Moving Toward a Big Picture Understanding and Response to Trumpism

This article by Brian Beutler addresses head on a question that’s been rattling around in my mind these last weeks - what’s the real dynamic between Trump and Congressional Republicans?  Refreshingly, he points out that, rather than implementing some sort of wild Trump-originated agenda, much of what Trump is doing is implementing Republican policies.  He also hits on what I think is a key element of what is going on - the sheer unpopularity of the agenda, and how Republicans see this as their grand opportunity to shove it down the country’s throat.  Beutler strikes on the metaphor of the Republicans being on a suicide mission with Trump, one that he describes as self-reinforcing - they have more incentive to support Trump, since he’s at least supporting their agenda, than to oppose him, which would arguably be the right thing, but which could mean giving up their last, best chance to push through unpopular measures.

I think Beutler is basically right here, except for one crucial bit - I don’t think any political party ever willingly embraces its own self-destruction.  What should worries us all is that the Republican incentive to support Trump wherever he goes may well lead to dark, anti-democratic efforts at self-preservation.  Possible forms these might take are restrictions on voting rights, implementation of new illegal surveillance programs to spy on Trump’s opposition, or manipulation of a new terror attack into a broad attack on civil liberties and political opponents.

I would LOVE to think that the Republicans are destroying themselves, but this is an idea that has been disproved time and again over the past decade and a half.  It will take a democratically renewed Democratic Party to end the current Republican hegemony in American politics, not the actions of a party increasingly untethered to democratic norms.

As important as steadfastly opposing Trump, the Democrats need to clearly and vigorously articulate an economic vision that puts jobs for all, reduction of inequality, and real economic development at the heart of its party platform, right beside advocacy for equal rights for all.  Why?  Because our economic disparities are the root of Trumpism - he has risen to power by feeding off the despair that so many Americans feel, a despair that was clearly not addressed during the eight years of the Obama administration.   And while there are strong racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim sentiments in many of his supporters, these sentiments draw their sustenance from the economic travails of these Americans.  Let me put it this way: well-paid, happily employed people who are able to live their lives with dignity, meaning, and initiative will simply not care if they perceive that people who are different from them are also doing well.  Or I can put it even more crudely: Just because you’re racist, or a misogynist, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a job.

The way that we’re going to fully reject Trumpism and ensure we never have to experience such a national nightmare again is to convince those who voted for him, and who voted for the complicit Republican party, that Trump and Republican policies largely harm rather than benefit most Americans.  As heartened as I’ve been by the defiant energy of the women’s march and the furious opposition to Trump’s immigration orders, two basic things need to happen in the coming weeks and months, complementary to the opposition: we need to oppose a polarization that reinforces the energies of Trump supporters and increases their ranks, and we need to advocate an economic vision that will actually help those who need an economic revival.

To the first point - we need to make sure that in opposing Trump, we don’t seem to be opposing the economic relief he has promised to bring to many Americans.  As an example, look at the widespread and appropriate opposition to his moves to build a wall on the southern border and to restrict immigration from Muslim countries.  Going after immigrants is a particularly devious move, because it causes the Trump opposition to spend its energy defending non-Americans.  The opposition is defending American values - our openness to people of all nations and faiths, our willingness to take in refugees - which is absolutely the right thing to do.  But we need to be aware that this is terrain that will possibly drive away Trump voters, if handled without a response to people’s exaggerated but very real concerns about terrorism.  Likewise, opposition to the wall needs to be coupled with a strategy for addressing the fact that, yes, illegal immigrants do take some American jobs.  For me, the crucial problem here is not the illegal immigrants, but those who hire them, creating an incentive for them to come to our country, effectively depressing wages in our country and creating a vulnerable, easily exploited workforce not protected by basic wage and safety restrictions.  Surely no progressives want workers, no matter their nationality, to face fear and exploitation?  Yet such is the plight of millions of illegal immigrants in this country today. 

The hideousness of the Trump-Republican agenda, and our righteous response to it, shouldn’t ever let us forget that though Hillary Clinton got a lot of votes, Donald Trump got a hell of a lot of votes, too, despite many of these same voters’ reservations about him.  As articles like this one suggest, the ability of demagogues to divide people is their strongest weapon.  Let’s remember that the way forward is bring people together, and addressing people’s real concerns.

Trump Hands Islamic Extremists an Inauguration Present

The biggest political news of the past few days, with one important caveat that I'll get to in a minute, is President Trump's issuance of restrictions on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries.  Under the pretense of protecting the United States from terrorists, the president has made overt the anti-Muslim prejudice of the G.O.P.  There is a reason no president of either party has implemented such a ban in the post-war era - it's because no president, and no party, have been so ignorant, so inclined to self-defeating policies, as President Trump and the current Republican Party.  This ban has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, and everything to do with expressing a vengeful, petty attitude towards the larger Muslim community, and to offering what seems like an easy way to make his supporters feel safe, even while it confirms that they have reason to be fearful of people of Muslim faith.

