The Civil War Remains a Battleground of American Politics

Spurred by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s recent remarks on how a lack of “compromise” helped cause the Civil War, New Republic’s Jeet Heer is making the case that arguments over the causes and morality of that conflict are ones that progressives should whole-heartedly engage in.  As he summarizes,

Some analysts think such debates over history only serve to empower Trump, giving him a phony culture war to distract from his political failures. But Trumpism is a byproduct of the unfinished conflicts produced by the Civil War; thus, combatting Trumpism requires combatting this pernicious view of the war.  Avoiding the subject would cede the central narrative of American history to people like Trump, and would fatally damage our ability to understand and fight one of our core political problems: the endurance of racism in America.

Heer provides a good rundown of how the idea that extremists and failed compromises led to the Civil War has actually dominated historical thinking for long stretches of time, and of how views of the war expose two opposing sides in American narrative-making: those who believe that our societal differences can always be “solved by white people finding common ground,” and those who believe “racism is deeply embedded in American society and can’t be defeated without a fight.”

This conflict is obviously also being played out in the ongoing battles over the presence of monuments to the Confederacy throughout the South, where their defenders’ vague references to protecting “our heritage” mask the white supremacist origins and current racist message of these statues.  We can’t allow apologists for treason and racism to set the terms of this debate; we can’t let them hide behind anodyne generalities in their defense, and need to make explicit what they’d rather keep at the level of dog-whistle politics.  They are playing with fire in their defense of the Confederacy, and we need to make sure they burn themselves, badly.  This cause gains even greater importance when you consider how important racism and white nationalism are for Donald Trump and the Republican Party as a whole; indeed, in its transformation into a white nationalist party in the mold of the Trump-Bannon vision for America, the GOP is beginning to look more and more like a one-trick pony — except, in place of the pony, you should feel free to substitute the image of a horse, astride which sits a defeated Confederate general stained with pigeon shit. 

Scenes from a Panicking White House

One of the more twisted dynamics of the Trump presidency has been the disjunction between the tremendous power his position carries and the overwhelming evidence of his utter incompetence.  In some ways, since last November, our collective political life has been like some unfilmed Twilight Zone episode in which a toddler has been granted authority over mankind, with all sorts of mayhem ensuing (or was that an actual episode?).  But according to the latest reporting from Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair, in a piece titled “You Can’t Go Any Lower: Inside the West Wing, Trump is Apoplectic as Allies Fear Impeachment,” White House staff now see impeachment as a concrete possibility; it appears that Robert Mueller’s first indictments have made his threat to the president into a reality for many of them.  And while The Hot Screen has previously suggested the near-certainty of Trump firing the special prosecutor, Sherman’s interviews indicate that at least some of the president’s advisors are aware that firing Mueller would carry extreme risks.

Beyond this, he also reports that as staff is taking the existential threat posed by the investigation more seriously, they’re also beginning to act in ways to distance themselves from anything Russia-related, for instance leaving the room if the topic of Russia arises.  Signs of a split between the president’s indications that he believes the Mueller investigation is illegitimate, and his staff’s perceptions of their own real legal peril, are a net positive: while some might side with the president in taking desperate measures to stave off the threat, others might be willing to spill the beans on whatever they know in order to avoid further enmeshment in presidential shenanigans.  Exhibit A for willingness to blab is Sherman’s article itself, which is sourced from half a dozen White House staffers. 

Not for the first time, Trump’s worries and criticisms around Mueller seem to indicate in one go extreme stupidity, obvious guilt, and a lack of concern about Russian meddling in the election that is suggestive of many things, none of them good.  The president has apparently, to his own advisers, complained that Clinton has not received the same sort of investigation as himself.  Does the man not understand that he’s the president, not Hillary Clinton?  That he won the election?  It is one thing for the president to tweet attacks about Hillary’s collusion with the Russians, another thing for him to actually believe that Hillary has committed crimes and express this thought to his staff.  That he may have convinced himself of his own lies is yet another brand of incompetence — as if we needed any more!  As somewhat of a side note, it’s also gratifying to read about how the president is blaming his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for some of his extremely bad decisions — good to see that nepotism thing backfiring in a big way, and Trump refusing to take responsibility for his own actions, to boot. 

