Why Hillary Lost - The Other Side Of The Story

               The simple arithmetic of vote tallies in any close election makes it inevitable that commentators have a field day mining the results for overarching causes. The thing is that any one factor that can be shown to drive even a small shift in favor of the victor can be described, with complete accuracy, as having "made the difference". Since there are invariably many such factors, each of which “made the difference”, cherry-picking them becomes a fraught exercise usually influenced by the commentator's political bias. Keith has taken a crack at this from the pro-Hillary position (American Counterpoint 11/11/16). Let me do the same here from the other side.

               I point out again, that "other side" for me does not mean pro-Trump. I dislike Donald Trump and never considered voting for him.  My perspective is not even exactly “anti-Hillary”, since I regard her to have been an articulate and reasonable representative of our modern-day Democratic Party, not at all the “flawed” representative disappointed partisans would now have us believe.

               It is the Party itself that has become the focus of my antagonism. And it is the Party, not just Hillary, which this month received such a stinging rebuke from the American electorate. This occurred, of course, without much in the way of affirmation for the Republicans either, who lost the popular vote and who disavowed much of their own political identity in nominating Trump.

                                                                           Hubris

               So what happened to the Democrats? Why did they lose? And why did they lose in such dramatic fashion after months of euphoric expectation? Not only did they believe that they were sweeping the Presidency in a landslide, but that the Senate, possibly the House of Representatives, and ultimately the Supreme Court were falling into their hands, finally delivering to them their long-sought opportunity to “remake America”. Then in a flash, just the opposite occurred. They lost the Presidency and failed to regain either branch of the legislature lost to them following their period of overreach during Barak Obama’s first term as President.  Soon they will once again lose control of the Supreme Court.

                It’s my opinion that what’s gone wrong with the Democratic Party is the same thing that blinded them to the threat confronting them in this election. The Democrats are suffering from an all-consuming hubris that is not only impeding their ability to govern effectively but their ability to ask serious questions and to see clearly what's going on around them. They consistently behave as though they own  monopoly rights to the moral high ground on any issue where they choose to engage, and they refuse to acknowledge views to the contrary. And while they are willing to pander to their own left wing and to patronize minorities, they treat other sectors of the American electorate  as if they were immoral, stupid, bigoted, and hardly worth talking to, much less partnering with in political problem-solving. Hillary's ill-considered "basket of deplorables" comment delivered off-the-cuff during her campaign did such political damage to the Democrats because people understood it clearly as the Freudian slip it was, revealing the Party's deep-seated elitism and contempt for anyone not sharing their idiosyncratic set of values.

Big Money

               Ironically, what should  have been major assets for the Democrats during this election morphed into liabilities. The first of these was all the money they had. For a long time one of the Democrats' most cherished notions has been that the Republican Party would hardly exist today were it not for the pernicious impact of Big Money that funded Republican candidates and their propagandists. This trope had been wearing thin ever since 2008 when Obama and his allies themselves rode to power on a tidal wave of money.  The case disintegrated entirely in the recent election, as George Soros and his coterie of progressive billionaires, buttressed by liberal Wall Streeters, the wealthy  Hollywood elite,  and private equity plutocrats, turned Hillary into the most lavishly-financed presidential candidate in American history.

                Donald Trump, while a billionaire himself, had to make do with far less, emulating Bernie Sanders in his disproportional reliance on smallish contributions. This proved to be all it took. Many of the usual big Republican donors, including the much-hyped Koch brothers, while continuing to fund down-ballot Republicans in many states, refused to back Mr. Trump.

               The purist wing of the Democratic Party, this year led by Mr. Sanders, was obviously repelled by Hillary's moneyed connections, which became a major campaign issue during the primaries. Leftwing actress Susan Sarandon went so far as to advance the 1960's-style argument that leftists should vote for Trump with the idea that his election would speed "The Revolution". While this kind of thinking might have motivated a handful of 60's radical nostalgia buffs, the much bigger problem for Hillary was the simple fact that lingering hostility from the Sanders crowd undoubtedly led many of them to stay home on November 8. In a close election, this made a difference.

                                                               Frankenstein's Monster

               The other asset-turned-liability for the Democrats this year was the liberal media. The media actively promoted Trump's candidacy during the Republican primaries, eager to help him gut both the establishment and 'Tea Party' wings of the party and at the same time to profit from the entertainment value Trump brought to the news cycle. The media obviously believed they could easily bring him low again in the general election by promoting old stories of his lewd misogyny and by focusing relentlessly on his crude  persona and his poor grasp of policy issues.

