Monday Smackdown: Finally We Find What Makes Clive Crook Stop Being an Anti-Anti-Trump Poseur!
A correspondent who wishes me ill writes and asks me what I think of Niall Ferguson and Clive Crook these days. I won't rise to the bait for Niall, but I will note that trade issues have made Clive Crook forget that back in November 2016 he decided to swim with what he saw as the tide carrying him to his niche as an anti-anti-Trump poseur. The talk about how we must be measured in our response—must listen carefully and respectfully to those with "the intelligible and legitimate opinions of that large minority" who will, after they have been marinated in Fox News, applaud Trump's actions—is gone, 100% gone:
Clive Crook: Congress Must Blunt Trump’s Assault on Trade: "What Trump did last week matters...
...Fir[ing] the first shot in what could become a trade war against U.S. allies demands a whole new level of alarm about the damage this president might do.... Decades from now, historians might be amazed that Trump chose to disdain U.S. alliances just as China's ambitions as an ideological rival and emerging military superpower had come more sharply into focus.... Few had expected him to carry out his earlier threat to put tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico and Europe.... The harm to a highly integrated global economic system could be immense.... You'd surely expect to see more local resistance.... Congress should be pressing to take back control of trade policy. This could and should be a bipartisan endeavor.... The idea that steel imports from Canada raise national-security concerns is fatuous.... Most Republicans in Congress think the president's approach is misconceived. But only a handful of GOP senators appear ready to support legislation to rein in Trump's freedom of action.... It's an abdication of Congress's responsibility under the Constitution—and could be the most consequential dereliction of duty so far...
But I remember the earlier Clive. For example...
Last summer Ramesh Ponnuru wrote: Ramesh Ponnuru: Bury the Confederacy for Good: "The meaning of public symbols is not a private matter...
...We remember Jefferson the slave master; but we also remember the Declaration of Independence, the University of Virginia, a role in our national history that is not reducible to his slaveholding. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, to this day has a highway with his name on it in Virginia because, and only because, he tried to found a nation with slavery as its cornerstone.... It was not necessary to have a vicious character to fight for the Confederacy in 1861, though one is required to root for it today.... Ulysses Grant acknowledged that Lee had fought “long and valiantly,” but in the same breath noted that he “had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” To judge such choices with mercy is not to honor those choices....
Those who defend Lee statues and worse often say they are motivated by “heritage not hate.”... But the meaning of a public symbol is not a private possession.... Can they really tell black people... who look at that statue, erected in the same period as “The Birth of a Nation” and the second Ku Klux Klan, and see a public display of contempt for their dignity and rights—that their reaction is absurd? The marching racists were vile and stupid. But they weren’t crazy to treat the statue as a vestige of white supremacy...
And then Clive Crook decided not to echo him but to say that the real victims of the public debate in the aftermath of Charlottesville were those who liked the Confederate statues whose feelings were wounded: Clive Crook: Why People Still Support Trump: "Trump's supporters are loyal.... [That] is a terrible indictment of the Democratic Party and much of the media. Why aren't the intelligible and legitimate opinions of that large minority given a hearing?... It's worth pondering that opposing the removal of Confederate monuments may soon make you a racist, if it doesn't already...
I am with Ramesh here: Those who look at the Confederate statues and tell Black people that they are not "a public display of contempt for their dignity and rights" are gravely lacking in empathy and historical knowledge, and are crazy in treating the statues as other than a vestige of white supremacy.
So why does Clive Crook think that they deserve to be treated with more dignity than those who have—rightly—felt the statues to be a racist warning in intent and effect that they have "no rights which the white man is bound to respect"?
But do note that this is the position that Clive Crook has fallen back to. He is no longer defending the rank idiocy he was blathering in mid-2017:
Clive Crook: Trump's Opponents Are His Only Hope: "I'd bet my West Virginia neighbors that President Donald Trump's support will soon collapse...
...and... the Republican Party will take a beating in next year's midterm elections. This amuses them very much, and they ask to be introduced to more people from Washington who think they know what they're talking about. You'll see, they say, Trump will be fine and the Republicans will increase their majorities next year.... I still expect to win my bet. [Even though] his opponents are a tremendous asset, never to be underestimated... he looks beyond saving. My neighbors, in case you're wondering, will pay up with a smile. They're good people...
