Post-Trump Populist Conservatism?

"But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You'd have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

Tucker Carlson at Fox News warns viewers that "socialism is exactly what we're going to get, and very soon unless a group of responsible people in our political system reforms the American economy in a way that protects normal people."

At National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks this over.

"This Open Secret"

"They know what is wrong with Donald Trump. They know why it's dangerous. They understand—or most of them do—the damage he can do to a system of governance that relies to a surprising degree on norms rather than rules, and whose vulnerability has been newly exposed. They know—or should—about the ways Trump's vanity and avarice are harming American interests relative to competitors like Russia and China, and partners and allies in North America, Europe, and the Pacific.
"They know. They could do something: hearings, investigations, demands for financial or health documents, subpoenas. Even the tool they used against the 42nd president, for failings one percent as grave as those of the 45th: impeachment.
"They know. They could act. And they don't.

James Fallows at The Atlantic laments congressional Republicans "failure of responsibility."

As does David Frum more generally.

Putin After Mitt

"Just four years ago, Mitt Romney was warning that Russia was 'our No. 1 geopolitical foe' and saying, 'Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I'm not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin.' The statement was roundly mocked by progressives at the time, and while the 'no. 1' designation may still be up for debate, Romney's statement at the very least looks a great deal more prescient than he was given credit for. In the wake of Putin's annexation of Crimea, the DNC hacks, and Russian intervention in Syria, many of the liberals who mocked Romney are now saying much the same thing.
"Clinton was perhaps cynical in invoking the most famous of Republican Cold Warriors on Thursday, saying, 'What would Ronald Reagan say about a Republican nominee who attacks American's generals and heaps praise on Russia’s president?' but it does seem likely the Gipper would be taken aback."

Inspired by the Trump campaign, David A. Graham at The Atlantic looks at the growing ardor conservatives have for Vladimir Putin.

"Taking a Hard Pass"

"Some other recent conventions have had several lawmakers who notably skipped their party's nominating event. In 2008, many vulnerable GOP senators didn't attend in a year where outgoing President George W. Bush's approval rating was abysmal. In 2012, many moderate Democrats also skipped out on President Obama's convention.
"But never before in recent history have so many prominent party officials boycotted the event or found convenient other reasons not to attend because they either didn't approve of or were uncomfortable with their party's presumptive nominee."

Jessica Taylor at NPR reports on Republican no-shows at the party's convention.

"Electorally Speaking, Vice Presidential Candidates Seem to Matter at the Margins"

"If Clinton and Trump are wise, it will be those candidates who populate their shortlists–rather than gimmicks and 'game changers.'"

Mark Z. Barabak in the Los Angeles Times interviews Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko, authors of The VP Advantage: How Running Mates Influence Home State Voting in Presidential Elections.

Return to Romney

"This meant that states had rights enshrined in the Constitution, but they also, like citizens, had grave responsibilities. The Michigan governor would not endorse conservative Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, because of his appeals to Democratic segregationists. And when Romney was in Richard Nixon's cabinet, he drove the president to distraction with his highly public efforts to integrate housing in all-white suburbs.
"As president of the American Motors Company, briefly among Detroit's most innovative car makers, Romney believed corporations had multiple stakeholders, as described by Rick Perlstein. If they are people, corporations also constitute a community of individuals who depend on each other. 'Each owes a debt to the other,' a biographer quoted Romney as saying. Hoover's rugged individualism, Romney thought, was 'nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.'"

John Stoehr in The American Conservative pines for George Romney's "liberal Republicanism, an all but extinct school of political thought that could once again help the GOP find its way."

"The Snake Has Started Eating Its Own Tail"

"Conservatives didn't always hate the media. The idea of a 'liberal media' is a relative recent innovation in conservative thought compared to more time-tested tropes like nationalism and celebrations of business success. Right-wing Americans tended to see the news media as their champion during the New Deal era, when the Republican Party had a weakened national presence while ideological opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's policies was most clearly articulated by powerful press barons as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Medill Patterson, and Robert R. McCormick. Newspaper columnists like Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky—known for their attacks on FDR, labor unions, and alleged communist infiltration of the government—were widely viewed by conservatives as lonely, heroic muckrakers fighting against a corrupt regime. The comic strip Little Orphan Annie, created by ardent Roosevelt-hater Harold Gray, often featured heroic newspaper editors and reporters fighting against nefarious liberal politicians and devious social reformers.
"A small trickle of conservative media criticism emerged after World War II when magazines like Human Events and National Review started arguing that elite publications like The New York Times and Time magazine were insufficiently anti-communist. But the minor current of conservative complaints about liberal media bias became a full flowing river with Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964."

Jeet Heer in The New Republic looks at the legacy of conservative criticism of journalists.

