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It is interesting to see the Democratic governors like Whitmer and Shapiro going all in for Harris in the Midwest in the last day or two. Also have to note Shapiro moving to the left as well in indicating he would defy a national abortion ban passed by Trump. It feels like this is squeeze play against those who think voting Trump in the short term will cause the Dems to move to right in the medium and long term.

**Also as an aside Kathy Hochul and Maura Healey from the deep Blue states of New York and Massachusetts are also participating in the Whitmer-Shapiro bus tour. Again a sign of Shapiro moving left against the wishes of many Substack commentators.

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Claire - I’ll wait for Part II to reply fully. Part I was not what I was expecting. As someone else mentioned, it was indeed a cri de coeur. To me, it evoked a great deal of sympathy yet provided little basis for empathy.

A few comments on the specifics:

Your conjectures about Kamala’s background and presumed emotions and beliefs seem to me like “positive projection.” What in her extemporaneous words or actions would lead you to think so?

Re: “we’ll vote to bring the American experiment to an end” – in just the first half of the 20th century, we survived the authoritarian progressive Woodrow Wilson, the would-be Supreme Court packer Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who, incidentally, was almost totally incapacitated for a good portion of his last term), the communist sympathizer Henry Wallace, and would-be dictator Huey Long. Democracies are resilient.

Re: Musk and his “disinformation machine” – I’ve already shared my bafflement with your opinion of X; I am just curious why you are not similarly exercised about TikTok, which seems to be much more adept at “turning millions of brains to mush” and is targeted at the most vulnerable and impressionable portion of the population.

Re: “He takes care to catalogue our many crimes, from slavery to child labor.” – THAT is the root of the Trump phenomenon, in my humble opinion. The fact that the whole of American history has been reduced to “a catalog of our many crimes,” and all the American heroes have been reduced to slave-owners, misogynists, and crypto-fascists, is the reason people discount Trump’s obvious faults and deficiencies. If there cannot be altruistic, dignified, truth-telling heroes to admire, why would the folks not follow a strongman who gives voice to their frustrations and promises them the world?

Re: “If *we* couldn’t make it work, how likely is it that anyone can?“ – As history, and especially our misadventures in building democracy in the Middle East over the past twenty years, demonstrated, very few nations can. Democracy requires certain prerequisites – please see my essay “What are Democracy’s Prerequisites?” https://jonathanblake.substack.com/p/what-are-democracys-prerequisites And *we* are not the same people as those who built this country, demonstrably.

Re: “The world will never respect anything America says again.” – for a different perspective, please take a look at "The World Is in Love with America." https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=260347&post_id=149798632 (And yes, respect and love are different, yet it’s hard to love something you don’t respect, right?)

Re: “The generation of Americans who are about to enter college (without ever having read a book) has never known, even for a minute, what it was like to believe that there are some things we *just don’t do*” – that is correct, and that is precisely what they’ve been taught; but it is hardly solely Trump’s fault – see two paragraphs above.

And finally, re: “I lost my clever” – NEVER! You are as eloquent and knowledgeable and smart as you’ve always been.

Looking forward to Part II!

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It’s great to see Claire quoting at length from Adam Garfinkle’s Substack, “The Raspberry Patch.” Like Claire, Adam is wrong about more things than he’s right about and like her, he’s a bit emotional. But the most important thing that they have in common is their brilliant mastery of the English language. Reading their posts is like enrolling in an expository writing course taught by the most talented teacher.

Claire neglected to quote the most salient point in Adam’s essay. It was this,

“The Enlightenment foundation of classic liberalism at its core turned on a discovery that institutions within a political economy—as the subject properly used to be called—can be designed in such a way that win-win outcomes can result, and that fair and sufficiently transparent processes can define down disagreements into less-than-existential struggles against the promise of future procedural access to the political process.”

Thanks to liberal democracy not every decision about who a nation’s leaders will be needs to be a competition between the Montagues and the Capulates or the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The choice between Trump and Harris resembles those conflicts more than was traditionally true in recent American elections. Both sides claim if they don't win, there won't be another election and our country is doomed. Harris says it. Trump says it.