               What they found instead was that they had created a Frankenstein monster capable of marching undamaged through everything raining down upon him. In the end, media hostility pitched right into Trump's wheelhouse as he complained loudly about a system rigged against him and his supporters. The Democrats' entire political identity is bound up in their posture as defenders of the downtrodden, but Trump managed to turn that around and portray them as the party of money and overweening power. His people instead were the downtrodden, and Hillary Clinton became the shrill voice of hypocrisy.

Choking Healthcare

               The specific issues over which the Democrats stumbled are many, but let me mention just three that I consider to be the most damaging. The first is Obamacare. In fairness to the Democrats, the healthcare system in the United States was  starting to buckle long before Barak Obama appeared on the scene,  choking as it was on bureaucracy, lawsuits, and private greed that feeds off insurance guarantees. However, Obamacare doubled down on these problems without addressing them. As a result, costs are now soaring for almost everyone, just as its detractors predicted in the beginning,  and Obama's smooth promises about protecting consumer freedom are going by the boards. 

               The healthcare exchanges standing at the heart of the system are failing,  as providers find it difficult or impossible to avoid losing money. Many previously uninsured people can indeed now get coverage, but that's a distinct minority of the voting population, and even many of those people are growing disenchanted as they discover how restricted  access to the actual services they need is becoming.  Healthcare is a ubiquitous concern for people, and Obama turned it into a centerpiece of his presidency. Obamacare's failures could do nothing but help doom the political prospects of any candidate  positioning herself as his heir.

 The Climate Change Juggernaut

               The next major problem for the Democrats has been environmental policy. Over-the-top rhetorical excess has become a hallmark of the Party in recent decades, and there is no issue on which this proclivity has been more pronounced than that of Global Warming, or "Climate Change" in its newly re-branded vernacular. Whether Climate Change really is an omnivorous threat to human survival or not is a subject  beyond the scope of this discussion. What matters here is how the Democrats' messianic obsession with it affected voter behavior.  

               Having positioned Climate Change as the existential issue of modern times, the Democrats set the stage for their "war on fossil fuels",  which became deeply unpopular in areas of the country where people earned their livelihoods extracting and processing oil, coal or natural gas. Even beyond these geographic regions, pragmatic people everywhere scratched their heads wondering how it could be that windmills or solar panels were, without unsustainable subsidies, at any point in their or their children's lifetimes going to provide the energy needed for them to live their lives.

                Prominent Democrats routinely mocked such concerns. They  coined the term "Climate Change Denier" with which to brand anyone doubting any aspect of the sudden new orthodoxy on this issue, implicitly lumping them together with cranks who deny the historical reality of the Nazi Holocaust!  Obama's Attorney General took it a step further and collaborated with an ad-hoc group of her state-level counterparts, all Democrats of course,  in attempting to find a way to bring criminal charges against researchers who publish data going against the grain of officially sanctioned opinion.

               All of these excesses probably seem normal enough within the leftish enclaves from which they emanate, but they never played well on Main Street or in the angry halls where Donald Trump gave his speeches.

Smashing The Melting Pot

               The third major deadfall for the Democrats was in the area they would refer to as "Social Justice". Republicans and Democrats have both for generations proudly embraced America's culture of ethnic assimilation. The "Melting Pot" metaphor has been central to the American experience since the nation's founding, and it came to mean a society in which people can maintain their ethnic identities while at  the same time subsuming them proudly into a larger and different American identity defined by a new common heritage. This became American patriotism.  Even African-Americans have been able to share in this despite the visible demarcation of skin color and the legacy of slavery. It is a healthy dynamic because it encourages people to look past their differences and feel a sense of their commonality.

               The Democrats, however, have managed to position themselves somehow against multicultural assimilation thanks to their growing focus on angry grievance politics.  Minorities in any society invariably have legitimate grievances because majorities pursuing their self-interest tend to run roughshod over groups lacking political power. In a well-functioning democracy, these groups have the ability to form alliances among themselves and compete more effectively. In modern America's political configuration, it has become the legitimate role of the Democratic party to champion this process.

