American woman (Clinton) as somehow less capable than a somewhat less rich, less powerful, less well-connected man (Sanders), and consequently in need of their finger-wagging intercession on her behalf. But so powerful is the weapon that they wield – labelling their targets as sexist, chauvinist or even misogynist – that it is often easier to acquiesce rather than stand up to the Identity Politics power play.

Therefore, if he is to survive the Democratic Party primary season without having his reputation and good name completely torn to shreds, Bernie Sanders would do well to learn one valuable lesson: the next time that Hillary Clinton interrupts him, his role as a white cis man is to stand there meekly and just let her talk out the rest of the debate.

It’s the socially just way to behave.

 

Bernie Sanders - Hillary Clinton - Democratic Party Primary - Sexism - Identity Politics - 2

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Support David Cameron? I’d Rather Feel The Bern

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Bernie Sanders For President

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Bernie Sanders or David Cameron? There’s no contest

At a time when far too many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have revealed themselves to be either snarling authoritarians (Marco Rubio, Donald Trump) or patrician, vacuous hairdos (David Cameron), the search for authentic commitment to individual liberty can sometimes lead to unexpected places.

Spiked are now making the controversial argument that this search leads all the way to Vermont, and to US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Todd Gillespie writes:

Despite being slammed by some as a big-government lefty, Sanders’ track record is more complicated — and arguably more libertarian than has been appreciated. Even libertarian stalwart Ron Paul has come out in support of Sanders’ small-government credentials, shortly after his son, Rand, left the Republican race.

Bernie has espoused positions similar to Rand’s, even joining with him to oppose government surveillance. Last year, Sanders wrote a blistering criticism of the ‘Orwellian’ practice of spying on citizens. He voted against the 2001 Patriot Act and its dreadfully named replacement, the Freedom Act, in 2015 — both of which Clinton supported. He is arguably the only candidate left who takes positions that can legitimately be described as libertarian.

He supports freedom of speech. He backs net neutrality and opposes attempts to censor the internet. In 2005, he introduced the Stamp Out Censorship Act, which sought to prohibit the government enforcing ‘indecency fines’ on non-public media (it failed to pass). Recently, addressing students at Liberty University (a Christian institution whose president has just endorsed Donald Trump), most of whom think very differently to Sanders, he said ‘it is vitally important for those of us who hold different views’ to engage in debate.

Anti-surveillance. Anti-censorship. Pro civil liberties. Pro free speech. All more than can be said of many American conservatives, who ostentatiously flaunt their love of the Constitution – by which they mean the Second Amendment, while conveniently overlooking the First and Fourth Amendments.

Gillespie continues:

Sanders’ right-wing critics write him off as a big-state socialist. But a better label might be ‘libertarian socialist’. Yes, he has a vision of centralised government spending funded mainly by tax hikes on big business, but Comrade Bernie also envisages having a private sector with greater employee ownership. He has introduced legislation several times to increase government funding for centres that would provide training and technical support for the promotion of worker ownership and participation. He introduced the Rebuild America Act 2015, proposing an extra $1 trillion investment to renew America’s crumbling infrastructure, increasing airport capacity, improving and expanding railways, roads, bridges and broadband connection. He also wants to end crippling student debt and drastically increase loans to fuel small-business innovation. You can’t accuse him of thinking small.

Of course there is also much in Bernie Sanders’ platform to abhor – the punishing effective tax rates which would be required to fund this social democratic revolution, the increase in the size of government and the stripping away of agency and responsibility from free citizens to make their own decisions and take their own risks, for a start.

But perhaps it is also a sign of the divergence between the American and British political spectrums that I quite often find myself nodding along in agreement when the ornery senator from Vermont opens his mouth to speak. Perhaps when you move far right enough in your British politics (many certainly seem to think I am Thatcher on steroids) you actually break through and register on the far left of the US political scale.

And one thing is certain – if Bernie Sanders were prime minister of the United Kingdom, we would have a far more ideologically conservative leader than we currently have in David Cameron.

Spot The Socialist - David Cameron vs Bernie Sanders - Semi Partisan Politics - Sam Hooper

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