Liberal democracy (and not just in the United

States) is collapsing for many reasons but surely one of the most important reasons is that it no longer seems capable of producing win-win outcomes. Too many disagreements are existential in nature, so existential in fact, that the access to future political remedies is no longer sufficient to serve as a restraint on popular passions. Make no mistake, it’s not that these issues merely seem existential, they are existential.

By way of example, if you believe that children, (most of whom are autistic) have a right to have their breasts or penises amputated in order to to convert to the gender they prefer at the moment it seems absolutely critical to cancel the parental rights of parents who won’t permit their children to transition to a preferred gender. To make matters even more stark, the advocates for this transitioning insist that removing the body parts that these children find objectionable, is not merely a cosmetic transition, it’s an actual transition from male to female or female to male.

If, on the other hand, you believe that children are too immature to make the consequential decision to have their breasts or penises amputated and that the intervention of the State in support of the child’s inclination is a fundamental violation of a sacred right for parents to protect their children, then State intervention in favor of the child’s desires truly is an existential issue. Future “procedural access” to the political process will never serve as a mechanism to reattach a child’s penis or breasts.

Here’s another example; if you reside in the suburbs of Detroit, Los Angeles or Chicago and you witness on television the orgy of gun crimes in the inner cities adjacent to where you live, it’s easy to view the Second Amendment as little more than an ornament inherited from ancestors that needs to be replaced by something newer, shinier and better. The fact that the authors of the Bill of Rights placed the right to bear arms second after the rights of free speech, free press and free assembly seems like little more than an accident of arithmetic. Given the carnage in American cities, curtailing the Second Amendment isn’t merely important, it’s an existential necessity.

If you live in a rural area things look different because gun crime is a rare occurrence. You’re likely to believe that the founding fathers placed the right to bear arms second in a list of ten rights-defining amendments because they believed the right to bear arms is fundamentally critical for sport, self-protection and as a check on over-weaning government. The difference between these opposing views isn’t trivial, it’s existential or near existential.

These are but two examples but there are many others. Let me provide just one more. Some people (apparently including Claire) think that free speech on social media platforms is an anathema to liberal democracy. Tolerating free speech on social media gives license to expressions of bigotry and even worse, disinformation and misinformation. To those who believe this, there are two obvious solutions; create a panel of experts who determine what’s true and untrue and sanction (either criminally or civilly) platforms which refuse to submit to the expert government appointed mediators assigned to determine whats true and decent. In Europe, this view is increasingly popular amongst government elites. In the United States, Democrats and traditional Republicans often share this view. Protecting democracy they believe actually requires censorship. In the United States, the First Amendment stands in their way

By contrast, those with the opposing view believe that the right of free speech is fundamental to democracy, that censorship is heinous and that in the United States at least, the First Amendment deserves the upmost reverence. They believe that toleration of bigoted expression and misinformation and disinformation is a small price to pay for the liberty and benefit to society that comes from the ability to express one’s views publicly. They think that the type of censorship that Claire supports destroys democracy rather than enhances it. The opposing views held by the two sides in this debate aren’t trivial, they’re existential.

The obvious question arising from all of this is why so many current disputes are of the existential type that liberal democracies are ill-equipped to handle while the disputes faced by liberal democracies in the past few hundred years were more of the sort amenable to resolution or compromise through the structures perfected by liberal democracies.

There must be several reasons for this, but I think a major reason is that decisions once decided by individuals or families or local communities have in modern times been usurped by national governments or even international institutions. Decisions about matters of great personal concern (abortion for example) are increasingly divorced from personal autonomy or the local communities where individuals spend most of their time. Individuals become increasingly powerless as faraway governmental institutions make more and more of the decisions once within their purview As this occurs, even issues that are far from existential seem like they're existential.

If you are a centralizer this is your fault. If you support increased federal power over the power of individuals or local governments, you are at least partially to blame for the increasingly fragile state of liberal democracy. If you're a fan of the EU, Nato or the United Nations ask yourself how you are complicit in weakening liberal demicracy.

National and International institutions are fragile. Local institutions are often antifragile. Liberal democracy may be doomed for exactly the reason Adam outlined in the paragraph quoted above. As existential issues come to dominate, it becomes increasingly apparent that liberal democracy simply isn't up to the task of mediating them. For liberal democracy to survive, the number of disputes viewed as existential needs to decline precipitously. It doesn't look like this will happen though. Regardless of who wins the Presidential election, half of the American population is bound to feel infuriated and probably cheated.