Sherman’s reporting on White House deliberations regarding its response to the Mueller investigation backs up the sense that these guys don’t have a master plan — but they also reinforce the degree to which this presidency has placed itself in opposition to the rule of law and to putting the country’s interests ahead of the president’s.  This is most obvious in the camp that wants to essentially go to war with Mueller.  Intriguingly, and counter to the perception that nearly every GOP member of Congress lives in fear of the Trump-loyal base, unofficial advisor Steve Bannon believes that “establishment Republicans are waiting for a chance to impeach Trump,” according to a Bannon confidante.  More persuasively, Bannon sees Trump’s power slipping, and even went so far as to do a quick analysis of which Cabinet members might or might not vote to remove the president from office via the 25th Amendment.

The biggest mistake that progressives and other opponents made in the 2016 election was to underestimate Trump.  But now, for the first time, The Hot Screen wonders if there’s actually a danger of overestimating him.  The Democrats have been stuck in an odd political zone, where the same party that includes people calling for Trump’s impeachment also includes people like Senator Charles Schumer, who has indicated a willingness to work with the president.  If Trump’s own people are worrying about impeachment by Republicans, shouldn’t Democrats be getting more aggressive in their attacks on the president?

General Kelly Doubles Down on Trumpism, White Supremacism; A Nation Retches

I guess one silver lining in General John Kelly’s alliance with Donald Trump is the object lesson it provides about why it’s so very important to keep generals away from the levers of power in our democracy.  Certainly beginning with his appointment as the chief of staff, Kelly’s military background has leant credibility to an unfit president; there seemed to be almost a bipartisan approval of Kelly being able to bring military precision to the running of the office.  But it was his defense of President Trump around the president’s controversial call to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson that saw Kelly inject a nasty dose of militarism into the body politic.  As Talking Points Memo summarized, Kelly managed to suggest that members of the armed forces are more fully citizens than other Americans; adopted the rhetorical stance that attacks on Donald Trump are no different than attacks on American soldiers; and more generally threw his lot in with the president’s retrograde agenda of Making American Great Again through a return to a mythical past era.  And this is to say nothing of marshalling his military-infused credibility to attack Representative Frederica Wilson with a series of lies, which he has refused to recant.

Now the general has amazingly done himself one better, going on Fox News to discuss Robert E. Lee as an “honorable” man and claiming that the Civil War was caused by a lack of compromise; in doing so, he’s embracing the white supremacism that’s at the heart of Trump’s rancid agenda.  As Josh Marshall notes, Kelly is “an example of what we might call Total Quality Trumpism, Trumpist ideology in a more disciplined, duty-focused, professional package. The core ideology and beliefs about reclamation and rectitude are the same. It’s not an accident that he ended up in the tightest circle of Trump’s orbit.”  I think another angle on this is that we are being given glaring evidence that members of the military should never be viewed as neutral protectors of the public trust.  Kelly clearly has political opinions, and they are despicable ones; yet his military background obscures this in the eyes of both the media and the public at large.  For him to appear on TV and promote a white supremacist take on the Civil War is, not to mince words, grotesque.  That he does so with the aura of the authority of a general of the U.S. Army, and as a supposedly technocratic Chief of Staff, is something that calls for widespread public contempt and repudiation.

Thankfully there are some among us who have already risen to the challenge.  Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates the utility of rapid-response tweetstorms in this barrage, which weaves historical reference and a deep understanding of the issues at play into a brutal and memorable refutation of this scary general’s blatherings.  No quarter for Confederacy apologists; no quarter for white supremacism: not in the White House, not in the Pentagon, not in our country.

Threats Against Journalists Only Come From Democracy's Enemies

Two horrifying events this past month — one involving actual violence, the other the threat of it — provide vivid demonstrations that a free press is only as free so long as a society is willing to defend it.  First, on October 16, a car bomb in Malta was used to assassinate Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist who had been deeply involved with investigating the scandalous Panama Papers.  Galizia had also been a harsh critic of Malta’s prime minister.  A few days later, thousands of miles away, a Republican official in Montana named Karen Marshall asserted on a radio show that she “would have shot” a journalist previously assaulted by GOP candidate Greg Gianforte.  Following his literal attack on The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, Gianforte had still managed to be elected as Montana’s sole member to the House of Representatives, lending a voter seal of approval to his violence. (He ended up pleading guilty to misdemeanor assault; his punishment was a $385 fine, community service, and anger management classes.)

