In 1932, the two top presidential vote getters in Germany were Adolph Hitler (Nazi) and Ernst Thälmann (Communist). Well, Donald Trump is no nazi, and Bernie Sanders no communist, but it says a lot about the state of America that the Donald and the Bern are the two hottest acts in America these days. Incomes that have been flatlining for a decade, seasoned with random acts of terror, have the American people in an unattractive state, desperate for scapegoats and settling, in both cases, on job-stealing foreigners.
Bernie, of course, is not a nativist/racist, unlike Trump. But it’s sad to see a self-proclaimed socialist, which was once the most international of persuasions, aggressively pushing a “good jobs for Americans, and let the rest of the world go starve” meme. Sanders’ “thinking” is a pathetically limited vision of a zero-sum world economy, in which there are X number of “good jobs” in the world, and our goal should be to get our hands on as many of those good jobs as we can. Sanders is a crank who plays down his good features—his opposition to anti-terrorist hysteria and the American foreign policy establishment’s continuing obsession with “regime change,” for example—because he can’t stop talking about capitalist control of the media, which is, of course, why everyone in the world doesn’t think exactly like Bernie Sanders. Bernie, you’re not in high school any more, but, at 73, I’m guessing you’ll never change.
Trump, of course, is simply awful, but it looks more and more like he will win the Republican nomination. If he takes Iowa, I would say the game is already more than half over (the latest poll shows Trump and Cruz tied at about 30, far ahead of the rest of the pack). A lot of Republicans are trying to pretend that Trump wouldn’t be so bad, which just shows how desperate they are. Trump is an intensely authoritarian personality, and it’s not at all hard to imagine him having congressmen and senators arrested. Newt Gingrich pioneered the idea of using “constitutional” powers in a proudly unscrupulous manner, and the Tea Party, with their “burn it down and start over” mentality, pushed the idea along. Trump would simply take it to the next level.
One can “hope” that the Republican establishment would prefer Hillary Clinton, who, with her deep ties to both Wall Street and the American foreign policy establishment, is basically George W in a pantsuit. But the Right has spent so many years hating her, picturing her election as the ultimate nightmare, that it will hard for them to switch gears. It’s fun watching the Right suffer, but to have to put your faith in Hillary Clinton, well, no one said the gods are kind. Because they aren’t.