               However, the Democrats are making a muddle of it, losing their grip on the difference between championing rights and divisive pandering. During the Democratic primaries, candidate Martin O'Malley was speaking in front of a largely black audience and was asked his opinion about the Black Lives Matter movement. He made the mistake of replying that "black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter." He was booed for this seemingly fair-minded comment and the angry crowd shouted down much of the rest of what he had to say. During the following days, rather than  defend his sound statement, he repeatedly apologized for it and parroted  back the expected trope that "black lives matter". This was a small incident in a very long campaign, but it was surely a teaching moment on one reason why so much of the American electorate has lost confidence in the Democratic Party.

LBGT

               The other area of grievance politics now causing difficulty for the Democrats is the so-called "LGBT rights" movement, another sudden re-branding, this time of what had not long ago been known as "gay rights". Homosexuality is something that most Americans in the past have had a hard time accepting easily, and that historically was actually illegal throughout all of the United States and much of the world.  Today, you would find few Americans outside of fundamentalist religious communities who would argue even privately that sodomy laws have any place in our statute books. Legal tolerance, however, is a long way from social acceptance. Even racial and religious  minorities, key participants in the Democrats' voting coalition, are uneasy with this particular focus, probably more so overall than white Christians.

                When the Democrats took gay rights a step further and began pursuing the legalization of gay marriage, they were crossing a dangerous line in many minds by attacking a core social institution. But before opposition to it could gain critical mass, the Supreme Court last year intervened to sanction gay marriage in all 50 states. Traditionalists were stunned. Sensing the wind at their backs, activists immediately ratcheted up the cultural war yet another notch by adding "transgenderism" to the list of sexual preferences in need of respect and legal protection. Thus was born LGBT.

               It's my opinion that this last stage may have been the tiny straw added to the Democrats' already cumbersome ideological  baggage that broke Hillary's  back in this election. The perception was that if the Democrats could take up a cause as odd and marginal as transgender rights seemed to be, and then to support it with the same full-throated moralism they pour on everything else they claim to believe in, then maybe the whole package was suspect. Could the Democrats really be taken seriously as a governing party any longer?

So Now What?

               Hillary's loss will have a titanic impact on the future of her party. It's left wing will wreak a terrible vengeance on the Clinton faction, whom they never liked anyway and whom can now be blamed for this electoral disaster. The extreme left is already taking to the streets in protest of the election, even before Trump has entered office. Both parties have become more adept at slandering and scandal-mongering than at the complex art of governing. The Democrats and their allies in the media are sharpening their knives now and will be all over Trump before he's even found his new seat in the Oval Office. There will be no honeymoon. Trump is notoriously thin-skinned, and his enemies know it. They will seek to goad him into stupid actions, and he's likely to oblige.

               It was, of course, only a few weeks ago that the Republicans seemed on the verge of disintegration. Now their surprise victory will give them respite briefly. The various discordant factions - the Bush traditionalists, the Cruz Tea Partiers, and the ascendant Trump know-nothings - will seem to fall in love for a while as they divide up the fruits of victory and look for ways to share power. But it won't last. Economic and political crises are brewing all over the world  right now, and it won't be long before Trump is dealing with intractable problems. I've been wrong about him continuously so far and I pray I'm more wrong than ever now, but I do not  see him possessing the knowledge, patience, moral fortitude, diplomatic skill or even the intelligence to cope with what he's soon to be up against. He doesn't have that many allies within his own party to help him, and virtually none among the Democrats, who will be eager to see him fail.

               America needs a pragmatic, inclusive and non-ideological third party.

Why Hillary Lost

I believe that Hillary Clinton, who seems on track to have won the popular vote by approximately 2% of the votes cast, lost the election to Donald Trump for three basic reasons:

1. Most fundamentally, there seems to be a very widespread and deep-seated antipathy to Mrs. Clinton.

a) I suspect it traces to her remark, as the First Lady, that she didn’t plan to stay home and bake cookies. I think that remark cut very deeply, insulting not only many women but also the then-prevalent lifestyle of most middle class Americans, or at least the vast majority who live outside of the coasts.

b) Hillary’s persona as a whip smart, active, self-assured and somewhat intellectual woman may have inspired some sexist opposition, especially with her public reserve and instinctive desire for privacy playing into a bad stereotype. But I don’t think that was a primary reason for antagonism to her. After all, there are plenty of such women who have succeeded in politics—Jennifer Granholm, Michigan’s former governor, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren being two obvious examples.

c) The Republican Party, fearing Hillary ever since her attempt to pass a healthcare law in the 1990s, has mounted a decades-long smear campaign against her, using endless Congressional investigations, a consistent policy of lies and distortions, and the rumor-mill of social media. While the attacks largely stopped when she seemed out of politics and just doing a good job as Sec’y of State, in the service of a master slanderer like Trump this campaign built with enormous effectiveness on the old smear campaign.

d) And Hillary made unforced errors, most notably the private email server. By comparison with the misdeeds of Trump and other Republican officeholders her mistakes were trivial, but given the underlying antipathy they could be and were magnified into great wrongs, for many even surpassing Trump’s frauds, lies, tax avoidance, and misogyny. Millions of votes that had gone to Obama failed to materialize for Hillary, due at least substantially in part to these errors and the slander campaign.