"Conservatism Itself Has Lost Its Identity to Politics"

"The mythology promulgated by the conservative movement has it that a candidate who naturally expresses both Christian conservatism and Goldwater-Reagan conservatism must be out there somewhere. But the record of three decades since Reagan won the nomination with support from both camps suggests otherwise: in a full generation, there has never been a candidate equally appealing to both kinds of conservative. What reason is there to think there ever will be one?"

Daniel McCarthy in The American Conservative looks at Republican factionalism.

"The Party of Tough Luck, Pal"

"So where is this coming from? The class traitors guiding the Republican Party, and the harsh new federal budget unveiled this week, usually promote their policies using personal anecdotes. Their condescension toward the poor springs from their own narratives: They are virtuous because they made it, or vice versa. Those who haven't made a similar leap are weaklings. It's a variant of Mitt Romney's view that 47 percent of Americans are moochers. Stripped to its essence, it's a load of loathing for their former class, delivered on a plate of platitudes."


Timothy Egan in The New York Times criticizes the "Horatio Algerians for the new Gilded Age."

He's Mr. One Percent/ He Ran for President

"On the off-chance this nonsense still needs rebutting, let’s be very clear: There are plenty of reliable Republicans who get heaping piles of government goodies, as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has explained: seniors who love their Medicare, veterans who depend on VA benefits, corporations that gorge on lavish subsidies. Believe it or not, there are even wealthy financiers out there who don’t pay income taxes on their loot and who deduct the mortgage interest on their vacation homes. (Not that I have anyone specific in mind.) Cohn points out that Romney himself promised an exceedingly large 'gift' to elderly Republican voters: restoring $718 billion worth of savings from Medicare that Obama had achieved through the Affordable Care Act."

Noam Scheiber in The New Republic tears into Mitt Romney for Romney's explanation for losing the election.

"A Contempt for the Electorate"

"Mr. Romney, by contrast, seems to be betting that voters have no memories, poor arithmetic skills and a general inability to look behind the curtain. We hope the results Tuesday prove him wrong."

The Washington Post's Editorial Board denounces Mitt Romney's campaign.


"In his closing argument today, Mitt Romney unveiled the passive voice to argue why President Obama’s reelection would portend terrible things. Pay close attention, English teachers: 'The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy.'

"Shutdown and default will be threatened, you say? By who, exactly? Well, by the Republicans in Congress, of course.

"You can see why Romney would omit this detail from his closing pitch. Since taking control of the House of representatives in 2011, Republicans have engaged in a de facto campaign of economic sabotage. They abandoned their previous belief, shared with the entire macroeconomic forecasting field, that short-term deficit reduction harms a depressed economy. They turned the debt ceiling vote, once an opportunity for mere posturing, into a hostage crisis threatening dire economic consequences worldwide.

"David Frum joked last spring that their argument was 'Vote Republican. It's too dangerous to leave us in opposition.' And now this is the Republican candidate’s actual argument! Except he omits the 'us' via the passive voice."

Jonathan Chait at New York concurs.


"The voters, of course, may well recoil against these cynical manipulations at the polls. But win or lose, the Romney campaign has placed a big and historic bet on the proposition that facts can be ignored, more or less, with impunity."

And Kevin M. Kruse in The New York Times excoriates Romney's post-truth campaign.

"The Oilfield in the Placenta"

"In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains."

Rick Perlstein in The Baffler connects political and commerical mendacity.

"Judgment and Nerve."

"In an unusual way, the success of Obama’s first term hangs in large part on his reelection bid, as a President Romney would probably kill his grandest achievement of providing health insurance to those Americans too sick or poor to acquire it in the marketplace. So any evaluation of Obama’s term before the election must be provisional.

"What can be said without equivocation is that Obama has proven himself morally, intellectually, temperamentally, and strategically. In my lifetime, or my parents’, he is easily the best president."

Jonathan Chait at New York makes his case for President Obama's reelection and against Mitt Romney.

E. J. Dionne, Jr., endorses Obama at Time.

"By any reasonable standard, no president since LBJ accomplished as much on domestic policy. And LBJ didn’t have to contend with the same political obstacles. The public wasn’t as skeptical of government. Conservatives didn’t have (quite) as much power to obstruct. Obama made plenty of mistakes, about policy and about tactics, but he also fought the good fight—and, more important, he did so when it was difficult. He didn’t let the auto industry die, even though the polls said it would be unpopular. He didn’t let Republicans roll him on food stamps on Medicaid, even though it would have helped him achieve an elusive spending deal. He didn’t drop health care reform—not in January, 2009, when advisers warned him it would be difficult; not in August, 2009, when the Tea Party protests exploded; and not in January, 2010, when Scott Brown’s election made enactment seem impossible.
"Obama staked his political life on these gambits. With this election, progressives can help decide whether he made the right bet. And if they don't? The damage to progressive causes could last a long time.
"Change in American politics is difficult, because the constitution divides power among three branches of government. Progressive change is almost impossible, because the big money in politics typically lines up on the other side. If progressives don’t reward Obama for what the positions he took—if they don’t turn out for him on election day—future reformers will take notice. And when they confront similar situations, when the polls start to look bad and advisers tell them to back off an important goal, they won't push forward defiantly. They'll buckle."

