Consolation for Hillary Supporters and anti-war progressives: If Trump wins, America might be getting the peace candidate.
Field Research and eyewitness report: There are intelligent, sophisticated, Ivy-Educated, non-racist people who support Trump. They are not simply bitter Sanders voters. They are pro-Trump. They think Trump is the peace candidate.
This blog attempts to be objective about political messaging and craftsmanship. We can see more clearly if we try to describe rather than marshall arguments to persuade people. It helps people in their own bubbles understand why approximately half of Americans are going to vote for Donald Trump, despite his manifest flaws. Same with Hillary Clinton.
Trump has re-made GOP policy, and has captured a new, politically awakened constituency: white working Americans without a college degree, especially churchgoers and especially males. It ended the Republican outreach push for blacks and Hispanics, and re-emphasized the traditional majority in the FDR coalition of the solid South and blue collar workers energized in opposition to eastern elites.
Less visible are the professional men and women--members of the elites--who support Trump despite his nativism and his disdain for elites. They are turned off by his appeal to xenophobia. They have Jewish and Muslim and immigrant friends andcolleagues and are uncomfortable with Trump's nativism. But they overlook what they don't like because they see Trump as a genuine change-maker in an area of great importance to them: American foreign policy.
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| Click Here for the Article by Pat Buchanan |
There has been a post-WW2 and post-cold-war majority consensus in the military and foreign policy establishment which had emphasized containment of the Soviets and then, after the collapse of the Soviets, a world-wide outreach to assert American hegemony and spread the blessings of democracy to the world backed by the overwhelming dominance of our military.
It served the interests of American business and it seemed like smart foreign policy. Democracies are good, free markets will help them and us both, and we nip problems in the bud, intervening when necessary because we have moral authority and military power--a great combination.
There are versions and degrees of this neoconservative philosophy, with Dick Cheney taking a stronger more assertive position than Hillary Clinton who is more assertive than Barrack Obama, but no major candidate has openly opposed this consensus--until Donald Trump. Trump argues many things, some inconsistent, but the general drift of his America First approach is that America should pull back from adventures in nation building and focus on the simple defense of unquestioned American interests. Protect the homeland, protect sea routes, protect key allies. Stop the habit of empire and colonialism. We shouldn't be fast to intervene in the messy business of other country's politics and government. Number one, we do not have the moral authority or the power, either one. Number two, our efforts do not serve American interests because they involve us in quagmires with endless practical and moral complications. Number three, it makes us a party to needless deaths and destruction in a form contrary to our own values; we arm the bad guys and become the bad guys. Number four, it motivates and empowers our enemies, so it backfires and makes everything worse.
Trump supporter Ron Maxwell put it this way:
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| President Trump. |
"If you believe that it is the duty and responsibility of the United States to be the policeman of the world, to spread democracy by military force in every corner of the globe, to forcibly remove dictators everywhere, to intervene militarily in foreign civil wars, to take sides between religious sects or deep-seated ethnic feuds, to use the American military to enforce a utopian world order by means of regime change and nation-building, then Clinton is your candidate.
If on the other hand, you believe the U.S. armed forces should be used only in defense of the United States and its national security (including its closest allies), then Donald Trump is your candidate." Ron Maxwell: Click here for the article: Trump, the Anti-War candidate
One principled theme of this argument is re-assertion of the central role of Congress--not the Executive--in deciding whether or not to go to war. This policy has the authority of having been explicitly written into the Constitution, plus it has a practical policy effect: wars require public buy-in which presumably would be slow to emerge unless vital American interests were involved. Do Americans really care enough about Kosovo and Serbia to take sides in their internal affairs, however ugly, with all the risks and corollaries that creates with nearby Russia? Do Americans really want to be arming Saudi Arabia so that it can better bomb Yemen? If so, let the president sell the policy to the public and to Congress and let them vote for the war and the means to fund it. The presumption is that the American people and its Congress want America to defend America, not go off sojourning for foreign monsters to destroy.
Hillary Clinton has made the argument that Trump is erratic and undisciplined and a risky choice as commander in chief, and Trump's apparent ignorance and unwillingness to learn or articulate a comprehensive foreign policy feed that meme. But the alternative view of this situation is that Trump has not been brainwashed and integrated into the grand program of American empire and become a pawn of the military-industrial complex, along with its foreign policy establishment. Trump is the risk of uncertainty. Hillary Clinton is the risk of her most certainly continuing a policy of engagement abroad that is creating enemies, doing objectively bad actions, and is quickly creating a long term risk to America much greater than radicalized Islam, or Communism, or global climate change. The policy is driving America bankrupt. We will go broke before we have a chance to drown in the rising sea waters.
Bottom line: Hillary is more risky than Trump. Hillary is wrong and Trump might not be.
Who thinks this way? Some intelligent, conscientious people who fit the demographic of urbane, sophisticated professional men and women who support Trump, not because he represents the Archie Bunker in their hearts but because they were anti-war during the Vietnam War, they watched the disaster of our Middle East policy and how the projection of American power on Russia's border helped create Putin, and who believe that the most secure America will be one that asserts America first, not American global hegemony. They are for Trump because they believe him to be the peace candidate.
These people exist. I have talked to them. If Hillary supporters wonder: who could possibly support Trump if they aren't also racist, misogynists? Well, this is some of them.
Tomorrow: another field report. Tomorrow it will be with a Marin County professional who describes his affluent golfing friends at the country club and what motivates them to support Trump.
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Podcast: We predicted the growing difficulty for Hillary:
Peter Sage and Thad Guyer go back and forth on whether the polls are merely a worrisome trend for Hillary, or a real disaster. Peter says that Trump's Hotel ribbon cutting was a triumph: early and below budget. Thad talks about the models that predicted this was likely to be a good year for the party out of power. And preview of coming attractions: what the losing party needs to do to remake its party.
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