Comment of the Day: : On Ross Douthat: "It's kindof like blaming Jackie Robinson for racist baseball fans because he once took out a shortstop on a double play."
And the extraordinarily execrable Ross Douthat, writing for the execrable New York Times editorial page:
: From Obama to Trump: "The Republican Party’s Trumpian meltdown... hasn’t inspired is much in the way of [liberal] self-examination...
...or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.... Trumpism... a creature of the late Obama era, irrupting after eight years when a charismatic liberal president has dominated the cultural landscape and set the agenda for national debates.... It isn’t an accident that this is the way the Obama era ends--with a reality TV demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt. First, the reality TV element... is a kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama effort in 2008. Presidential politics has long had... a cultish side that’s grown ever-more-conspicuous with time. But the first Obama campaign raised the bar... quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric... Great Man iconography... pillared sets... Oprah... Will.i.am... Hollywood stars... one part Aaron Sorkin-scripted liturgy, one part prestige movie’s Oscar campaign. And it worked. But because it worked, now we have the nearly-inevitable next step: presidential politics as a season of ‘Survivor’ or, well, ‘The Apprentice’....
[Trump] is also proving... that voters are increasingly habituated to... an ever more imperial presidency... a trend that Obama’s choices have accelerated.... The current president has expanded executive authority... launching wars without congressional approval, claiming the power to assassinate American citizens, and using every available end-around to make domestic policy without any support from Congress... cut the legs from under principled liberal critiques of executive power... weakened the American left’s role as a bulwark against Caesarism....
It [is] altogether fitting... that his reward is the rise of a right-wing Caesarist... rallying a constituency that once swung between the parties, but that the Obama White House has spent the last eight years slowly writing off... white working-class voters, especially in the Rust Belt and coal country.... Obama has... slam[med] the door on them... [with] energy policies... immigration gambits... gun control... shift to offense on same-sex marriage and abortion. It was possible to be a culturally conservative skeptic of mass immigration in the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton. Not so anymore.