In the restrictions against taking in refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries, Trump is targeting terrorism's victims, not its perpetrators.  We can look at this from another perspective, too: unable to determine a policy that would actually combat terrorism by draining away its social, economic, and political roots, Donald Trump is embarking on a superficial, counterproductive approach that literally blames the victims.

Another thing to note - the partial nature of the ban.  If Trump is serious, why not ban immigration from all Muslim nations with terrorist activity?  As this NYT article notes, "There was a random quality to the list of countries: It excluded Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where the founders of Al Qaeda and many other jihadist groups have originated. Also excluded are Pakistan and Afghanistan, where persistent extremism and decades of war have produced militants who have occasionally reached the United States. Notably, perhaps, the list avoided Muslim countries where Mr. Trump has major business ventures.”

Substantively, this act will do almost nothing to fight terrorism.  Symbolically, it seems far more likely to feed the fever swamps that give rise to Islamic extremism, providing more evidence to recruiters that the United States is engaged on a crusade against the Muslim world.  This is an overreaction that betrays American values and suggests that Muslims are both inherently violent and less worthy of being saved; and so far-right thinking pursues its symbiotic relationship with Islamic extremism, providing still more fuel for their propaganda.  It's not just that what Trump has done can be interepreted or twisted: it IS an overt declaration of contempt for Muslims around the world.  This a hideous introduction of religious prejudice into American foreign policy and into the U.S. body politic more generally.  

The other big news of the last few days that I want to highlight is Trump’s revisiting of the lie that he would have won the popular vote were it not for millions of illegal votes.  Tellingly, the Republican party is remaining mostly mum on this point, and I fear that talk of an investigation presages a full-court press to restrict voting rights on the basis of these phantom illegals (who were smart enough to vote en masse without their conspiracy being revealed, yet inept enough not to vote enough in the right states - even in his lies, we see, Trump manages to mix in an extra dose of racism!).

Whitelash, Meet Majoritylash

I don't think I've ever felt such a whiplash between grimness and hope in the realm of politics as I have in the space of January 20 and January 21.  Inauguration day lacked the gut-punching surprise of election night, but it carried a heavier burden, as Trump's ascension to power moved from potential to actual.  After a transition that included Trump's full embrace of plutocrats and generals for leading roles in his administration, unceasingly aggressive tweets that demean the office of the presidency, and no attempts to reach out to those who voted against him, his inaugural address seemed confirmation that Trump will govern from a position of dark aggression and paranoid beliefs about our nation.

But the next day, America showed that Trump's narrative of a sweeping mandate and a benighted people owing him fealty and gratitude is a scam spun by a con man, as record-breaking crowds showed up in dozens of cities for women's marches.  Rather than grim resistance, we saw a joyful, humorous, diverse explosion of grassroots democracy that reaffirmed a basic reality: many, many people thunderously oppose Trump and his policies.  More than this: women are asserting a range of concerns that have been substantively and symbolically dismissed by Trump's election.  These levels of contempt and ridicule for the chief executive seem unprecedented at the start of a presidency, and yet here we are.

I don't think it's too early to say that Trump's illiberal, authoritarian, and misogynistic campaign and election, after summoning forth a minority of voters to push him over the top of the electoral college count, have provoked a powerful backlash.  If Trump's victory signaled a change in the laws of political physics (e.g., any of a number of missteps by Trump would have sunk any other candidate), then we may be beginning to discover that the change isn't confined to Trump alone, but extends to the broader political universe, and that we don't know what all these rules are yet.  And now that I've mentioned alternative political, it does seem like underlying it all is at least one basic continuity between pre- and post-Trumpian physics: actions provoke reactions.  The question of our time is, has Trump unleashed a movement that will end up blocking and even overwhelming his own?

Trump has put together a powerful coalition that draws on explicitly white resentment, economic suffering, and cultural dislocation.  It is not a majority coalition, but it was close enough to one to win him the electoral college, with a little help from Vladimir Putin and James Comey.  However much Trump's authoritarian style can be traced back to his own disturbed personality, there is a clear link between this approach and the fact that his political strategy continues to burn any bridge to the possibility of a majority coalition.  In alienating a majority of women, minorities, gays, and believers in a scientific worldview, Donald Trump's strategy essentially requires an attack not only on democratic norms, but the idea of democracy itself.  This is a project that was begun long ago by the Republican Party, which with Trump has completed its conversion into the party of white supremacy and white nationalism.   But what we are beginning to discover is that while you can win for a while without a majority of the population, whether it's through gerrymandering or election assistance from the FBI, you cannot evade the most fundamental facts of life in a democracy - numbers matter.

Beyond this, we are discovering something else - that a majority of Americans actually do believe in a free society, a society of laws not men, a society where all people should be considered equal, whether man or woman, African-American or white, gay or straight.  It is instructive that while the majority was finding its way back to empowerment this weekend, the Trump administration squandered its first days in power by clumsily attempted to propagate lies about how many people attended the inauguration.  We are truly entered into a clash between democratic reality and authoritarian deception.  I know which one I'm betting on.

