Bernie Sanders Remains Delusional, Republicans Consider Voting for Hillary

While Bernie Sanders remains locked in an ego fueled fantasy that he will somehow win the Democrat nomination (to me, his ego seems as big or bigger than Donald Trump's), sane Republicans are now considering what they once thought unthinkable: voting for Hillary Clinton in November. Sanders seemingly cares nothing about making sure a Democrat wins in November - perhaps because he is not really a Democrat -  and prefers to indulge his egomania by continuing an unwinnable contest, only aiding Donald Trump in the process.  A piece in Politico looks at the situation of sane, non-extremist Republicans.  Here are highlights:

Ted Cruz’s sudden suspension of his campaign following his double-digit loss to Trump in Indiana Tuesday night is forcing anti-Trump Republicans to finally confront the Hobson’s Choice of a general election matchup between Hillary Clinton and a demagogic conspiracy theorist untethered to conservative principles.

While many conservative stalwarts are conflicted and stuck in a state of paralysis, some are considering the ultimate betrayal.

Schmidt predicted that “a substantial amount of Republican officials who have worked in Republican administrations, especially on issues of defense and national security, will endorse Hillary Clinton in the campaign.”

Trump is eager to unify the Republican Party, recognizing Cruz as a “great competitor” with a “brilliant future” just hours after suggesting that the Texas senator’s father was involved in the assassination of JFK and promising to “win big in November.

Cruz, in his farewell speech, didn’t mention Trump. At least three Republican senators —Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse and Cory Gardner of Colorado — signaled Tuesday night that they remain opposed to a Trump candidacy. Like many in the #NeverTrump brigade, they’re thinking beyond November 2016 and about the very survival of the Republican Party.

"If we nominate Trump, [the party] is lost beyond this cycle. I think we lose women for a generation, in big numbers,” said Katie Packer, who served as Romney’s deputy campaign manager and now leads the Our Principles super PAC that spent $10 million in an effort to stop Trump.

“There’s a feeling among Republican women that I talk to that the people who would nominate this guy don’t have any real respect for us as women—especially professional women. They would rather see us in a Mad Men era, where women knew their place and catered to their husband, cooked dinner and met their sexual obligations and didn’t have any other role in society. And there are other people who are supporting him because the guy’s a blatant racist and they identify with that.

“So there’s a sense that if this is who my party is, I don’t really identify with it anymore.”

But the most absolutist opposition to Trump is largely held by the GOP’s donor class and Washington-based establishment—the very people Trump and his supporters have delighted in offending from the start.

For the last several months, the increasingly panicked GOP establishment looked at the first mainstream Republicans to line up behind Trump—first, endorsements from Chris Christie and Jeff Sessions, later former RNC staffer Rick Wiley taking a job with Trump’s campaign—as “Vichy Republicans,” likening their appeasement of an outsider who, in their view, was hijacking their party to the appeasers of Adolph Hitler during his takeover of France.

"It’s like everything that I was taught to believe about conservative philosophy is totally out the window,” Packer said. “When Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennet are defending Trump and making excuses for him—these are people I used to look to as real pillars of conservatism—it’s like bizarro world. It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore."

But now that Trump’s takeover is nearly complete, Republicans are at odds over who that label applies to more—the conservative appeasers of Trump or those willing to back a Democratic nominee.

[I]t’s very difficult for me to come up with any principle by which Donald Trump is aligned with the Republican Party,” said Stuart Stevens, the strategist who guided Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.

“That’s the same argument the Communist Party used for years—you have to do it for the party. I’m not going to go along with the Brezhnev logic. If the party stands for nothing but election, it stands for nothing.”

Many long-time conservatives find themselves in a state of paralysis, unable to decide which side of that line they’re going to be on. “The goal is to defeat the Democratic candidate,” said Fred Zeidman, a prominent Republican in Houston who was been a bundler for Jeb Bush and eventually opted to support Cruz. But asked if he would support Trump, he hedged. “I’m just not ready to answer that question.”

It is time for Sanders to suspend his campaign and his followers to focus on keeping Trump out of the White House come November.

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Gloucester County School Board Will Squander Money and Seek Rehearing En Banc

Transphobic, cowardly Gloucester County School Board

Rather that put the fiscal interests of Gloucester County taxpayers first and foremost, the Gloucester County School Board has opted to seek to appease a minority of religious extremists and file a petition for a rehearing en banc in the Gavin Grimm case - i.e., by the full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.  Sadly, the move is not surprising given the general backwardness and knuckle dragging aspects of that county.  One can only hope that the petition is refused or that the en banc panel slams the school board's unconstitutional policy.  The Daily Press looks at this wrongheaded decision.  Here are highlights:

The Gloucester County School Board filed a petition Tuesday for a full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals review of the ruling issued last month in the lawsuit filed by a 16-year-old transgender student.