2. Hillary ran a campaign that played Trump’s game. This was perhaps the most inexcusable error of all. Trump had demonstrated, with his Republican primary opponents, the folly of getting into a character assassination battle with him. He is a far more skilled slanderer than anyone else on the public stage. Yet Hillary did what the Republican primary losers did. In devoting her campaign to attacking Trump’s character she failed to campaign on her clear advantages in terms of the issues spelled out in the excellent Democratic platform, issues that were designed to appeal to many of the Trump constituents. Had she done so, her Presidency would have been a lot more appealing to a broad swathe of the public. Instead, Hillary’s campaign became a comparison of two disagreeable people, reducing Hillary to Trump’s level and making their faults appear comparable.

3. The third reason for Hillary’s loss was FBI Director James Comey’s letter 11 days before the election, resurrecting the email controversy and apparently supporting Republican smears against her. There was no defense against this letter, and no time to overcome its impact. Hillary’s margin of lead ranged from 3-14% just before the letter in 7 national polls, with the average being 6.4%, to 1-3% just before the vote. Since Hillary lost the crucial battleground states by very small margins, it’s clear that Comey’s letter was sufficiently powerful to cause her loss.

Comment on Mark's Doom and Gloom

I am posting this as a new post, rather than a comment, due to space limits on the comment section.

Mark wrote:
"The two-party system in this country, designed as it is keep radical elements in the fold and to harness diverse energies, is thus coming apart at the very moment the risk of exogenous challenge is growing. Our overleveraged financial system is poised for another crash, and the federal government is out of ammunition this time with which to fight it. Keynesian economists have sustained the fiction that fiscal policy still has plenty of play in it, but that notion flies out the window immediately upon the arrival of the next recession, already long overdue, which will balloon the budget deficit to unsustainable levels.  Monetary policy is equally exhausted,  with the Federal Reserve having had little choice since the last crash but to hold the short-term interest rate at zero simply to maintain the economy's current limp equilibrium. Other than negative rates - utterly unsustainable for long - the central bank has thus already used up everything it might have had to help us through the next crisis."

I think Mark has stated here the main economic views on which he and I disagree, so let me take them up:

1. Our over-leveraged financial system. By this Mark means that we have too much debt relative to economic activity. Too much debt reduces our flexibility to deal with unexpected costs. But too little debt reduces our ability to make current investments that support future growth and security. What, then, is the right debt level? That varies with interest rates, inflation predictions, economic growth predictions, and other guesses. Even if we can confidently calculate all those factors, nobody actually knows what is optimal, or how close to optimal our current levels are.

After years of extremely low interest rates, the debt levels of the US government has indeed risen.  That ratio reached a high of 119% of GDP in 1946, fell to a low of 31% in the '70s, and as of June 30, 2016 stood at 105%, up from 67% in 2008. There is a rough correlation between federal debt levels and tax collections. Debt soared with the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and dropped with the Clinton and Obama tax increases. As of today, US tax rates are far below those that formerly prevailed, which means that if debt really is "too high," we have a lot of flexibility to raise taxes in compensation. It should also be noted that debt normally rises when it becomes cheaper--that is, interest rates fall. Likewise, the ratio of debt to GDP would rise if GDP growth rates fall, as they have since 2008. So just what the relatively high current ratio of federal government debt means, we don't know.

State debt is far less substantial, ranging from 3 to 23% of State GDPs, with the richest States mostly having the highest debt levels. Private debt, though, far outweighs all gov't debt: mortgages, other borrowings, corporate bonds, etc. Because this debt is measured in several different "silos," it becomes tedious to recount each silo and its ratio to the relevant measure of economic activity. So let me just note one important and easily measured one: the ratio of corporate debt to corporate market value. That has fluctuated greatly over the years, reaching a high of 98.1 in 1982, a low of 30.3 in 1999, and the latest quarterly number, for June 30, 2016 was 37.8.

Bottom line: there is no way to know how much debt is too much.