Rex Tillerson, the Wrong Choice for the Foreign Policy Tiller

This write-up in The Nation about the Rex Tillerson hearings raises yet more questions about the coherence and direction of President-elect Trump's foreign policy.  But what I've been reading about him up to now, including in a January 9 Wall Street Journal article that is unfortunately for subscribers only (lucked into a copy of the actual paper at a cafe), has already convinced me this man is a tragically bad choice for Secretary of State.  Climate change is the preeminent challenge of our time; to state what will be an obvious point to many, one of the most prominent oil company leaders in the world is the last person you can trust to lead international efforts to head off this looming catastrophe.  Big oil is exhibit number one for anyone wanting to make the case that mankind's greed and short-sightedness is hard-wired into the species and will lead us to an early extinction.  But it's not just abstract corporations that are the problem in this case, although a corporation is an amazing structure for diffusing critical thought and moral responsibility.  Ultimately, oil companies are led by men (and I am guessing a few women at this point) who either practice willful ignorance or a deliberate disregard to climate change.  

Yes, yes, I know that our entire civilization runs on oil, we're all implicated, yadda yadda yadda.  But big oil has done disproportionate damage to efforts to keep the planet healthy, sowing doubts about climate change and spending untold riches on greenwashing efforts that would be far better spent actually helping move the economy to a renewable and sustainable energy future.  And yes, I understand the case that these CEOs have a responsibility to shareholders to make money.  But it's not necessary to fully resolve the question of relative culpability and moral turpitude to conclude that there are many better choices than an oil company CEO to be secretary of state at this critical juncture of human civilization.

At any rate, we're not just dealing with some abstract nominee, but a particular man.  If the absurdity of an oil executive as secretary of state at this time of environmental crisis doesn't move you, then maybe Tillerson's coziness with Vladimir Putin will.  As the WSJ article describes, Exxon has, under Tillerson, made investments in Russia that have substantially aided Putin's grip on power.  And during a time when the U.S. and Russia have been in conflict on various foreign policy fronts, Tillerson has nonetheless steered his company's money to the development of Russia's energy resources - hardly the actions of a patriot who puts American interests first and foremost. 

This man has spent his career serving private profit, not the public interest, helping befoul the environment, cloud our planetary future, and provide material support to an authoritarian antagonist of the U.S.  I fear that the general and widespread craziness that Trump is forcing us to contend with is distracting a lot of people from just how outrageous the Tillerson pick is. 

Seeing Red

I’ve been trying to articulate to myself the particular strangeness of this political moment, when U.S. intelligence agencies have released a collective assessment reflecting their belief that the Russian government engaged in cyberattacks to influence the presidential election; this in itself would be an unprecedented, unsettling event.  But it’s inseparable from the overall shock and grotesquerie of Donald Trump’s election, and his sordid reaction to the news of Russian interference.

Part of the strangeness is that it comes after an election that has been alternately bitter, surreal, frightening, and heartbreaking, in which one of the two major parties' candidates was a cartoonish, reality show figure whose most extensive political involvement before running for president was his racist demand that President Obama produce his birth certificate, because African-American man.  In his authoritarian appeals, blatant racism, and horrific misogyny, Donald Trump was indeed a nightmare figure for many of us; the conjured id of a nativist backlash, vindictive and harboring a latent violence.  The warning signs of his victory were always there; he kept coming back from things that would have ended the candidacy of a mere mortal.  This includes the Russian cyberattack allegations; these were already known and pretty well established during the campaign, and the fact that we are still grappling with them is part of the surrealness I am feeling now.  It is like the 2016 campaign never ended.

I’m guessing that most Americans have arrived at the following conclusion: whether or not the Russians interfered with our election process (and it seems a near-certainty they did), and however they feel about this fact, there seems to be no absolute way of knowing whether or not it was this interference that caused Donald Trump to win, rather than the half dozen or more other major contenders for explaining his victory.  In a depressing way, the intelligence community's confirmation of Russian intervention to assist Trump, without any evident repercussions possible for Trump himself, seems like yet more evidence of the man’s tragic unstoppability.

Partly this illustrates the Democrats’ adherence to the rule of law versus the feral gang that the Republican Party has increasingly become.  For a partly fun, partly frightening exercise, imagine if the positions were reversed, and it turned out that Hillary Clinton had received extensive Russian support in her election.  Is there any doubt as to how the Republican Party would have responded?  Is there any doubt that they would deny that president’s legitimacy, with or without a thorough investigation of the extent of the Russian meddling?  The Republicans are playing by a different set of rules than the Democrats, one that I don’t want the Democrats to replicate, but which allows the Republicans to gain advantage after advantage without political cost.

But back to reality, or rather, the air of unreality, of the Russian factor.  I would argue that Donald Trump’s consistent dismissal of the fact of the attacks, up to yesterday’s acknowledgment that perhaps something happened, but that it absolutely did not affect the election results, has been a fact as outrageous for our country as the actual Russian interference.  His rejection out of hand of the facts that the intelligence community has given him is so obviously self-serving, I have trouble believing anyone could not see it.  Of course he doesn’t want to find out that he may owe his presidency to the Russians!  What president would?  But this self-serving action is absolutely un-presidential.  Even before Trump is actually inaugurated, we’ve received confirmation that he puts his own needs ahead of the country, in the most blatant, self-serving way possible.

