BRIEF REPLY

ES asks an interesting question:  ""While I don't dispute the valuable lesson, your comment takes for granted that the Trump we are getting now is the real Trump, so to speak. People who suspect a change in character believe (whether rightly, I don't know) that the current Trump is no more than an act put on to appeal to certain demographics and that it therefore must both be the case and must be possible that his character will change when the time comes (either after securing the nomination or before if he loses ground).   Do you think such an assessment likely?"

I have no doubt that Trump will change his positions on issues instantaneously and without the slightest indication of discomfort, as he has already done many times.  But I do not think fundamental character traits can easily be faked, particularly by someone so obviously in thrall to powerful infantile needs and fantasies.

As many observers have noted, Trump is obsessed with anxieties about masculinity, dominance over male competitors, and sexual prowess with "trophy" women [witness his inability to let go of the issue of his small hands.]   I think it will drive him utterly out of control to be locked for months in a contest with a strong woman [and say what you will about Clinton, as I already have, she is indeed strong.]   I can easily imagine him doing something insanely self-defeating, like manufacturing an excuse to pull out of a scheduled presidential debate.

PRE-DAWN MUSINGS

More than forty years ago, when I was still relatively newly arrived at the University of Massachuesetts Amherst, I knew a Professor of Italian named Zina Tillona [she has since gone on to earn a law degree and now practices in Northampton, I believe]. A group of us were sitting around gossiping one day about a mutual acquaintance who had just been tapped for an administrative position despite no prior such experience. "I wonder what sort of Dean he will be," someone said, idly. Zina replied, "Well, most people do most things the way they do most other things."

Ay first, I thought the remark rather trite, almost tautological. But on reflection, I realized that it encapsulated a very deep truth. There are styles in human behavior, and those styles crop up across a wide range of activities, some trivial, some very important. So this man was likely to be a Dean in roughly the way he was a tennis player, a father, a teacher, or a lover. If he was fussy, obsessed with trivia, vindictive in his personal relationships, and perpetually late to parties or his children's teacher conferences, then he would almost certainly be fussy, obsessed with trivia, vindictive, and chronically late to appointments as a Dean.

Erick Ericson says something similar in Childhood and Society [I think.] People have styles in dreaming, he observes. Some always dream in color, others in black and white. Some have barren, simple dreams, others have cluttered dreams. And this is true regardless of the subject matter of the dream.

Why is any of this important, even granting that it is kind of interesting?  Because there is continuing speculation that  Donald Trump will "pivot" to the General Election once he secures the Republican nomination and will then cease to behave as he has these past nine months.  He will cease making vile misogynistic comments, quickly study up on the basic facts of foreign affairs, develop a robust ground game, and become a formidable candidate against [presumably] Hillary Clinton.

I seriously doubt it.  Most people do most things the way they do most other things.

MY SECRET VALENTINE

When I read about the petition circulating [50,000 signatures so far] to allow guns at the Republican Convention, I thought, "wouldn't it be lovely if some leftie were trolling the Republicans?"  It turns out that is exactly what is happening.  God I love this country!

AND AGAIN, CLINTON AND THE EMAIL/SERVER MESS

I was sitting at dinner this evening, talking to Susie about what I had gleaned from the Washington Post story about Hillary Clinton and the e-mail/server scandal, when suddenly I remembered a passage from The Great Gatsby that perfectly captures what is wrong with her and Bill.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

I freely confess that I really do not like them.

WHITHER BERNIE?

Let me turn my attention now to the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.  First, the facts.

There will be 4765 delegates at the Convention, 4051 pledged and 714 unpledged ["superdelegates"].   It will take a total of 2383 delegates to win the nomination.  If Clinton wins those 2383 from the primaries and caucuses alone, that will leave 1667 for Bernie [Martin O'Malley has 1].  In short, to win without superdelegates, she must go into the Convention with a pledged delegate lead of 716 over Bernie.  At the moment, her lead is 299, more or less.  If Bernie continues to do well in the remaining primaries, it actually seems more likely that  he will somewhat narrow the gap, although he is virtually certain not to overtake her in pledged delegates.

So, it will come down to the superdelegates.

If we assume that Clinton goes to the Convention having won more votes and more pledged delegates, what could possibly persuade the superdelegates, who are as people inclined to support Clinton anyway, to withdraw their support for her and choose Bernie?

I can only see three possibilities, none of which seems likely.

First, the Republican Convention having taken place the preceding week, if the Republicans nominate someone [i.e., Kasich] who beats Clinton in the polls, that might do it.  If they nominate Trump, which seems most probable, the mere fact that Bernie crushes Trump in the polls even more than Clinton will not do it.  Clinton currently beats Trump by more than ten points in the polls, which, in a presidential election is a landslide.  Sufficient unto the day.

