I put 20 on him at 11/4 about 2 months back
The centre of American politics has collapsed
With rioting on the streets from far left and right, the Democrats must condemn it unequivocally to win back core voters
Andrew Sullivan
Monday August 31 2020, 12.01am BST, The Times
It has finally happened in America. We have lethal battles in the streets between the two tribes of our polarised politics. Iâm doing my best to convey the gist of what happened without justifying any of it. No excuse for vigilantism, for looting, rioting and arson. The truth is: even a few minutes of chaos and violence can contain a universe of confusing events, motives and dynamics. And yet it is the imperative of our present culture that we defend one side as blameless and the other as the source of all evil.
Iâm horribly conflicted on some issues. Iâm supportive of attempts to interrogate the sins of the past, in particular the gruesome legacy of slavery and segregation, and their persistent impact on the present. And in that sense, Iâm a supporter of the motives of the good folks involved with Black Lives Matter. But Iâm equally repelled by the insistent attempt by BLM and its ideological founders to dismiss the progress weâve made, to redescribe the American experiment in freedom as one utterly defined by racism, and to call the most tolerant country on the planet, with unprecedented diversity, a form of âwhite supremacyâ.
Iâm tired of hearing Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, say, as she did yesterday: âThe reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.â This is what Trump has long defended as âtruthful hyperboleâ â euphemism for a lie.
But hereâs one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits it disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. This comes first. If one party supports everything I believe in but doesnât believe in maintaining law and order, Iâll back a party that does. In that sense, Iâm a one-issue voter, because without law and order, there is no room for any other issue. Disorder always begets more disorder. And if liberals do not defend order, fascists will.
When I watched the Democratic convention and heard close to nothing about ending the present lawlessness, I noted the silence. This huge blind spot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology that it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been and redescribe it as a âslaveocracyâ, most ordinary people will rightly balk.
One of the most devastating lines in President Trumpâs convention speech was this: âTonight I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?â A cheap shot, yes. But in the present context, a political bullseye. The key theme of the convention was reminding people of the American narrative that once was. Yes, it was unbelievably vulgar, but it was extremely effective. Mike Pence, the vice-president, gave us a vision of America that was a souped-up Disney special from the early 1960s. And look at the icons Trump invoked: Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett. In the midst of a culture being redescribed by the left as âwhite supremacyâ, and in a moment of arson and rioting, it felt like a kind of balm.
All this reassurance played out against the backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, Minneapolis, where a suicide led to looting, and Washington, where mobs of wokesters chanted obscenities and demanded bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These fanatics are now in part the face of the Democrats: self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to The New York Times , are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them.
Remember the moment this summer when The New York Times caved to its activist staff and fired James Bennet? Itâs no accident this was over an op-ed that argued that if New York would not stop the rioting, the feds should step in to restore law and order.
It is just as true that the president has shown a similarly cavalier and even more cynical attitude to urban unrest. In the case of the protests outside the White House this summer, he deployed law enforcement so crudely he seemed to want to inflame it still further for political reasons. Heâs more than usually aware that chaos is always good for authoritarians, and has delighted in excoriating Democratic mayors and governors for tolerating it. He has also sent signals to law enforcement that he supports abuse of suspects, and ignored the real threat of white nationalism in police ranks, and of terroristic white nationalist movements in general.
I find the interaction between some police and vigilantes in Kenosha deeply disturbing. Non-college-educated white men make up a lot of the police and military in the US â and Trump has big margins of support among them and signals he will always have their back. As the far left has indiscriminately smeared the police, and promised to abolish or defund them, they have helped Trump co-opt them in a terrifying dynamic. As Trump was eulogising a murdered policeman, the leftist mob outside was in the midst of a âF*** the policeâ demo. If the Dems want to fight an election on that choice theyâre engaged on a suicide mission.
This is all uncomfortably like some aspects of Weimar. The centre has collapsed. Armed gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their extremes because they hate each other so much. The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders that a long period of lockdown will unleash; a failure of nerve by liberals to defend the values of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of demagogues and bigots.
What most people want in that kind of nerve-racking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out. In Trump, we have someone who would happily trample any liberal democratic norm to do it. And the left seems to be all but begging him to do it â if only to prove them right.
Yes, we still have an election. But barring a landslide victory for either party, it will be the beginning and not the end of the raw struggle for power. In a close race, Trump will never concede, and if he is somehow forced to, he will mount a campaign from the outside to delegitimise the incoming president. If Biden wins, we may have one last chance for the centre to hold â and what few hopes I have rest on this.
But Biden is weak and a party man to his core, and has surrendered to the far left at almost every turn. Youâd be a fool to believe he could resist their fanaticism in office, or that if he does, he wonât be toast in a struggle to succeed him. And on the central question of civil order, he blew it last week and so did the Dems. Biden needs a dramatic gesture that puts daylight between him and the violent left. He has indeed condemned the riots, with caveats. But the caveats have to go. And the sooner the better.
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The reaction of the Irish media if President Trump is re-elected will be hysterical . I donât like the Trump and hope Biden wins but imagine Matt Cooper
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@bandage could we take back @sidney for the 2 weeks after Trump gets re-elected?