Part of what is dizzying is that Donald Trump is in fact acting exactly like a president would in some alternative reality where he really was, not just the preferred candidate of the Russians, but their actual agent.  He denies the Russians interfered as much as he can, he praises Vladimir Putin, he proclaims a desire to work closely with the Russians.  I’m not saying he is a Russian agent, or that it’s a bad thing to want better relations with Russia - in fact, I think the U.S. failed massively after the end of the Cold War to effectively turn Russian in a more democratic direction, and has played with fire by pressing deeply into Russia's sphere of influence - but these elements must still be counted among the surreal elements of the whole spectacle.

Then, there’s the whole question of who the public at large really can trust here.  If the Russian interference is as extensive as the intelligence consensus is saying, then why on God’s green earth didn’t they stop it, or make a bigger fuss?  Of course, looking back to the election, the Russian element was already politicized, with Trump denying the whole thing back then.  But as with 9/11, it seems like the intelligence agencies were largely asleep at the wheel, indifferent to actual threats to American security.

Finally, there’s the depressing partisan angle.  It still feels amazing to me that Trump supporters would rather look the other way than confront the reality that their man received significant support from the Russians - don’t a lot of these people consider themselves patriots and “real” Americans?  So it also seems that another victim of this election is basic patriotism, although this may be more in the manner of a final nail in a coffin that probably began to be constructed in earnest during the Vietnam War.

The Devil in the (Security) Details

Over the past few weeks, I’ve read a couple articles about Trump wanting to continue using a private security detail once he becomes president, including this one.  I was struck by the arrogance and insularity of this wish.  It seems foolish not to fully rely on the expertise and resources of the Secret Service, and it seems another sign of Trump’s tendency to rely on a group of loyalist insiders as he makes his way in the world, even when better options are available to him now that he’s president.  It also hints at a basic incompetence to this inbred approach, perhaps best illustrated by his personal bodyguard's dilatory response to a possible threat at a rally during the campaign.

Most of all, I was struck by the imperial thuggishness of the idea - a security group not accountable to the public or the presidency, but with personal loyalty to this particular president.  During the campaign, of course, Trump used his security to throw out people he didn't want at his rallies, or, rather, to throw out people once he'd harangued and otherwise used them to rile up the anger and hate of his supporters.  I think we have to assume that Trump intends for such bullying and un-presidential behavior to be the norm for his presidency as well.  Given the campaign history of his security team, and the president-elect's authoritarian tendencies, I also can't help thinking of them as the enforcers that any good autocrat keeps at his beck and call to intimidate his enemies.  There is a combination of buffoonery and menace to a private security detail that is quintessentially Trump -- but as we learned from his campaign and unfortunate victory, the buffoonery doesn't make the menace any less real or dangerous.  

This story posted on CNN raises a couple other significant angles on Trump wanting a private security team.  Author Jon D. Michaels notes an implicit message that the Secret Service isn't good enough to do the job, which is of a piece with Trump's - and I would add, with the Republican party's - larger ideological war against competent government.  It's another way to undermine the idea that government is good for anything.  In an analogous vein, Michaels points out the larger implications of a president who relies on private funds to potentially run his own essentially privatized government, which would be immune from Congress' balancing control over funding the executive relies on.  He uses the theoretical example of a wealthy Homeland Security head who uses personal funds to pay for workers to implement anti-immigrant measures despite Congressional restrictions on the budget the department has to work with.  This might sound outlandish, but there are laws in place to prevent this sort of thing, which means it's a threat that has already been considered worth addressing; and if you think the Trump presidency isn't going to be about aggrandizement of presidential power and the challenging of political norms across the board, then you haven't been paying attention for the last year and a half.

Again, I'm reminded that one of the central challenges of opposing Trump is choosing where to make a stand when his assault on our values and security is so tremendously broad.  I agree with Michaels' assessment - it might not seem like a big deal compared to other issues, but there are important principles at stake.  And from a political angle, calling it out is an effective way to link Trump's narcissism, rejection of expertise, and denigration of long-established political norms in a way that can resonate with the public; it neatly encapsulates concerns that so many people have about his basic competence, judgment, and commitment to our traditions.

Crony Capitalism Hitting Its Stride

This NYT editorial contains some vital points about the dangers of crony capitalism to be found in Donald Trump’s approach to economics.  Shrewd corporations can gain political advantage by presenting job decisions as responsive to Trump’s “keep jobs in America” rhetoric, which can then allow them cover for more substantial moves that actually threaten far more jobs than were saved, not to mention stiff consumers.  We saw a similar cronyism in the Carrier deal, which saves far less jobs than advertised, was made possible by the expenditure of Indiana taxpayer dollars, and which should be viewed through the lense of the parent company, United Technologies, wanting to curry favor with Trump in order to preserve its business with the federal government.

Making the Trumpocalypse More Than a Metaphor

As if we needed still more evidence that this man is unfit for the presidency and is a danger to our democracy, Donald Trump has now tweeted his support for the U.S. expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities.  Worse than this, and despite advisors' attempts to spin his comments as being anti-proliferation, Trump doubled down the next days, telling an interviewer "Let it be an arms race."  I don't know how it could be made more clear to us that the abolition of nuclear weapons should be a far higher priority than it's been over the past several administrations.  We are now cursed with a president whose clear lack of judgment and experience makes it more possible than ever that these weapons might be used; and these recent comments of his only feed these worries.  A reversal of decades of U.S. nuclear policy changes announced via Twitter?  Is this a bad dream?  Donald Trump's casual bluster about weapons of apocalypse may be the strongest reason yet to oppose and defeat this monster at every opportunity.

President Obama's Fatal Misappraisal of the GOP

With all due respect and deference to President Obama's handling of a very difficult political situation over the past 8 years, some of his recent comments to the press have driven home for me both the consistency in his political thinking and its fatal flaws.  In his final press conference Friday, he discussed what the Republican response to the Russian election hacking means about that party and American politics more generally.

Speaking about widespread Republican voter support for Vladimir Putin - 37% approval in a recent poll, Obama said, "How did that happen? It happened in part because, for too long everything that happens in this town, everything that's said is seen through the lens of does this help or hurt us relative to Democrats or relative to President Obama?  And unless that changes, we're going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence because we've lost track of what it is that we're about and what we stand for.”  He also said, “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us.  But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values. Mr. Putin can weaken us, just like he's trying to weaken Europe, if we start buying into notions that it's okay to intimidate the press. Or lock up dissidents. Or discriminate against people because of their faith or what they look like.”

I'm all for Obama calling out Republicans for their absurd lionization of Putin and drawing connections between the illiberal attitudes of Republicans and the Russian leader.  But even as he bemoans Republican opposition to everything the Democrats do as being their guiding light, Obama suggests that this attitude might change.  Unfortunately, if there's one thing the Obama presidency has taught us, it's that the absolutism of the Republican Party only trends in one direction.  This did not change through his entire presidency, and it is not going to change now that the Republicans have control of all three branches of the federal government.  This is who they are.  

Over the years, President Obama has often employed the metaphor of a right-wing fever gripping the GOP, and talked of how this fever needed to break in order for Republicans to return to the norms and niceties of American politics.  This fever analogy has proved accurate, but unfortunately not in the way Obama intended.  The fever did not break; rather, the fever has broken the GOP.   We can see now that the infection has run its course -- but the underlying disease has transformed the Republicans, and has left them in a permanently altered and monstrous state: a major American political party firmly rooted in white supremacism, dedicated to the continued enrichment of the upper reaches of the upper 1%, and necessarily anti-democratic as it seeks to impose an agenda that flies in the face of the economic needs and basic decency of the majority of the American people.  The new president and his team have a sophisticated understanding of the new media and communications environment in which our politics increasingly reach the public, but the ends to which this understanding is aimed are age-old and crude - ever more wealth for those who already have more than enough, and an amoral exploitation of the common good for narrow private ends.  

For too long, President Obama has acted like the GOP is a normal political party, even as it consistently sought to delegitimize his presidency.  For him to suggest that the Republican Party is copying Putin's policies is laughable: the Republicans found their way to authoritarianism all on their lonesome.  With a party like this, you don't negotiate and cross your fingers hoping that they'll eventually see the light.  The only way forward, as it's always been, is to fight them, and beat them.

When More Knowledge Feels Like Less Power

Like a lot of other people, I've been trying to keep abreast of all the news about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.  The more you learn, the uglier it gets: the recklessness of the Russians embarking on a course of action that one could argue is tantamount to an attack on our country; the inept FBI response in alerting victims of the hacking; the collective shrug the Republican Party is giving at the news that a foreign power intervened to help their candidate win; questions over whether President Obama acted properly in responding to these Russian attempts, and in alerting the public to them.  As with the election as a whole, a dizzying darkness seems to lie over what has transpired, in part because everything seems to be so interconnected and yet so irresolvable; greater knowledge leads not to empowerment, but to a growing sense of helplessness.  

One example, the biggie: did Russian intervention tip the election in Donald Trump's favor?  From one perspective, it's impossible to know, only to speculate - how could we ever get hard numbers to determine this?  We do know that Donald Trump won the electoral college through a very narrow popular vote win in a handful of states, and it's within the realm of possibility that his margin of victory was secured by those voters who chose Trump over Clinton because of the hacked emails.  But then what of the effect of James Comey's announcement in late October that new emails had been discovered, or his "clearing" of her just days before the election?  There's also evidence that this casting of aspersions on Clinton swayed some voters against her in the election's final days.  And what about reports we are seeing about how very badly the Clinton campaign was conducted in upper Midwest states like Michigan - didn't the campaign's leaders make errors that badly hurt Clinton's prospects?  And how did Trump become the Republican nominee, anyway - wasn't it in part because of a massive failure of the media to concentrate on the right questions, and because Trump was provided with literally millions of dollars of free advertising through their coverage of him?  And let's not forget the whole thing about him losing the popular vote by 3 million votes and just squeaking into an electoral college victory?  And of course, another layer of the dizziness is that we knew about the hacking months ago, so that something that was at first only strange and vaguely threatening has gradually grown more nightmarish.