Another critical ingredient for liberal democracy is comity. Sadly in the West, comity is gone. Its not looking good for the liberal West.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Hu-Kpq-WU Last night in New York City, Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation

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Claire, After reading today's missive, I thought seriously about how it might be possible for me to ship a nice Pouilly Fuisse to your apartment in Paris, but I'm afraid that's not possible. I always thought The Cosmopolitan Globalist was a step above The Atlantic, but now, I'm not so sure. Noah Rothman puts his assessment of our upcoming election this way. "As the race has tightened heading into the home stretch, however, the Harris campaign has begun to rely once again on the Democratic Party’s most reliable voters. It’s a base election again, and the Democratic base is addicted to the allegation that Donald Trump is an unreconstructed Heideggerian.

It might work. It might not. In any event, even if Harris wins in November, she will no longer be able to claim that she was lofted into the presidency along with a torrent of good feelings and unbridled optimism. The next three weeks will be a bleak tableau of competing apocalypticisms. Voters will be left to assess only which flavor of Armageddon they prefer." "An unreconstructed Heideggerrian or competing apocalypticisms?" Apparently, you've opted for the latter. A Pouilly Fuisse won't cure that condition I'm afraid. God Bless.

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Claire, I’m curious about what percentage of your American readers plan to vote for each of the candidates. My guess is that somewhere between 60-70 percent will vote for Harris, but who knows? A few of your readers might be so disgusted by both candidates that they won’t vote at all or will vote third party or write in a candidate’s name. You should create a poll to find out, unless of course, you would rather not know.

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I'll do that, I'd be curious, too.

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

I don't know if its possible but if you could open it up to non-paid subscribers you could increase the sample size. Not that it's would be a scientific, but it would be interesting

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Polling Cosmopolitan Globalist readers on their electoral preferences would be interesting, but what would the resultant data tell us? There are only two viable presidential tickets on offer, D's and R's -- though candidates of multiple "3rd parties" are running in various states, none have a snowflake's chance in Hell of getting elected -- and a single variable poll would basically answer only one essential question: how many of Claire's readers are suffering under the delusion that Donald Trump would make an acceptable President.

It would take a much more lengthy and intricate questionnaire to determine the reasons why such disparate political actors as Dick & Liz Cheney, AOC, and Taylor Swift are all publicly committed to supporting Harris. Because she appears pretty normal, perhaps?

Even more interesting would be insights into the psychopathology of Trump supporters -- Elon Musk on one end of the IQ spectrum, and MAGA-hatted ordinary folks on the other. What aspects of Trump's character, speeches or policies comprise his "secret sauce" of electability? Sadly, I'm pretty sure I haven't seen any of these people on the comments boards here, though it would be great if they were lurking somewhere here behind an innocuous-sounding nom de computer.

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Keep playing with your kitties Claire, leave your word processor to die a quick death from battery failure (or maybe cat piss). Your TDS is evident in the extreme in this latest wordplay you've posted.

Be glad Sinwar's dead; the high point of the week and likely little whatsoever to do with what the USA does to support Israel while also ignoring what Iran is doing with those thousands of centrifuges buried deep in the ground.

"...Kamala Harris, a woman who, whether you agree with her or not, is well within the normal boundaries of American politics." That statement right there illuminates the main issue Claire. If KH can be thought of by any rational US citizen as being 'well within the normal range of American politics' after her tenure as VP, by what standard might you exclaim DJT a fascist?

"Trump will instead attempt to tear the country apart." BHO did a pretty fine job of starting that (with help from his staff and high-ranking Dems & their lawyers) during the eight years he had the OO for a playpen. Many of us firmly believe DJT may be the best for the job of bringing what's left back together again. We'll have to wait though, there's a lot of angst right now clouding our crystal balls.

"...everything the Founders bequeathed us in that Constitution, the tools they so carefully weaved through its fabric to protect us from demagogues and tyrants, don’t work." 'Cause maybe a lot of what was given us has been circumvented or outright ignored the last eight score & four years? By elected representatives on both sides of the aisles? There's much in it that does work still, why there will be an election come 11/5, the outcome of which yet unlikely to go uncontested as with others since the beginning of this century. Remains to be seen whether any eventual count of votes cast might have some (smaller) number of verifiable, legitimate votes cast by US citizens winnowed out from the chaff left from the Machine.