2. The "long overdue" next recession. By post-WW2 standards, the current "recovery" is long, but far from the longest recovery period. The current recovery has lasted 7 years as officially measured. The recovery in 1970 lasted jut under 9 years; that of the 1990s lasted 10 years.

3. Monetary policy. Here at last I agree. With the Republicans refusing to raise taxes or debt (except to finance war), Obama's fiscal policies were paralyzed, leaving monetary policy the only way to combat the Great Recession. With interest rates near 0, there isn't much more the Fed can do. But with a recovery continuing, and tax reform on the way--including taxes on offshore trillions--I am not sure fiscal policy will remain paralyzed under Trump.

The paralysis that has crippled our economy was aimed at defeating Obama. It is a bitter irony that the people who elected a Republican regime did so because of economic hardships largely resulting from Republican obstruction. But that's the current reality, and ironies aside, it's not all doom and gloom.

What Just Happened? And What's Next?

          As I drifted off to sleep last night, the voting was slightly in Donald Trump's favor  based on the early counts coming in. I didn't think too much of it, fully aware of how the losers in past presidential elections had often been ahead at this stage.  Nonetheless, a couple of thoughts lurking for months in the back of my mind started inching their way forward. The first was that Trump probably had a large base of silent supporters intimidated by the intense shaming campaign waged by the Democrats throughout this election campaign. Many of these people might not speak honestly to pollsters but could make their feelings known in the privacy of a voting booth.

          My second thought was that the mainstream media in this country can no longer be trusted to provide honest reporting on much of anything. They too often report as news what they themselves want to believe, and it seemed possible that the deafening barrage we had been hearing for months now on the inevitability of Clinton's victory might have been little more than reverberation of the media's private echo chamber.

          These thoughts must have gained subconscious momentum while I slept, because when my wife's alarm clock rang at 6:00 AM, I - contrary to my normal pattern - came wide awake immediately  and grabbed for the TV remote, sensing something amiss. Indeed, something was amiss, because the first image accosting my eyes was a clip of Donald Trump praising Hillary Clinton for her hard-fought campaign and her years of service to our great country. I didn't have to see any vote tallies to know what had transpired overnight.

So Now What?

          I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for the Libertarian candidates at the top of the ticket and the down-ballot Republicans, albeit without enthusiasm in either case. I had disliked Trump for many years because I had no respect for his style as a businessman. My own Republicanism has always stemmed mainly from my belief that the Republicans, more so than the Democrats,  stood for the core business virtues that undergirded American peace and prosperity: pragmatism,  hard work, fair dealings, healthy ambition, and a zest for applied innovation.  I saw none of this in Donald Trump, who always seemed more interested in the glitz of marketing than in the sweaty grind of making things work. It was unsurprising to me when, during the course of his business career,  he revealed a propensity for loading up subsidiaries with debt and then walking away when his grandiose projects failed to yield the return necessary to service it. As they might say in a GEICO commercial, if you're Donald Trump, that's what you do. Now he's leading our country.

 

                                             Uncharted Waters

          We're deep into uncharted waters at this point and the storm that has been brewing is now upon us. It is therefore impossible to predict with any precision what happens next, but a few things are clear. The first is that America's long-cherished two-party system is fatally disabled and probably soon will die. This problem was imminent even if Clinton had won,  but Trump's victory will trip the fast-forward button. On the surface it might seem somewhat encouraging that all of the official post-election speechmaking so far has followed the traditional American norm of congratulation and conciliation. President Obama gave a particularly gracious talk in the Rose Garden of the White House at noon today, and even Trump managed to sound like he may have meant some of the nice things he had to say about Hillary.

          But none of this will last. Trump has gutted the Republican Party during the course of his scorched-earth march to the pinnacle he just reached. He humiliated both the traditional "establishment" wing, epitomized by Jeb Bush, and the newer supposedly radical "Tea Party" wing, epitomized by "Lyin' Ted Cruz". Most of these people will go through the motions now of trying to come together to govern, but all vestiges of Republican cohesiveness are gone. What remains of the Party is little more than a crude nativist faction with no real program beyond a rush of crony-capitalist infrastructure spending, probably one-upping the Democrats in this regard, and a destructive scaling-back of trade and immigration.  

