Liberals to blame for the rise of Trump?

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Huh? Apparently they used all the ammunition against Romney, so there wasn't any left for Trump. But a closer look and this turns out to be nonsense, the reproaches against Romney were justified:

In the spirit of spreading culpability for the GOP’s meltdown as thin as possible, The Daily Beast recently served up a new theory that lays blame for Donald Trump at the feet of liberal commentators in general, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in particular. The argument is that overheated liberal denunciations of past Republican standard-bearers desensitized conservative and independent voters to the kind of criticism that should’ve been reserved for a uniquely menacing figure like Trump.

“He was frequently called a ‘bully,’ ‘anti-immigrant,’ ‘racist,’ ‘stupid,’ and ‘unfit’ to be president,” complained Karol Markowicz in a piece that received wide acclaim on the anti-Trump right. “I’m referring, obviously, to the terrifying Mitt Romney.”But when you unearth the context in which liberals used those terms, you find they were being perfectly fair-minded, and the lustrous halo around Romney begins to fade.

Amy Davidson of The New Yorker called Romney a “bully” after The Washington Post reported that as a high school student at the Cranbrook School, Romney had mercilessly bullied a gay teenage classmate.

Ruben Navarrette argued, persuasively, that Romney’s “self-deportation”-based immigration proposals were “anti-immigrant.”

It turns out nobody of any stature in liberal politics called Romney racist, but liberals like Lawrence O’Donnell did quite rightly allege that Romney was pandering to racists by seeking boos from the NAACP national convention, so he could turn around and boast, “if they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy—more free stuff.”

Meanwhile the person who claimed Romney was “unfit to be president” did so in an uncompensated Huffington Post blog post, as did the comedian who, taking cues from CNN’s Erin Burnett, argued it was politically “stupid” for Romney not to release his tax returns.

Krugman frequently questioned Romney’s honesty, but almost always in relation to the fact that Romney used fantasy budget math to mislead voters about his regressive tax reform proposal, or for more discrete lies, like claiming Obama had gone on an “apology tour” after assuming the presidency in 2009.

Conservatives’ Laughable Effort to Blame Liberals for Trump | New Republic

[Admin]

Here is Krugman himself responding to the challenge that he is to blame for the rise of Trump because he has been 'shrill' on Romney:

Lies, Lying Liars, and Donald Trump

So, there’s a new conservative take on who’s to blame for Donald Trump — and the answer, it turns out, is liberal commentators, and me in particular. Yep, by denouncing the dishonesty of people like Mitt Romney, I was crying wolf, so that voters paid no attention to warnings about Trump.

Actually, even if you leave aside the substance, this is bizarre. Do you really think that the fraction of the Republican primary electorate that selected Trump cares what New York Times columnists, me in particular, have to say — that they would have been warned off if only I had been nicer to establishment Republicans? That doesn’t even rise to the level of a joke.

But anyway, let’s talk about what I said about Romney. (By the way, I don’t think I referred to him as a “charlatan” — I used that word to refer to supply-side economists, because that’s what Greg Mankiw, who was advising his campaign, called them.) Here’s a key passage:

Every one of the Romney campaign’s major themes, from the attacks on President Obama for going around the world apologizing for America (he didn’t), to the insistence that Romneycare and Obamacare are very different (they’re virtually identical), to the claim that Mr. Obama has lost millions of jobs (which is only true if you count the first few months of his administration, before any of his policies had taken effect), is either an outright falsehood or deeply deceptive. Why the nonstop mendacity?

Is there anything wrong with that passage? The “apology tour” thing was a constant refrain, even though Politifact declared it pants on fire. So were the Romneycare not Obamacare and job loss things, which were equally false. So what is the assertion here? That I should not have called Romney out on lies, because that would undermine my authority when a much bigger liar came along?

How about a different hypothesis: the foundations for Trumpism were laid in part by conservatives who made dishonesty about policy a routine part of Republican politics, and also both-sides-do-it journalists who enabled that culture of lying. This left the Republican establishment helpless in the fact of someone who lied as much in a day as they did in a week, because they couldn’t credibly make the case that policy dishonesty was disqualifying.

Actually, I don’t fully believe in this hypothesis either; mainly, Trumpism is the GOP’s id triumphing over its weak superego, which was probably destined to happen regardless. But it’s a lot more plausible than blaming little old me.

[Admin]

A useful reminder from Bloomberg:

Republicans Are Responsible for Trump

AUG 16, 2016 11:44 AM EST

By Jonathan Bernstein

Are Democrats responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? That’s an argument some are making – asserting that hyperbolic partisan attacks on Republicans such as George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney rendered Republicans insensitive to more accurate alarms later raised about Trump. It’s essentially an argument that Democrats cried “Wolf!” so often that Republicans didn’t care when the genuine article showed up at the door.
You can argue about whether Romney, for example, was a “sneering plutocrat,” or Bush was a “dunce.” But there is no credible argument that even the most over-the-top partisan claims produced a Trump.

How do we know? Because Republicans proved it. They called President Bill Clinton a drug-running murdererand a likely communist, and then they impeached him, claiming he had committed high crimes. Democrats reacted to these often outlandish attacks by nominating normal candidates such as Al Gore and John Kerry. Not Donald Trump.

Republicans similarly attacked Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War. And that’s before some Republicans alleged that Barack Obama was not even a U.S. citizen, a claim that top Republican leaders declined for years to refute. The Democrats, once again, managed to handle all of that unpleasantness without nominating someone like Trump.

It’s pretty normal for partisans from either side to believe that their candidates are uniquely and unfairly maligned -- “our attacks were just telling the truth, while their attacks were full of exaggerations and falsehoods.” That skewed perception has consequences. For example, some Democrats who believe Hillary Clinton is prone to appearances of impropriety may be more willing to overlook that fault because they believe that Republicans would just make up a phony scandal in lieu of a real one. 

The key difference between the parties, however, is the closed conservative information feedback loop. Within the feedback loop of Republican-aligned media, fringe attacks on Republicans (such as, for instance, Kanye West’s claim that Bush “doesn’t care about black people”) are treated as if they are official Democratic dogma. Likewise, within the loop, it’s taken for granted that Democrats are both dishonest and disastrous -- making even very harsh attacks on them seem relatively moderate and restrained.

At any rate, the notion that Republicans were somehow blinded to Trump’s inadequacies as a candidate by previous over-the-top criticism of Bush, McCain and Romney just doesn’t hold up. After all, the Democrats haven’t nominated a Kardashian.