In April, a panel of three judges ruled in favor of Gavin Grimm who is challenging a bathroom use policy imposed by the School Board that requires transgender students to use either a private bathroom or the restrooms assigned to their birth gender. Grimm was born female but identifies as a boy.

In a lawsuit filed last June, Grimm said the high school is violating Title IX and the Constitution by refusing him access to the boys' restroom.

The en banc review the School Board seeks would be a rehearing of the case by all nine judges on the appeals court. The three-judge panel voted 2-1, in Grimm's favor, to send the case back to a federal judge in Norfolk. Federal Judge Robert Doumar refused to issue a preliminary injunction that would have required the schools to let Grimm use the boys' restrooms while his discrimination lawsuit proceeds.

If readers want more information on these transphobic cowards, go here.

Ted Cruz Drops Out of Presidential Race - What Now for the Establishment?

After losing decisively to Donald Trump in Indiana, Ted Cruz announced tonight that he was dropping out of the GOP presidential nomination contest.   As a reader commented today on an earlier post, in someways, despite Donald Trump's demagoguery and flirtations with outright fascism, Cruz was the more frightening candidate given his religious extremism and apparently belief in a Christian Dominionist agenda that in effect longs for a right wing Christian theocracy in America.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Cruz's announcement which comes after a day of insanity of the GOP side of the aisle, including Trumps's claim that Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of JFK.  Here are highlights (Politico also has coverage here):

Ted Cruz, the insurgent Texan whose presidential campaign was fueled by disdain for Washington, dropped out of the 2016 race Tuesday night, removing the last major hurdle in Donald Trump’s quest to become the Republican nominee for president.

Cruz’s decision came after losing overwhelmingly to Trump in the Indiana primary, all but ensuring that real estate mogul will claim his party’s mantle at the Republican National Convention in July.

“I said I would continue on as long as there is a viable path to victory. Tonight, I’m sorry to say, it appears that path has been foreclosed,” Cruz told a small group of supporters here Tuesday night. “Together we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we got, but the voters chose another path.”

Cruz also said he would “continue to fight for liberty,” but did not address whether he would support Trump as the nominee.

In his last day on the campaign trail, Cruz unloaded on Trump, calling the businessman a”pathological liar” and a “narcissist” who was proud of being a “serial philanderer.” The attacks were reminiscent of the broadsides Sen. Marco Rubio launched against Trump in the waning days of his own presidential campaign — and a far cry from the lavish praise Cruz heaped on Trump for most of 2015, declaring, “I like Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, moderate Republicans and the GOP establishment are now faced with the prospect of whether to support Trump, hold their noses and vote for a Democrat, or simply stay home and not vote.  If they chose the latter, many down ballot GOP candidates will likely be defeated.  Another piece in the Post looks at this dilemma. Here are highlights:

Anti-Donald Trump Republicans are starting to consider whether their opposition to a Trump presidency is so strong that they would be prepared to fight him in the general election — even if that means helping put an avowed enemy, Hillary Clinton, in the Oval Office.

One strategy under discussion is to focus on helping down-ballot GOP candidates while sitting out the presidential race under the belief that Trump will lose to Clinton no matter what. A more drastic and difficult option: rallying support for a third-party candidate who could uphold traditional Republican positions but would almost certainly steal votes from Trump.

“You have to bet on sanity,” said GOP strategist Stuart Stevens, who helped lead the campaign of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. “If this is one of those moments in history where for various reasons the party has to play out nominating someone who is completely unelectable . . . so be it.”

The dilemma came into focus Tuesday night, when Trump scored a decisive victory in Indiana over Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas

“Indiana further confirmed the ‘stop Trump’ efforts didn’t work and spending even more resources in an effort keep him from the nomination will just be expensive political therapy or theatre at this point,” former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, a former Marco Rubio backer who is now neutral, said in an email.

“The GOP is going to nominate for President a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level,” tweeted Mark Salter, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Then he added a Clinton campaign slogan: “I’m with her.”

For some Republicans, the prospect of a President Clinton is more palatable than a President Trump — not because they like Clinton, but because they could fight her on familiar terrain, rather than watching an unpredictable Trump use the power of the White House to remake the GOP.

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The Implosion of Ted Cruz

I find the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency to be frightening.  That said, Ted Cruz in the White House is just as frightening given his loathsomeness and bigotry - and willingness to utterly prostitute himself to the Christofascists in the GOP base as underscored by his ongoing anti-transgender lies.  In deed, Lindsey Graham described the choice between Trump and Cruz as akin to deciding whether to be killed by a gunshot or poisoning.  Now, with Indiana voters going to the polls today, it appears that Cruz has begun to implode.  A column in the Washington Post looks at "Lucifer's" decline.  Here are excerpts:

In a case of exceptionally bad timing, Fiorina hitched herself to Cruz at precisely the moment his candidacy began to implode, as polls showed him fading in must-win Indiana before Tuesday’s vote. Fiorina’s previous criticism of Cruz and her checkered record at HP were again in the news.