Trump[s] opponents... have been... his great enablers, celebrating every misstep, putting the worst possible construction on every dumb comment, howling at every pratfall, one day hyperventilating and the next yucking it up—all as if to tell Trump's supporters, "There you are, morons, you see we were right."... However justified, that chorus of contempt for Trump's supporters isn't going to encourage them to defect.... The refusal from the start to give him a chance (sorry for bringing that up again) continues to undermine his critics' credibility even though, by now, he's had his chance and blown it...
Or the even more extreme idiocy he was blathering in late 2016:
Clive Crook*: Consider This: Trump Might Be a Good President: "His critics... have been so harsh that it won’t be difficult for Trump to prove them wrong...
...I have to give credit to Slate’s Jamelle Bouie... crazy zealot... but at least he's consistent...
Clive Crook: Consider This: Trump Might Be a Good President: "His critics... have been so harsh that it won’t be difficult for Trump to prove them wrong...
...The view that he’s a far-right racist zealot, a 21st-century Hitler, shouldn’t be hard to refute: He just needs to avoid dressing his supporters in paramilitary uniforms, declaring martial law in the inner cities, and building a network of concentration camps. President Obama and Hillary Clinton tapered their denunciations of Trump once he was elected, choosing to be gracious and open-minded. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both said that, much as they detest Trump, they’ll work with him....
I have to give credit to Slate’s Jamelle Bouie... the crazy zealot... but at least he's consistent. If Trump were indeed a Hitler for our times, you would be right to refuse any and all cooperation, and to stop him by any means necessary....
Trump... isn’t “far-right.” In the agreements he’ll aim to reach with Republicans in Congress, he’ll often be a moderating influence, pulling to the left.... Trump has said he wants to cut taxes and increase spending on infrastructure. A big fiscal stimulus is exactly what many liberal economists have been calling for these past several years. Today, as you might expect, they're no longer so sure. Some damn-the-torpedoes Keynesians now see the merit in fiscal conservatism.... [But] a Trump presidency could give them a macroeconomic policy that’s closer to the one they’ve been advocating than anything they’ve seen so far. And in the short run, it would boost growth....
Trade, so central in his campaign, is apparently not among the three things he wants to address right away. Those would be tax reform, immigration and health care.... It will help that Trump has no ideology.... His goal isn’t to drive through, at any cost, some radical transformation of America’s society and economy, or to reorder international relations and remake the world. It’s to prove his critics wrong, and keep on winning.
Clive Crook: Why People Still Support Trump: "Trump's supporters are loyal. What is one to make of this?...
...There are two main theories of Trump's support. One is that a large minority of Americans—40 percent, give or take—are racist idiots.... The other is that a large majority of this large minority are good citizens with intelligible and legitimate opinions, who so resent being regarded as racist idiots that they'll back Trump almost regardless. They may not admire the man, but he's on their side, he vents their frustration, he afflicts the people who think so little of them—and that's good enough.... The first theory is absurd and the second theory basically correct. The first theory, if it were true, would be an argument against democracy.... This sense that democratic politics is futile if not downright dangerous now infuses the worldview of the country's cultural and intellectual establishment. Trump is routinely accused of being authoritarian and anti-democratic, despite the fact that he won the election and, so far, has been checked at every point and has achieved almost nothing in policy terms....
The second theory—the correct theory—is a terrible indictment of the Democratic Party and much of the media. Why aren't the intelligible and legitimate opinions of that large minority given a hearing?... Those who scorn Trump's supporters might argue that none of their opinions are in fact intelligible or legitimate.... [But] it isn't racism to favor tighter controls if you believe that high immigration lowers American wages.... It's worth pondering that opposing the removal of Confederate monuments may soon make you a racist, if it doesn't already.... I think the statues should go—read Ramesh Ponnuru on this—but most of those who support leaving them in place aren't racist.... Refusing to engage, except to mock and condescend, is both anti-democratic and tactically counterproductive. Proof of that last point is the dispiriting tenacity of Trump's support... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-28/why-people-still-support-trump
