Trump & Fascism: The Basics

An extraordinary thing happened during the recently-concluded election cycle: the rise of Donald Trump inspired some in the mainstream corporate press to utter the "f" word. Not "fornicating" but "fascism." This proved a brief flirtation; a few months later, those in the press have long since dropped this talk and have largely tried to go back to some semblance of business-as-usual while being tasked with covering a "president" who is entirely inexplicable in those terms. Applying the word to him was hyperbolic and arguably even irresponsible but not, as some would have it, because there's any great distance between Trump and fascism. Trying to cover  Trump without reference to fascism is, in fact, like trying to ignore an angry gorilla while crammed into a very small closet with it.

That isn't to say Trump is a fascist, just that the matter was handled indelicately and now needs to be handled with greater care, instead of just being ignored. Trump is the darling of the "alt-right," much of which is overtly fascist.[1] This isn't coincidental or in any way unintentional--he all-but-openly courted these elements during the campaign, often in ways that would have been political suicide for any other modern presidential candidate. Trump has a much larger fanbase among a faction of what's considered the "regular" right that would properly be described as protofascist--not the whole hog but well on its way. And that's Trump himself, a protofascist who, at present, lacks some of the important elements of the real thing.

"Fascism" is one of the most repeated but least understood words in political discourse, perhaps second only to "socialism" in words whose meaning has been almost entirely lost to relentless, politically-motivated misuse. As far back as the 1940s, George Orwell famously lamented that in common usage, it has come to mean merely "something not desirable." For decades, it was hurled as a multipurpose term of abuse, first by both conservative and liberal factions, then, for a long time, by liberals and leftists. In more recent years (in the U.S., at least), it has primarily been conservatives and rightists spewing it like a grudge. Reduced to virtual meaninglessness, its emptiness encouraged people with too much time on their hands to fill it with all manner of nonsense. Thus at a point in history when it has become a more important subject than it has been in decades, people aren't just uninformed about it, they're often very badly misinformed. This isn't just troublesome, it's potentially dangerous.

Any effort to define fascism as a body of ideas must contend with the fact that one of its defining elements is a seething anti-intellectualism and a fundamental anti-rationalism that sometimes masquerades as a faux-rationalism, travestying the real thing but counterfeiting it in the service of the fascist cause. Fascism prioritizes action over reflection. Its basic antagonism toward serious, informed thought means it isn't so much a cohesive ideology as it is an impulse; reactionary, to use another word that has gone out of fashion in common political discourse. Any discussion of fascism must account for this. Few of those that occur in internet forums ever do.

Oxford defines fascism as "an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization." While not really incorrect, that's far too general and incomplete, as dictionary definitions will tend to be. Among other things, fascism is a movement, something with which that definition doesn't reckon at all. To the extent that such definitions feed that vacuum that has developed around the word, it may do more harm than good.[2]

Presenting itself as "radical," even "revolutionary," fascism is militant far-right sentiment on legs. The fascist is ultranationalistic, which is the most important thing to understand about him and the source from which nearly everything else about him flows. He despises modern liberal democracy, which he insists has failed and betrayed the people, and calls for national renewal by sweeping it aside and replacing it with an authoritarian regime. He holds that radicals, liberals, labor unions, immigrants, democrats, racial or ethnic minorities, sexual "deviants," non-conformists, women who don't understand their place is in the kitchen and bearing male children, those measured as less than patriotic, not of the right ethnicity or religion, those pesky "intellectuals" with all their ideas about things, etc. are, by their mere existence, an attack on the established institutions and traditions (or imagined institutions and traditions) of the particular cultural milieu chauvinistically favored by the fascists--enemies who have no place in society. Fascists foster a cult of aggrievement against these "enemies," who are relentlessly demonized and scapegoated as a rationale for stamping them out in the name of that project of national renewal and are willing to employ an incredible amount of violence, often up to and including mass murder, to crush them. As Benito Mussolini put it, "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better." All of the fundamental values of the liberal society--freedom, self-determination, democracy, diversity, tolerance, openness, free inquiry--are held in contempt by the fascist, who projects strength, resolve and moral clarity against what he sees as weakness, softness, incompetence, betrayal, decadence, idiocy, relativism, appeasement, impurity, indecision, indecency, bleeding heart-ism and that Great Other--that which is outside that favored milieu. The fascist typically indulges in a perverse Romanticism that revels in the imagined glories of some mythologized past and seeks to recapture them. He embraces martial values, hyper-masculinity and glorifies in war and conquest--means of proving strength, superiority, heroism. The fascist venerates heroism; in his story, he's the hero who is going to save civilization from these evils.

Fascist movements tend to congregate around charismatic demagogues who rise to power preaching this message and presenting themselves, rather than any specific political program, as the living embodiment of it. Because these movements are tied to the cultures from which they emerge, some specific details about the various permutations of fascism will differ but they're a bit like slasher movies; it may not be quite accurate to say of them "if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all," but it ain't far off the mark.

That's fascism, a far-right movement that preaches national renewal by means of the destruction of the liberal society, the suppression of the left and the adoption of an authoritarian state run along ultranationalistic lines. Hopefully, this makes clear how much any brief, positivist description--like, for example, the previous sentence--necessarily leaves on the cutting-room floor and helps knock some of the ambiguity out of the subject.

Nearly everything beyond this is merely ad hoc, and the failure to understand this is where the efforts of so many of the internet's amateur lexicographers fail. It's hard to do history and political science when you don't know either, and the matter of fascism is further complicated by the almost-constant presence of politically motivated revisionism that actively seeks to take advantage of the general ignorance of the subject for partisan advantage. In the name of further demystifying the matter, some of the many hashes made of fascism are worth some attention here.

A popular one is an effort to define it via a structural model and this hash's Exhibit A-Z is the following quote by Mussolini:

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

The first big problem: While Mussolini did put forth the idea of a "corporate" or, more typically, a "corporativist" state, this quote isn't real. It appears nowhere in the recorded utterances of Benito Mussolini. The next: Those selling this notion of fascism invariably treat "corporate power" as a reference to modern business corporations, a reading that is entirely alien to fascist corporativism. A repudiation of socialism, the theoretical fascist "corporativist" state was one in which sectors of society were organized into corporate entities that made a pretense of representing these various interests but, of course, these entities would be created and run by the fascists themselves. Fascists don't do democracy.

That misperception regarding "corporate power" is often fed by another stream of commentary offered initially by Marxists who presented fascism as a form of capitalism in crisis, proposing a narrative wherein the established Big Money interests, feeling threatened by socialists and other radical reformers, turn to fascism in order to smite these foes and protect their interests. That basic narrative is largely correct. The support of the, broadly, capitalist class is typically critical in bringing fascist movements to power, after which the money-men enter into a mutually profitable arrangement with the regime that develops.[3] Where the cruder Marxists sometimes collapse into hash is in suggesting that the fascist states were merely the puppets of that capitalist class, a preposterous proposition. The money-men embraced the fascists movements and were made even wealthier by them but whenever a dispute arose between they and the government, the regime got the last word. While, in practice, these regimes are invariably pro-capitalist, this is usually just part of fascism's larger alliance with traditional conservative elites, not some doctrinal commitment to capitalism itself.[4]

Another hash--one of the most common, in fact--is made by those who attempt to present fascism as an economic doctrine or to examine it as any sort of cohesive economic system. Fascism isn't an economic system, it isn't an economic doctrine and it has no economic doctrine. As Hitler put it, "the basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all." Fascists aren't intellectuals sitting around reading economic texts--certainly not writing them--or putting any real effort into trying to learn how economies work. "Economic policy" under these regimes is ad hoc--whatever it takes at the moment to meet the goals (or perceived goals) of the day. Policy could radically change on a dime with circumstances then change again shortly after. There's no real consistency, either internally or between the different fascisms.[5]

