[Peace-discuss] [New post] Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…

Thu Dec 28 17:46:27 UTC 2017

I don’t get it Carl.  Just what do you disagree with about Roth’s description of his own disgust with American policy in the times he talks about? Be specific. All that you reply/comment upon  below is beside the point. What I find particularly dismaying is your ambiguous defense of Trump, as if he were a great anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, peace maker. You have truly been fooled—that is a good word— by Trump's hope for a modus vivendi with Russia; now we can see that it was illusory—a US  led NATO is on Russia’s borders and sanctions persist. Are you ignoring his military buildup, his threats to use and develop even more nuclear weapons, his crusade against N. Korea, his attack on the environment (EPA ) and anthropogenic climate change, his association with the fossil fuels complex and walking away from the Paris agreement. His continuation of threats against Iran linked to Israeli policies and against Palestinians, his attack on the public school system with his appointment Vos, His overt militarism, his appointment of federal judges of the most reactionary stripe he can find, his catering to violence and racism. I am unable to list all his regressive and dangerous policies, yes, many a continuation of what went before his term in office, like the drone murders and the continuing depredations in Afghanistan and Syria.

Perhaps you should consult the reflections of your muse Noam Chomsky on all this.

No, I have not forgotten about how Democrats have also played (many of) these vile games.

All this reminds me that you have also forgotten about the crassness of Nixon, his subversion of law, his continuation of the Vietnam war, his anticommunist fervor. But yes, he as not all encompassing evil, as you point out.The times were such that he advanced some policies that now would be regarded as “liberal”. And how about his Secretary of State Kissinger, the mastermind of his foreign policy in Chile against Allende, but yes also China.

As for Trump, he is a personal  but consequential nonentity, ignorant, stupid, and amoral beyond measure. The two,Nixon and Trump, are not totally comparable, but Roth’s disgust certainly rhymes with what many of us feel today with the Trump/Republican administration.
—mkb

On Dec 27, 2017, at 4:03 PM, Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu<mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:

I disagree: all analogies limp, and Nixon/Trump is particularly spavined. Roth was writing at the high point of the social democratic arc that began with the New Deal.

Nixon’s was the most liberal US administration since WWII, despite Nixon’s own views. (Even a guaranteed annual income was proposed by the administration but defeated by Democrats: see e.g., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan" [1973].)

Neoliberalism, the conscious, calculated construction of American business, was just getting underway. (See e.g., “The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies,” a 1975 report written by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki for the Trilateral Commission; it says that after ‘the sixties” the problems of governance in the US "stem from an excess of democracy" and thus advocates "to restore the prestige and authority of central government institutions” and the profitability of business.)

Neoconservatism was being constructed, primarily by partisans of Israel who feared that the anti-war sentiment engendered by war in SE Asia would carry over into the Mideast. (By 1969 about 70% of the US public had come to regard the Vietnam war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake.”)

Inequality in the US, on the decline since 1929, had reached its low point ca. 1970; the curve turned up, accelerated, and has now reached levels equivalent to those of 1929. For many Americans,”make America great again” means restoring the economic situation and life chances their parents knew in "les trente glorieuses" (1945-75), as Piketty calls those years.

Trump was the first major party candidate in 40 years to attack the neoconservative (more war) and neoliberal (more inequality) policies that dominated all administrations from Carter’s through Obama’s; that’s in part why he was elected - as an inchoate protest against war and immiseration - against a pro-war and pro-Wall St. Democratic candidate. (See e.g.,  <http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/clinton-because-communities/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__mondoweiss.net_2017_07_clinton-2Dbecause-2Dcommunities_&d=DwMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=RbDT1tYJGukRYhPt5oNtCeRe3p2Bp2sx7Qk4TWFvItM&m=idZcGlmdCGhnPtm_l6MG1c_-0nXELR2EqrUZ13VSRVA&s=1H0bj4X-qpG1PlfnJTupSBuGyTVnC8wxIEAUQ1Cfp9E&e=>>.)  —CGE

On Dec 27, 2017, at 11:12 AM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:

