Trump Is No Stalin, a Historian Reassures

Plus, Trump takes The Editors’ advice; the religious divide; Sanders blames Bibi

Joseph Stalin as seen in a 1937 painting by Samuel Johnson Woolf. Credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Muriel Woolf Hobson.

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: 

On election night I tweeted, “If Trump wins he better come out fast and name a lot of women to important powerful cabinet and White House positions because otherwise (and even anyway) the level of anger is going to be uncontrollable.” 

Trump’s first personnel announcement? Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. 

It will be interesting to see whether Elise Stefanik goes into the administration or stays in the House of Representatives. Linda McMahon, Tulsi Gabbard, Lara Trump, and Kristi Noem are also mentioned for possible roles. McMahon is co-chair of the transition.

The Religious Divide: Fox and AP cooperated for an exit poll. Among the most striking findings to me (and consistent with past findings) was the question on “What is your present religion, if any?” Those who answered “none,” 23 percent of the total, went 69 percent to Harris and 23 percent to Trump. Trump won Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and other Christians, according to the survey. 

Another question asked “How often, if at all, do you attend religious services?” A third of the respondents answered “never”—they went 61 percent for Harris and 36 percent for Trump. The “once a week or more” answer got 23 percent, and that group went 64 percent for Trump and 34 percent for Harris.

Democrats can try to expand their share of religious voters, or they can try to expand the number of secular voters by defunding religious institutions or regulating them oppressively. Likewise, Republicans can try to expand their share of nonreligious voters, or try to expand the numbers of religious voters by pursuing policies—funding for religious schools, or lighter regulation of religious institutions—that will support their growth. Or both parties can simultaneously pursue both approaches.

Sanders blames Netanyahu: A senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, issued a statement on the election results that includes a claim that “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right…Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions finding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.” He went on to denounce “the big money interests…who control the Democratic Party.” 

What a knucklehead. To blame Netanyahu for the humanitarian situation in Gaza without mentioning the Hamas terrorist organization, its Iranian sponsor, and the hostages it is holding seems odd. The presidential candidates who were most stridently anti-Israel, Jill Stein and Cornel West, attracted trivial support that, at least when I checked, doesn’t seem to have significantly affected the election outcome in any state. I suppose the theory is that anger over the humanitarian situation in Gaza somehow turned the election by keeping Democratic voters home or driving them into the arms of the Republicans.

As Rep. Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, put it in shutting down that argument, “Here’s the ground-level truth. If you’re a young man of color struggling to pay your rent, put food on the table, and keep your family afloat, the furthest issue on your mind is a conflict 5000 miles away. The existential issue for you is inflation. The crippling cost of living is the cause of your discontent. Anyone claiming otherwise is representing their own ideological imagination rather than reality.”

Money doesn’t buy elections: Harris and the Democrats outspent Trump on the order of two to one, with vast disclosed and hidden sums from Bill Gates, Alex Soros, Laurene Powell Jobs, Michael Bloomberg, and who knows who else. If Trump had won by outspending his opponent with unlimited and undisclosed sums, the newspapers would be full of calls for campaign finance reform, including constitutional amendments, and complaints about unregulated campaign cash and the danger of corruption. A lesson of the presidential race outcome is that while money matters, at a certain point, there are diminishing returns. If ten television commercials depicting Trump as a fascist don’t change a voter’s mind, spending more money to air an 11th commercial isn’t going to change the voter’s mind, either.

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