Many-a-hash is made by those--even, over the years, many of the top experts on fascism--who try to explain fascism as one would any other traditional political movement. If fascism's anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism doesn't trip them up, its relationship with doctrine will. If one wants to get a general picture of the policies for which most political parties stand, one need only consult that party's current platform. Fascists tend to be very opportunistic though, political omnivores who make a show of syncretistically gobbling up bits and pieces from other political movements and parties across the spectrum and deploy propaganda in the worst sense of that word. In their hands, "doctrine" in the programmatic way ordinary political parties conceive it doesn't really exist. It's treated as a fluid, the generation and exploitation of popular grievances or the steering of existing ones toward fascist ends, that which needs to be said from day to day in order to achieve then maintain power. Mussolini had originally been a socialist. He'd been expelled from the Socialist party in 1914 for a growing list of heresies, principally his support of the First World War, and in March 1919, he founded the Fasci di Combattimento--the Fascism from which we get the word--in order to, as he put it, "declare war against socialism." Initially, he tried to craft a sort of fusion of right and left views--the original Fascist manifesto, though anti-socialist, was quite progressive in many respects, even radical in others--calculated to draw attention--but this drew little interest and after the Fascists were utterly squashed in the 1919 elections, Mussolini simply abandoned--or, more often, directly reversed--most of the left elements[6] and Fascism became a movement of reactionary ex-soldiers who mustered into far-right paramilitaries that were rented out to the industrial and agribusiness elite to physically crush the Italian left. This approach led them to power. In internet discussions of German fascism, some amateur professional will inevitably pull out the 25-point program of the National Socialist German Workers Party from 1920 as representative of that party. In that platform, there is, to be sure, plenty of the Nazism that would later emerge but the radical planks in it, the items that inevitably prove to be the reason it's brandished in these discussions, were entirely ignored once the Nazis seized power. Likewise, the German fascists' use of socialist slogans and imagery and even the word "socialist" itself amounted to little more than an effort to attract votes (at which it largely failed) and attention (at which it succeeded beyond what anyone could have expected). Those attracted to the movement who took the radical window-dressing seriously were successively purged.[7] The fascist freely poses as adopting various doctrines to which he has no real commitment to serve various ends and freely discards them if they've served their purpose or outlived their usefulness. Always in this is ultranationalist grievance. Fascism doesn't have a traditional political movement's connection to programmatic doctrine. And once in power, it's about recognizing the authority of the fascist leaders and doing what they say.

This hopefully provides an outline of where the Trump phenomenon is similar to fascism and wherein it differs. It's easy to understand why even reasonably intelligent and informed people would jump to the "f" word to describe him. The ultranationalism, the anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, the opportunistic political syncretism (during the presidential race, Trump freely ran to Hillary Clinton's left on many issues), the lack of any real program beyond Trump as the strongman who promises to cure the liberal democracy that ails the nation, the promise of authoritarian rule and of national renewal to be achieved by it ("Make America Great Again"), the machismo, the militarism, the exaltation of authority, the persistent demonization of his "enemies," including helpless minorities, often to justify repressive policies--it would be far easier to list the few areas in which he differs from fascism than those wherein he echoes it. Nevertheless, some of those points of departure are important. Fascism revels in violence against its perceived enemies and while Trump spent months during the campaign encouraging his supporters to carry out violence against anti-Trump protesters and has always pimped a belligerent foreign policy, this is hardly the same as fielding a paramilitary force who battle opponents in the streets. Trump, likewise, hasn't called for the abolition of liberal democracy. His attacks on its institutions, however, are relentless and, in fact, form the basis of his popularity. While, in this writer's view, these differences rule out "fascist" as an accurate description of Trump,[8] it's also entirely reasonable to see these differences as merely matters of degree, as, if one follows Trump's "logic" on both, one reaches the fascist conclusion.[9] While Trump is no fascist, he's certainly protofascist.

An unfortunate fact of life on the internet is that baseless and stupid fascist comparisons, particularly Nazi comparisons, are, in political discussions, ubiquitous--like air but without any of its beneficial properties. Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney--it doesn't matter who is being discussed, their background, how far removed from fascism they may be, if a conversation goes on long enough, someone will eventually chime in with some entirely inappropriate fascist analogy. It's just a sad reality that while everyone these days has a computer with an internet connection, not everyone has the real tools needed to participate in informed, thoughtful discussion of public affairs.[10] Those toting such understocked toolboxes routinely compare any politician they dislike to Adolf Hitler, frequently even depicting those pols as Hitler. Trump has gotten the same treatment. Here are some things that shouldn't have to be said: Hitler was the leader and, in many ways, the personal embodiment of arguably the most evil regime in human history, a regime that launched the most murderous war in that history and that, in fact, industrialized murder on a mass scale. Comparing any run-of-the-mill pol to Hitler is utterly ludicrous. Comparing Donald Trump to Hitler is utterly ludicrous. There are over 60 million graves between these pols and anything that could possibly justify any such comparison. When someone makes one of these comparisons, he marks himself as a thoroughgoing crackpot who is bereft of sound judgment.

Were that the only effect, there would be no need to do anything more than step back and let the fool cut his own throat. Unfortunately, the pervasiveness of these sorts of comparisons can also have a very negative impact, in that they can lead those bombarded with them to avoid or even dismiss more serious and informed conversations on the topics of fascism, protofascism, the current President of the United States and the movements that brought him to power. At the same time, those who, for partisan reasons, don't want such conversations to go forward will attempt to portray every effort at holding one as nothing more than just another iteration of Trump-with-a-Hitler-moustache memes. We have to be able to talk sensibly on such things. 

As president, Trump is in a position to do incalculable damage to the U.S. and the world and when it comes to items in need of attention, he's likely to suck up most of the oxygen for the immediate future but his rise is representative of what is perhaps an even larger problem. The manufactured disconnect between so much of the American right and reality has been a constant concern of this writer's commentary on public affairs for more than a quarter-century, in which time that disconnect has become more and more profound as right-wing and far-right-wing media have arisen to carefully nurture it.[11] Collectively, I've long referred to that media, after its principal function, as the Rage Machine. Only a few weeks ago, I wrote:

"What lurks behind [Trump adviser Kellyanne] Conway's alt-'facts' is the extraordinary social damage wrought--and nascent fascist movement birthed--by the right-wing Rage Machine. For better or worse, the U.S. is a fundamentally liberal nation. There's simply no significant popular support for conservative policies. To maintain power in the face of this, the American conservative elite have aggressively labored, through their massive media apparatus, to reduce 'politics' and the larger social discourse to the level of a simple good-vs.-evil tale, encouraging their followers to side with them not because their policies are more sound or they have any sort of better argument--any serious examination of such things is, in fact, discouraged--but because they've conjured a pleasing narrative in which they've positioned themselves as the virtuous heroes and everyone else as the evil villains. Nearly every major rightist outlet in the United States has spent a few decades making open war on both reason and on reality itself. Because objective facts would equal an agreed-upon yardstick against which claims can be assessed--and because conservative and reactionary claims can't withstand that scrutiny--breaking down confidence in them has been a major project of the Rage Machine, which attempts to indoctrinate its followers in the belief that the truth or falsity of any proposition can be judged entirely by its temporary political utility. Facts, via this conditioning, become things that can be used as propaganda on the rare occasions when they serve the cause and can be otherwise discarded; the only 'fact' is the Machine's narrative. The Machine tells its followers they're persecuted, feeds them a steady diet of manufactured outrages and utterly dehumanizes and demonizes liberals, minorities and anyone else who may stand against the hero of the tale. Liberals, in this fantasy, aren't those who may have a legitimate disagreement. They're an evil, lying, cheating, stealing, weak, moronic enemy actively seeking to do you harm, that have control of the levers of power by illegitimate means and that need to be defeated, destroyed, eliminated. When all reason, all serious thinking, all confidence in institutions has been burned away, all that's left are a bunch of fearful, rage-filled reactionaries who have been taught that though they're right, they're good and they represent The People, they're persecuted by this foe, whom they've been taught to despise. The American conservative elite hope those reared in this atmosphere will show up on election day and vote Republican, which is exactly what has, for some years, happened, but this smog has now given rise to something they didn't anticipate and can't control: a Trumpenstein monster, an angry, ambulatory representation of every bad impulse the Rage Machine has ever projected, with the fascist's promise of national renewal by means of the authoritarian dismantling of the liberal society. Trump's hardcore supporters were reared in this environment... For this particular group, there are no genuine facts anymore, just a narrative to which they've been conditioned to respond." 

The Machine has relentlessly bred this protofascist cult, whose adherents are fed up with the liberal democracy with all its tolerance and diversity and built-in procedures that always seem to prevent them from getting their way. They wanted a strongman who promised to do what that liberal democracy wouldn't and in 2016, they allied with conservatives, actual fascists, those who wished to express their disapproval of the incumbent administration and its de facto continuation in the person of Hillary Clinton and others to successfully elect that very thing. While Trump has tapped this cult, it's larger than him, was there long before he came along and is likely to continue well beyond him, as its spawning pool is made up of most of the major institutions of the American right, particularly the media institutions, which show no sign of going away.