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic adds his take.

Heck of a Job

"What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They’re right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies."

Jonathan Chait at New York explores how Hurricane Sandy could affect the election.

As do Noam Scheiber, Alec MacGillis, and Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic.

Four More Years

The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post endorse a second term for President Obama.

The Onion endorses John Edwards.

First Freedom?

"As both Mr. Clinton’s and Mr. Bush’s uses of the phrase suggest, the ostensible reason for ascribing primacy to religion among constitutionally protected freedoms is its place as the first mentioned in the Bill of Rights. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s 'first freedom' claim, the actual Constitution does not say anything about religious liberty except to state in Article 6 that no religious 'test' will be required of officeholders. Nor does the document once use the word 'God,' an omission that some 18th-century Americans decried. ('A Papist, a Mohomotan, a Deist, yea an Atheist' might someday even become president, one critic warned.)
"The First Amendment, adopted four years later in 1791, does protect 'the free exercise' of religion–but only after barring government from 'establishing' religion. Viewed strictly in terms of sequence, the First Amendement’s 'first freedom' might be seen as freedom from rather than freedom of religion."

Peter Manseau at The New York Times questions the emphasis by politicians on religious liberty.

"All He Offers Is a Hand-Waving Cover Designed to Justify the Infliction of Catastrophic Harm upon the Poorest and Sickest among Us"

"Ryan assumes that increasing the role of the market and decreasing the role of government will increase upward mobility—the wealthier people can get, the easier it will be to get wealthy or to fall out of wealth. But he doesn’t argue it explicitly, and for good reason: There’s no reason to believe it. In fact, the evidence all suggests exactly the opposite. Economic mobility is higher in countries with higher levels of equality and lower in countries with lower equality."

Jonathan Chait at New York criticizes Paul Ryan's speech about poverty.

And Timothy Noah at The New Republic connects Ryan to "inequality denialism."

"Our System Isn’t Designed for It"

"Essentially, Republicans looked around when Obama was sworn in and saw political opportunity. They had lost the White House and faced steep Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. In a way, this made them weak; they had no power to advance their own agenda. But it also gave them strength; they had considerable power to stall Obama’s agenda, and with economic anxiety rampant, it seemed logical to assume voters would blame the ruling party if things didn’t turn around quickly.

"The result is that Republicans devoted themselves not to constructively criticizing Democratic proposals, crafting feasible alternatives, and accepting olive branches from the administration but instead to cranking up the hysteria and treating virtually every Obama initiative as a step toward socialism. They matched this with legislative obstruction, tying up scores of nominations, forcing a record number of filibusters, and forcing Democrats to pass their agenda on party-line votes."

Steve Kornacki in Salon discusses the ramifications of rewarding Republican obstructionism.

And Timothy Noah in The New Republic calls out David Brooks for arguing in favor of extortion.

The Right-Wing Will Always Be with Us

"Should Romney lose in November, a far happier liberal scenario can be entertained: For all their qualms about stimulus spending and Obamacare, perhaps voters still prefer the party of modest government activism to the party of no government. Polls provide support for this view. In the latest Pew survey, the GOP as a whole is almost as unpopular as the tea party: Only 27 percent of Americans describe themselves as Republican (as opposed to 31 percent Democratic and 36 percent Independent).
"One can almost write the obituaries for the right that would appear after a Romney defeat right now. Even the millions spent by Karl Rove’s sugar daddies in the post–Citizens United era had failed to sell a far-right GOP to American voters. Once again the republic has been saved from the crazies by good old bipartisan centrist common sense.
"Dream on."

Frank Rich in New York argues that "conservatives are the cockroaches of the American body politic, poised to outlast us all."

But E.J. Dionne, Jr., in The Washington Post writes that at least the "right wing has lost the election of 2012."

Bow Down before the One You Serve

"The call raises the question of whether the Romney campaign is complicit in the corporate attempts to influence employees' votes that have been recently making headlines. On Sunday, In These Times broke the news that Koch Industries mailed at least 45,000 employees a voter information packet that included a flyer endorsing Romney and a letter warning, 'Many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences [of a bad election result], including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills.' Last week, Gawker obtained an email in which the CEO of Westgate Resorts, Florida billionaire David Siegel, informed his 7,000 employees that an Obama victory would likely lead to layoffs at his company. This week, MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes unveiled an email by ASG Software Solutions CEO Arthur Allen in which he, too, warned employees that an Obama second term would spell layoffs."

Mike Elk at In These Times reports that Mitt Romney promoted the idea that business owner tell employees how to vote.