So the Russian factor is dizzying because we're not totally sure if it mattered, even though we can very easily surmise how it could have; and beyond this, there's the basic fact there have already been so many outside-the-box moments in this campaign - how could there be even more at this point?  The mind boggles.  It's not too much to say that for many of us, our sense of what is normal has been completely upended.

And here's one more aspect of the dizziness that grows out of the the new normal - oh, heck, let's just call it the new reality: this new reality is one that distinctly reveals our own powerlessness every step of the way.  Whether it's something simple, like not understanding how our fellow Americans would even consider voting for Donald Trump, to the idea that our election might plausibly be tilted by Russian machinations.  At the center of this disorientation is of course Donald Trump himself, a candidate who broke so many norms and basic decencies of American politics and society.  And now it's obvious that this breaking of norms is fully embraced by the Republican Party as a whole, as numerous Republican politicians treat Russian meddling in the election as a partisan issue in which the only relevant fact is that it screwed their political opponents - advantage GOP!

And now that Trump's president-elect, the disorientation simply continues, as he fills his cabinet with a rogue's gallery of billionaires, incompetents, and warmongers, and accuses the Democratic Party of massive fraud when he tweets about the millions of illegal voters who cost him the popular vote.  

There's much, much more to be said on the subjects of disorientation and this new reality, but for now I offer a couple of observations.  First, I think things seem particularly crapulent right now because the Trump presidency exists in a state of pure potential: in a lot of ways, we have a sense that we can't stop him because a) he just won the election despite many people's work towards a different outcome and b) he is not actually president yet and there really are no traditional political levers to oppose him until he is - we are in an unpleasant, threatening limbo state.

Second, learning that the Russians were specifically backing Trump's campaign, and that Donald Trump seems to have no problem with this, doesn't change the fundamental perilous crossroads our country has arrived at.  His authoritarian attitudes and undemocratic notions have been on broad display for a very long time at this point; certainly after all his fawning praise of Vladimir Putin, it isn't surprising that he'd welcome that autocrat's interference in the presidential election.  There is more than enough evidence to conclude that we're in an unprecedented political situation, in which the Republicans are relying on increasingly undemocratic means to seize and hold power in our country, with the added bonus of a president uniquely unqualified to hold that office.  In a very real sense, the Russians could not have had the influence they did if our media and the Republican Party had not been so broken and venal, respectively; instead, both these institutions worked to amplify the meddling.  The central question before us remains the same: what do we make of the fact that the ruling party in America is resorting to increasingly authoritarians means, and what do we do to oppose and ultimately defeat it?

Hatred of Muslims as the Logical Outcome of the Unending War on Terror

Many, many people have been rightly incensed over the past year by Donald Trump's slanders and threats against American Muslims and Muslims more generally.  But it's important to think about how we've gotten to the point that a presidential candidate of a major political party was able to denigrate a major religious group and strike a chord with millions of fellow bigots.  The context is so obvious as to be almost invisible at this point: the U.S.' deeply flawed, self-defeating response to Islamic terrorism over the last decade and a half.  If Americans feel emboldened to express hatred of Muslims, it's in large part because the United States itself has for many years now been engaging in a de facto war against the Muslim world, from our unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq to the current regime of drone strikes that exclusively find their targets in Muslim countries.  It doesn't matter that the United States officially says we aren't at war with Islam; the repeated message the American public has gotten is that we are indeed at war with Islamic terrorists in multiple countries around the world, and we've got the wars to prove it.  How can this not have seeped into the consciousness of millions of Americans, poisoning them against fellow Americans who happen to be Muslim, not to mention Muslims more generally?  Religious freedom in our country is becoming yet another piece of collateral damage in a deranged war on terror that has treated a mainly political challenge as a mainly military one.

If you're not questioning the endless, unwinnable war on terror, then excuse me if I don't take you seriously when you act like you care about the rights of American Muslims.  The one is the curse of the other.

Preserving, Protecting and Defending the Donald

Over the past few days, we have learned how the C.I.A. has become quite certain that Russian hacking efforts during the past U.S. election cycle were intended not just to interfere with the process, but to aid Donald Trump's candidacy.  In response, President Obama has ordered further inquiry into the matter, and elected officials from both parties are calling for investigations.

It is hard to think of allegations more serious than that a hostile foreign power has worked to undermine our democracy and support its preferred candidate in an election; but the allegations are that serious.  

Yet in an interview with Fox News Sunday, Donald Trump completely dismissed this possibility, and called the reports of Russian actions to benefit him "ridiculous."  What is in fact "ridiculous" is for a president-elect to dismiss out of hand, without any engagement with the facts of the case, charges as deadly serious as these.  And as if dismissing the issue weren't bad enough, Trump suggests that these reports are being promulgated by sore-loser Democrats, which would mean that Democrats, not Russians, are actively working to undermine the election results.  In fact, this would in turn suggest a conspiracy between the Democratic Party and the CIA to subvert our democracy.