Despite the occasional effort by internet liberals to tar them with the label, conservatives aren't fascists. While the protofascists are drawn from the conservatives' ranks, fascists and protofascists are, in fact, as much a threat to conservatives as they are to anyone else. They run all over those principles conservatives profess to cherish. Conservatives don't control the public microphone of the right though. The voices that come through it may call themselves "conservative" but they're largely reactionaries, the protos, and while many of them were horrified by the rise of Trump, nearly all of them had helped create the toxic environment that bred him and that, left unreformed, will breed the next one and the next ten. Collectively, they are the Rage Machine. Like any machine, this one can't run without fuel and what's powering it now is its primary audience: conservatives. This puts conservatives in an unique position to make a difference. The only way these institutions will ever dry up and disappear (and hopefully be replaced with better ones) is if their audience willingly walks away--has a road-to-Damascus moment, turns off Fox News, shuts out Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, stops reading RedState and Breitbart and Coulter and Malkin, casts Glenn Beck into the sea. Confirmation bias can be an intoxicant and feeding it has proven a formula for right-wing media success, as the appetite for it on the right seems insatiable.[12] For a time. Conservatives are going to have to sort out whether their future is conservative or reactionary. At the moment, too many of them think they're sitting at a safe distance and delighting in watching a video feed of that gorilla in that closet raging away. They may soon discover they're actually stuffed in that closet with the rest of us.

--j.

---

 [1] The phrase "alt-right" was introduced by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, as an effort to rebrand the same old white supremacist/Nazi/fascist subculture.

 [2] Some of the other standard dictionary definitions are even worse. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." Vocabulary.com calls it "a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)." The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as "a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control of social and economic life, and extreme pride in country and race, with no expression of political disagreement allowed." And so on. Definitions so devoid of substance that they would cover nearly any dictatorship.

 [3] That doesn't, of course, prevent some of those capitalists from experiencing buyer's remorse. Even if one is becoming fantastically rich via the arrangement, it sucks to live under a dictatorship.

 [4] Nonetheless, this arguably makes fascism a form of capitalism. There's a history of both rightist "Libertarian" capital-C Capitalist ideologues embracing fascism and of fascism embracing them, perhaps most infamously in the Pinochet regime in Chile. This is a large subject that would quickly turn into an overly long tangent here, so I've set it aside.

 [5] In "The Anatomy of Fascism," Robert Paxton, one of the foremost living experts on fascism, wrote:

"This [economic policy] was the area where both fascist leaders [Hitler and Mussolini] conceded the most to their conservative allies. Indeed, most fascists--above all after they were in power--considered economic policy as only a means to achieving the more important fascist ends of unifying, energizing, and expanding the community. Economic policy tended to be driven by the need to prepare and wage war. Politics trumped economics... [F]ascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler’s will."

In a 2015 interview with Vox, Paxton said "it's hard to link those people [the fascists] to any one kind of economic idea."

In "A History of Fascism 1914-1945," historian Stanley Payne, who specializes in Spanish fascism but has written on the broader subject, writes that "economic policy under [Italian] Fascism did not chart an absolutely clear course." Of Germany, Payne concludes "no completely coherent model of political economy was ever introduced in Nazi Germany."

Daniel Woodley, from "Fascism & Political Theory":

"...as a political innovation, fascism is distinguished by an absence of coherent economic ideology and an absence of serious economic thinking at the summit of the state. Not only are economic factors alone an insufficient condition of understanding fascism, but the decisions taken by fascists in power cannot be explained within a logical economic framework."

Stuart Woolf, "The Nature of Fascism":

"No comparative study exists of fascist economic systems. Nor is this surprising. For one can legitimately doubt whether it is appropriate to use so distinctive a term as 'system' when discussing fascist economics... Nor, in the economic field, could fascism lay claim to any serious theoretical basis or to any outstanding economic theoreticians."

He describes fascist economics as "a series of improvisations, or responses to particular and immediate problems" and notes that "the actions of any single fascist regime... [were] so contradictory as to make it difficult to speak of a coherent and consistent economic policy in one country, let alone in a more general system..." And so on.

 [6] When the movement made its sharp rightward turn, Alceste De Ambris, the principal author of the 1919 Fascist manifesto, left it in disgust. When the Fascists rose to power, he opposed them and was eventually forced to flee Italy because of it.

 [7] An element of the fringe right has long gnawed on the farcical notion that fascism is some sort of movement of the left or even a socialist movement and the internet has helped make this . Essentially a form of Holocaust denial, it's the sort of idiocy that could only gain traction in a profoundly historically illiterate population.

 [8] Vox consulted several experts on fascism and they agreed Trump didn't qualify. At least one other has gone on record as saying Trump is a fascist. Some of those experts are, in this writer's view, being overly precious about their subject. Stanley Payne, for example, says fascism literally couldn't exist after the 1940s. Robert Paxton, who says Trump isn't a fascist, nevertheless notes that Trump "shows a rather alarming willingness to use fascist themes and fascist styles." It was a subject of some interesting discussion.

 [9] And Trump does practically nothing to counter this. American conservatives have long used a language of freedom to sell their agenda. That the notion of "freedom" they're peddling is usually a travesty of the real thing (and that language a cynical farce) is, here, secondary to the fact that this is the ideal to which they rhetorically appeal. There's nothing like that in Trump, who works from the usual fascist playbook about the nation in decline and presents America as a besieged and dying failure. Not an uplifting vision of America as the Land of the Free but a dark vision of it as a crazed, reactionary fortress.

[10] The best the rest of us can do is to try to educate them, which is one of the points of this article. 

[11] At least some conservatives seem to be recognizing the problem. Last year, longtime conservative talk-radio host Charlie Sykes offered some observations about the state of the American right. Speaking of conservative media, he said

"We've basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes... whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood... The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that. 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.'... You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it. And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true... We've created this monster... [W]e have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media... But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there. And I am feeling, to a certain extent, that we are reaping the whirlwind at that."

Unfortunately, Sykes then retired from the Wisconsin airwaves in December.

[12] On the other hand, the disaster that is Trump in power will probably do significant harm to the Machine and bring it into disrepute.

Yes, Sanders Would Have Won: Exploding False Clintonite Narratives

Clintonites in the press and the Democratic party, sometimes aided and abetted by Hillary Clinton herself, have spun a number of narratives to explain--or, more to the point, to explain away--the embarrassing failure of the Clinton campaign in the 2016 presidential race and continue to labor to generate from them, by mere repetition, an artificial Conventional Wisdom about the outcome of the election. These narratives tend toward the self-serving and self-exculpatory--Clinton and her people are never said to have done anything wrong--and for the most part, range from grossly misleading to entirely false. The campaign generated a great deal of data and collectively, they stand as a bulwark against these misrepresentations. If, that is, anyone bothers to consult them.

"It's Bernie Sanders' fault Trump won," runs a popular one. "He fatally weakened Clinton by putting her through such a grueling primary contest."

Baked into this is a rather irritating sense of entitlement on the part of the Clintonites, one that turns up through many of their narratives. In this case, they're rejecting the notion that the party nomination should be conducted via a vigorously contested democratic process and asserting, instead, the view that their candidate was entitled to a coronation, free of serious challenge. During the campaign itself, there had already appeared a variation on this, when members of the party Establishment began posing as Noble Statesmen thoughtfully looking out for the greater good by insisting, from fairly early in the race, that Sanders should drop out, endorse Clinton and try to "unify the party" so that it may better face the Republican nominee in the Fall. All of these insiders had, of course, endorsed Clinton and were, in this, merely doing their part for their candidate by trying to create the impression that there was something wrong with Sanders contesting the nomination. Toward the end of the race, this became particularly intense. For anyone who accepts the basic premise of a party primary system, the sense of entitlement that underlies these notions is a non-starter. During the 2008 Democratic contest, Hillary Clinton herself had, by the end of February, virtually no statistical chance of winning yet continued to battle Barack Obama right into June, reluctantly dropping out only a few days after the last round of state contests.

Clinton had turned that earlier contest into a bitter, ugly fight--at one point, she'd openly fantasized about her more popular opponent being murdered--which added more and more baggage to the substantial pile she'd already accumulated (and would continue to accumulate). Even in 2008, she'd been an anachronism, a tired throwback to 1990s conservative "New Democrats" trying to sell herself to an increasingly liberal electorate that wanted "hope and change." Entering the 2016 race, she was the weathered face of a way of doing business a lot of people thought they'd finally rejected and buried nearly a decade earlier. This is a chart of Clinton's favorability rating averages from 31 Jan., 2013--as far back as Real Clear Politics allows one to make these interactive charts--to 31 Jan., 2016, the day before the Iowa caucus:

HuffPost Pollster uses a lot of the same polls as RCP but includes some that RCP doesn't and its database goes back farther and thus offers both a slightly different and a longer-running look at the matter. But the story is the same:

Clinton's favorability ratings were in long-term decline. That Huffpost chart begins in Sept. 2010 because that's when they began dropping (and it runs through to the present). By the Huffpost data, Clinton's approval average dropped below 50%--the dead zone--in July 2014, never to return. RCP puts that landmark a little later, in mid-March 2015. In mid-April, when Clinton officially entered the presidential race, her average was, by both data sets, underwater, with more people telling pollsters they disliked her than liked her. And it stayed underwater. It's still there today.

Clinton's weakness was apparent even among Democrats. In a poll that wrapped 8 days before she entered the presidential race, Gallup asked, "Who would you like to see the Democratic party nominate for president in 2016--Hillary Clinton or someone else?" Over 1/3 of Democratic respondents--38%--chose "someone else," along with 43% of Dem-leaning independents.

The unpopularity that proved Clinton's undoing wasn't brought on by Bernie Sanders. Rather, it was just a continuation of a very long-running trend. When, in either the Summer of 2014 (Huffpost) or the early Spring of 2015 (RCP), Clinton's average finally fell below 50% then went underwater, Sanders wasn't yet even a factor. In a March 2015 "people in the news" poll by Gallup, 62% of respondents said they'd never even heard of him, and another 14% said they didn't know enough about him to have an opinion. For a long time, he was one of American politics' best-kept secrets in the press (more on that later). In a YouGov poll conducted at the end of April--the period when Sanders entered the presidential race--53% of adult respondents had never heard of him and only 9% of registered voters were then supporting his bid to become the Democratic nominee. And so on.

One of Clinton's major weaknesses was, of course, that voters didn't find her honest and trustworthy. As with her approval ratings, these numbers, too, had been disintegrating over an extended period before Sanders came on the scene. The data recording this are a bit more spotty. Clinton had left the State Department and was a private citizen for over 2 years before announcing her presidential run; pollsters tend not to systematically track such things until election season rolls around. CNN/Opinion Research offers the following through a series of polls:

During the campaign season, the ABC News/Washington Post poll proved to be a pro-Clinton poll, meaning it tended to yield results slightly more favorable to Clinton than her polling average,[1] but it told the same story. In May, 2014, it had asked, "Do you think Hillary Clinton is or is not honest and trustworthy?" At the time, 59% of registered voters said she was. By May, 2015 though, this was the chart included with the poll results on this question:

A Quinnipiac poll from mid-April: "American voters say 54–38 percent that Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, a lower score than top Republicans." And so on. When Sanders entered the presidential race on 30 April 2015, Clinton was already in trouble.[2]

The Democratic primary campaign did Clinton's numbers no favors, to be sure, but enhanced exposure to Hillary Clinton never does. Her poll numbers have only ever been good when she's mostly out of public sight and mind. Whenever she's becomes a center of attention and is perceived as a partisan political figure, they sink. This isn't a Bernie Sanders-induced phenomenon either; it's a pattern that has been present throughout the whole of her time on the national stage. Nate Silver of 538 was writing about--and charting--it as far back as 2012. Silver revisited this theme in 2013. In Sept. 2015, as Clinton's polling continued to crash, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post's Plum Line covered it as well. Though none of these commentators offer the thought, it's also entirely reasonable to assume that all of those crashes would eventually have a cumulative effect, with each new occurrence reminding people why they'd come to dislike her in the past.

This writer covered most of this ground in real time in various internet venues during the long 2015-'16 campaign season. For anyone who bothered to look, the seeds of Clinton's eventual destruction were right there in the often-brutal data. A few items from my notes:

--A Fox News poll, conducted in May 2015 (only days after Sanders threw his hat in the ring):

--An August 2015 poll by Qunnipiac open-endedly asked respondents to say the first word that comes to mind when the name of a candidate is mentioned. The top 3 words for Hillary Clinton were "liar", "dishonest" and "untrustworthy."

--An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from October 2015 asked,

"Now, which of the following best describes how you would feel if Hillary Clinton were elected president--optimistic and confident that she would do a good job, satisfied and hopeful that she would do a good job, uncertain and wondering whether she would do a good job, or pessimistic and worried that she would do a bad job?"

A plurality--a whopping 43%--chose "pessimistic and worried," with another 13% choosing "uncertain and wondering." Only 24% chose "optimistic and confident," with 19% opting for "satisfied and hopeful." That same poll asked respondents to rank, on a scale of 1 to 5, how "honest and straightforward" they saw Clinton: 40% chose 1--the lowest rating--with another 10% choosing 2 (only 13% chose 5, with another 13% choosing 4).

--When a CNN/ORC poll in mid-December 2015 asked if Clinton was "someone you would be proud to have as president," 56% answered in the negative. Asked in that same poll if Clinton "shares your values," 58% answered in the negative.

--In the head-to-head polling, Clinton's initially-commanding double-digit leads over Donald Trump had disappeared by August 2015. Here are the Clinton-vs.-Trump polls in the RealClearPolitics database from December 2015 and January 2016, the months leading into the first contest of the primary season:

When one takes into account the margin of error (listed in the column marked "MoE"), Clinton was in a statistical tie with Trump in five of the 11 polls, is only leading by one point in a sixth, two in a seventh and only beats Trump by a significant margin in the four that remain. Additionally, a Zogby poll, a CNN/ORC poll and two Morning Consult polls from January (here and here), not included in the RCP collection, also showed the two in a tie (a third Morning Consult poll that month gave Clinton a 4-point-over-MoE lead over Trump).

During this same period, Clinton fared even worse in the head-to-heads against the other major GOP contenders. Of the 9 Clinton-vs.-Ted Cruz polls, one had Cruz winning by 3 points over MoE, one had Clinton winning by 0.5% and the rest were ties. Of the 9 polls matching Clinton against Marco Rubio, Rubio beat Clinton by 6 points in one and was tied with her in the other 8.

All of this before a single vote in the primary season had been cast.

For this writer, Clinton's weakness as a candidate seemed obvious all along and I'd shared that thought (and the considerable supporting data behind it) throughout the campaign, most often on various Facebook groups. By the end of February 2016, I assembled my accumulated thoughts into an article that handicapped Clinton and her candidacy. The present article is very much a companion piece and sequel to it. Interested readers can check it out--I've tried not spend too much time recovering the same ground. Briefly, Clinton, laden with more baggage than anyone else in American politics, was running as a Democrat in the shadow of a two-term Democratic administration, which is always a hard sell, but instead of trying to differentiate herself from the incumbent or blaze any sort of new course (which voters want), she tried to present herself as Obama's Siamese twin for short-term gain. The ultimate Establishment figure in a screamingly anti-Establishment election, she was an opportunistic flip-flopper whose instincts, in a liberal party, were conservative, who positively oozes insincerity and who ran a demoralizing and utterly defeatist "No, We Can't" primary campaign peddling diminished expectations and aimed at crushing, by whatever means necessary, the energizing "hope" candidate who had sprang up as an alternative. The myth of her inevitability, carefully nurtured by Clinton and her surrogates in the press, appeared to have been depressing interest in the Democratic contest. She ran a horrible campaign, making all the wrong calls, pointlessly antagonizing the Sanders voters she was going to need to win and wasting time and resources trying to recruit "moderate" Republicans and flip red states that obviously weren't going to flip while ignoring states she was going to need to win. Throughout all of this, the Democratic party Establishment seemed to be under some sort of suicidal spell, closing its eyes, plugging its ears and chanting to drown out reality while, come Hell or high water, it pushed ahead with a campaign that seemed not only doomed but obviously doomed (I certainly predicted, early on, that Clinton would probably lose any general-election match-up against Trump). Clintonites, whose machinations have now saddled the U.S. with the Trump regime, are constructing these false narratives with the aim of absolving themselves but the hard, inescapable truth, now born out by the predictable election outcome itself, is that Clinton was always a weak, loser candidate and if the goal was to beat the Republican nominee, it was never responsible to back her in the first place. In a sane world, the Clintonites, their Master Candidate defeated by a reality-show joke of an opponent, have now been as utterly discredited as anyone in American politics can be with their pants still on.