Democrats Now Must Face A Rising Hard Left

          As for the Democrats, they may now be in still worse trouble. Even had Clinton won the election, she was going to have a hard time controlling the ascendant left wing of her party, energized as it had been by Bernie Sanders before being soon dispirited again by what they regarded as Hillary's theft of the nomination. Sanders was, of course, never going to be anything more than a transitional leader for this faction, which will now make a sharp turn even further to the left and exact revenge on the Clinton faction, which is perceived as having prostituted itself to Wall Street while achieving no gain in return for the sacrifice of principle. There's no telling where all this goes now, although foreshadows of the likely future could be seen already in the early morning hours in the radical fever swamps of Berkeley and Oakland, where gangs of protestors emerged as though on the search for riot police with whom to engage.  The ranks of these people are likely to grow in the months ahead, and it seems only a matter of time before some of the nastier elements among Trump's supporters, themselves also now newly energized, choose to come out of hiding to offer battle.

A Perfect Storm  For Mr. Trump

          The two-party system in this country, designed as it is keep radical elements in the fold and to harness diverse energies, is thus coming apart at the very moment the risk of exogenous challenge is growing. Our overleveraged financial system is poised for another crash, and the federal government is out of ammunition this time with which to fight it. Keynesian economists have sustained the fiction that fiscal policy still has plenty of play in it, but that notion flies out the window immediately upon the arrival of the next recession, already long overdue, which will balloon the budget deficit to unsustainable levels.  Monetary policy is equally exhausted,  with the Federal Reserve having had little choice since the last crash but to hold the short-term interest rate at zero simply to maintain the economy's current limp equilibrium. Other than negative rates - utterly unsustainable for long - the central bank has thus already used up everything it might have had to help us through the next crisis.

          Other countries of the developed world are experiencing their own versions of all these same problems. Much has been made of the parallels between the Trump phenomenon and so-called "Brexit" crisis in Europe.  Trump's victory now will re-intensify that and the other various centrifugal  forces already threatening Europe and  other parts of the world. Multiple crises occurring simultaneously tend to aggravate one another. All of this is waiting for Mr. Trump.

 

          If he were a great manager and a visionary politician, I might have some hope  that we were approaching one of those great turning point of history at which heroic leadership emerges to turn crisis into opportunity. However, anybody who watched his victory speech this morning would have been quickly disabused of such notions.  While he offered a moment or two of graciousness, and he was trying hard to stay organized with his teleprompter, Trump was clearly no Churchill. He sounded lost and is clearly in over his head with this new job. His evident self-satisfaction with his victory only served to reinforce the perception that he doesn't really understand what he's now up against.

          I found it impressive at first that President Obama appeared so relaxed during his speech in the Rose Garden this morning. Then it occurred to me that his relaxation was probably not an act at all, and that he's bound to be relieved to be finally out from under all this before the bottom drops out. Hillary Clinton, should she be looking for a silver lining to the cloud of her defeat, might find it in the thought that she too is escaping a trap from which she likely could not have otherwise escaped.

          Donald Trump, for his part,  is already looking like the loser at a game of musical chairs.

I never thought Trump was a Hitler, but there are parallels...

I never thought Trump was a Hitler, despite striking parallels. In 1933 many Germans felt bitterly humiliated and economically betrayed from losing WW1, suffering the Versailles treaty, losing their savings to hyperinflation, and facing the Depression. The Weimar Republic could not cure these ills, and its humane leaders were not skillful campaigners. Up rose a fascinating demagogue whose description of Germany’s problems had elements of truth, who blamed others, not the humiliated Germans, for those problems--Communists, homosexuals, international bankers, the Jews—and whose conviction that he could make Germany great again was persuasive to many. His diagnosis and his solutions, like his propensity for violence, fit German prejudices and suited many military and business leaders as well. He offered bitter German men a voice and a cause, plus the possibility of strength through violence. And so they elected Hitler.

Trump has not Hitler’s enemies and goals, nor his ideological fervor. But he has something like Hitler's demagogic talents and Hitler's predilection for blaming wrongs on minorities and foreigners, along with a history of blatant racism and sexism. Moreover, McConnell-type Tea Party Republicans--his core supporters--have insisted, with a whiff of Hitler's Brown Shirts, on wrecking existing social and political norms. 

Fortunately, there are major differences that will prevent this nightmare from becoming our reality. Unlike 1933 Germany, American voters are a kaleidoscope of identities, not just white men. There are other important differences too, but most of all we do have the examples of history. We know from Hitler, Stalin, the North Koreans, Vladimir Putin, and many other examples that civilization and economic well-being cannot flourish in the company of demagoguery and the whims of a psychologically unstable leader.