RUTHFULLY YOURS

Populism is typically born in places like Nebraska, Louisiana, Kansas, and the other places given short shrift in that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cartoon showing the view of the world from Ninth Avenue.

It’s not supposed to hail from Brooklyn or Queens, never mind Burlington, Vermont, or midtown Manhattan. But that’s where the two reigning populists of the 2016 cycle call home.

You could say that Donald Trump, the son of a rich real-estate developer in Queens, was always a populist at heart. All his life he wanted to break into the fancy-pants world of Manhattan real estate. Despite his wealth, he still has that bridge-and-tunnel chip on his shoulder. And that chip explains the garishness of his publicity-seeking lifestyle, as well as his politics.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. He followed a somewhat familiar path to politics. As Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina quipped in one of the recent Republican debates, Sanders went to the Soviet Union on his honeymoon and never came back. In reality, he ended up in Burlington and became the socialist mayor of one of the very first latte towns.

Looked at through a historical lens, a billionaire Manhattanite from Queens and a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn should be standing at the pointy end of the pitchforks, not leading the mobs holding them. Nearly all of the famous populists hated the East Coast, the super-rich, and the big cities. A good number — but not all — of them disliked Jews.

And yet, what you might call “blue state populism” is here.

Consider this: when more women than men attend college and graduate school by increasingly sizable amounts (Latina females over white males by 14%!) and the American male breadwinner looks to be going the way of the dodo bird, Hillary Clinton is basing her campaign for the presidency largely on breaking the glass ceiling.

Not only that, she is accusing her putative opponent Donald Trump of sexism. This is the woman who blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on the “vast rightwing conspiracy,” apparently imputing magical-mystical aphrodisiac powers to conservatives.

The Donald — you’ll be surprised to hear if you’ve been living on Pluto — has been firing back, sweeping Mr. Hillary, now supposedly about to stump for his wife, into the fray.

“You look at whether it’s Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones or many of them,” Trump said on NBC’s TODAY. “That certainly will be fair game. Certainly if they play the woman’s card with respect to me, that will be fair game.”

In recent days, the GOP front-runner has been highlighting the former president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, saying that Bill Clinton has a pattern of “abuse of women.”

Donald Trump last week used some typically coarse language to describe Hillary Clinton, who responded by accusing Mr. Trump of sexism while announcing that she is unleashing Bill Clinton to campaign for her. This was too ripe an opening for Mr. Trump, who is now attacking Hillary for acquiescing in Bill’s predations against women.

Mr. Trump is rude and crude, but in this case he is raising an issue that rightly bears on the 2016 election campaign and the prospect of a third Clinton term. Mrs. Clinton wants to use her gender both as a political sword and shield to win the White House. The purpose is to make male politicians less willing to take her on, while reinforcing her main and not-so-subtle campaign theme that it’s time to elect the first woman President.

So she and her allies will try to spin any criticism as sexist. Even politically correct Bernie Sanders got this treatment after he said during a debate this autumn that “all the shouting in the world” wouldn’t keep guns out of the wrong hands. Mrs. Clinton later said that “I haven’t been shouting, but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting.” Against Republicans, she’ll play the “war on women” theme non-stop.

No matter how you slice it, Trump’s call to “take out” terrorist families would made war crimes our policy. The fact that he’s either ignorant or uncaring of that fact makes it worse, not better.

For soldiers seeking to earn a green beret, the final test they have to pass at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg is a mentally and physically demanding field exercise called “Robin Sage.”

The student “alpha teams” are inserted (by parachute, mule, helicopter or on foot) in the North Carolina pine forest to reach a mock guerrilla” camp. Their mission is to earn the guerrillas’ trust and begin to train them in our ways of war.

At some point, each team is faced with being compelled by circumstance or ordered to participate in a war crime. The few who do never get a green beret. Donald Trump couldn’t pass that test.

Before the Dec. 15 debate, Mr. Trump said, “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” He said it again during the debate, so it wasn’t a slip of the tongue.

There’s a fundamental problem with Mr. Trump’s idea: What he advocated — twice — would be a war crime. The intentional killing of noncombatants obviously violates the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If any U.S. soldier — officer or enlisted — were ordered to do it he or she would be duty-bound and legally required to refuse to obey.

One thing that frustrated even the most ardent supporters of George W. Bush’s administration was his refusal to hit back hard at over-the-top, abominable personal attacks against him and his family, including his daughters, by those in the media and in the culture at large.