And to finally tackle the other of the big, false Clintonite narrative, yes, Bernie Sanders probably would have beaten Donald Trump. Not only that, there's significant evidence he may have rolled right over Trump in a complete rout the likes of which the American presidency hasn't seen in a few decades.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was much beloved in his home sate of Vermont but when he launched his presidential campaign, he was virtually unknown to the broader public. For most of 2015, much of the corporate press tried to keep it that way, carrying out what became known as the "Bernie Blackout." Even basic name-recognition was pretty long in coming. What little coverage Sanders received in 2015 often had a dismissive and/or mocking tone and this mingled with the general lack of coverage to negatively impact the candidate's numbers for some time. When he eventually started to break through this effort to ignore him to death and became a genuine threat to Clinton's candidacy, much of the press switched to the usual Rabid Attack-Dog Mode always reserved for left candidates who become popular, buttressed, in this case, by the slanderous assaults of the Clintonites, both in the press and in the Democratic party. Despite these prolonged efforts to bury he and his candidacy, Sanders persevered and when people finally began to get to know him, they found they liked him. A lot. Most of the public's good will toward Clinton was already history when Huffpost Pollster started keeping track of Sanders' favorability ratings and while hers steadily sank into oblivion, here's the arc of Sanders' own over the course of the last 21 months:

The more people saw of Sanders, the more they liked what they saw, but the Blackout delayed his ability to build that profile with the public. In mid-Sept. 2015--nearly 5 months into his campaign--1/3 of respondents were still telling Gallup they'd never even heard of him. Sanders' net favorability among Democrats eventually shot past Clinton's but that only happened in late March, nearly 2 months into voting (and nearly a year into the campaign). As the primaries neared their end, Sanders had--again, among Democrats--a whopping 13-point net favorability advantage over Clinton.

These numbers suggest that if there had been no Blackout, no imposition of that early, months-long delay in Sanders being able to introduce himself to the public, the primaries may have turned out very differently.

One of the manifestations of the Blackout is that, when it came time to sanction head-to-head polls, news organizations frequently matched Republican hopefuls against only Clinton, pretending as if Sanders didn't exist. There is, as a consequence, less data in this area than with Clinton but there's still more than enough to tell the story. The RealClearPolitics database contains 46 head-to-head polls matching Sanders against Trump between 20 July, 2015 and 5 June, 2016. Of that, Trump only managed to beat Sanders above the margin of error 3 times, the most recent of these happening way back in mid-November 2015. In another 4, they were in a statistical tie. The last of the latter happened in mid-February; from there forward, the chart below tells the story: Sanders won every poll, all but three of them by dominant double-digit leads:

To the 46 polls at RCP, we can add 18 Morning Consult polls:

In all but two of these, Sanders is beating Trump by double digits above the margin of error. Ipsos/Reuters also conducted 7 Sanders-vs.-Trump polls from late January to mid-March; Sanders won all of them.[3]

In the last full month in which Sanders was included in the head-to-heads, he was still rolling right over Trump, while the Clinton vs. Trump polling was previewing what would eventually happen in the general: Clinton was statistically tied with Trump in 6 of that month's 10 polls and losing to him above the MoE in a seventh:

With one exception (covered later), there's a gap in the Sanders/Trump head-to-head polling after the primary season but in his favorability polling during that period, Sanders continued to rise, averaging nearly 60% favorable by the month of September, at which point polling orgs either stopped polling on it or RCP stopped recording their results. Through that same period, the monthly average favorability polling for both Clinton and Trump were statistically flat-lined, Clinton at an embarrassing 40-43%, Trump at a slightly worse 35-39%.

From shortly after he entered the race, Sanders was a star in ascendance, Clinton one in decline. These tracks crossed too late to land Sanders the Democratic nomination but if he had been the nominee, it seems pretty unlikely Trump--disliked by most Americans from the day he entered the race--would have been able to significantly enough alter Sanders' trajectory to eke out a win.

Trump and Clinton will go down in history as the two most disliked major-party presidential candidates in the history of polling (unless/until some new contenders replace them). At the end of April, while the Democratic primaries were still ongoing, the Los Angeles Times noted that "together, Clinton and Trump are the two most unpopular presidential candidates in memory." Eleven days later, the Washington Post's Dave Wiegel wrote--in an article titled "The Year of the Hated"--that "the 2016 election is likely to pit Hillary Clinton, who is disliked by a majority of voters, against Donald Trump, disliked by a greater majority of voters." As the New York Post put it, "No presidential candidate in polling history has been as hated by voters as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are now." On 1 July--that is, before the party conventions and more than two months before the traditional kick-off of the general-election campaign on Labor Day weekend--Gallup reported that "Trump and Clinton are currently among the worst-rated presidential candidates of the last seven decades according to Gallup's long-term 'scalometer' trend." By mid-July, a few days after Sanders dropped out of the race, pollster Morning Consult noted that

"One of the most common stats trotted out in this presidential campaign is that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton are the most unpopular candidates in modern history, with more voters saying they have an unfavorable view of the candidates than a favorable one."

Morning Consult took this a step further and asked those who disliked Clinton why they felt as they did; it was the same reasons they'd been giving pollsters all along:

Among Democrats who disliked Clinton, 39% said it was primarily because she was untrustworthy, 25% said it was because she was corrupt and 26% said it was because she "changes her positions when it's politically convenient." With independents, it was 47% untrustworthy, 39% corrupt, 23% squishy; with Repubs, the split was 50/45/18%. The next day, ABC News was telling the same story, reporting that Clinton and Trump "remain the two most unpopular likely major-party nominees in ABC/Post polling..." By 8 Sept., NPR was reflecting the journalistic fatigue in covering this point:

"You've heard it a bajillion times at this point: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most unpopular major party presidential candidates on record. Both of them have unfavorability ratings of more than 50 percent."

That was the story everywhere.

Clinton lost the general election in the Rust Belt. That is the correct characterization. Trump didn't win those critical states, the ones that gave him the election; she lost them. Large portions of these states, which were the industrial heartland of America, have, for decades, been devastated by policies aimed at deindustrializing the U.S. in the name of corporate profits. Heading into this election, Pennsylvania and Michigan had been blue states for a quarter-century, Wisconsin had been for even longer. Clinton is a Wall-Street-backed, tone-deaf "free trader" who, whenever there's an election in front of her, comes out against the latest grant-superpowers-to-the-multinationals proposal--that which is misleadingly sold as "free trade"--then "evolves" back to supporting them as soon as she's in power. Presented with this living embodiment of the policies that had laid waste to their homes, it isn't at all surprising that a large number of voters in these states, the long-suffering victims of these policies, cast their lot with Trump, the first general-election candidate who seriously promised to do anything about their situation. Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by razor-thin margins (0.23%, 0.73% and 0.77%, respectively) while underperforming--often grossly underperforming--Obama's 2012 take among white voters (particularly white males), young voters and independents. Her campaign did just about as badly as any Democratic campaign would ever do in those states.[4] As the primary results and electoral history in those states suggested, many there would have preferred a more sane alternative like Sanders, something the Democrats, once Clinton became the nominee, weren't offering anymore. Winning a primary is, of course, very different from winning a general--something that shouldn't be understated--but Sanders had, in these states, won huge, lopsided majorities among those demographics in which Clinton so badly underperformed. He'd already defeated Clinton in contests in two of these three states. Sanders was performing better than Clinton in the head-to-head polling vs. Trump in all three states as well. The final Michigan poll to match both Democratic contenders against the Republican was conducted by the Detroit News. In it, Clinton was statistically tied with Trump, while Sanders was beating him by 19 points. In Pennsylvania, it was a Quinnipiac poll that had Clinton statistically tied with Trump, with Sanders beating him by 6 points--3 above the margin of error. In Wisconsin, the last was a Marquette poll that had Clinton beating Trump by 9--4 points over MoE--and Sanders beating Trump by 24--19 points over MoE.

For obvious reasons, Clintonites who maintain that Sanders would have lost to Trump retreat from the hard data, preferring, instead, to rely on nebulous, unquantifiable assertions. Americans, it's said, would never vote for a candidate who, like Sanders, identifies himself as a "socialist." And, indeed, one can point to polling data wherein people say as much. The only thing such polls really measure, though, is respondents' reaction to a contentious word. This is a phenomenon well-known by pollsters. One of the most remarked-upon examples in recent years occurs in polling on the Obama healthcare law. If pollsters ask about "the Affordable Care Act," the name of the law, it draws much better numbers than if, instead, they refer to it as "Obamacare," a word that causes the numbers to go down, even though it refers to exactly the same policy. For many years, there were few more demonized words in American political discourse than "liberal." As a consequence, the number of people who self-identify to pollsters as "liberal" was anemic. Today, it's difficult to find a single issue of major import on which Americans don't hold to a liberal view by overwhelming margins, yet the overwhelming majority of that same public--76% in Gallup's 2016 survey--identifies as either "moderate" or "conservative" (and "conservative" has significantly outnumbered "liberal" for decades). The one word in our political discourse that has been more demonized than "liberal"--both much more intensely and for much longer--is "socialism." What really matters here isn't in-the-abstract public reaction to a word. What Sanders defines as his "democratic socialism" is a slate of policies, one with, for the most part, immense public support. Last year, co-writer/researcher Mitch Clark and I put together a fairly extensive article about the polling data on Bernie Sanders' major issues and found that most of his top agenda items are supported by huge majorities of the public, often even by majorities of Republicans.

Hold that thought.

Another of these fuzzy Clintonite claims--a sort of corollary to the first, really--is that Sanders never faced any real political attacks and that his campaign would have withered in the face of them. For anyone who lived through the 2016 campaign cycle, the first part of that amounts to a "don't believe your lying eyes" claim--ludicrous on its face. Clinton, who, herself, mercilessly pounded Sanders with constant--and mostly scurrilous--attacks, contributed to it, saying, "I don't think [Bernie Sanders has] had a single negative ad ever run against him," a claim Politifact debunked. Adam Johnson at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting tackled the wider claim in even more detail, pointing out that it's an empty, unfalsifiable assertion, outlining only a sample of the savage attacks Sanders had weathered and noting the obvious:

"Is there some undiscovered bombshell waiting to blow up about Sanders? Of course, it’s possible he murdered someone with his bare hands in a Calcutta bazaar in 1991—we can’t know for sure. What one has to believe in order to accept the entirely theoretical assumption that a damning piece of news about Sanders awaits to be revealed is that the Clinton team, armed with $186 million dollar warchest, either A) can’t find something the GOP will or B) found something but is just too darn nice to expose it. Neither of these scenarios seems plausible."

With commanding leads over the Republican, Sanders' campaign would have to do a lot of withering--and his meteoric momentum throughout the campaign would have to be blunted then reversed--to pull defeat from the jaws of victory, and there just didn't seem to be much out there with which to beat him back. And who was going to do it? Well...

Donald Trump's numbers throughout the presidential race were abysmal, his favorables typically even worse than Clinton's. From Day 1, a majority of Americans disliked him. On election day, his RCP average stood at 39.4% favorable, while Clinton's was at 41.6% --a tie that meant the two finished the general-election race as they began it: as the two most disliked major-party presidential candidates in the history of polling.[5] Just as with Clinton, a majority of respondents consistently told pollsters they didn't consider him "honest and trustworthy." In a Quinnipiac poll, for example, only 37% thought he was. But in that same poll, only 30% would say the same of Hillary Clinton. In fact, of the 7 different candidates then in the race about whom that question was asked, Clinton scored the lowest.[6] The highest-scoring candidate, on the other hand, beat everyone else in a rout. Matching a pattern that continued throughout the campaign, a whopping 68% said they found Bernie Sanders honest and trustworthy. Even 54% of Republicans said so. That poll was conducted on Feb. 10-15, 2016, only days after the primary/caucus contests had started.

Something to keep in mind while you're sitting in front of the evening news tonight watching the protofascist buffoon in the White House trying to dismantle the liberal society with strokes of the pen. It didn't have to be this way.

Hillary Clinton's followers, who backed a weak candidate who went on to lose, now tell you Sanders couldn't have beaten Trump. Consider what goes into that claim. Those offering it insist we ignore all the actual accumulated data (all of which suggests there would have been a significant Sanders win) and accept the proposition that, by the end of a Sanders-vs.-Trump contest, most voters would have decided to vote against a candidate they like and whose policies they love because of a word (SOCIALISM!) that candidate uses to describe those policies and would, instead, cast their ballots for a candidate they hate--the most disliked candidate in the history of polling, against whom Sanders would somehow do worse than did the 2nd-most-disliked candidate in the history of polling.

Yeah.[7]

I'm sure this will be argued--and fulminated over--endlessly but history's final word on the subject comes from a privately-commissioned Gravis poll that was conducted in November only two days prior to the general election. It asked likely voters for whom they would vote if the looming presidential contest were between Sanders and Trump. Readers will no doubt be shocked to learn that it, too, showed Sanders destroying Trump. Margin of victory: 12%.

The election is now a few months in the past and many would prefer to stop talking about Hillary Clinton, put aside the divisions of that ugly campaign and focus on the problem the U.S. has inherited as a result of it. It's a legitimate perspective. Whether or not his reactionary fanbase yet recognizes it, Trump is a threat to every American, to American society and to the entire world. Not just an embarrassment or the butt of a joke: a threat. A protofascist Twitter troll running the most powerful nation in the world is dangerous. This business of how he got there, however, is a matter that needs to be hashed out and it's not a distraction from dealing with Trump, it's a critical part of it, because if any of these false Clintonite narratives are allowed to harden into a Conventional Wisdom, nothing will have been learned. The Clintonites who brought about this calamity won't be held accountable for their part in it, won't be pushed aside in disgrace and will only try to do it again. And again. And there's an unreformed system still in place that would allow them to do it. Trump doesn't present an ordinary political situation that can afford to tolerate that.

--j.

---

[1] And to cut off the knee-jerk implication, that's not necessarily because of any unfair bias; much more likely just a quirk in the methodology.

[2] Clinton favorability ratings bottomed out at just a hair about 36% in late May 2016 before stabilizing in the low 40-percentile, where it remained for the rest of the campaign. Her "honest and trustworthy" ratings bottomed out around 27%, though some anomalous polls put it even lower.

[3] The Morning Consult and Ipsos/Reuters material is archived, with details and links, at HuffPost Pollster.

[4] CNN maintains a handy archive of exit poll data from the 2012 race, the 2016 primaries and the 2016 general.

[5] On election day, Gallup, the Grand Old Man of polling, reported that "the 2016 election is the only one in Gallup's polling history to feature two broadly unpopular candidates... Trump and Clinton are the two most negatively reviewed U.S. presidential candidates of the modern era, and probably ever."

[6] Pollsters sometimes directly pitted Clinton against Trump on this question. CNN did so in September and found that by a 50-35% split, respondents said Trump was more honest and trustworthy than Clinton.

[7] Trump certainly knew better. He said repeatedly he'd rather face Clinton than Sanders. Reince Priebus, then the head of the Republican party and now Trump's chief-of-staff and right hand, did as well.


Post-Credits Scene - The obvious caveat. Campaigns ain't static--it's are always about how you get there. Probabilities are just that.

Journalism in the Era of the Alt-Facts Administration [UPDATE BELOW]

It's entirely expected that the newly-sworn-in protofascist regime in the capitol is likely to have significant problems adjusting to holding power within a liberal democracy wherein it can't entirely control the press, the internet, the other branches of government--the other power-centers that are theoretically there to keep such a regime in check. The corporate press is going to have some problems adjusting as well.

After aerial photos of Donald Trump's Friday inauguration suggested a smaller audience for the event compared to those of the past, Trump dispatched his minions to wage war on this notion. On Saturday, Sean Spicer used his first official appearance as White House Press Secretary to offer up a demagogic tirade against the press, calling it dishonest, saying it was "sewing division" and in particular raging against any reporting that the inauguration was anything less than heavily attended. "No one. Had. Numbers," he huffed, "Because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out." Embarrassingly, an anti-Trump march on the capitol Saturday appeared to draw several times the crowd as the inauguration; Spicer was on that case too, adding, "By the way, this [the lack of any numbers] applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protesters today in the same fashion." Get it folks? No numbers! And then, only moments later, No Numbers Spicer boldly asserted that

"This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe."

