The Decline and Fall of Hillary Clinton

[cantbeserious]

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-decline-and-fall-of-hillary-clinton.html

The last couple of weeks in American politics have offered an interesting confirmation of some of the main themes I’ve discussed on this blog. For that matter, those weeks would have come as no surprise to one of the thinkers whose work has guided these essays since this blog started a decade ago, the philosopher of history Oswald Spengler. I can all too readily imagine the hard lines of Spengler’s face creasing in momentary amusement as he contemplates the temporarily divergent fates of those two candidates for the US presidency that, less than a year ago, nearly everyone insisted would be facing one another in the general election: Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.

Bush is in some ways the perfect poster child for the theme I have in mind just now. When he launched his campaign last year, it was a letter-perfect copy of the successful presidential campaigns of the last three decades. He lined up plenty of big-money sponsors; he assembled a team of ghostwriters, spin doctors, and door-to-door salesmen to run his campaign; he had a PR firm design a catchy logo; he practiced spouting the kind of empty rhetoric that sounds meaningful so long as you don’t think about it for two minutes; he took carefully calculated stands on a handful of hot-button topics, mouthed the conventional wisdom on every other issue, and set out to convince the voters that their interests would be harmed just a little bit less by putting him in the White House than by any of the alternatives.

That sort of content-free campaign is what got George Bush I, Bill Clinton, George Bush II, and Barack Obama onto the list of US presidents. What it got Jeb Bush, though, was a string of humiliating defeats. Some have suggested that his tearful exit from the race in the wake of the South Carolina primary was the act of a child who had been promised a nice shiny presidency by his daddy, and then found out that the mean voters wouldn’t give it to him. I think, though, that there was considerably more to it than that. I think that Bush had just realized, to his shock and horror, that the rules of the game had been changed on him without notice, and all those well-informed, well-connected people who had advised him on the route that would take him to the presidency had basically been smoking their shorts.

Snip ...

[haikugal]

1. .

Snip


The reaction to Albright’s public tantrum is in many ways as instructive as the tantrum itself. A great many American women simply aren’t buying it. More generally, no matter how furiously Clinton and her flacks hammer on the buttons of the vending machine, trying to elicit the mechanical response they think they ought to be able to expect, the voters aren’t falling into line. Trump and Sanders, each in his own way, have shown too many people that it’s possible to hope for something other than an intolerable state of business as usual. In the wake of their candidacies, a great many voters have decided that they’re no longer willing to vote for the lesser of two evils.


That’s a point of some importance. To my mind, it’s far from accidental that for the last few decades, every presidential election here in the US has been enlivened by bumper stickers calling on voters to support the presidential ambitions of Cthulhu, the tentacled primeval horror out of H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic dread. I’m sorry to say that the Elder God’s campaign faces a serious constitutional challenge, as he was spawned on the world of Vhoorl in the twenty-third nebula and currently resides in the drowned corpse-city of R’lyeh, and as far as I know neither of these are US territory. Still, his bid for the White House has gotten further than most other imaginary candidacies, and I’ve long thought that the secret behind that success is Cthulhu’s campaign slogan: “Why settle for the lesser evil?”

The reason that this slogan reliably elicits laughter, in turn, is that the entire rhetoric of presidential politics in the United States for decades now has fixated on the claim that one party’s pet stooge won’t do anything quite as appalling as the other side’s will, even though they all support the same policies and are bought and sold by the same corrupt interests. Over and over again, we’ve been told that we have to vote for whatever candidate this or that party has retched up, because otherwise the other side will get to nominate a Supreme Court justice or two, or get us into another war, or do something else bad. Any suggestion that a candidate might be expected to do something positive—that he or she might, for example, reject the bipartisan policies that have crashed the standard of living for most Americans, consigned the nation’s infrastructure to malign neglect, and pursued gargantuan corporate welfare programs, such as the worthless F-35 fighter, at the expense of anything more useful or necessary—is dismissed out of hand as “unrealistic.”

What the insurgent candidacies of Trump and Sanders show conclusively, in turn, is that the lesser-evil rhetoric and its fixation on “realistic” politics have just passed their pull date. There are very good reasons for this. The pursuit of the lesser evil means that the best the American people are supposed to hope for is the continuation of the current state of things—that’s what you get, after all, if your only talking points fixate on stopping things from getting worse—and for most Americans today, the current state of things is unbearable. Cratering wages and soaring rents, a legal environment that increasingly denies even basic rights to everybody but corporations and the rich, an economy rigged to load ever-increasing costs on working people while funneling all the benefits to those who already have too much—well, you can fill in the list as well as I can. If you don’t happen to belong to the privileged classes, life in today’s America is rapidly becoming intolerable, and the “realistic” politics that both parties have pursued with equal enthusiasm for decades are directly responsible for making it intolerable.

Snip

[cantbeserious]

2. Yes - Cogent And On Point

eom

[haikugal]

20. I got out of the habit of visiting his blog...will start to get back there more often.

[kath]

3. Thanks for this. VERY good article. Definitely worth the read. Also many good, intelligent comments.

[cantbeserious]

4. Welcome As Always - Please Share Widely

eom

[zappaman]

5. Yeah, she took a nose dive today

Gonna be hard to recover.

[ucrdem]

17. #feelthefail

[retrowire]

21. #imwithfail nt

[reformist2]

6. Let's not pat ourselves on the back for dumping Hillary quite yet. She still has a lot of support

Misguided and possibly misinformed support, imo, but support nonetheless. In any case, she has not lost the nomination at all, like Jeb! has.

[cantbeserious]

7. Purchasing The Presidency Is Writ Large In The Direct And Indirect Ways Candidates Are Bribed

List Of - Publicly Disclosed - HRC Speeches And Fees - $ 21,667,000

A True One Percenter - Beholden To The Real Owners Of America - Oligarchs, Corporations And Banks

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-27/snowden-sums-presidential-campaign-just-one-tweet

[BernieforPres2016]

11. It doesn't appear you read the piece

The author expects Hillary to win the Democratic nomination and then get crushed by Trump in the general election.

[reformist2]

18. Yeah, I didn't read that far. But shame on us if we can't convince enough Dems to dump her now!

[BernieforPres2016]

8. A great piece, maybe the best I've seen about where our society and political system stands

But the DNC and perhaps a majority of Democratic voters still have no idea of what is going on and are prepared to ride Hillary off the cliff.

[cantbeserious]

10. Yes - All Too True

eom

[kwassa]

9. Yes, a terrible defeat for Hillary today.

Huh? What?

[cantbeserious]

12. Read The Blog - Educate Oneself

eom

[rbrnmw]

13. ....

[cantbeserious]

15. Did You Read The Blog

eom

[grossproffit]

14. Her loss in South Carolina was embarrassing. Oh wait, she won.

[cantbeserious]

16. Did You Read The Blog

eom

[AzDar]

19. K & R

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. Now the blogger tells me Chtullu is running again...

(And yes I read it, and yes, this is not going to be pretty for the United States, but perhaps Americans will finally... grow up)

[cantbeserious]

23. We Can Only Hope

eom