It’s not Fiorina’s fault that news broke just after her “nomination” was announced that former House speaker John Boehner, still a popular figure in nearby Ohio, had called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” and a “miserable son of a bitch.” Nor was it Fiorina’s fault that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Friday gave Cruz such a tepid endorsement — he said that he “will be voting for Ted Cruz” but that “I particularly want to commend Donald Trump” — that Pence attempted a do-over in the form of an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star.

But if Fiorina picked investments the way she picked her candidate, you can see why HP stopped requiring her services. She bought Cruz at the peak, when polls showed him close in Indiana. But an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll Sunday found Trump up 15 points.

And now Cruz and Fiorina have to explain all those things she used to say about him: that “Cruz is just like any other politician”; that “there’s no honor in charging a hill that you know you can’t take, only casualties, although Ted Cruz maybe got name recognition and money”; and that it was “odd that Senator Ted Cruz did not renounce his dual Canadian citizenship until 2014.”

Cruz now also has to defend Fiorina’s record at HP, where she let go thousands and sent jobs to India and China. “Will the Cruz-Fiorina team do the same thing to Indiana that she did to Hewlett-Packard?” Fox News’s Chris Wallace asked Cruz on Sunday.

Fiorina was not standing at his shoulder later Monday, when he waded bravely into a group of Trump supporters outside his event. Cruz bravely tried to engage them in calm discussion. “Donald Trump is deceiving you. He is playing you for a chump,” Cruz said.

The Trump supporters taunted Cruz: “Do the math. . . . Time to drop out. . . . You are the problem, politician. . . . Where’s your Goldman Sachs jacket? . . . Lyin’ like you always do. . . . Are you Canadian?” America, one said, would be a better country “without you.”

If Cruz hadn’t established himself as a singularly unlikable candidate, one could almost have felt sorry for him in that moment. He needed urgently for Fiorina to sing more Ethel Merman . . . 

Putin Took Credit for the Boom. Now There’s a Bust.

As noted many times, Russia has been plagued throughout the centuries with a curse: failed leaders who have put personal ambition and/or ideology ahead of the best interests of the Russian people.  This curse continues to persist under Vladimir Putin who sees himself as a new tsar and who, with his cronies, has raped the Russian economy of assets.   Now, with oil prices falling and economic sanctions for his illegal invasions of Crimea and parts of Ukraine also taking a toll, the question is whether or not the Russian people will rightly blame Putin's years of mismanagement for their plight.  The answer to this question is still out, but some Russians seem to be finally opening their eyes and not being duped by Putin's foreign adventures and anti-gay efforts that were always meant to be a distraction from his failed leadership on the economic front.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New York Times:

Today, the economic troubles that Mr. Putin came here to make a big show of solving are back, only worse and involving far more intractable problems than just the “trivial greed” of tycoons that Mr. Putin blamed for Pikalevo’s tumult in 2009.

Pikalevo, about three hours east of St. Petersburg, and the rest of Russia are now mired in the country’s longest recession since Mr. Putin came to power at the end of 1999, with the World Bank warning last month that the nation’s poverty rate would increase this year to 14.2 percent of the population, “undoing nearly a decade’s worth of gains.”

Russia’s current crisis, though largely caused by market forces beyond the Kremlin’s control, notably a slump in the prices of oil and gas, has pushed Mr. Putin into a corner. After years of taking credit for a booming economy, which also had little to do with his actions, and casting himself as a can-do leader capable of untying the toughest economic and political knots, he faces a crisis that has exposed the stark limits of his power and prowess.

A recent rebound in oil prices has lifted hopes in the Kremlin that the worst of Russia’s economic storm has passed, but it has also highlighted just how much Mr. Putin’s fortunes depend on unpredictable and uncontrollable outside forces like the energy market or the economic sanctions imposed by Europe and the United States.

[T]hroughout his 16 years in power, whether as president or prime minister, Mr. Putin has presented an image of an omniscient and omnipresent leader interested in and capable of addressing his country’s most microscopic concerns.

[C]ost-cutting maneuvers, which keep workers off the unemployment register but in some cases reduce their income to almost nothing, are increasingly popular with Russian businesses hit hard by the downturn. But they are deeply unpopular with a population that had grown accustomed to rising salaries under Mr. Putin.

The downturn seems to be taking a toll on Mr. Putin’s standing, or at least on faith in his policies, as Russians’ fascination and delight with his foreign ventures wanes and pocketbook issues increasingly dominate public worries. Around half of those polled this year by the independent Levada Center said they thought Russia was moving in the “right direction,” compared with 64 percent last summer.