Do we need any clearer evidence that this man is unfit for the presidency?  Not simply not taking seriously an incredibly troubling issue, but slandering the opposition in an obvious attempt to protect himself?  In declining to take the accusations seriously, he fails the oath of office he is soon to take, which will call for him to "preserve, protect and defend" the U.S. Constitution.  The fact that he has such an obvious self-interest in dismissing the allegations, and has chosen self-interest over the national interest, should also be clear to anyone paying attention to this issue.  We see an enormous blind spot threatening to engulf his presidency even before it begins: any threats to the U.S. will be ignored if handling them presents a threat to Donald Trump.

Going All In

The ever-incisive Joan Walsh has just laid out an essential part of the reality facing Democrats right now, and the appropriate way to respond.  In filling his roster of cabinet picks with a gang of millionaire-billionaire insiders, Donald Trump has presented the Democrats with an embarrassment of riches to choose among as the Senate begins to debate the nominees.  As she notes, "Not only will it be the richest [cabinet], ever; it features plutocrats who've presided over the hollowing out of the working class Trump pretended to care about."  Beyond picking one or two nominees to oppose, she suggests highlighting the basic starkness of Trump's collective choice, and notes that "right now, Democrats are missing an opportunity to brand the president-elect as a man who's betraying his base, right out of the gate."

It is in fact not just disappointing, but deeply unsettling, that the Democrats are not yet doing a better job of connecting the dots and offering a broad critique of Trump's direction so far, particularly when he's giving them such a gift-wrapped package of Cabinet choices.  This was not a normal election, Trump is not a normal president, and this is not a time of normal politics.  Frankly, I don't know how we get back to the old normal, as crapulent as it was.  But the first rule in fighting the dark forces of Trump and right-wing Republicanism is understanding that going big is part of the solution.  Fighting hard against one or two Trump nominees might or might not manage to block those appointments; but the more important effort is to make all possible efforts to show that the overall direction Trump and the Republicans want to take the country is opposed by a solid majority of our population, and to provide an alternate vision that would benefit this majority.

Whether it's a Labor Secretary pick who opposes workers' rights and minimum wage increases, or the repeal and non-replacement of Obamacare, or the unfolding project to kill Medicare and gut Social Security, Republicans are working to implement highly unpopular ideas that also happen to fly in the face to the promises Trump made to disaffected white working class voters who pushed him over the top of the electoral college.  More than this: they're working to implement legislations that wouldn't just hurt millions of middle- and working-class Americans, but fundamentally change what sort of country we are - from one where we use democracy to advance our common interests and help all move forward, to one where government is used as a cudgel to strip the vast majority of the country of hard-won gains in order to empower the uppermost classes of our country.  In this context, an across-the-board opposition makes more sense politically for the opposition party.  It's not normal politics for one party to attempt to decimate the basic framework of social support for the American people; and the opposition can't act like it is, particularly when the media is doing such a bad job of framing the conflict.

I keep thinking back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and its slow, terrible build-up that reeked of manipulation and lies.  President Bush chose a catastrophic course of action that Democrats should have opposed unanimously; instead, too many went along, giving it a bipartisan sheen that makes it difficult for Democrats to fully criticize to this very day.  I feel we're now at an analogous crossroads.  There is no great mystery about what Trump is doing: he's going full-core right-wing and pro-1%, with a bit of populist window dressing like the Carrier deal thrown in to make people think he cares about the working class.  

Once again, we find that the application of the term "conservative" to the modern Republican party is a misnomer.  Conservative would be protecting the generations-old programs of Social Security and Medicare.  Conservative would be making sure people have at least the basics of life covered, like health insurance.  Conservative would be protecting our planet for future generations.  What we're seeing instead is free market zealotry, a pitiless agenda of siphoning wealth to the upper reaches, and frankly a heartlessness that leaves me chilled to the bone; a more proper word for these people is "radical."  They are indeed going to the root of things, looking to extirpate from our society basic notions of public good, collective endeavor, economic security.  It's not too complicated to see where this comes from: they're protecting the interests of the richest among us, and an ownership class that sees the vast majority of Americans not as equal citizens embarked on a common enterprise, but as raw labor and consumers to be exploited, conned, and ripped off.

Trump seemed to offer the possibility of an off-kilter check on these traits - after all, he made no mention of Medicare or Social Security cuts during the elections, and his emphasis of unfair free trade deals suggests he may still surprise us with pro-worker moves - but at this point, given the company he keeps and the inclinations of the Republican Congress, this theoretical moderation is not nearly sufficient.  Besides, he's all on board with the other key part of the Republican agenda: increasingly targeting the fictional crime of voting while Democrat.  

What is in fact needed is for the Democrats to get off their duffs and start fighting back like their political lives depended on it, because they do.  What Trump and the Republicans have in store represents an obliteration of the best things the Democratic Party has stood for since the age of Roosevelt, an unraveling of the remaining Great Society and New Deal advances.  A party that doesn't recognize an existential threat to its reason for existence doesn't deserve to be a party.