(Glad I opted for a monthly subscription when I signed up to read your stuff here. You piqued my curiosity when I first encountered your writings Claire, I'd hoped to learn something new from your efforts. There's still some time to let things ride though, I'll stay subscribed for a while yet, see if might return to a state of lesser perturbation. If not, rest assured there'll always be cats.)

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

SpC sez, "Many of us firmly believe DJT may be the best for the job of bringing what's left back together again." You score one point out of 100 for your answer: Donald Trump certainly demonstrated a remarkable ability to bring people together on Jan 6 2021. But that is not the same thing as bringing the country together.

If Trump is elected or is not elected, political turmoil and divisiveness will continue until Donald Trump is decisively beaten at the polls and a saner leadership has retaken its proper place in the remains of the Republican Party.

Roll another one, SpC -- and sweet dreams until Jan 20, 2025.

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

Was this cultist-bait? You know they're not going to be able to resist...

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Oct 18·edited Oct 18

Interesting, Claire, your evocation of Cluster B as yet additional confirmation of your extraordinarily intense case of TDS; as just yesterday several "rightwing provocateurs" (to use the current woke media term of art) have cited and linked to over-the-top screeds therein as demonstrable indicators of a Cluster B takeover of TDS freaks. Maybe you should consider the possible influence of Toxoplasmosis gondii on your politics, given the plausible thesis that infected cat ladies are in now command?

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

With all due respect Mr. Potkin, what twaddle you write Trump and his weird. rambling pronouncements have weakened American democracy like Kryptonite turns poor old Superman back into a feebler version pf Clark Kent. Claire, like all sensible Americans is just feeling the dread of the nightmare we will have to live through, whether Trump succeeds in hoodwinking enough gullible schlubs into voting for him or not. If not, be sure he will start another 'burn the house down' rally just as he did in the last election.

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Oct 18·edited Oct 18

That's Doctor Potkin, Mr. Hodson. I don't recollect that my up-thread (nor probably, my previous) "twaddle" had much to do with Trump. You didn't happen to do any online research on T. gondii (I studied parasitology in med school, although I'm a Ph. D., not an M.D.); and in particular, its demonstrable —if only occasional— unhinging of infected women?

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

Well Doctor P, since your comment (is that what you mean by an "up-thread"?) references Claire's " extraordinarily intense case of TDS" I have assumed you were speaking of "TRUMP Derangement Syndrome," a mock 'illness' which Trump supporters like to throw back at Trump critics for supposedly exaggerating the extent of the man's many shortcomings. Your comment most definitely concerned Trump; you insinuated that Claire's fears for the future of American democracy are due to cat-feces-induced hysteria. ( which could be interpreted as a misogynistic slur, btw).

In answer to your question, no, I have not investigated any parasites lately, including T. gondii. They sound nasty, and good for you if you can make a living in that line of work.

So -- what you are complaining about, exactly? I surmise that in your highly educated estimation, Claire's worries about America's future -- with or without the Orange Menace occupying the Oval Office -- are little more than silly, overblown female hysterics, possibly due to keeping kittie for company. The fact that over half of Americans (a fairly well-informed and well-educated bunch, btw) also are concerned seems immaterial to you.

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Oct 18·edited Oct 18

Glad to hear that you can read my mind as to what "seems immaterial". If the "injecting bleach" hoax (ref: <https://drinking.bleach.hoax.com> was still being blurbed forth disingenuously by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC just a day or two ago, I'd take that as indicative of the degree to which your "fairly well informed and well-educated half of Americans" lives in a totally-siloed info/media milieu. I generally like and respect Claire, with whom I've interacted personally for decades prior to launching her presence on substack. Notwithstanding that, I've been repeatedly advising her, mostly backchannel, that the reflexive hyper-detestation of Trump —as manifest even when the larger topic of her posts have nothing to do with him— needlessly alienates some fair part of her readership and eventually her income stream. And the T. gondii symptomology in some adult women does actually manifest as hysteria and clouded intellectual judgement.