[T]he Kremlin’s current nightmare: With low global energy prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict crimping Russia’s prospects of recovery, the economy has hit a wall. It simply cannot compete with China, the United States or even the European nations that Russian state media constantly portray as fading has-beens. The easy and popular fixes the Kremlin used in the past to resuscitate the economy — or at least to placate the public — have all been exhausted.

There are few signs, however, that Russians will take to the streets in protest or flock to the banner of a divided and feeble opposition. 

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In the Age of Trump Is America Ripe for Tyranny?

As I have noted before, I was a history major in college and have continued to read many historical works over the intervening years.  One of my favorite periods is Classical Greece which gave rise to the concept of democracy.  However, if one knows the history of Greece in this time period and Athens in particular, government rule whip sawed back and forth between democracy, oligarchy and tyranny.  The latter episodes often occurred after the democrats fell prey to demagogues who seized the moment and their ability to sway the masses to put themselves in power.  Sometimes these tyrants were benevolent, but more often than not, they were not.  In a very long piece in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan has a piece that argues that America is potentially ripe to fall prey to a demagogue/tyrant much in the way that Athens did on more than one occasion.  Needless to say, Sullivan sees Donald Trump as the greatest threat, but he also has fears of what Bernie Sanders is seeking to unleash on the left.  Ironically, Sullivan sees Hillary Clinton - who he despises - as the possible bulwark against the fascism that Trump personifies. He also has a wake up call to Berniacs. Here are lengthy article highlights (I hope readers will read the entire piece and share their thoughts):

As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. . . . But it is inherently unstable. . . . And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites.  And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

[A]s I watched frenzied Trump rallies on C-SPAN in the spring, and saw him lay waste to far more qualified political peers in the debates by simply calling them names, the nausea turned to dread. And when he seemed to condone physical violence as a response to political disagreement, alarm bells started to ring in my head. Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my mind a few decades ago about the intrinsic danger of late-democratic life. It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our own hyper-democratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.

Could it be that the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter, to prove not just Plato but also James Madison right, that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”? Is he testing democracy’s singular weakness — its susceptibility to the demagogue — by blasting through the firewalls we once had in place to prevent such a person from seizing power? Or am I overreacting?

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires.

Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished.  . . . In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war and boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J. Trump. This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.

The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent. . . . . . And this year, the delegate system established by our political parties is also under assault. Trump has argued that the candidate with the most votes should get the Republican nomination, regardless of the rules in place. It now looks as if he won’t even need to win that argument — that he’ll bank enough delegates to secure the nomination uncontested — but he’s won it anyway. Fully half of Americans now believe the traditional nominating system is rigged.

Sanders, who is sustaining his campaign all the way to California on the backs of small donors and large crowds, is, to put it bluntly, a walking refutation of his own argument. Trump, of course, is a largely self-funding billionaire — but like Willkie, he argues that his wealth uniquely enables him to resist the influence of the rich and their lobbyists. Those despairing over the influence of Big Money in American politics must also explain the swift, humiliating demise of Jeb Bush and the struggling Establishment campaign of Hillary Clinton. The evidence suggests that direct democracy, far from being throttled, is actually intensifying its grip on American politics.

But it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue. And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic. Yes,occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant.

We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.

In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, The True Believer, he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with rage. The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages.

The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok,  . . . .

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization. 

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe . . . . But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And so Trump launched his campaign by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of rapists and murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad. He has now added to these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican Establishment itself.

And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance. And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any juncture.

To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyper-democracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way.

Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest. . . . Torture and murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness. 

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. . . . .  Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally. 

It may be that demographics will save us. America is no longer an overwhelmingly white country, and Trump’s signature issue — illegal immigration — is the source of his strength but also of his weakness. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting how polling models have consistently misread the breadth of his support, especially in these past few weeks; he will likely bend over backward to include minorities in his fall campaign; and those convinced he cannot bring a whole new swath of white voters back into the political process should remember 2004, when Karl Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments that increased conservative voter turnout.

And so those Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands. That it will fall to Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions will be uncomfortable to watch, since her willingness to compromise and equivocate is precisely what many Americans find so distrustful. And yet she may soon be all we have left to counter the threat. She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class—and Democrats must listen.

More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the moment to remind them that they partly brought this on themselves. This is a moment to offer solidarity, especially as the odds are increasingly stacked against them.  They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.

For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

Some will say that Sullivan is over reaction.  Having read extensively on the rise of Hitler and how the German people were manipulated to rally to Hitler, Americans need to understand that what happened in Germany (i) did not happen over night, and (ii) it was powered by rage akin to that which were now see on display among Trump supporters.

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