The assassination of Galizia illustrates the simultaneously powerful and vulnerable position a free press occupies in a democracy.  In covering segments of our society like politics and business, journalists can expose malfeasance and effectively lay bare the sins of the powerful; in the best case scenario, they help provide a truth-based framework in which citizens can understand what is happening in their world.  But the press’ role is one that ultimately depends on their ability to go about their business without fear of reprisals, up to and including violence against them.  A free press is one of the lynchpins of the notion that a democracy will sort out its conflicts through words, debates, and elections, not through violence.  Galizia’s killing, though, is a reminder that it is democracy’s laws that protects journalists, nothing more; in reality, the powerful or the guilty can always violate those rules.

But when this happens, it needs to be seen for what it is: an attack on a democracy’s foundations, on those who make it possible to conduct democracy’s business in the first place.  Killing a journalist is a particularly specious crime, to my mind somewhat akin to targeting a doctor or teacher because of their profession — an attack on someone who serves the public interest, and whose role is by definition objective and non-violent.

By comparison to the killing of Galizia, Karen Marshall’s comments might seem simply unhinged or intemperate — but coming on top of an actual previous act of violence against Jacobs, they are particularly grotesque and noteworthy.  Gianforte had already physically assaulted this reporter, but the injuries Jacobs sustained were apparently not enough to sate Marshall's blood lust — only death will do for the hapless journalist.  Her statement is also notable because it’s yet another manifestation of an anti-free press stance running from the very top of the Republican Party.  Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was chock full of rallies in which he incited resentment and even violence against reporters, to the point that various journalists found themselves the targets of taunts and threats from thousands of his supporters.  This flirtation with violence against reporters remains to my mind one of the most damning facts of Donald Trump’s political trajectory, one that renders him unfit for political office in our democracy.  As noted above, to assault reporters is to assault our democracy; even to come up to that line without actually crossing it is beyond contempt.  Part of the horror of Trump's election is that such behavior was rewarded, not punished, with dire consequences we are experiencing on literally a daily basis.

All around the world, reporters are murdered for doing their jobs.  According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, eighteen were murdered in 2016 alone; including Galizia, ten have been killed so far in 2017.  To threaten violence against journalists cannot be treated as mere bloviation by sadistic politicians.  When Republican politicians suggest importing such violence into our country, it’s another sign that the GOP hasn't simply lost its way, but has shifted to an authoritarian mindset incompatible with American democracy.  The emerging strains of violence towards a free press are not signs of the right’s growing strength, but of its moral bankruptcy and ultimately, its weakness.  Unable to make a case for its cause in democracy’s language, introducing the threat of violence against the physical persons of journalists is a glaring sign of its abandonment of democracy.  

The Pain of Presidential Lies

In an opinion piece about President Trump’s false claim that previous presidents didn’t call Gold Star families, Paul Waldman hits on a point that’s been gnawing at me in much more fragmentary and less eloquent form for a while now.  Assessing the consequences of the president's ceaseless lying in the context of Trump's conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson and its aftermath, he describes the cycle of political fragmentation these lies propagate: 

Now here’s why this matters. Yes, many news outlets pointed out that Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But there are probably three interns at Fox News who are now scouring old news reports to find some family member of a fallen soldier who didn’t get a call from Obama.  If they find it, that person’s story will then become the subject of a segment on Sean Hannity’s show, and it will then get retold on a hundred talk radio programs and conservative websites as proof that Obama was a monster and the media are all lying about this.  (Trump’s insistence that there was “fake news” at work is another way of telling his supporters not to believe whatever they hear about this subject that comes from sources not explicitly supporting him.)  And I promise you that if you took a poll two weeks from now, you’d find that 40 percent of the public (or more) believes that Obama never called the family of any fallen soldier, and only Trump has the sensitivity to do so.

And that’s how Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation.  The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.

If you’re one of those who marvel at the fact that Trump’s approval ratings aren’t even lower than they are, this is a big reason for that.  It’s absolutely necessary to correct Trump’s falsehoods, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that any poisonous lie he tells won’t find an eager audience.  And the whole country gets dumber and dumber.

