Political Theatre category archive

Thom and John Kenneth White try to figure out what the hell is going on withe the Republican Party.

Part One:

Part Two:

Via PoliticalProf, who reminds us

You don’t have to like her. You don’t have to vote for her. Just don’t say she isn’t winning.

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Job’s Anger.

Josh Marshall tries to figure out just what Trump thinks he can accomplish attacking Hillary Clinton by blaming her for her husband’s imperfections.

Via Job’s Anger.

Robert Kagan sees darkness if Donald Trump is elected. He suggests that the Republicans who are now falling in line–in some cases, falling all over themselves–to support him, because in Republican world, winning is the only thing, do not realize the implications of his rise. Here’s a snippet:

Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.

“Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.

It has been a long time since I read de Tocqueville, but I recall the passages to which Kagan refers. The author worried that the American dream would collapse under its own weight.

(If you haven’t read de Tocqueville, you should; it captures a moment in early American history, a moment that is often misrepresented, and remains relevant today.)

Addendum, a Few Minutes Later:

Colin Woodward discusses the European view of Trumpery at the Portland Press-Herald. An excerpt:

. . . he’s championed a group of people who’ve seen their standard of living decline in the face of globalization: the white working class, whose economic interests haven’t been represented by either party in two generations. He claims he’ll bring back manufacturing and make their America great again. They’ve responded enthusiastically, although Trump is about as far from conservative Christian family values and Republican free market orthodoxy as one can get. They’re the warm water fueling the Trump hurricane.

The downside is that Trump is seeking to protect these “good Americans” in a fashion familiar to Europeans: by threatening to withdraw normal legal and constitutional protections for those seen as “traitorous others.” For European far-right nationalists like those in Hungary’s Jobbik, the British National Party or the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, this class usually includes some combination of Jews, Roma (also known as Gypsies), Muslim immigrants or foreigners from countries they dislike. For Trump, it’s Mexicans, Muslim-Americans, the journalists in the press pen or the black protester at his rally who maybe should be beaten up; he’s promised, in one such instance, to pay the legal bills of someone who tried to do just that.

Daniel J. Evans, ex-Republican Governor of Washington, tells a story almost as an aside, an anecdote that encapsulates the excrescence that is contemporary coverage of political news.

Voters this spring were subjected to a series of TV political debates that were more reality show than a serious argument of national and international issues. I was reminded of a conversation I had with a TV news director many years ago. I was asked to do political commentary regularly in a 1 minute time slot. When I questioned how serious one could be in that short time period, he exclaimed, “It doesn’t matter, we want more heat than light.” He could have been in charge of this year’s presidential debates.

You can read the rest–it will take only two minutes–but, really, like Clarissa, this explains it all.

Excerpt:

The problem that the Republican Party has right now isn’t that Trump isn’t a Republican. It’s that he is the perfect Republican.

In related news of the discourse, John Freivalds, writing at The Roanoke Times, discusses the failure of established media to hold Donald Trump accountable for his lies. Here’s a bit:

. . . that has been the essence of many Trump statements to take a scintilla of news and expand it into something totally preposterous. And until now the media has let him get away with it.

Aside:

I believe that excising the qualifier, “until now,” from that sentence would render it more accurate.