March 11: The Tiger has shown himself at Gap. The Troops are advancing on all sides to arrest his progress. He will conclude his miserable adventure by becoming a wanderer among the mountains.
I honestly think Trump has the best chance of being the next POTUS. (I peg him at 35%, Hillary at 30%, Jeb at 20%)
It\u2019d be a realignment election that pivots the Republicans to a nativist welfarism, which is a realignment they\u2019ll have to make sooner or later - it\u2019s where their base is at already. If he can pull it off - \u201cit\u201d basically being the Sailer Strategy - and swing the Rust Belt red that\u2019d give the GOP an electoral lock until and unless Texas flips (and the threatened Republicans\u2019 inevitable divisionist gambit fails) and/or the next realignment comes. You\u2019d cede bankers, blacks, and professionals with postgraduate degrees, but if you\u2019ll recall so did the New Deal coalition.
Trump and Sanders are both burning up the floor and giving their party establishments heartburn pitching Scando-German native-producerist welfarism to a white audience, whoever can grab that ring first hoo boy. And as that recent Netroots Nation demonstrated, I think any pivot attempt\u2019s going to face more resistance from the Dem base.
(If you look at the aftermath, you realize a lot of white progressives didn\u2019t realize it would even be a pivot, they thought that\u2019s where they\u2019ve been since FDR and don\u2019t seem to have recognized the Great Society/New Democrat thing as a realignment in the first place, largely because it didn\u2019t work for them. Remember, \u201cwe will build an invincible coalition by adding minorities, feminists, the young, and the well-educated to our established lock on white producerists\u201d was the Democratic plan in the 1970s. Admittedly, the numbers are better now on the left side of the formula, but the right\u2026 and I don\u2019t think anyone has a coalition lined up right to win the actual shooting war they\u2019d have to in order to make a realignment where no one was repping whiteness-as-such.)
Historically, there are two forces in American politics that can only be matched by each other - big capital and nationalism. Nationalism being white nationalism, as \u201cwhite\u201d is the national identity America constructed to legitimate and unify itself, much as \u201cFrench\u201d was deployed as France centralized in the early modern period.
The Republicans were doing pretty well since the 1970s because they managed to get both on the same side, but the Democrats have managed to sneak a lot of capital out from under them - notice all the religious freedom opposition, all the Wall Street money, Schumer and Cuomo basically being Rockefeller Democrats.
And some of the most well-known and respected Presidents have come to power in realignments that basically mobilized (white) nationalism against money power - Jackson, Lincoln*, and both Roosevelts. (Money usually comes back through steadier erosion and cooption.)
Everyone realizes that the subtext of Obama\u2019s 2008 electoral appeal was that his victory would represent the integration of black and white as political subjects and finally after all this time relegate racial divides to the history books. And man, isn\u2019t that fucking ironic.
Honestly, I think he tried, I don\u2019t at all see him coming in with the plan for racial rabble-rousing the more ridiculous rightists attribute to him. I think early in his presidency he did the minimum lip service (and little more) necessary to service his coalition and hold it together, and the stuff after the \u201914 midterms was him realizing it wasn\u2019t going to work and doing what he could to leave the forces he actually had in the best position going forward.
And if he couldn\u2019t make it work, fuck, man. Fuck.
(What it would really take is a culture hero figure like him coming in just in time to face and triumph over a massive external force - total war, basically - that would essentially allow them to refound the nation on a new mythos.)
* Abraham Lincoln, agent of white nationalism? Yep. Remember first that plantation agriculture was the economic engine of America - slaveholders were Big Business; and second that while people today remember the Republican anti-slavery coalition as driven by New England moralists, a huge component of it was actually midwestern (remember, Lincoln was from Illinois) smallholders (read: petit bourgeois) and mechanics (read: skilled industrial workers) following a \u201cFree Soil/Free Labor\u201d ideology, who hated slavery in the same sense and for the same reasons as their heirs hate illegal immigration.
"}