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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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The Rightful Caliph has blogged over at ACX that The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs.

He is arguing that while tariffs are an "idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s" which are not a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform, the fact that he can push through them is a consequence of his cult of personality and him being surrounded by yes-men who will not risk his anger by telling him an idea of his is terrible. So the tariffs in particular point to a broader failure mode of right-wing populism, which he contrasts with the ideological capture of institutions by the left.

Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.

I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.

He is then saying that he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left to Trump's approach of starting without institutional knowledge and just see how things go.

As usually, this is compellingly written. It did not make me update a lot on Scott's politics -- he had explicitly endorsed anyone-but-Trump for the presidential election, and extrapolating that he would not be a fan of the tariffs was not exactly hard. I like how Scott took this issue which has been discussed to the death on the object level, then took a step back and asked "but what is the deeper truth about that political system beyond the object level stupidity?"

As usual for Scott blogs about CW-adjacent topic, there is a lot of discussion going on at ACX.

If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing. And maybe that particular metaphor owes more to Biden’s age than the inexorable logic of liberal institutionalism. But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent

I'm unsure how to react to this statement. On the one hand, it seems like a fairly straightforward argument. On the other hand, it seems to make several assumptions that I don't think are true, and I'm unsure how much of that is because I am ideologically opposed to the overall sentiment and how much is based in cold hard fact.

Well, let's game this out. My prior is that Congressional Democrats, State Department Bureaucrats, White House staffers, DNC operatives, and Democrat-controlled media all move more-or-less in lockstep. Sure there are sometimes stutters and gaps when it takes time for the new messaging to be passed down from the decision-makers to the apparatchiks, but generally speaking the Democrats are able to put out fairly consistent messaging across the broad spectrum of their PMC alliance members. All that to say, where one goes, they all go. If the Congressional Democrats decide Fuck Ecuador is the right message, then so do the State Department bureaucrats and the White House staffers and the DNC operatives and the MSM. The same holds true no matter what order these are listed in.

So Generic DNC President decides that the message of the day is Fuck Ecuador, for whatever personal reasons you may choose to ascribe to him or her. Through some level of backroom dealing, favors owed and repaid, dirt dug up, whatever, Generic DNC President gets the DNC operatives on board. So the MSM starts sane-washing Fuck Ecuador because Daniel Noboa is a right-wing authoritarian now because he declared war on the gangs in Ecuador and that's not allowed. Ecuador is vital to the stability of the Western Hemisphere so obviously the United States has to Do Something about this right-wing authoritarian strongman. So the Congressional Democrats start pumping out statements about how they support Generic DNC President's brave stance against right-wing authoritarianism, and the MSM continues pumping out articles about how Ecuador is really really really important and Noboa is just plain evil, and the State Department Bureaucrats get on board because hey they read in the New York Times that Noboa is just plain evil, and the White House staffers get on board because they truly believe that Generic DNC President has the country's best interests at heart. And so we went to war.

Evidence in support of this: Biden, despite promising to be a transition candidate, decided to run for re-election. And everyone fell into lock-step behind him. The Congressional Democrats said they'd never been prouder to be an American, the State Department Bureaucrats said they loved everything President Biden did, the DNC operatives spun-up their fundraising machine for him, and the Democrat-controlled media said anyone who thought Biden was a dementia-riddled walking corpse was fake news. This continued right up until it became completely undeniable on live television. At which point, without holding an abbreviated primary, without holding any kind of candidate search, every element of the party, after a few of those aforementioned stutters and gaps, fell into line behind Harris. And then the Congressional Democrats said they'd never been prouder to be an American, the State Department Bureaucrats said they loved everything Vice President Harris proposed, the DNC operatives spun-up their fundraising machine for her, and the Democrat-controlled media said that anyone who thought Harris was going to lose was fake news.

That's how I see that going. Someone sanity-check me. Because if I am right, well the entire thrust of Scott's argument kinda falls apart. If I am wrong, I'd like to know.

