stickdog

Excerpt:

The power elites think you are cannon fodder, in one way or another.

I’ve been reflecting on all those people I see around me advocating for bloody violent conflict from the comfort of their armchairs, TV studio, or bench in Parliament. How can anyone respect these people?

Right or wrong, “just war” or otherwise, at least in medieval times many of the leaders actually put their skin in the game.

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They either sincerely (and stupidly) believed their Popes or Gods, or they just really, really wanted some more land and gold. “Might is right!”, especially when you have the “divine right” of a King.

Today, when the power elites want something (usually related to oil or profits for the Military-Industrial Complex), they can just print money (thereby lowering your wealth) and recoup their outlays with war profits from all those juicy 'defence' stocks. Of course, this requires selling a story to the inevitable cannon fodder—flag-draped plebs—and to the foreign—usually brown-faced—'collateral damage.' And the plebs fall for it time and again. Will it be forevermore?

And it's not just the usual career politicians who play this game; the 'intelligentsia' are often worse. Since it's that day of the year again, I found myself reading some of Wilfred Owen's poems, and I was reminded that W.B. Yeats had excluded him from the 'Oxford Book of Modern Verse,' a collection curated by the literary elites. Yeats argued:

'In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies... If war is necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever...'

Thus spoke the man whose nationalistic literary revival enabled the fatal Easter Rising. He would have us believe that those who died found it a 'joy' to die, but for some strange reason, he opted out of the actual fighting. He did write a poem about it, which led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize a few years later, and he lived a long and comfortable life among the political and literary power elites. During this time, he advocated for Fascism and Mussolini, even writing marching songs for the Irish Fascists known as the 'Blue Shirts’.

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Excerpt:

Matt Yglesias suggests that people still underrate the importance of the 2016 presidential election. It’s hard for me to believe that he really thinks that; not a day goes by in which rich angry liberals fail to blame everyone else but themselves for 2016. But it’s his list of “some of Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic handicaps” that supposedly cost her the election that’s really risible - “the emails, the decades-long poor relationship with the non-ideological press, the sense that she should be held responsible for stuff her husband did.”

This is, shall we say, selective. In particular, it leaves out the perhaps-salient fact that Hillary Clinton is and has always been one of the most divisive national politicians in the history of public polling. From the time she arrived on the scene as First Lady, to her run as New York’s junior senator, to her role as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, to her twerking, gaffe-ing, galactically entitled presidential run, Hillary Clinton has always been profoundly unpopular with broad swaths of the electorate. Her traditional high favorability among Democrats was a secondary benefit to her primary campaign - her biggest strength being the overwhelming attitude among Democrat insiders that it was “her turn” - but could do little to help her in a general election where her lack of favorability among independents doomed her.

None of this was a secret in 2016, not her unpopularity and not the fact that she was being handed the nomination because she was a member of a powerful political dynasty that had immense influence on the Democratic party. The will of the voters was secondary at best. The Morning Consult, from that year:

Clinton Is Seen as Untrustworthy and Corrupt

For voters who have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton, their dislike can be boiled down to one word: trust. Almost half (47 percent) of voters who have an unfavorable view of Clinton don’t think she is trustworthy and almost four in 10 voters (39 percent) say she is corrupt….

It’s little surprise that 50 percent of Republicans say she is untrustworthy, but that was also the top reason for 47 percent of independents and 39 percent of Democrats who have an unfavorable view of Clinton. Republicans and independents, at 45 percent and 39 percent, respectively, also believe she is corrupt, compared with 25 percent of Democrats.

A little over one-fifth of voters (21 percent) said Clinton changes her positions when it’s politically convenient. At 26 percent, Democrats were slightly more likely to criticize Clinton for that reason, compared with 23 percent of independents and 18 percent of Republicans.

It’s mystifying, how little the conventional wisdom on 2016 reflects this plain reality - that Hillary Clinton lost because voters don’t like her.

There was ample evidence, during that Democratic primary, to predict that her periodic lack of favor would doom her in the general. Here’s a Gallup graphic that shows her popularity over the course of her career in the national spotlight.

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Her favorable-unfavorable numbers were bad, period. You could be forgiven though for looking at such graphics and thinking that she simply was inconsistent over time. The trouble with saying that her popularity is just inconsistent, rather than a clear disadvantage, is that a graph like this is exactly the last thing you want in a candidate running against Donald Trump in 2016, particularly given that she was clearly entering another period of unpopularity right before the election began in earnest. The Democrats enjoyed the benefits of incumbency and eight years of a president who, despite engendering a lot of conservative insanity, was broadly popular and oversaw a slack but steady economic recovery and a return to normalcy after the habitual insanity of the Bush years. Incumbency + no recession + no major wars is a hard bag to fumble, but the Democrats managed to fumble it. The symbol of the Democratic party shouldn’t be a donkey but rather a man tripping over his own dick.

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It’s common for people to defend Clinton by saying that her unpopularity is a result of sexism. That is, no doubt, partially true, although she’s also a remarkably clumsy politician. I don’t doubt that sexism has hurt her career in myriad ways. The trouble with that is that it simply doesn’t matter. Elections are what they are’ public sentiment is what it is. If you insist that this was the most important election of our lifetimes, as Yglesias is here, then you have to focus on what is rather than on what ought to be. And the reality was plain: Clinton presented genuinely unique vulnerabilities as a presidential candidate given how many people in the country actively disliked her. For or fair, that was just true.

But we weren’t allowed to point out the clear danger of the moment because the media decided early in the cycle that any questions about Clinton’s electability were simply a stalking horse for misogyny. The party and its loyalists insisted that it was sexist to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Clinton had severe vulnerabilities in basic public sentiment; here’s a version from the NYT. Under the conditions of 2016, with the incumbency advantages and Trump’s unique issues, you would have wanted to elect someone who simply didn’t have the level of negative baggage that Clinton did, someone who the country generally saw as inoffensive. Yglesias nominates Martin O’Malley, but of course Bernie Sanders fit the bill as well. Sanders beat Trump in poll after poll, and cleaned up with independents, which would seem to be important in a presidential election. Clinton apparatchiks have always scoffed at those polls, asserting without evidence that Republican oppo would have sunk him without caring much that Republican oppo was already sinking Hillary.

Bernie, of course, also would have energized the youth like no other, setting up the Democrats for durable gains down the road with that demographic.

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