This is not normal politics. These are not normal times.  Whether or not people are willing to recognize it, we are in a state of profound crisis. 

Gabbard Gabbard Hey!

I wanted to share and amplify this Talking Points Memo post about some recent comments by Congressperson Tulsi Gabbard.  The issue of civilian control over the U.S. military has been rising to the foreground lately in light of Donald Trump's multiple appointments of former generals to various government posts, including a cabinet-level position in the case of his Defense Secretary nominee.  I totally agree with Josh Marshall that Gabbard's suggestion that military leaders are more patriotic and more attuned to the national interest than civilians is deeply unsettling, and is indeed the sort of talk you'd expect to hear in a banana republic.

Donald Trump's selection of so many military leaders to guide his national security policy should worry us in the first place because it suggests that militaristic approaches to the world will be favored over other approaches.  U.S. foreign policy is already far, far too militarized, and it's troubling to think that this could get even worse.  This is also a major problem to see given Donald Trump's existing ignorance of foreign and military affairs.  It's not like he has his own strong base of knowledge to bring to the mix, and surrounding himself with military men means he'll be given a smaller range of options around how to form policy.

The two points I've just made are pretty broad.  But more important than both of these to understanding the problem of Trump's overreliance on generals for guidance is the specific context in which Trump is making this choice.  Since 9/11, the United States has been engaged in an ceaseless, victory-less war around the world against terrorism.  A strong, and I believe overwhelming, case can be made that the United States has amplified the Islamic terrorist threat through its militarized and often incompetent response to 9/11; the central piece of evidence is the invasion of Iraq, a country not linked to 9/11 and barely linked to terrorism, and whose botched occupation resulted in a supercharging of terrorist recruiting efforts and the destabilization of a major chunk of the Middle East.   In both Iraq and many, many other place we have spent a decade and a half basically proving, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, that there is no military solution to mitigating or theoretically ending terrorist threats to the United States.

Central to the bloody, unnecessary proving of this obvious point has been a broad deference to the military brass to run our wars, particularly in the age of Obama.  But the overwhelming fact of our situation is that military solutions have failed; or rather, if there are military solutions, they are too bloody and expensive for us to contemplate, or to find popular support to implement.

And so we have long been caught in an unhealthy cycle, in which a disengaged public lauds the military for doing its dangerous work and keeping the country safe, to the point that polls of the most trusted government institutions regularly show the military at the top of the list.  I very specifically am calling this cycle unhealthy because it is partly based on a relief in the U.S. population that someone else is out there risking their lives for our country.  This combination of admiration and guilt has in turn made it difficult to contemplate any criticism of the military.  How could we dare, when they're the ones risking their lives.  And of course there is a lot of good reason for this admiration; the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who have served our country and fought in our wars are in truth performing selflessly.  To a lesser extent, this syndrome of guilt and gratitude has also confused people on the basic point that you can support the troops while also being critical of a militarized foreign policy; in fact, holding both these things to be true, and not in contradiction, is essential to a healthily-functioning democracy.

But something subtler has also happened, and this is where I will link things back to Representative Gabbard's comments: while the adulation of the military, through honest thankfulness and unacknowledged guilty, has in reality been earned by the rank and file of the military, those who do the fighting and the dying, the military leadership has indirectly gathered status and approbation through this worshipful attitude.  I'll try to say this a little more directly: the generals and admirals who have often misdirected our recent wars and other military action have to a great sense been able to escape public criticism, because they're buffered by a broad public admiration of front-line soldiers.

Tulsi Gabbard's comments only strengthen my sense that something untoward is going on in Americans' attitudes to the military, something that she draws from and builds on in her comments.  There is no doubt that members of the military are admirably patriotic; but who's to say they're more patriotic than firefighters, or nurses, or teachers?  Gabbard seems to suggest that risking your life is the ultimate gauge of patriotism.  But even if that were the case, it's not the generals who have put their lives on the line; it's the men and women under their commands.

Let's not forget what the purpose of the military is: to win wars and kill people.  To confuse this specific skill set with a broader competence, whether through an honest admiration of the military's patriotism or camaraderie, is a dangerous delusion for a democracy.  And for Donald Trump to be overly reliant on a group of men whose ultimate profession is the exercise of violence, rather than a more holistic approach to maintaining U.S. security, is a very bad sign indeed.

Thunder in the Distance

Donald Trump's precedent-smashing phone call with the leader of Taiwan a few days ago makes me think that the political meltdown that so many feared would happen in the event of his election is coming to pass, and much more quickly than most people would have thought.  I've already put my (insignificant) personal cards on the table: based on various disqualifying qualities and actions, I think Trump needs to be removed from the presidency.  He's clearly not going to resign, so all other democratic means need to be pursued to accomplish this.  But here's my food for thought for today: what happens when, for instance, Donald Trump starts fumbling us into a war with China, or Russia?  What are each of us going to do, and what are we going to do acting collectively, to save our country from gross and unacceptable incompetence?  It is horrifying that we're in a position to have to consider this question, but we are, and we must.