This is one of the single most frightening confluences of our political moment: that we have entered a stage where an enormous percentage of the American people are susceptible to what we should rightly call political propaganda, propagated by an extremely extensive right-wing media apparatus, at the same time that we have a president who lies as easily as he breathes.  As Waldman would no doubt agree, not only does the whole country get dumber and dumber, but it gets more polarized as well, based on mutually contradictory bodies of evidence. 

There are reasons for this state of affairs beyond the right-wing propaganda machine, most of which have nothing at all to do with Donald Trump, and which many smart people have explored, documented, and theorized upon, such as a generalized loss of faith in institutions.  But as others have also noted, Trump has skillfully exploited and accelerated a pre-existing situation.  A recent poll by Politico provides more hard evidence for the widespread lack of faith in news sources and a belief that the media lies about the president: 46% of voters said they believe the news media makes up stories about Trump, including 76% of Republican voters and a startling 44% of independents. (In an unexpected twist, Trump himself tweeted about the 46% figure — not to bemoan it, of course, but to praise it, as a positive sign that people don't believe what the media reports.)

Waldman's piece crystalized for me why all the lies coming out of Trump's mouth are so painful and angering to hear.  Words that to me further confirm Trump's unfitness are heard by other people as further evidence that he's the perfect man for the job; uncorrected, these lies poison the possibility of rational dialogue in our politics.  We are in desperate need of innovative ways to fight the lies, and to revive common faith in a free press.

According to the White House, We Should Make Fun of Representative Frederica Wilson for How She Dresses. Maybe We Should Thank Her For Her Public Service Instead?

Until a few days ago, The Hot Screen had never heard of Democratic Representative Frederica Wilson.  Now, as the Trump White House zeroes in on her as its African-American target du jour, in an attempt to move the discussion away from his lies about contacts with Gold Star families, his slander against previous presidents, and why the hell U.S. troops are now fighting in Niger, articles like this one are giving us some background on Wilson’s character and career.  Both President Trump and Chief of Staff Kelly have slandered her as “wacky” and a showboat, yet her history of public service (including involvement in education and work to help disadvantaged youth) show that these two men are way off the mark.  And the fact that she actually knew and had helped La David Johnson before he joined the military, and is a friend of the family, is important context for understanding her involvement with them following Johnson’s death.  

The article summarizes some of her political work this way:

[The] technicolor clothes and flashy demeanor belies the grim legacy that made her an icon in the African-American community in Florida and, now, the nation: her advocacy for young black men, particularly those who end up dead. Since her time in the Florida legislature, Wilson’s political identity has been forged by fights — often with a white, male-dominated establishment — to figure out what happened to them and why.  

In recounting her political career, the article also notes Wilson’s involvement with a Florida legislature investigation into the beating death of a teenager at a boot camp in the state; according to the attorney for the boy’s family, the public relations tactics used to draw attention to that killing were subsequently employed after the killing of Trayvon Martin (Martin was from Wilson’s district).  Wilson also founded a nonprofit program for at-risk African-American youth, a program in which Johnson had participated.

In a tweet today, Donald Trump has continued his attacks on Wilson, writing, “Wacky Congresswoman Wilson is the gift that keeps on giving for the Republican Party, a disaster for Dems.  You watch her in action & vote R!"  This tweet continues Trump’s recent tendency to more or less plainly state the political intent of his twitters — in this case, letting us know that his attacks on Wilson are indeed all about political gain for himself and his party.  He’s probably right that attacks on the Congressperson will rally his base; The Hot Screen is less sure that most people who do indeed “watch her in action” as she pursues inquiries about what’s going on in Nigeria won’t find her reasonable questions preferable to the president’s self-serving evasions.  The Hot Screen is also not so certain that it’s the Democrats who are facing disaster at this point, when it’s actually the president who not only lied about his contacts with Gold Star families, but has also engaged in a series of new lies to cover his tracks. 

When George W. Turns Up, It's Our Patriotic Duty to Tune Out

I doubt that I’m the only person who, in the early days of the Trump presidency, fevered with desperate patriotism and fervent hope that the center might still hold, at some point imagined that our living former presidents might issue some sort of joint statement against Donald Trump, in the event we were to reach an unforeseen precipice of dingbat authoritarianism in the not-too-distant future.  It would be a sort of torch of executive celebrity and authority held up against the darkness of our reality TV chief exec.  I wasn’t sure what they’d say or do, exactly: but it would be decisive in moving public opinion.  

