Robert Kagan: This is how fascism comes to America

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The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.

And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as it has everyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-how-fascism-comes-to-america/2016/05/17/c4e32c58-1c47-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html

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1. The Spectator: Why the Republicans are even more divided than they look

Sir: Jacob Heilbrunn astutely analyses the predicament Donald Trump creates for America’s neoconservatives (‘Lumped with Trump’, 14 May). But the ideological schisms within the Republican party are even more profound than he indicates. In fact, Trump not only divides the populist right from movement conservatives — and neoconservatives — based in Washington, DC, he also divides neoconservatives against themselves. William Kristol, the neoconservative kingpin in Washington, has lately found himself under intense attack by David Horowitz, a California-based ex-radical-turned-rightist in the classic neoconservative mould. Horowitz has excoriated Kristol for dividing Republicans and effectively helping Hillary Clinton. Trump, Horowitz argues, is not only obviously better than Clinton on domestic policy but is also apt to be a better friend to Israel, in part because Trump talks about renegotiating Obama’s deal with Iran, while Clinton supports the deal as it exists.

Pro-Trump neoconservatives, like pro-Trump conservatives of other schools, do not have nearly the media presence that anti-Trump conservatives do. Yet Horowitz is far from alone: an anonymous group of writers in California, who evidently have ‘Straussian’ neoconservative leanings, have recently started an intellectual Trumpist website called the Journal of American Greatness.

DC-based movement conservatism commands the loyalty of far fewer voters than anyone had suspected. The mirage of a powerful and unified conservative movement was but an illusion fostered by a dozen journalists in the nation’s capital intoxicated by their fame within the pages of their publications. But nobody in the country at large listens to them — not even the neoconservatives in places like California. So who needs Bill Kristol?
Daniel McCarthy

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/why-the-republicans-are-even-more-divided-than-they-look/

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2. Neocon-Bashers Headline Koch Event as Political Realignment on Foreign Policy Continues

In the latest example of how foreign policy no longer neatly aligns with party politics, the Charles Koch Institute — the think tank founded and funded by energy billionaire Charles Koch — hosted an all-day event Wednesday featuring a set of speakers you would be more likely to associate with a left-wing anti-war rally than a gathering hosted by a longtime right-wing institution.

At the event, titled “Advancing American Security: The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy,” prominent realist and liberal foreign policy scholars took turns trashing the neoconservative worldview that has dominated the foreign policy thinking of the Republican Party — which the Koch brothers have been allied with for decades.

Most of the speakers assailed the Iraq War, nation building, and regime change. During a panel event also featuring former Obama Pentagon official Kathleen Hicks, foreign policy scholar John Mearsheimer brought the crowd to applause by denouncing American military overreach.

“We need to pull back, stop fighting all these wars. Stop defending rich people who are fully capable of defending themselves, and instead spend the money at home. Period. End of story!” he said, in remarks that began with a denunciation of the dilapidated state of the Washington Metrorail system.

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/neocon-bashers-headline-koch-event-as-political-realignment-on-foreign-policy-continues/

[newthinking]

3. Robert Kagan, NeoCon who is trying to rebrand himself as a "liberal interventionist".

One fascist calling out another, so I guess he should know..


http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/


Robert Kagan is a neoconservative writer and historian based at the Brookings Institution. A longtime proponent of an aggressive, interventionist U.S. foreign policy, Kagan has played an influential role in shaping the neoconservative agenda for more than two decades.

Kagan was a cofounder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a now defunct pressure group that helped build Beltway support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. In the early years of the Obama administration, he reprised this role as a cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a PNAC successor group.

He has also served as an adviser to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a board member of the U.S. Committee on NATO, an “international patron” of the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and a foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

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4. It is because of who he is that it is interesting.

The Conservative political establishment here is divided, and angry. They will mostly get behind Trump in the end, but there will be a new boss, policies will change, and in very unpredictable ways, and who gets to feed in the public trough will change too.

And there is an element of shadenfreude, Kagan is a guy that richly deserves his commuppance.

[newthinking]

5. Kagan is already shifting to align with neoliberal Democrats

they are not going away, they are just moving their furniture to another residence.

[Depaysement]

6. He's also tight with HRC

One reason I am hesitant to vote for her. Kagan = new wars

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7. I know who he is, let's try to not make it about the primaries for once.

Understanding what is going on with the Pubbies is at least as important as obsessing about who gets to be the big shot for the Dems.

[Depaysement]

8. I wasn't talking about the primaries

But whatever.

[bemildred]

9. You brought up HRC.

Not trying to annoy you, just don't want to discuss that mess.

[MisterP]

11. useless passel of ex-Trots!

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12. So full of themselves, so vicious, so wrong. nt

[KoKo]

10. Ahhh....Robert Kagan...

The benevolent one....

Good Links!