After ranting and raving for a little over five minutes, Spicer then stomped out of the room without taking a single question from the assembled reporters. Ladies and gentlemen, your new White House Press Secretary!

Politifact tackled Spicer's claims on this subject and found nearly every one either entirely false or grossly misleading--rating: Pants On Fire.

For NBC's Chuck Todd, this crowd-size thing was completely ridiculous, Spicer's fiction appearing to have been advanced for no real reason at all. Mainstream press commentators like Todd still haven't quite figured out that whole protofascist thing. They never figured it out during the campaign either, and their failure was, in fact, a not-insignificant factor in how this regime was inflicted upon the U.S. Fortunately, Chuck had Kellyanne Conway, the Counselor to the new President, to explain it to him. The two engaged in a rather comical rhetorical dance on Meet the Press Sunday morning.

"The presidency is about choices," said Todd, "so I'm curious why President Trump chose yesterday to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd-size. I guess my question to you is, why do that?"

Conway tried to deflect on to other issues, went into a long, irrelevant commentary that tried to make Trump's performance in the election sound like some sort of major popular win--I'll come back to that in a moment--then said of reports of the relatively small size of the inaugural crowd, "I think it is, I think it is a symbol for the unfair and incomplete treatment that this president often receives." She went on about how the Nielsen ratings showed that more people watched Trump's inauguration on television than watched Obama's 2013 inauguration.[1]

Todd persisted; Conway's response was to threaten to cut off access to the White House for those questioning the administration:

"If [you're] going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we're going to have to rethink our relationship here. I want to have a great, open relationship with our press."

Dynamite. Todd continued to seek an answer to his question and Conway gave him another headline item:

"You're saying it's a falsehood and they're giving-- Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that."

That phrase "alternative facts" is likely to get a lot of play in the press.[2] Todd, to to his credit, clearly couldn't believe his ears. "Alternative facts are not facts," he noted. "They're falsehoods."

The correct word, of course, is "lies" but applying the "L" word to even the most blatant lies by the president--any president--is a longstanding taboo in the press. The Cult of Objectivity likes to pretend that deploying that particular characterization is some sort of breach of professional ethics, an inappropriate editorial judgment.[3] It's going to be interesting, then, to see how those in the press are going to cover a president who utters massive lies as a matter of daily routine.[4] On this point, Todd at least seems to be heading in the right direction; while he still refuses to call a lie by its proper name, his formulation--a "provable falsehood"--is as strongly worded as anything we ever get from any of his mainstream colleagues and he didn't back down from it, even when threatened.

What Todd doesn't seem to understand is that to this administration--and to its fans--things like the size of the inauguration crowd aren't at all inconsequential. While trying to dodge Chuck Todd's questions, Kellyanne Conway offered this:

"On this matter of crowd size, I mean, for me, I think the most quantifiable points of interest for Americans should be what just happened a few months ago that brought him [Trump] here, the 31 of 50 states he won, the 2600 counties, the 200 counties that went for President Obama that now went to President Trump and the fact that 29, 30 million women voted for Donald Trump for president, they should be respected, somebody should cover their voices as well."

Some "quantifiable points" Conway neglected in her irrelevant spiel: Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million, with 58% of women voting against him. Trump had an explanation for the former back in November:

Though the idea of widespread "voter fraud" is one of those "alternative facts" persistently peddled by the right-wing Rage Machine as rationale for Republican voter suppression efforts, it's a fiction, one that has been debunked by every serious examination of the question. Every scrap of reliable information says this kind of in-person voter fraud is virtually non-existent and the idea that it's not only real but extends to millions of people falls into the same category as Trump's claims about "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims celebrating in the streets of New Jersey when the 9/11 attacks occurred. These were lies that, like so many that emanate from Trump, aim at demonizing powerless minorities (Trump identified those he claimed were voting illegally as illegal immigrants). Trump's politics are protofascist in nature--basically fascism minus the more extreme commitment to violence--and the corporate press is simply going to have to accept this and understand the implications of it. One of those implications is that Trump must, at all times, project an image of a strong and beloved leader, standing up for the people while besieged by an evil Establishment. He can't bear to let stand the fact that he lost the vote or, in the current dust-up, even a hint of anything that can be interpreted as mockery of his small, er, crowd size.

What lurks behind Conway's alt-"facts" is the extraordinary social damage wrought--and nascent fascist movement birthed--by the right-wing Rage Machine. For better or worse, the U.S. is a fundamentally liberal nation. There's simply no significant popular support for conservative policies. To maintain power in the face of this, the American conservative elite have aggressively labored, through their massive media apparatus, to reduce "politics" and the larger social discourse to the level of a simple good-vs.-evil tale, encouraging their followers to side with them not because their policies are more sound or they have any sort of better argument--any serious examination of such things is, in fact, discouraged--but because they've conjured a pleasing narrative in which they've positioned themselves as the virtuous heroes and everyone else as the evil villains. Nearly every major rightist outlet in the United States has spent a few decades making open war on both reason and on reality itself. Because objective facts would equal an agreed-upon yardstick against which claims can be assessed--and because conservative and reactionary claims can't withstand that scrutiny--breaking down confidence in them has been a major project of the Rage Machine, which attempts to indoctrinate its followers in the belief that the truth or falsity of any proposition can be judged entirely by its temporary political utility. Facts, via this conditioning, become things that can be used as propaganda on the rare occasions when they serve the cause and can be otherwise discarded; the only "fact" is the Machine's narrative. The Machine tells its followers they're persecuted, feeds them a steady diet of manufactured outrages and utterly dehumanizes and demonizes liberals, minorities and anyone else who may stand against the hero of the tale. Liberals, in this fantasy, aren't those who may have a legitimate disagreement. They're an evil, lying, cheating, stealing, weak, moronic enemy actively seeking to do you harm, that have control of the levers of power by illegitimate means and that need to be defeated, destroyed, eliminated. When all reason, all serious thinking, all confidence in institutions has been burned away, all that's left are a bunch of fearful, rage-filled reactionaries who have been taught that though they're right, they're good and they represent The People, they're persecuted by this foe, whom they've been taught to despise. The American conservative elite hope those reared in this atmosphere will show up on election day and vote Republican, which is exactly what has, for some years, happened, but their smog has now given rise to something they didn't anticipate and can't control: a Trumpenstein monster, an angry, ambulatory representation of every bad impulse the Rage Machine has ever projected, with the fascist's promise of national renewal by means of the authoritarian dismantling of the liberal society.[5] Trump's hardcore supporters were reared in this environment and it's to them all this fuss over things like crowd-size is directed. For this particular group, there are no genuine facts anymore, just a narrative to which they've been conditioned to respond. Those alt-"facts" are there to feed that narrative and, perhaps more importantly, to try to widen the range of those infected by it.

Something that perhaps shouldn't need to be so overtly stated is that governance isn't a game to be played between an authoritarian reality-show star and his admiring viewers. There are real people, both in the U.S. and abroad, who can be hurt by Trump and that will be hurt if he governs as he says, real civil liberties that can be crushed and that will be crushed if he has his way. The government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world is now in the hands of a protofascist Twitter troll. That's a problem. The "evil Establishment" Trump stands against isn't the actual political Establishment; it's the institutions of liberal democracy and ultimately, liberal democracy itself. In this particular matter of news media, the press is, at least in theory, a check on Trump and Trump's goal is to completely destroy public confidence in it as an institution--to get rid of that watchdog. He has the presidency and he can do an incredible amount of damage.

His administration presents journalists with something many of them may initially perceive as a crisis. In reality, it's an opportunity, a chance for the press to clean its own house, a chance to shine. While that idea that there are no facts, only narratives, seems self-evidently stupid and dangerous, it's also exactly how most of the corporate press covers political issues. He said/she said "journalism," reporting competing claims as if they were equal while making no effort to adjudicate which, if either, is true. Mainstream commentators may be horrified by that characterization of lies as "alternative facts" but they've implicitly incorporated that same notion into their own work for decades. That needs to stop. Lazy equivalence only ever privileges the lie and in this age of Trump, that's something journalism--and America itself--can no longer afford. And speaking of that, reporters and commentators need to stop trying to come up with some creative way to call a lie something other than a lie. Talk straight. Grow the fuck up. Become that watchdog you're supposed to be, instead of the lapdog you usually are. Since everything in the corporate press seems to come down to profits and demographics, the good news is that Trump is widely despised. He just entered office with the lowest approval rating of any new president on record and that means there's an audience for serious journalism that challenges this administration, something the press should offer with every administration anyway. That can, of course, have a negative effect as well. In the Confirmation Bias Nation, reporting that is false and inaccurate but that plays to public anxiety about Trump can also draw a big crowd. That kind of irresponsible work would only feed Trump's own narrative though, and help further undermine the institution. These are the paths open to journalism now. Shape up, serve your country and maybe this becomes your finest hour or continue down the road of prevarication and/or click-bait-chasing and be rendered even more irrelevant.