I also doubt I’m the only person who felt a falling of spirit when we realized that this scenario necessarily involved the participation of the irredeemable George W. Bush.  

I’m reminded today of this presidents-to-the-rescue fantasy by Dubya’s rare political speech at the George W. Bush Institute, in which his remarks included more or less explicit criticisms of the current president:

"Our identity as a nation, unlike other nations, is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood [. . .] This means that people from every race, religion, ethnicity can be full and equally American.  It means that bigotry and white supremacy, in any form, is blasphemy against the American creed.”

I’m willing to grant that Bush is indeed speaking in reference to Donald Trump — but I’m far less willing to grant his words any importance, much less any moral authority.

George W. Bush’s abuse of the public trust in the wake of the terrifying 9/11 attacks is one of the most immoral, consequential, and disastrous acts in all of American history.  Not only did he greenlight the invasion of Afghanistan, leading to what is now the longest war in U.S. history, but his administration subsequently lied and manipulated the country into invading Iraq — a country that had absolutely zero connection to 9/11 and next to zero involvement with any actual terrorist threat to the U.S.  His administration suggested Iraqi connections to 9/11 — those were lies.  His administration suggested that Iraq was close to developing nuclear weapons — those were also lies.

The disastrous consequences of this decision reverberate to the current day, among which must be counted the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, along with the thousands of American servicemen and servicewomen lost in a war whose ultimate purpose became to patch up the consequences of George W.’s catastrophically stupid decision to start the war in the first place.  

Not only did W. gin up a war on false pretenses, he then oversaw an invasion and occupation of Iraq in which idiocy vied with incompetence for first prize, in which the president’s stated vision for a democratic Iraq was in no way matched by the application of the appropriate resources or strategy.  This is all well-documented, and as I’ve already said, the human toll is nearly incomprehensible.  This is to say nothing of the destabilization of the greater Middle East as a consequence of the invasion.  Bush may never have been impeached for his actions, but at the very least we can’t ever forget the enormity of the crime or its vast cost.

On top of this, of course, he led the country into an open-ended, militarized war on terror that continues to this day.  And let’s not ignore the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, or the fact that he presided over the development and outbreak of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But even this is not all of it.  George W.’s words today invoke the many ways he lacks the slightest moral authority to pronounce upon our current political situation not least because they remind various observers of one of the less well-remembered scandals of his White House — the firing of U.S. attorneys in an effort to implement a plan to suppress voting by minorities.  This is the man who today is being praised for assailing Donald Trump’s bigotry — the man whose administration engineered policies abusing the role of the Justice Department, policies that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is now preparing to supercharge in the name of Making America White Again.

And lest you think that his anti-minority attitudes were just in the past — turns out that this week George W. has been campaigning for Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia.  Gillespie is running a Trumpian, anti-immigrant campaign that is widely viewed as a test case of whether such tactics can bring the GOP success in state contests.  

One of the more sickening developments of the past several years, and more so over the past year or two, is the idea that perhaps George W. wasn’t so bad after all.  After all, hey, what about all those naive paintings he does now in his spare time?  And he's a veritable political titan next to Trump, right?  Well, no.  George W. Bush is a failed president whose reputation was perversely protected by how much the country was distracted by trying to clean up his messes, and now by how hideous the next GOP president has turned out to be.  But make no mistake — at least at this point, it is safe to say that George W. Bush inflicted far more damage on the U.S. than Trump has.

Racism and bigotry have been the GOP’s special sauce for decades now.  Donald Trump just brought this out into the open.  When George W. tries to take the moral high ground, it’s to our country’s detriment that his past means that we have one less president who can speak with moral authority at this time of crisis.  And it’s our loss when we lose sight of the fact that not just Donald Trump, but the party that nominated him, has long exploited race to keep Americans divided.  George W. Bush has no further credible role to play in our national politics, except as a reminder of how incuriosity, immorality, and hideously bad judgment can combine to create disasters almost beyond imagining, and how the GOP has long played the race card from the bottom of a dirty deck.