And everyone fell into lock-step behind him

Initially yes, but not post-debate (Pelosi being the obvious case) and I doubt that happens with Trump.

That's how I see that going. Someone sanity-check me.

I think you are mostly right, but I think the structure of the machine you’re describing is a bit different. It’s not a linear chain coming down from the White House, and the White House isn’t the one controlling it. For foreign policy, the locus of control is the State Department and CIA (but I repeat myself) and then other entities emanate out from that locus like spokes on a wheel.

So in your hypothetical, some group deep within the State Department looks at the numbers and maps and decides that conquering Ecuador is vital to America’s geopolitical interests. Suddenly, the President starts getting alarming security briefings about Ecuadorian weapons of mass destruction and imminent Ecuadorian aggression. The media gets their marching orders and starts running two articles a day about how the Ecuadorian President might actually be Satan. The NPCs take the lead from the both the White House and media and pretty soon you have people burning Ecuadorian flags on the street and demanding war.

The second thing is that the October 7 attack and the subsequent invasion of Gaza is the first major hiccup in the machine, where the gears seized up and the NPCs in the colleges and on the streets didn’t perfectly spin along with their state department orders. That might just be a one off thing. Israel-Palestine had been a culture war issue for over half a century, and people had much more baked-in preexisting opinions about it than they ever did about Ukraine or Iraq. So it was significantly harder to just beam their NPC programming right into their heads and send them off. But it could also be a sign that the control machine is just generally breaking down. I have a theory that the fervor over the Ukraine War was supposed to be a whole-of-society thing in America, not just a center left neoliberal cause celebre. It’s just that the programming ended up being rejected by large sections of the American populace. I see evidence of that and I keep meaning to make a post about it.

My prior is that Congressional Democrats, State Department Bureaucrats, White House staffers, DNC operatives, and Democrat-controlled media all move more-or-less in lockstep.

The best counterexample I can give is how Biden handled Israel-Palestine. Much of the leftist base along with some true-believer DNC operatives and parts of the media are very much pro-Palestine, and wanted Biden to basically say "fuck Israel". He didn't do this, and it was an ongoing point of tension within the Dem coalition for most of Biden's presidency.

Another counterexample would be to read up on Matthew Yglesias' take on "The Groups", and how during the Biden admin it seemed like on many policies (with the exception of things like the aforementioned Israel issue) the base got to functionally overwrite what the President wanted. Furthermore, it seemed like Harris would have liked to pivot harder to the center if she could have, but the base was fractious enough that there were concerns about wide defections, so Harris ended up being a mealy-mouthed "something for everybody" candidate.

I agree that the topic of bombing Ecuador was probably not a well chosen example by Scott, because few Americans truly care what non-Western country their air force is bombing today. It will not affect them in the same way as declaring a trade war on the rest of the world will. Still, I think that Obama or Clinton would have had to spend a lot of political capital to bring the Democrats and MSM on board with it (unless there was a "bomb Ecuador" lobby who had already laid the groundwork, of course). Perhaps a Democratic president can get away with one or two whimsical decisions on that level per term, but certainly not with three per year.

Biden deciding to run again was a disaster, and the Democrat's leadership was absolutely asleep at the wheel to not stop him well in advance. Rallying behind Harris -- while clearly not a winning move in retrospect -- can be seen as the Democrats trying to make the best out of a terrible situation they had maneuvered themselves into.

Everyone seems terrified nowadays of having contested conventions which used to be the norm.

I'm reading Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 and it's an eye-opener.

After the first few primaries nowadays, everyone just drops out to make room for the Chosen One. And it's happening earlier and earlier.

That election is reason both parties are so afraid of contested conventions. The Democrats came out of that with George McGovern, who got absolutely wiped out in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. After that, both parties quietly decided that candidate selection was too important to be left to the voters.

