Review: "The Dangers of Hillary Clinton"

A great editorial is one which provokes thought, and maybe even forces you to reconsider your views. The New York Times' "The Dangers of Hillary Clinton" by Ross Douthat is such an editorial.

The background:

A VOTE for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, the Clinton campaign has suggested in broad ways and subtle ones, isn’t just a vote for a Democrat over a Republican: It’s a vote for safety over risk, steady competence over boastful recklessness, psychological stability in the White House over ungovernable passions. 

This theme has been a winning one for Hillary, in her debates and in the wider campaign, and for good reason. The perils of a Trump presidency are as distinctive as the candidate himself, and a vote for Trump makes a long list of worst cases — the Western alliance system’s unraveling, a cycle of domestic radicalization, an accidental economic meltdown, a civilian-military crisis — more likely than with any normal administration.

The essay's premise:

Indeed, Trump and his supporters almost admit as much. “We’ve tried sane, now let’s try crazy,” is basically his campaign’s working motto. The promise to be a bull in a china shop is part of his demagogue’s appeal. Some of his more eloquent supporters have analogized a vote for Trump to storming the cockpit of a hijacked plane, with the likelihood of a plane crash entirely factored in. 

But passing on the plane-crash candidate doesn’t mean ignoring the dangers of his rival. 

The brass tacks:

The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly. 

What makes this kind of thinking so dangerous is the elite work hard to put this kind of thinking into the mainstream. By controlling the strings of the mainstream media (MSM), they are able to insert what they think into the mainstream, and then come back later and say, "See? This is what everyone thinks! Aren't we a great democracy?" When you control the public discourse, and decide the topics, and decide how they are to be discussed, this is NOT democracy. Fascism? Communism?Authoritarianism? Oligarchy? Crony capitalism? Pick whatever label you like, but it isn't democracy or republicanism (what the Founding Fathers favored).

Douthat goes on to point out the failings of our elitists, describing them accurately as "elite folly", mentioning such great ideas as the Iraq War, financial services deregulation and housing debacle, the European Union, Angela Merkel's open-door policy, and the war in Libya. He adds:

This record of elite folly...is a big part of why the United States has a “let’s try crazy” candidate in this election, and why there are so many Trumpian parties thriving on European soil.

One can look at Trump himself and see too much danger of still-deeper disaster, too much temperamental risk and moral turpitude, to be an acceptable alternative to this blunder-ridden status quo ... while also looking at Hillary Clinton and seeing a woman whose record embodies the tendencies that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place. 

Indeed what is distinctive about Clinton, more even than Bush or Obama, is how few examples there are of her ever breaking with the elite consensus on matters of statecraft. 

Literally, Douthat proceeds to give Hillary Clinton her highest praise yet, if one would dare call it that: She is very much the candidate of the status quo. If you believe our elites know better than us, she is the candidate for you! Or, as Douthat describes it:

The good news is that she is not a utopian; she is — or has become, across a long and grinding career — temperamentally pragmatic, self-consciously hardheaded. So she is unlikely to do anything that the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe and America would consider obviously radical or dangerous or dumb. 

But in those cases where the cosmopolitan position isn’t necessarily reasonable or safe, in those instances where the Western elite can go half-mad without realizing it, Hillary Clinton shows every sign of being just as ready to march into folly as her peers.

I am reminded of the quote from George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Those who support Hillary Clinton are clearly asking for more of the failures of the past two decades. We aren't even talking about long ago history. This is within our own lifetimes, and people are willing to whistle past the graveyard of elite follies, and vote for more of the same.

This is not an espousal of voting for Trump, but it is very much an understanding of why anyone would consider voting for such an arrogant lout as Trump. Unfortunately, we have to dig deeper into history to find the reasons why Trump is no solution either. But at least the Trump supporters haven't forgotten the lessons of their own lifetime.