Walter Russell Mead: The Meaning of Mr. Trump

[T]rump looks like a vulnerable candidate—one with so many flaws that his candidacy must inevitably implode once he comes under serious scrutiny. But as he showed during the primary campaign, Trump isn’t subject to the normal rules. Between policy flip-flops, lack of knowledge and experience, business woes, ill-tempered outbursts, and scapegoating of minority groups who are likely to vote in November, he presents his opponents with an embarrassment of riches: there are so many attractive targets for negative ads that even Lee Atwater would be hard pressed to decide which to hit first.

But this apparent weakness and vulnerability conceals a strength: Trump is an unconventional candidate whose proposition to the electorate isn’t about particular policy stands, experience, credentials or even personal and political honesty. Trump is the purest expression of the politics of ‘NO!’ that I personally can recall. He’s the candidate for people who think the conventional wisdom of the American establishment is hopelessly out of touch with the real world. He’s the little boy saying that the emperor, or in this case, the aspiring empress, has no clothes. What energizes the Trump phenomenon is the very power of rejection: people who think the train is about to head off a cliff want to pull the emergency cord that stops the train even if they don’t know what happens next. To many of Trump supporters, Hillary Clinton looks like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: the enforcer of a fatally flawed status quo and the personification of bureaucratic power in a system gone rogue.

What makes Trump so appealing to so many voters is that the establishment does seem unusually clueless these days.The great American post-Cold War project of seeking peace and security through the construction of a New World Order based on liberal internationalism and American power doesn’t seem to be working very well, and it’s not hard to conclude that neither the neoconservatives nor the Obama-ites really know what they are doing. When it comes to the economy, it’s been clear since the financial crisis of 2008 that something is badly awry and that the economists, so dogmatic and opinionated and so bitterly divided into quarreling schools, aren’t sure how the system works anymore, and have no real ideas about how to make the world system work to the benefit of ordinary voters in the United States. With the PC crowd and the Obama administration hammering away at transgender bathroom rights as if this was the great moral cause of our time, and with campus Pure Thought advocates collapsing into self parody even as an epidemic of drug abuse and family breakdown relentlessly corrodes the foundations of American social cohesion, it’s hard to believe that the establishment has a solid grip on the moral principles and priorities a society like ours needs.

Trump appeals to all those who think that the American Establishment, the Great and the Good of both parties, has worked its way into a dead end of ideas that don’t work and values that can’t save us. He is the candidate of Control-Alt-Delete. His election would sweep away the smug generational certainties that Clinton embodies, the Boomer Progressive Synthesis that hasn’t solved the problems of the world or of the United States, but which nevertheless persists in regarding itself as the highest and only form of truth. (read the whole thing)

[Walter Russell] Mead could have mentioned Zbigniew Brezinski,

the diplomat turned pundit who is a frequent defender of Barack Obama. Has the irony occurred to Professor Mead that he wrote an entire article about role of the press in Afghanistan while virtually ignoring the Taliban? As Mead knows (or should know) Brzezinski practically invented the Taliban back in the 1970s when he trained and armed the Afghan mujahideen to the hilt in order to give the Soviets a black eye. Of course it would be too much to expect Mead to offer even tepid criticism of Brzezinski; he is, after all, an editorial board member of the "American Interest."

According to commenter wigwag that is one thing Mead could have mentioned in his article Media Gives President a Pass Again published at the American Interest.

Wigwag goes on at length describing more things that W.R. Mead could have mentioned since Mead didn't have a problem mentioning Harold Bloom by name in an earlier piece wigwag knows that it's possible for Mead to do it. So why not? Another notable not mentioned by name would be Tom Friedman who mentioned W.R. Mead benevolently in one of his own pieces so now by not mentioning Friedman by name as one Obama's chief cheerleaders when he could for clarity must be for another reason like not messing up that good thing.

Wigwag postulates co-existential self-hate, oikophobia as another blogger insists, as the unifying reason why media align with progressive liberal politicians and protect them. Wigwag does what liberals do and recommends a book on the subject, the one that helped formulate his opinions. Why is recommending a book a thing that liberals do? Because wigwag recommends two and tells us if we haven't read then we're doing ourselves a disservice.

Read it so we can be smart as he.

Smart in the same way he is smart, along the same lines of thinking so your thoughts are formed as his thoughts are formed on the subjects at hand and we do him a disservice by not catching up.

Wigwag expands on Steel, the author of the first book. Wigwag finds it interesting the same things that informs and biases media principals and glitterati toward Obama policies are the same things that inform their attitude toward Israel because Israel is a product of the West and they harbor ill feeling for the West and its history, for themselves. Then he recommends another book.

Wigwag continues about rejection of American exceptionalism and how there is a clear split between party (with media scrutiny) and party with media support.  These are all subjects we've talked about here but it was odd seeing all splayed out by a random commenter. All of the following comments are supportive of this one by wigwag. One said wigwag's comment is better than the article, which is quite good, but again, material all well covered. Wigwag is right, W.R. Mead's piece really would have been better with names.

The modern bureaucratic government is like Philip II of Spain, the Spider King.

He sat at the center of his labyrinth at the Escorial, endlessly toiling, never resting, as he painstaking scratched comments, queries and instructions on the teeming piles of documents his officials brought in from his globe-girdling domains. The king was overworked, the realm badly governed. The system wasn’t adequate to the circumstances; the kingdom had outgrown the government; the volume of business to be done, the complexity of questions to be addressed and the speed at which decisions needed to be taken quite overwhelmed the capacity of the world’s most industrious monarch until it was hard to say who was worse off — the king or the kingdom.

The American Interest.
Beyond Blue: Even the Dems Can't Hack It Anymore
Essay # 8 

Despite occasional feeble and halfhearted efforts to “reinvent government”, the structure and culture of the Executive Branch and its administrative offshoots today lags far behind contemporary best practice. Whether it is managing information or making decisions, the government structure today is simply not up to its task. 

Republicans and anti-blue statists will want to fix this because bad government is big government and takes a terrible toll on the economy (cumbersome procedures, bad decisions, a large and expensive staff). But smart proponents of a strong federal government will also want to change this status quo because the state as presently constituted is simply not able to take on all the missions they would like to see addressed. 

Just as we once saw competing Republican and Democratic versions of Progressive politics, so going forward we will see competing Republican and Democratic versions of post-blue politics. I can’t predict how these partisan battles will come out, but it seems likely that through it all, the government will be remade and the bureaucratic administrative state that has dominated American life since the New Deal will transform.

I have nothing to add to this except to say how impressed I am with this series of essays. The first essay describes the original American dream of building one's own family farm and how jolting the drastic change was to simple home ownership, why all that happened and how it was survived. You can read the rest of this essay at the link, plus two more for free, but the remaining five essays will cost you $3.00. I say, it's well worth it.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/01/29/beyond-blue-part-one-the-crisis-of-the-american-dream/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/01/beyond-blue-part-two-recasting-the-dream/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/05/beyond-blue-part-three-the-power-of-infostructure/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/08/beyond-blue-part-four-better-living-in-the-21st-century/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/20/beyond-blue-5-jobs-jobs-jobs/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/28/beyond-blue-6-the-great-divorce/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/03/10/beyond-blue-7-from-levittown-to-superburb/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/03/20/beyond-blue-8-even-the-dems-cant-hack-it-anymore/