Worldwide Wage Disappointment Highlights Stakes for Real Economic Reform

A recent piece in the New York Times, titled “Global Economy’s Stubborn Reality: Plenty of Work, Not Enough Pay,” highlights what seems to The Hot Screen like a pretty central conundrum and ticking time bomb of the modern world — sluggish wage growth or outright declines in major economies around the world, at a time of relatively high employment when traditional economic models would predict higher wage growth.  The article doesn’t delve into the political ramifications of this phenomenon, but worker insecurity is obviously a foundation stone of the Trumpified world we’re living in, with right-wing movements promoting a closed-border nationalism in combination with various degrees of anti-immigrant sentiment.

This concise article raises far more questions than it answers, but they’re crucial questions.  Are wages stalled because we’re still digging out of the effects of the Great Recession, or did the Great Recession enable or embody a restructuring of the economy that has permanently placed workers at a disadvantage?  With national economies opened to foreign competition, are there any brakes on a race to the bottom when companies have clear and rational economic incentives to hire foreign workers at a fraction of the cost of local and/or unionized workers?   And what’s the point of companies trying to make cheaper products or sitting on their money when it means their workers, who are also consumers, don’t have enough money to spend in order to drive the economy forward?

The article also reminds THS of how important it is to figure out answers to these questions, and for any progressive political party to be able to provide an accurate and compelling narrative about the economy and a path forward that’s grounded in the reality of the global economy — not in the sense of accepting injustice and imbalance, but in identifying what the actual challenges are in order to chart a just course forward.  Donald Trump is telling a story about the economy that has various strains of truth to it, and more importantly, which resonates with many of his supporters’ lived experience of job and wage insecurity.  Big corporations have shipped American jobs to Mexico; immigrants come to America and take our jobs; other countries cheat us on trade, and NAFTA has to go; Obamacare is a drain on the economy; and Trump is going to turn all of this around and make America great again.

But it isn’t difficult to see that if Donald Trump is wrong about key parts of his diagnosis— and he surely is — it could easily end up making things worse (and this is to say nothing of the immorality of his racist, demagogic tirades against both American and immigrant minorities).  NAFTA may not be a great deal — but now that it’s so deeply embedded in our economy, surely there are better ways of fixing it then just eliminating it outright, with all the economic disruption that will bring to workers and owners alike?  And what if automation has been as significant a factor as trade agreements in the loss of manufacturing jobs?  Needless to say, the president’s silence on the importance of revitalizing unions is deafening, though any honest analysis of economics shows us there’s a crucial need for unions not only in the U.S. but worldwide to help right the inevitable imbalance between laborers and business.     

Progressive politicians need to provide an economic agenda that puts at its center the economic insecurity which exists at the heart of the American economy.  You can only read so many descriptions of hard-working Americans losing their jobs after years of steady employment, through no fault of their own, and of the devastation of their cities, before Donald Trump’s election begins to seem increasingly inevitable.  After all, he told voters a story that resonated with their experience; he, at least, acknowledged their insecurity.  Whether he really meant it, or will do anything about it, are different questions altogether.  Progressives need to fully acknowledge this same downsized economic reality, put forward an accurate and compelling diagnosis, and identify how to make it better.  Not only is it immoral to leave vast swathes of our population to fall down the economic ladder, it’s also a recipe for future Trumps to come along, misdiagnose the roots of our problems, and put forward solutions that just feed the downward spiral. 

Indeed, this is the dark rebuttal to arguments that Trump’s incompetence and shitty policies will lead enough supporters to abandon him, as they begin to feel the real-world effects of his policies.  Instead, it seems nearly as likely that increasingly desperate people could just double-down on Trump and his politics of victimization and vengeance, at least so long as the opposing party seems not to take their struggles seriously or provide an alternative framework for why their prospects have become so tenuous.  Trump, after all, can still blame his opponents for blocking his amazing plans to MAGA.

Will Threat of Nuclear War Spur Decisive Break in Support for Trump? or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Bomb

One of the obvious conundrums of the Donald Trump presidency is the disparity in media presence between him and his opponents (not to mention between him and everyone else).  The president’s pronouncements and actions dominate the public sphere like no politician before him.  He can move the national dialogue with a single tweet, a technology that in itself has given him a communications agility we haven’t seen in the White House before.  