No, this is why The Democrats are so afraid of a contested convention. The would-be technocrats know that thier preferred policies (Socialism, Globalism, LGBTQism, Degrowth, Et Al) are deeply unpopular with the electorate which is why they have to rig thier primaries and are constantly appealing to emotion and identity politics in thier party messaging rather than expressing any sort of positive vision.

Meanwhile the GOP's willingness to let the voters choose the candidate is the only reason Trump was on the ballot in the first place.

Degrowth

Get real. Trump has just delivered the most anti-growth policy of the post-war era but Democrats still get this moniker because they, what, don't always acquiesce to tax and spending cuts?

As TequilaMockingbird pointed out, "degrowth" refers less to market statistics and more to the literal expansion of the "physical economy:" less power generation, less manufacturing, less consumption, etc., stemming from a belief popular among eco-minded progressives that syncretizes socialism and envrionmentalism into a desire to return to the state of nature where Man is theoretically more fulfilled and healthier, and in doing so, heal the Earth from the damage caused to it by civilization.

Now, of course, you can still be cheeky and say that Trump will accomplish the same things anyway, which I can't bring myself to dispute, but I would also like to register, per my recent posting history, that I truly do suspect that the setbacks to global capitalism will not spell the end of civilization.

I'm not talking about FAANG's stock prices

That may have been the beginning of it, but IIRC as late as 1988 the Democratic nomination was up in the air as late as June/July. (Anyone remember the "Seven Dwarfs"?)

Every election cycle since then, the front-runner has been locked in earlier and earlier, and the whole process rendered less and less interesting to watch.

Also note the election of Jeremy Corbyn as head of the Labour Party in the UK. A very old, very socialist man who was thrown in as a sop to the far-leftists on the basis that he couldn't possibly win; the organisers had forgotten the reforms they'd made to try and grow grassroots support and boy, did Corbyn have grassroots support. Then he gets elected to the head of the Opposition party and he promptly starts talking about how he would never fire nuclear weapons to defend Britain, how he would prevent people taking their money abroad to prevent them avoiding the swingeing new taxes he was going to create, and videos started coming out where he referred to 'our friends from Hamas' etc. Not popular.

I would simply remember Syria Libya. Why did the Democrats who had run against regime change in the Middle East decide to bomb them back to hell again? What was accomplished besides the reopening of slave markets? They didn't even bother selling it to the public, they just did it.

"We came, we saw, he died" was the main sober analysis offered by the administration at the time.

The regime change that Democrats ran against was very specific to what had gone on post-9/11. Democrats were by no means advocating any kind of peacenik isolationism; they were responding to a brash neocon foreign policy that suggested we could remake problematic countries in our own image by unilateral military action. We had attempted to do it in Iraq and there was talk suggesting we should try it again in Iran. To be clear, I was opposed to action in Libya at the time, but the context in which it occurred was very different from Iraq or even Afghanistan. One of the big problems identified in the years following the Iraq invasion was that by removing Sadaam Hussein without any obvious successor we created a power vacuum that ignited sectarian conflict that had been supressed by decades of Baathism. And then, as Colin Powell said. "You break it, you bought it". Combine this with the questionable justification, presence of US ground troops and the associated casualties, and lack of international cooperation, and it was an easy war to criticize.

And yet, the Republicans kept saying that the problem was a lack of all-out commitment. Hell, even as the war's popularity hit a low ebb in 2008, John McCain was running for president saying he wanted to commit more troops to Iraq. Libya had several advantages. There was an active civil war against the regime, and opposition leaders made a natural governing class once Qadafi was taken out. We weren't going to attempt to remake the government ourselves once the war ended. Limiting it to airstrikes decreased the risk of US casualties to near zero. And the whole thing was a NATO operation, not a unilateral adventure with a "coalition of the willing" that had the stink of a failed UN Security Council resolution. It would have, and did have, more in common with the air wars in the Balkans than with Iraq or Afghanistan.