For me, if Trump wins then the violence never stops, the country falls off the cliff.
Their only hope would be if he decides that heâs won the election now and doesnât need to care what anyone thinks so he sends in the troops to portland, but that would only he a short term fix. Theyâll probably end up having an annual purge.
I still think Trump will lose but if the Dems manage to lose this one they just need to wind up. Itâs unbelievable how politically stupid so many of the party are.
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Itâs a bit like the way momentum hijacked the Labour Party in the uk. More interested in celebrity endorsements and woke sjw policies. What used be their base has been abandoned. Brexit and Trump are inevitable consequences but instead of self evaluation itâs doubling down. At least in Britain there seems to be some hope with Corbyns removal but the DNC are still living in la la land.
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President elect Joe, Trump will ate him in a debate
#TrumpsAmerica
After he called John McCain a loser for being captured in Vietnam nothing should come as a surprise.
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Could be close
No question which side the military will be on in the civil war
Never underestimate the stupidity of a grunt
Good article by the ever reliable Janan Ganesh reprinted in the Irish Times today.
Trump drags Biden to a place he doesnât want to be
By having to address law-and-order subtleties, Democratic candidate is in wrong fight
Janan Ganesh
During a verbose half-century in public life, Joe Biden has never made such a succinct case for his election.
âAsk yourself,â he said in Pennsylvania on Monday, âDo I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?â In 16 words â the last one delivered with a thespian frown â the US Democratic presidential hopeful alluded to a long career of moderation. The Republican friends. The orthodox foreign policy. The prison-building crime bill. There is no less plausible Jacobin in the party.
Everything about the line was perfect, in fact, except its necessity. Two months away from an election, a candidate should not have to distance himself from political violence. As deftly as he did it, one of Washingtonâs old saws â âIf youâre explaining, youâre losingâ â feels dangerously apt.
What should trouble Biden is not the recent narrowing of his poll lead over President Donald Trump. Some tightening is natural as the election nears. Far more ominous is the change in the subject of national discourse.
As recently as May, Bidenâs attitude to protesters and those who police them was not at all germane. Nor was anything, come to think of it, bar the coronavirus pandemic. That he must now explicitly disown rioters shows how much the terms of political trade have moved against him over the summer. What had promised to be a single-issue election â a plebiscite on the handling of Covid-19 â has spread to more familiar themes of crime and race. The issue of the day is less public health than public order. To that extent, a drowning president has a life line.
âSelf-ownâ
It is, to be clear, a frayed and tenuous one. Biden has been an eerily stable frontrunner in first primary and then national polls for most of the past two years. His doubters must entertain the possibility he is quite good at politics. Nor has the president much to brag about as a keeper of the peace. It is one thing to deplore chaos on the streets from outside government, as Richard Nixon did in 1968. To do it as the most powerful person in the republic amounts to what I believe is called a âself-ownâ.And yet the more we parse Trumpâs record on this matter, the less we discuss the pandemic. The numbers have lost their power to shock. With about 4 per cent of the worldâs population, the US now accounts for between one-fifth and one-quarter of its known Covid-19 cases.
According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, Britain is the only other rich nation (among 14 surveyed) that believes its government has botched the coronavirus response. Other than the world wars and the Depression, no living American has experienced a larger historic event. And still the election is increasingly about something else.
Biden is fighting gamely, then, but on the wrong ground. As long as the pandemic crowded out other subjects, Trump was not just vulnerable. Democrats themselves were united. Almost all of them see the crisis as its own case for universal healthcare, labour protections and what populists have slandered as the âadministrative stateâ.
On the suite of issues we might file under âidentityâ, though, this is hardly a single party or movement at all. It is an unstable truce between old liberals, who envisage a colour-blind republic, and a younger set that views this as so much cover for structural racism. A faultline that runs through such Democratic strongholds as the American campus and the elite newspaper was always going to rise like a vein in the party itself.
Last monthâs Democratic convention was a delicately scripted attempt to avoid offending either the partyâs moderates or the activist left. Bidenâs Pennsylvania speech was a more explicit pitch to the former.
Either way, the mere act of addressing this subject amounts to a strategic loss for the party. In the campaign of Republican dreams, Biden spends the next two months explaining that âdefund the policeâ means something subtler, that âno justice, no peaceâ is just a slogan, not a threat, and that neither is Democratic policy. For the first time since he effectively clinched the nomination in March, Biden is on the defensive. And a once-in-a-century pandemic has lost its monopoly on public debate.
An election is often understood as pitting against each other two answers to the same question â classically, âwho will best run the economy?â Really, though, it is a contest to set the question. Biden wants voters to ask, âwho will fix the pandemic?â Trump wants them to wonder who will secure their cities. That the more pressing question is even in doubt attests to the presidentâs momentum. â Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020
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Together the Military industrial complex and the hippy woke brigade will be unstoppable
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It Trump has both these against him he canât be all bad .
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The generals havenât had a war for four years they are itching to bomb someone.
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