Politapocalypse (U.S. Politics Megathread)

As the main U.S. media outlets report and amplify each and every outlandish assertion by Donald Trump and his fellow contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, major damage is being done to the underlying quality of the dominant political discourse in the United States.

That damage has two main characteristics. By giving so much airtime to the Republican leadership battle, the preoccupations of a tiny but vociferous portion of the American electorate is being showcased as though they represent the views of Americans as a whole. And by restricting the response to that battle largely to the counter-views of the leading Democratic Party contenders, a whole slew of arguments of a more profound kind are receiving virtually no air time at all. The democratic process is being inexorably damaged by both these tendencies.

The Republican candidates are currently having a field day. Views that once would have been roundly condemned as unacceptably non-American are now treated as simply more moderate responses to proposals that are more outlandish still. Views that once would have been quickly dismissed as factually incorrect are now given traction and legitimacy by their regular repetition. This is the real damage currently being inflicted on the quality of American political discourse by Donald Trump in particular, damage rooted in his apparently consistent search for the evermore reactionary position that leaves simple conservatism looking gloriously moderate by comparison.

These assertions by leading presidential candidates play well to a Republican Tea Party base that is hungry for quick and simple solutions to what are in reality deeply-rooted and complicated problems. But they potentially play well too to a wider American audience -- one that is aware of America's increasing involvement in a third Middle Eastern conflagration and one that feels, particularly after the mass shootings in San Bernardino, increasingly unsafe because of that involvement. That is an audience which is likely to look first to the White House, or even to the Democratic Party more generally, for reassurance and action; so it is also an audience which is likely to be currently disappointed and frustrated by the heavily qualified justifications for war now currently on offer from the Obama administration.

The president struggled to be heard on all of this in his Sunday night address, his voice partly drowned out by the cacophony of hate now passing as legitimate political commentary on right-wing radio and television talk shows. Yet even if his right-wing critics had been willing to hear him out, what they would have heard was less than fully convincing. For he would have them and us believe that it is possible to fight ISIS successfully without committing large numbers of U.S. ground troops to yet another Iraq-type war; and that it is possible to wage that war without significantly increasing the danger of large-scale terrorist activity here at home. These two claims rest on a linked set of well-rehearsed but still problematic assertions: that airstrikes are effectively degrading ISIS as a military force; that local ground forces are available to complete that degradation if properly trained by the United States; and that a broad coalition of the willing is involved in this fight, happy to accept U.S. political leadership and to share the burdens and dangers involved.

The trouble with all these claims and assertions is that we have heard them before, and seen them fail in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We are seeing the training of local forces in Iraq and Syria failing even now. Little wonder then that, when offered the prospect of foreign war without domestic pain, the Obama administration should be losing ground to Republican arguments that wars are not won that way, and that if this one is to be won it has to be harder fought. Little wonder either that the Democratic candidate who is most likely to face this Republican onslaught next November is already sounding more hawkish on ISIS than the administration that she has both to defend and to replace. The president would have us conduct a surgical war, "strong and smart" as he put it. His opponents want something that is significantly more strident: but both of them seem to be offering us the prospect of yet more war without end. Both seem to be offering us, that is, what Ira Chemus recently correctly labelled "America's Reckless War against Evil."

David Coates
Worrell Professor of Anglo-American Studies, Wake Forest University, Department of Politics

uuuuuuuum.....I'm pretty sure that's not how evolution works.

I'm not entirely clear what you think the alternative should have been. If it had been left entirely to liberals there would be virtually no health insurance companies left at all and we'd have single payer like almost every other developed nation.