Contrast this approach with what Republicans were saying at the time. They were criticizing Obama for not acting decisively enough. Qadafi, like Sadaam, needed to go; we didn't need to wait for NATO to see what they wanted to do; we needed to take control of the situation with massive airstrikes. The contrast was put in much clearer terms after the Benghazi attacks, which Republicans alleged could have been prevented had Obama taken the threat of terrorism more seriously and provided actual military support for the diplomatic mission in Libya. Instead, Obama was too much of a squish to stamp out terrorist influence along with Qadafi, and was allowing the country to go to shit. "We Came, we saw, he died" was offered as a pithy summary of the quick in-and-out operation that Libya was, and how we were able to take out a dictator without it turning into a quagmire.

Libya was a "pick your poison" scenario, in which the options were to exempt Qaddafi from the "world police" treatment for atrocities (I don't recall the details of what the inciting incident was - some anti-dissident thing gone too far), because he had relinquished WMDs and it would send a bad message to rogue states, or to treat Qaddafi like any other dictator without WMDs. If anyone knows whether threading the needle on that one was possible (i.e., prevent further mass-murder by Qaddafi without getting Qaddafi overthrown), they probably aren't a Motte commenter, but it wasn't an arbitrary about-face on Libya or (to the best of my knowledge) done with regime change as a terminal goal.

The USA did, and still does, nothing about Sudan except some toothless sanctions.

Is Sudan as geopolitically important as Libya was?

Somalia sure is and we let that be a shitshow which sometimes has a government. Yemen combines the strategic importance with the government backed human rights abuses and, well…

My understanding that Somalia's primary effect on the West is that its coast needs to be avoided. Yemen policy is inextricable from Iran policy. Syria is the closest parallel I can think of.

The US could have told the Europeans to more firmly eat shit when they suggested intervening, and it likely would have proceeded in the same way that many other African insurrections have, i.e. it would be over quickly... or maybe it wouldn't, but in either case it wouldn't be our problem. Unless of course it became another power-vacuum that allowed a proto-ISIS to rise. In any case the US was probably more deferential to European calls to intervene given how they helped the US to some extent in its wars in Afghanistan + Iraq, and there were a lot of people wondering if NATO had any purpose any more, so they probably hoped to kill multiple birds with one stone and ensure NATO didn't look like "all for me, none for thee".

After the Iraq affair and 15 years of State department media psyops, I don't trust a damned thing they say anymore and don't see why I should believe that Qadaffi did these alleged atrocities

Especially given that digging into the Lockerbie bombing shows a lot of weird stuff as to the provenance of the attack.

Libya was a "pick your poison" scenario, in which the options were to exempt Qaddafi from the "world police" treatment for atrocities (I don't recall the details of what the inciting incident was - some anti-dissident thing gone to far)

Qaddafi was fighting an armed rebellion, something he had done a few times before. My recollection is that he was winning that fight pretty handily as well, that it was not a terribly bloody victory, and that his previous victories over armed rebellions had not been terribly bloody either; based on prior behavior, he would have executed or imprisoned the rebel leadership, and then things would go on more or less as before. The three-way civil war that resulted from our intervention likely resulted in bloodshed roughly an order of magnitude worse than what would have resulted had we just let things play out. At least, that's my understanding; I invite correction from those who know better.

I don't think it was so much about the amount of domestic bloodshed with Qadafi versus some unknown quantity. We had already been through Iraq and Afghanistan and weren't naive about what a power vacuum could look like. The problem was that it was a volatile time in the Middle East due to Arab Spring, and Qadafi had a history of sending troops into nearby countries and destabilizing them so as to get his own mini-sphere of influence. It was bad enough when he did it in places like Chad or Niger, but the possibility of something similar happening in Egypt was probably more than Western governments were willing to tolerate. This is all speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if the State Department wasn't adamant about this narrative when it came to selling the operation to the American public, because a history lesson involving the complex histories of countries they've never heard of combined with hypotheticals doesn't pack quite the same punch as "there will be civilian reprisals if he regains power".

Libya was already in what could only be classified as a fullblown civil war well before the French pushed NATO to intervene. The country had already functionally split in half, with pitched battles between the rebels and state forces.