This needs only a very little updating.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Corey Robin <donotreply at wordpress.com<mailto:donotreply at wordpress.com>>
Subject: [New post] Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…
Date: December 25, 2017 at 6:19:58 PM CST
To: mkb3 at mac.com<mailto:mkb3 at mac.com>

New post on Corey Robin
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<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_-3Fauthor-3D1&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=aPVYea6Cv8ypCygMwEeb-ww2EJTUgrfcdDGWjx0AeE0&e=>
Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_2017_12_25_politics-2Din-2Dthis-2Dcountry-2Dhas-2Dnever-2Dfelt-2Dthe-2Dway-2Dthe-2Dit-2Ddoes-2Dnow_&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=frKhVcLiYziRTwUZnr3R2q2MCyi10-_BtE5luFwcc-0&e=>
by Corey Robin<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_-3Fauthor-3D1&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=aPVYea6Cv8ypCygMwEeb-ww2EJTUgrfcdDGWjx0AeE0&e=>

"The Vietnam War years were the most 'politicized' of my life. I spent my days during this war writing fiction, none of which on the face of it would appear to connect to politics. But by being 'politicized' I mean something other than writing about politics or even taking direct political action. I mean something akin to what ordinary citizens experience in countries like Czechoslovakia or Chile: a daily awareness of government as a coercive force, its continuous presence in one's thoughts as far more than just an institutionalized system of regulations and controls. In sharp contrast to Chileans or Czechs, we hadn't personally to fear for our safety and could be as outspoken as we liked, but this did not diminish the sense of living in a country with a government out of control and wholly in business for itself. Reading the morning New York Times and the afternoon New York Post, watching the seven and then the eleven o'clock TV news—all of which I did ritualistically—became for me like living on a steady diet of Dostoevsky. Rather than fearing for the well-being of my own kin and country, I now felt toward America's war mission as I had toward the Axis goals in World War II. One even began to use the word 'America' as though it was the name not of the place where one had been raised to which one had a patriotic attachment, but of a foreign invader that had conquered the country and with whom one refused, to the best of one's strength and ability, to collaborate. Suddenly America had turned into 'them'—and with this sense of dispossession came the virulence of feeling and rhetoric that often characterized the anti-war movement.

...Of course there have been others as venal and lawless [as Richard Nixon] in American politics, but even a Joe McCarthy was more identifiable as human clay than this guy is. The wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won the confidence and approval of a people who generally require at least a little something of the 'human touch' in their leaders. It's strange that someone so unlike the types most admired in the average voter...could have passed himself off to this Saturday Evening Post America as, of all things, an American."

—Philip Roth, 1974

Corey Robin<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_-3Fauthor-3D1&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=aPVYea6Cv8ypCygMwEeb-ww2EJTUgrfcdDGWjx0AeE0&e=> | December 25, 2017 at 7:19 pm | Tags: Philip Roth<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_-3Ftaxonomy-3Dpost-5Ftag-26term-3Dphilip-2Droth&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=n2wmM2UATOW7wLY7yoPmppLaG0CW9OkMbF9YJbsPTKQ&e=>, Richard Nixon<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_-3Ftaxonomy-3Dpost-5Ftag-26term-3Drichard-2Dnixon&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=lElYFzW5XWzS4D4JlHRNCGg7a-af6Qyti-pgywzOzdE&e=> | Categories: Literature<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_-3Ftaxonomy-3Dcategory-26term-3Dliterature&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=RkILuUZ0hVf-zVzmK2DO0_G7IZ2vMsYP7uJRUAPwRZs&e=>, The Right<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__coreyrobin.com_-3Ftaxonomy-3Dcategory-26term-3Dthe-2Dright&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=KAQeWCkI3hRslb8gN9mGh-nOkwBzjlOMIY3YIuoGdoM&e=> | URL: https://wp.me/p5IQfX-2nV<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wp.me_p5IQfX-2D2nV&d=DwMGaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=tfHzwZBcTLEveiewRiq0OdhFmfRmlvZjpIBS0AUJ2v0&m=Grz6lZ97zGQQ0E--LtDeejfMeLCOzCFcjJi1Ry2_Fqw&s=8aM0EVoUeO_FBBVxXce6nkO7JoPLso7gVMf8z6CSKxo&e=>

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