Bush revered the office of the president and, unlike his successor, held it to a higher standard than did gutter snipes such as Sean Penn or the New York Times.

This is why Newt Gingrich drew cheers and praise during the 2012 election cycle when he hit back at the media for its open bias. Who can forget that CNN’s John King opened a primary debate by asking Gingrich questions about his ex-wife (something to remember every time we’re told Bill Clinton is off limits)?

This election cycle, the role of credible media tormentor has been notably filled not by Donald Trump but by Ted Cruz, and it’s resonating more because Cruz has a clearer path to the nomination than Gingrich did in 2012.

— When Jim Webb, the former Virginia senator and Navy secretary, left the Democratic primary race in October, he hinted that he might mount an independent run for president. That looks more likely now that Webb has blasted his party’s front-runner for her “inept leadership” as secretary of state.

“Hillary Clinton should be called to account for her inept leadership that brought about the chaos in Libya, and the power vacuums that resulted in the rest of the region,” Webb wrote in a Facebook post Saturday. “While she held that office, the U.S. spent about $2 billion backing the Libyan uprising against Qaddafi. The uprising, which was part of the Arab Spring, led directly to Qaddafi being removed. . . . Now some 2,000 ISIS terrorists have established a foothold in Libya. Who is taking her to task for this?”

Political observers can be excused for shaking their heads at a Webb race as an independent. A mercurial candidate and poor fundraiser, he never garnered more than 1 percent support among Democrats before dropping out. But Webb knows that people underestimated the impact of Green-party candidate Ralph Nader on the 2000 race. Nader raised only $8 million and was ignored by major-network TV-news coverage. But he managed to win 2.7 percent of the national vote, clearing 5 percent in ten states. Democrats still blame his presence on Florida’s ballot for costing Al Gore Florida’s electoral votes and handing the presidency to George W. Bush.

It’s unclear whether Webb would hurt one major-party candidate more than the other. Conservatives laud his service as a decorated Vietnam War veteran and secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. But while he was in the Senate, Webb was a reliable vote for Democratic initiatives, including Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation bill. An economic populist, he says that both parties are too close to Wall Street and are responsible for the drop in the median income of middle-class families – it’s fallen four percentage points since 2000.

Donald Trump’s rants against Mexican migrants have helped rocket him to the top of national polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. What an inconvenient fact it must be that Mexicans are now leaving the U.S. in greater numbers than they are arriving.

Significant Mexican migration to the U.S. dates back at least to a Bracero program, launched in 1942, to match the supply of Mexican agricultural labor to U.S. demand during harvest time. The arrangement made it legal for Mexican workers to cross the border to work and return home at the end of the season.

The U.S. terminated the program in 1964 under pressure from organized labor. But Congress could not repeal the laws of economics. Opportunities for work and higher wages in the U.S. continued to be a draw, and Mexicans continued to migrate north. But as the risks of crossing the border increased, they tended to stay longer.

In a paper for the Migration Policy Institute, economist Francisco Alba found that the number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. “doubled from 2.2 million in 1980 to 4.5 million in 1990 and more than doubled to 9.4 million in 2000.” By that time they constituted almost 30% of this country’s immigrant population. The Pew Research Center’s Ana González-Barrera estimated that seven years later the Mexican-born population (legal and illegal) in the U.S. was 12.8 million.

Notwithstanding international and domestic criticism, and irrespective of his crude and rude style, Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination has gained momentum, in part, due to his proposal for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration, until the introduction of an effective counter-terrorist vetting process. According to a December 10, 2015 Rasmussen poll, his proposal is favored by a majority of GOP voters (66%:24%) and a plurality of all voters (46%:40%).

Trump is leveraging, not shaping, the current US state of mind – and especially that of Republican voters – which reflects frustration with the federal, state and local political and non-political establishment/elites, as well as with political-correctness in the areas of the economy, crime, immigration, foreign policy, the war on Islamic terrorism, and homeland security.

Trump benefits from the drastic erosion in the stature of conventional wisdom/orthodoxy, and, therefore in the stature of conventional/orthodox candidacy.

Trump is aware of the yearning to resurrect the ethos of the American Dream, which featured the USA – until the 2007-2009 Great Recession – as the only moral, economic and military super-power. He attempts to echo the eagerness to stop the slippery slope of the American state of mind from boundless optimism to pessimism, from patriotism to skepticism, from faith and confidence in American exceptionalism to national and personal uncertainty and anxiety, from expected upward mobility to feared downward mobility.