My recollection is that the rebels were losing ground pretty steadily, and fear of Qaddafi committing massacres once he broke the rebel forces was used to sell intervention to the public. That was how it was sold to me, in any case.

Yes. And then the mandate of 'intervene to stop the advance to prevent a massacre' was reasoned into 'and then reverse the advance in the other direction.'

And so one of the only people in history to actively give up a WMD program under external threat ended up ensuring that they would be one of the only people in history to give up a WMD program under external threat. WMD non-proliferation had a terrible setback that year, but at least Hillary got a quippy one-liner and bolstered her tough-on-national-security reputation.

Yeah, that's approximately correct.

There was also, as a lower-stakes and economics-only version, the recent Biden admin call for an unrealized capital gains tax -- which quite a lot of supposedly The Good Ones were willing to bend over backwards to present misleading or outright false arguments for, and never engage with criticisms. To be fair, it wasn't successfully enacted; to be less charitable, that was not for any mainstream progressive pushback.

That wasn't a Biden-idiosyncrasy, though, that was a logical consequence of the left-populist/activist call for a wealth tax - the wealth they want to tax is unrealized capital gains. It would only be comparable to Trump and tariffs, if Biden had spent decades promoting it, against party consensus, and the party adopted the policy, after he was elected.

I took that as an attempt to stop the tactic the rich use where they keep all their money in assets, take out loans using said assets as collateral and report no income because they're technically living off loans, then the loans are repaid by the estate at a different tax rate.

I make no claims that that specific proposal was good, but I would be interested in some method of making the above tax scheme not viable.

I'm curious if there is another way to prevent that tax "scheme." (Is the primary benefit taxes? There's also compounding gains on the assets, themselves.)

I'm hardly an expert on how to write laws that can't be exploited, but an idea I toyed with was that if you meet some threshold of money borrowed vs assets and/or income (high enough that the average person wouldn't meet it), the amount you borrowed to maintain your lifestyle counts as your income and is taxed as such.

That’s politically impossible because it hits seniors getting reverse mortgages for their cruise ships.

More comments

capital gains taxes are bad actually so this is fine.

Alternatively, they still have to pay sales taxes on what they buy.

Do you mean Libya?

Yes, my bad.

Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day. It's distinctly less personalistic. People learned that the message of the day was that Biden is the greatest person in the whole world, and they knew questioning it made you a Bad Person who must be punished. But the Democratic blob recognized a weakness in the candidate that they couldn't paper over and, in the span of a few weeks, shivved him, memory holed him, and made Harris the greatest person in the whole world. That dynamic does not and could not exist with Republicans and Trump. In Presidential politics, Democrats perform a kind of pseudo-personalism: the point of acting as if you believe X is the Great Person of History is not to indicate any true belief but to indicate tribal membership. Biden dead-enders were heavily marginalized everywhere a day after Harris became the heir apparent, if Biden dead-enders even ever existed.

It's not as clear to me as it is to Scott, though, that one cult is clearly less damaging than the other. The reaction to COVID did far more damage to our economy and wellbeing than the tariffs will (and I believe the tariffs are ridiculous and incredibly damaging), and that can be squarely laid at the feet of the neoliberal bureaucrats.

Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality;

How quickly we forget the "Is Obama Enlightened" discourse, and even the "Cocaine Joe" and Bernie memes of the late Obama era. Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".

Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".

I would argue that this is mostly orthogonal to which side has more of a cult of personality. Historically, I think most cults of personality are closer to falling in line -- believing that that guy is just the right man for the job -- than falling in love -- believing that that charming guy is actually a very decent person.