--j.

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[1] This is entirely dishonest--second-term inaugurations from established administrations are always more sparsely watched than first-term ones. According to Nielsen, Trump's inauguration drew 30.6 million viewers, which puts him well behind Obama's 37.7 million viewers in 2009, Reagan's 41.8 million in 1980 and Jimmy Carter's 34.1 million in 1977. He was even behind Richard Nixon's second inaugural, which drew 33 million in 1972. The good news for Trump is that he did at least manage to barely squeak by both Bill Clinton in 1993 (29.7 million) and George Bush Sr. in 1989 (29 million) but if one adjusted for the population growth in the U.S. over those years, he would be well behind them as well, and probably the lowest on record. 

[2] Or maybe not. It's a silver platter item but if those in the corporate press ignore it, it wouldn't be the first time when it comes to dealing with Trump. Or even the 10,000th.

[3] Earlier just this month, Janine Jackson of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting wrote about this.

[4] On Saturday, for example, Trump made a rambling speech to CIA employees in which he asserted that reports about tension between himself and the U.S. intelligence community were a fabrication of an out-to-get-him press. "I have a running war with the media," he declared. "They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. Right? And they sort of made it sound like I have this feud with the intelligence community." In the real world, Trump, only days earlier, had compared that same intel community to Nazi Germany.

[5] Trump's emergence caused a split inside the Rage Machine, with some embracing him as a virtual messiah while others were horrified. It's been particularly amusing to watch the latter. The National Review's Jonah Goldberg just couldn't believe Republicans would embrace a Trump--the Jonah Goldberg who once wrote an entire book on the premise that fascists were "liberals." Glenn Beck, who sat on television for years preaching anti-rational conspiracism, displaying his infamous board on which he labored to visually connect President Obama and any prominent liberal to dictators, evil Jewish plotters, communists, etc., was aghast at Trump's rise. Unlike most prominent anti-Trump rightists, Beck correctly recognized his own responsibility for this development and was even apologetic about it.


UPDATE (24 Jan, 2017) - From the New York Times:

"President Trump used his first official meeting with congressional leaders on Monday to falsely claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority, a return to his obsession with the election’s results even as he seeks support for his legislative agenda."

The Times' headline for this story: "Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers." Progress, fellahs, progress.

A Memo To The Press: Get the Clinton Loss Right

In one of my other hats (one I wear here on occasion), I'm a bit of a political analyst. It has been offered to me by several friends and acquaintances that I'm pretty good at this and that this is probably because I'm a radical, a guy who doesn't have a dog in partisan battles. I'll defer to others on the matter of whether my analysis is of any merit. Some months ago, I did predict the likely outcome of yesterday's presidential contest. On days when I should probably be doing something better with my time, I haunt various message boards and Facebook groups and talk politics. The weakness of Hillary Clinton as a candidate has been a constant theme of mine throughout this campaign season, just as it was back in 2008. On 3 June, I wrote a post I threw up on several Facebook groups--and that's how it was often treated, as if I'd thrown up--noting that, from a long-term perspective, it could be argued that

"The best possible outcome of a Clinton/Trump general is to simply let the GOP have the presidency and allow that to become the rock on which that party in its present form is finally broken. That's also the most likely outcome of such a race. But that's a story for another time."

That post eventually evolved into an article here, "A Trump Win the Best Possible Outcome?" Late last night, Donald Trump won the presidency.[1] In the coming days and weeks, I imagine we're going to be hearing all kinds of spin from Democratic insiders in the press trying to explain this. Or, more to the point, to explain it away. Late last night, I wrote some thoughts on this:

As I’m writing this, the outcome of the presidential contest hasn't yet been settled but it’s clear Donald Trump has performed solidly and is probably on his way to winning it. However that turns out, what should have been a one-sided massacre of a joke of a Republican candidate has become a razor-thin contest and before the usual Democratic spin-cycle starts, it’s important to get some things straight.

Hillary Clinton didn't perform badly because of the presence of third-party candidates in the race. Clinton didn't perform badly because of Bernie Sanders. She didn't perform badly because people didn't want a woman for president. It certainly wasn't because she wasn't conservative enough, and moving the party even further right is certainly no solution. It isn't the fault of young people or of James Comey. Hillary Clinton has performed so badly because of Hillary Clinton. She's a weak, loser candidate who began the race more disliked than liked, ran a terrible campaign that made that even worse, a bought-and-paid-for shill, the ultimate Establishment politician in a year in which that was an anathema. She's behind and probably going to lose because she was, yet again, another pol who offered nothing to those who have been harmed by the decline of America and have been left behind by the political Establishment. In the absence of constructive politics that address their concerns, people will inevitably turn to whatever is available, even a faux-populist protofascist campaign.

This didn't have to happen. The Democrats had a solid candidate who drew all the enthusiasm within the party and who would have rolled right over Trump. And Clinton and the party Establishment burned every bridge in order to screw him over and foist Clinton on the public instead, at a time when most people openly told pollsters they despised her. It worked. Hope was broken.[2] And now, the U.S. is likely to be saddled with a dangerously incompetent protofascist half-wit.

There's a certain element of unappealing braggadocio in told-you-so-ism but in this case, it's some salt that needs to be vigorously applied to this particular wound, because this outcome was utterly predictable. I assembled the below graphic in October 2015[3] and used it to accompany this analysis, which I'd been offering in various venues even before that, and had, in fact, offered back in 2008 as well. The good news is that a Trump win will probably finish off the GOP and lead to the revitalization of an opposition party.

It will, that is, unless the expected Democratic spin I've tried to prematurely disentangle is allowed to substitute for a genuine autopsy.

Showing the same lack of class that helped defeat her, Clinton declined to speak to her followers gathered at her campaign headquarters in New York last night, offering no public concession. It fell to Trump to note, during his own victory speech, that she'd called him and conceded.

It will be interesting to see if Democrats get this right and, for the purpose of this blog, even more interesting to see if the press holds them to account rather than letting them spin it away. Trump's win also presents a  major problem for the GOP, as the populist views he's adopted on things like "free trade" and jobs clash rather spectacularly with those of the party and its elected officials and the coverage of that will be a whole 'nother can of worms. But that's a can of worms for another day...

--j.

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[1] In recent days, I've been overwhelmed by the feeling that I've seriously dropped the ball on the Trump phenomenon. Trump is the latest manifestation of trends I've been covering for a couple decades now and though on various message boards and debate groups I've written perhaps entire books about his candidacy and, much more importantly, what's behind it, I've written almost nothing in the way of formal articles on it (and certainly no books). His campaign could be seen as a culmination of so much work I've done. Now that he's won, I guess I'll have the opportunity to play catch-up. I note this for no particular reason. Maybe it's just that this piece sounds like I'm crowing about getting the election right, so I'm feeling overly compelled to point out a personal shortcoming as counter.

[2] Bernie Sanders saw the likely outcome of a Clinton/Trump contest as well. In a speech to the Democratic National Committee's Summer conference on 28th August, 2015, he warned:

"Let me be very clear. In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate, will not gain the House and will not be successful in dozens of governor’s races unless we run a campaign which generates excitement and momentum and which produces a huge voter turnout. With all due respect, and I do not mean to insult anyone here, that will not happen with politics as usual. The same old, same old will not be successful. The people of our country understand that — given the collapse of the American middle class and the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality we are experiencing — we do not need more establishment politics or establishment economics. We need a political movement which is prepared to take on the billionaire class and create a government which represents all Americans, and not just corporate America and wealthy campaign donors. In other words, we need a movement which takes on the economic and political establishment, not one which is part of it."

[3] To clarify, this was an existing image of Clinton; I only applied the word to it.