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Dr P - When you say “totally-siloed info/media milieu” I take it that you mean the mainstream news media. It’s only a silo if you want it to be; there’s nothing stopping anyone from nosing around the internet — I can find trash news sites galore with a few clicks. But I don’t bother reading fascist apologia that attempts to normalize Trump’s typical claptrap.

It doesn’t take a PhD or even an intro to psychology class to judge Trump, as I did years ago, and see him for the charlatan he is. And as for your dig at Rachel M, I agree she can be irritatingly repetitive in a mocking sort of way, but when she laughs at Trump it’s not because she’s mocking him, but she’s calling attention to the stupid stuff that he says.

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Clare inhabits a bleak world.

All I can do is feel for her.

Perhaps she will recover her equilibrium at some point.

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

Patronizing a bit, aren't we, Steve?

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

Une autre chose, ma cherie. Je recommande une promenade dans le musée de Montmartre, comprenant une tranche de quiche et un café au lait dans son jardin arrière. Apportez un pull-over.

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

We are going to get through this era. Hang in, dear Claire! Also, your kitties are growing so fast!

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

Geoff -- I am sure we will "get through this era" but I am worried about what shape we'll be in once arriving on the other side.

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

I feel the same way you do. No way should this election sit on the balance of a hair, nor should Trump have the power to engender civil disruption if he loses. The whole situation is a disgusting travesty.

That said, I do think that inability for society to adapt quickly to new modes of communication has much to do with this. Do you really think Nixon would have quit in 1974 if Nixon had had the current version of Fox News in his corner? Do you think that Goldwater and his fellow Republican Senators would have told him to quit either? I don't. Letting the Fairness Doctrine lapse in 1987 was a grievous error.

And the Net, as you and Warzel say, has made it far worse. Anne Applebaum notes in the Atlantic that tyrannical regimes such as China, Iran, and Russia no longer use Stalinesque propaganda that paints their governments as perfect (only North Korea still does that) . Far easier to tear down America and the west and say that everyone and everything is corrupt, that there is no reason to aspire to democracy or liberty. If you do something really bad, put out the pro pro forma denial while the flooding the zone with eight versions of reality (as Putin did after shooting down the Malaysian airliner) so that only the people who really care can discern the reality. The tyrants keep doing this because it WORKS.

I have met too many otherwise intelligent people who tell me that "you can't know what's true." I tell them to read the mainstream news sources from both sides of the aisle and figure it out, but they don't listen. They don't CARE what the truth is. They like Trump and they don't mind being ignorant.

In my view, we need to rewrite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and simply say that if a post gets re-amplified more than X times (50 maybe?) you must have surveillance software to flag the post, and send it to moderation. And if you allow additional amplification thereafter for a false post, you should be subject to libel law. But that won't happen for some time, even if Trump loses.

Meanwhile, if the printing press caused the post Renaissance European religious wars, if the radio enabled both Hitler and the slaughter in Rwanda, then there is no limit to the damage that an unregulated internet can do.

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

suntrader -- Changing the laws governing communication might help some, but I suspect that nothing short of a national change of heart -- or maybe 70 million of them -- will be needed to get America its mojo back. If we cannot ALL agree that certain behaviors are wrong and totally beyond the pale for anyone in politics or government, (lyin', cheetin' & stealin' are a few such which come to mind), then we really haven't got much of a Republic worth keeping, in my opinion.

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Dearest, oh so hard working Claire, how do your fearful, relentlessly obsessive rants in this exact mode win their exclusion from the panoply of insane, 'teality-denying' beliefs you say comprise the mental basis of today's America? By dint of what sort of rationale do you manage to exclude yourself from inclusion in ir?

What's more, how does the likes of "The nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump, is a squalid figure, and the squalor is not subtle. His vileness, his lawlessness, and his malevolence are undisguised."

not present all the evidence we need to see thar its author firmly believes he is speaking off a Jew?

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Oct 18Liked by Claire Berlinski

Warbling JT - One is led to wonder what part of reality you believe that Claire has denied in her essay/s on this subject. Put another way, what good results do you, M. Warbler, expect to see from a Trump win?

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Oct 17Liked by Claire Berlinski

Somehow, I am a bit leery of the reactions Part II may elicit in me. As it stands, the first "installment" stands nicely as a modern textual corollary to Eliot's The Hollow Men (or perhaps, vice-versa) ..

Really well done.

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