Sure, Obama had some cult of personality, but he was equally the figurehead of an ideological movement. If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant. By contrast, Trump has much more slack. The evangelicals who voted for him to get Dobbs certainly did not love him as a faithful Christian. He was a sinful tool for them, but he was the tool which got the job done. And the dissatisfied poor people did not vote for him because they precisely shared his philosophical beliefs about tariffs. They were simply dissatisfied with how the DC elites ran things, and correctly noticed that these elites really hated Trump, and correctly figured out that they could piss off these elites maximally by electing him. (Immigration is the other motive, and one where Trump's hands are likely tied. Opening the borders is something which his base would not forgive him -- like Hitler converting to Judaism or Stalin declaring himself a Tsar. So I guess that all movements are some fraction ideology and some fraction cult of personality, only that modern left-wing movements are stronger on the ideological side.)

If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant.

Again the amnesia strikes - he did this! Repeatedly, during the 2008 election!

Anyone know to what extent it was an open secret among activists that Obama was pro-gay marriage, but thought "take what you can get" was the better political strategy? He had been more transparent, as a State Senator.

if at any point he had stated he was opposed to gay marriage

This actually happened though: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-still-opposes-same-sex-marriage/

Did his base turn on him in an instant? It seems like they reelected him instead.

Huh, I either hadn't heard of or forgot about him opposing gay marriage in 2010, after his election. The general running narrative among Democrats in my sphere is that Obama had cynically lied in 2008 about his opposition to gay marriage in a (what turned out to be successful) bid to gain voters for his presidential election. This was an openly stated belief during the 2008 campaign before he got elected, and it seemed to be the common belief the last time I encountered the topic among my peers a few years ago, and I generally leaned in the direction of believing that, but now I'm wondering if he really was stating his honest beliefs, which actually truly changed over time.

I don't know how old you or your peers are, but I was in law school in 2008 and was following both the primary and general election campaigns pretty closely. There wasn't any consensus among Democrats at the time regarding the gay marriage issue. Minority voters were generally opposed to it, and the only people seriously in favor were activists and gay people themselves. Even the more leftist wing of the party didn't exactly place a top priority on it. The mainstream opinion, held by both Obama and Clinton, was to be in favor of civil unions and against statewide initiatives to prohibit gay marriage outright. They basically punted, and it basically worked, since the issue was at the bottom of most voters' list of priorities. Republicans would occasionally bait Democrats with the issue since gay marriage wasn't particularly popular among the general public at the time, but the moderate, boring, amorphous position gave them sufficient cover that only the true religious firebrands bothered to bait them that often. Neither Obama nor McCain mentioned it much during the 2008 campaign.

I'm probably around your age or a little younger, as I had very recently graduated college in 2008, and most of my peers were around my age. We were in Massachusetts, which had already legalized gay marriage by that point, and our perception was that gay marriage was so obviously a human right (it was vanishingly rare to encounter people socially who didn't agree with this - the few times we did, that person was usually socially ostracized by people within my circle - I was never enough of a social butterfly to have much influence over or feel much impact of these decisions) that either mainstream Dem politicians who were against it and for civil unions were just making cynical, calculated decisions to misrepresent their true beliefs for the purpose of not scaring off the superstitious/bigoted conservatives (including the more conservative/religious Democratic voters) or were just superstitious/bigoted themselves due to clinging to religion.

For Obama specifically, we almost definitely projected a lot of our own values onto him as the avatar of Hope and Change who would lead us out of the dark Bush 2 years. With gay marriage, we thought it was basically an open secret that he was cynically lying about his opposition to it, and plenty of us, including myself, also had a lot of confidence that he was actually an atheist cynically lying about his faith in Christianity.

It did lead to the weird situation where Trump entered office as the first non-incumbent who was not opposed to gay marriage.

Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day.

Failure mode implies a repeated failure in this mode. Which other Republican cults of personality beyond Trump are you thinking of? Reagan?

What makes Democrats distinct from this? Obama actually did have an adoring media, and to this day there are people that unironically argue that he had no scandals. Clinton and his charisma was so central to the Democratic party's adoption of neoliberalism that he almost made Hillary electable. If we want to go back to the cold war, JFK was subject of so much mythologizing that the term 'camelot' only refers to him in a US political context.

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