Trump Is No Stalin, a Historian Reassures
Plus, Trump takes The Editors’ advice; the religious divide; Sanders blames Bibi
Foreign Affairs has an interview with a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stephen Kotkin, a historian of Stalin:
Speaking of Stalin: one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today is that you’ve spent decades closely studying him and his regime, and few people know more than you do about authoritarianism. Trump’s critics often accuse him of being or aspiring to be a strongman, or an autocrat, or even a fascist dictator. What do you think of that critique?
Not much. Trump no doubt has a lot of desires. He would no doubt like to have the kind of control over the American political system that Xi Jinping has in China or Putin has in Russia. He’s said so. I’m not sure Trump’s personality would be conducive to wielding that kind of power and control. And that’s not the system that we have. Stalin was effective in his system. But what if you put a personality like Stalin in our system? What do you get? Someone who is supremely skilled at despotism maybe finds himself bereft in a system with innumerable checks and balances and a free press and open society, doesn’t know how to manage. You have to consider the larger system, the set of institutions, the political culture, not just the personality, not just the fantasies of the individual person.
Kotkin, who taught at Princeton for years, also mentions: “The nontrivial chance of a great-power war breaking out in the Pacific theater in East Asia—a war that the United States could lose, which is something we as a nation haven’t talked about in a long time. I’m not defeatist by any means; I’m not suggesting we would lose. But the mere fact that it’s thinkable is a big change.”
A smart Bret Stephens column: Bret Stephens, who voted for Harris, has a good column about the election:
liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.
Weingarten concedes: The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, who spent a lot of her members’ dues money unsuccessfully backing efforts to elect Democrats, put out a statement that said in part, “I pray we are curious and introspective enough to understand what happened and ask how we unify the country. What binds us as Americans is far more important than what divides us.” Curiosity is underemphasized as a public virtue in America these days, and I am glad to see Weingarten mentioning it.
Biden concedes: President Biden, in a speech today, said, “The American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay.” It’s nice to hear this from Biden. I agree with him. It’s a little rich, though, because as the Bret Stephens column notes, the Democrats spent the past few years depicting Trump as, as Stephens puts it, “a mortal threat to democracy itself.” Now Biden says “we’re going to be okay,” with Trump as president. Was he intentionally misleading everyone when he said before the election that it wouldn't be okay? Or is he trying to be reassuring by misleading the American public now about whether it will be okay even though it really won’t be okay? Maybe it only just now suddenly dawned on Biden that we’ll be okay with Trump as president? If so, it’s some timing.
Trump takes The Editors’ advice:
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