Second, if the e-mail/private server issue heats up, and a top aide to Clinton gets indicted or plea bargains, that could scramble everything, and the availability of a plausible alternative in Bernie might influence enough of the superdelegates to throw the race to Bernie.

Third, that bird might return, this time with a message taped to its leg from God.

I am holding out for number three.

THE PRIVATE SERVER MATTER

I have just finished reading a long story in today's Washington Post going in great detail into the "scandal" arising out of Secretary Clinton's use of a private server and private Blackberry to send and receive all manner of work-related e-mails during her time as Secretary of State.  Two things seem clear to me:  First, there is not the slightest hint of a suggestion that Clinton ever did anything willfully to share classified information with inappropriate persons;  and Second, from the outset, her behavior was high-handed, arrogant, reckless, stupid, self-serving, and arguably flat-out illegal.  She behaved from first to last as though regulations of which she was well aware simply did not apply to someone as important as she thought herself to be.  Did her behavior endanger the United States?  Probably not.  Could it have done so?  Probably.  Is there any excuse for what she did?  I cannot see one.  She was motivated principally by a concern for her own convenience, nothing more.  At one point, she actually sent a memorandum to her underlings warning them to abide by procedures that  she herself was in the process of ignoring.

She does not, in my judgment, come off as a very admirable person.

WHAT IS A LIBERAL?

It is a slow day, rainy down here in bigotland, so I thought I would try to respond to Chris's question about liberalism.  Let  me begin by reminding everyone that forty-eight years ago I published a little book called The Poverty of Liberalism.  This has been on my mind for a while.

Liberalism as a political doctrine started life as a rationale for capitalism, and it has never wavered in its pursuit of that project.  In the early nineteenth century there were three responses to the dramatic, revolutionary, transformative impact on Europe of the newly burgeoning capitalism.  The Conservatives decried capitalism's ruthless destruction of traditional social, economic, political, and religious arrangements, pining for the good old days, inventing the myth of Merrie Olde England, or simply viewing with despair and alarm the death of all that they considered good in the social world.  The Liberals celebrated the new order, which they considered the apotheosis of rationality and the ultimate demystification of social reality.  They were well aware of the evils attendant upon the development of capitalism -- the slums, the poverty, the frequent economic booms and busts -- but they considered them the growing pains of the new order and were confident that the perfection of free markets would in short order overcome those imperfections.  The socialists, like the liberals, considered capitalism a massive advance over the previous feudal order, but were convinced that its evils were structural, not ephemeral, and could only be overcome by replacing capitalism with a truly rational social order, socialism.

For a while laisser-faire capitalism flourished, but the Great Depression created an intellectual as well as an economic and political crisis, in response to which the ideological justification for capitalism split.  One wing, which arrogated to itself the term "Liberal," embraced Keynesian teachings, and concluded that to keep the engine of exploitation going it would be necessary both to accept some measure of state interference with the actions of the capitalists and to make accommodations with the demands of the workers, in the form of unions, social services, and some amelioration of the condition of the working class.    The other wing, which took over the title of "conservative," resisted the accommodation with the workers and the intrusion of the state into the affairs of corporations.  Meanwhile traditional Conservatism, which was of course hostile to the spirit of capitalism, took up residence in the Catholic Church, which had never got over its disdain for capitalism as a Johnny-come-lately, or else, rather like Saruman and Grima Wormtongue, retreated to the Op Ed pages of the New York TIMES, where it now finds expression in the maunderings of Ross Douthat.  [Ayn Rand, by the way, is to Liberalism roughly what Smerdyakov is to Ivan -- a bastard who takes seriously every nonsensical utterance that her legitimate sibling utters with a certain ironic detachment.]

Since the end of World War Two, which is roughly when I began to notice the larger world, American politics has been a struggle between the two descendants of traditional Liberalism, made a great deal more complex by America's assumption in the late 1940's of the world-historical role of Imperial Hegemon, replacing the British, French, and German empires and competing, ultimately successfully, against the Russian empire.  Every president for the past 80 years [and more, but never mind] has been completely committed to the defense of capitalism in one or another of these fashions.

When I decided, on April 21, 1961, that I was "not a Liberal," I had little or no understanding of what I have here written.  I knew only that Jack Kennedy was a Liberal [he had graduated from Harvard and his wife spoke French, for heaven's sake], and that therefore, whatever he was, I was not.

Bernie Sanders describes himself as a Democratic Socialist, even though the fateful words, "collective ownership of the means of production" never pass his lips.  Sufficient unto the day.  First, it was Occupy Wall Street and "the one percent."  Now it is Democratic Socialism and "the billionaire class."  Major social change is like a landslide, not like brain surgery.  Bernie is a boulder rushing down the correct side of the mountain.  I am content to be a pebble slipping and tumbling in his wake.