Suchergebnisse

 In my last post, I said that Donald Trump's strong position in the race for the Republican nomination is not the result of his personal hold on Republican voters, but of support (or at least lack of opposition) from Republican elites.  A Republican who doesn't pay much attention to politics is likely to recall that things went pretty well while Trump was in office (up until Covid, which wasn't his fault), and therefore will be inclined to give Trump another chance unless he's given a reason not to.  The obvious reasons are Trump's weak performance in general elections and his campaign to overthrow the 2020 results, but leading Republicans haven't emphasized either one.  On the first point, here's a comparison of the 2012-2020 results:                      Rep         Dem        Other2012             47.2%      51%          1.8%2016             45.9%      48%           6.1%2020             46.8%      51.3%        1.9%In 2012, Mitt Romney was running against an incumbent president who was a skilled politician.  In 2016, Trump was running against an opponent who was neither an incumbent nor a skilled politician.  In 2020, Trump was an incumbent himself, and in addition to the normal advantage of incumbency, there's a tendency to rally round the leader in times of national emergency.   Yet both times he fell short of Mitt Romney's share of the vote in 2012.  Usually after a candidate loses an election, people in his party start talking about why he lost, what the party needs to do differently, what kind of leaders it needs moving forward, etc.  That's never really happened with Trump.  On his campaign to overturn the election, for a few weeks after January 6, it seemed like many Republican leaders were ready to turn against him.  But since then, the dominant tendency has been to downplay it by saying that even if the 2020 election wasn't "stolen," there was something wrong with it, or that the Democrats are engaged in "election interference" themselves.  For example, when Maine's Secretary of State ruled that Trump shouldn't appear on the primary ballot, Susan Collins denounced the decision on Twitter.  She didn't have to say anything--she could have waited until a reporter asked and then just said it was up to the courts.  Or she could have said while Trump's conduct might not qualify as insurrection, it was a serious matter, and that was why she had voted to impeach Trump and would not be voting for him in the primary.   Other Republicans went farther, saying that there is or will be a Democratic push to get Trump taken off the ballot.  So why haven't Republican elites made the case against Trump?  I think that some of it is that they thought his support would fade away after he left office and didn't command as much media attention.  A second is that the appearance of disunity usually hurts a party with voters.  Right-wing Republicans have been willing to engage in intra-party fights in order to get what they want.   Rather than fighting back, moderate and mainstream Republicans have tried to placate them in order to maintain as much party unity as they can.  This is partly because of electoral considerations--moderate and mainstream Republicans are more likely to be from swing states or districts where they have to get some support from Democrats and independents.   I think it may also because their long period of being in the minority in Congress gave Republicans a tradition of being concerned with sticking together.  So someone like Collins, who is clearly not a fan of Trump, gives a generic Republican response rather than taking the opportunity to try to weaken him.

ABSTRACT:
This article explores how Herman Melville uses the elegant structure of the April Fool's Day prank to anticipate not only the critical and commercial failure of his final novel in 1857, but also the proclivities of the twentieth-century literary scholar. The Confidence-Man simultaneously invites and defies the many attempts to read it as allegory and, through a series of increasingly antagonistic metafictional interludes, Melville's narrator berates his imagined reader and, vicariously, all his readers for their delusional expectations, hypocritical standards, and otherwise irrational reading habits.

It is not sanctions but Saddam's relentless war against his own people that is killing Iraqis

THE RISE OF JAPAN AFTER WORLD WAR II IS WELL KNOWN AND WELL DOCUMENTED. THE ARTICLE EXAMINES THE CURRENT INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY TO PROVIDE A FRAMEWORK IN WHICH THE ECONOMICALLY STRONG, MILITARILY WEAK, AND INTERNATIONALLY PASSIVE POPULATION OF JAPAN MUST OPERATE. IT EXAMINES THE BILATERAL AND REGIONAL RELATIONSHIPS OF JAPAN TO ANALYZE JAPAN'S FUTURE OPTIONS. THESE RELATIONS INCLUDE RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES, THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION, THE SOVIET UNION, WESTERN EUROPE, AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD.