By Ross Douthat
Saturday, October 22, 2016
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.
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 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.
Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the
last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq
War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a
neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist
consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice
of center-left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate
Democrats.
Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame
financial-services deregulation or happy-go-lucky housing policy (or both), the
policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of
the political establishment. Likewise with the euro, the European common
currency, a terrible idea that only cranks and Little Englanders dared oppose
until the Great Recession exposed it as a potentially economy-sinking folly.
Likewise with Angela Merkel’s grand and reckless open-borders gesture just last
year: She was the heroine of a thousand profiles even as she delivered her
continent to polarization and violence.
This record of elite folly — which doesn’t even include
lesser case studies like our splendid little war in Libya — 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.
She was for the Iraq War when everyone was for it,
against the surge when everyone had given up on Iraq, and then an unchastened
liberal hawk again in Libya just a few short years later.
She was a Russia dove when the media mocked Mitt Romney
for being a Russia hawk; now she’s a Russia hawk along with everyone else in
Washington in a moment that might require de-escalation.
She cites Merkel as a model leader, she’s surrounded by a
bipartisan foreign policy cadre that’s eager for a Details To Be Determined
escalation in Syria, and she seems — like her Goldman Sachs audiences — intent
on sailing serenely above the storm of nationalism rather than reconsidering
any of the assumptions of her class.
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.
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