It’s fair to say that this media dominance has contributed mightily to a deeply troubling sense among the many, many people who disapprove of his presidency that the man seems simply unstoppable.  This perception is amplified by the sheer volume of bad, horrifying, and/or batshit crazy ideas that continue to slither out of the White House on a daily basis.  An unspoken but broadly-shared hope that both the quantity and (lack of) quality of the presidency would lead to a rupture in his support has not been rewarded; instead, the president’s sheer persistence is in itself deeply disturbing.

Maybe I’m overstating things; maybe I’m discounting the slow slide in his poll numbers, the inevitable toll of his legislative failures on public opinion.  But there are two undeniable, pernicious effects of his media dominance.  The first is that the unprecedented onslaught of political sludge has inevitably weakened our ability to tell the merely godawful from the more life and death stuff.  The second is that it’s encouraged a sense that we are witnessing an unstoppable political force, when what we’re actually witnessing is an unstoppable spectacle.

At this point, Donald Trump’s incompetent and terrifying handling of North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, his own apparently uninformed and deranged thoughts on nuclear weapons and war, and what we are increasingly learning about his own staff’s fears about his competence, are facts that we need to collectively identify, prioritize, consider, and act on.  More than any other existential challenge of this presidency — the efforts of the Russian government to aid in his election, the possible collusion of the Trump campaign with these efforts, the president’s determination to undermine health care for millions of Americans, his insane denial of climate change and destruction of policies to combat it, his aid and comfort to right-wing extremists across the nation — the fact that a man with the self-control of a toddler and the accumulated rage of a narcissistic 71-year-old is to all appearances driving us to a nuclear confrontation with North Korea needs to be THE subject we are talking about.  It is a conversation that Donald Trump simply cannot be allowed to dominate.

In the past few days, you might say that the worst fears about Trump’s mental and emotional competence are being proven well-founded.  Tennessee Senator Bob Corker has gone on the record to say that not only himself, but virtually all other Republican senators, have serious concerns about the president’s "volatility."  Notably, he asserted that the White House staff is in a continuous hustle to keep the president’s worst impulses in check, and that he fears that the president may be setting the country on a path to World War III.  There has been a report about Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis discussing what to do if the president were to suddenly try to launch a nuclear attack, as well as Kelly’s general efforts to “physically sequester” the president, apparently as part of his initiative to bring discipline to the White House.  But as The Atlantic’s David Frum argues, there are huge risks, including to democratic principles, in relying on advisors and generals to provide constraints on a president in the absence of Congress playing its proper role.  We’ve also learned that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s remark that Donald Trump is a “fucking moron” was prompted by the president’s frightening and ignorant inquiries about increasing the U.S. nuclear arsenal by almost ten times its current size (questions that the president has subsequently denied asking).  This is to say nothing of the man’s daily demonstrated lack of empathy or sense of shared humanity.

The true lunacy of our situation is not Donald Trump.  It’s that way too many Americans are watching his reality-show presidency as if it were really a reality show; as if his demented actions aren’t already having consequences for their fellow Americans, from his incompetence in marshaling a response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, to this week’s moves to unilaterally gut Obamacare; as if the terrifying nuclear possibilities gathered around him couldn’t become reality; as if they can’t do anything to change things.

There are no easy solutions here.  If there were, people would have already acted on them, and we wouldn’t be at such a perilous place.  The existence of nuclear weapons, and our collective failure to abolish them, are problems that pre-date Donald Trump’s presidency.  We have never fully reckoned with this genocidal power at the country’s disposal, or how it is impossible to reconcile with either democracy or any ethical way of thinking.  After all, the notion that the president could theoretically wipe out another country, or even all life on earth, is a power so far beyond constitutional checks and balances as to make the Constitution null and void.  We have been seeing the consequences of this for the past half century and more, as the rise of the imperial presidency has been abetted by the chief executive's control of this absolute power. 

But at least the idea that a nuclear war might be caused by a deranged political leader has haunted our conscious, collective imagination from the beginning of the nuclear age, and indeed is a key part of the U.S.’s argument for why North Korea should not be allowed to have nukes.  We cannot claim this is a possibility we have never imagined.  

It’s predictable to the point of cliche that Donald Trump might use war to distract the country from his flailing presidency.  We have seen this script before.  George Bush rode 9/11 to re-election, in part by means of wars in two countries from which the U.S. to this day is unable to extract itself.  As Trump continues to fail as president, his incentives to reset the political board by means of radical action will only grow stronger.  And he has the power, doesn’t he?  Isn’t it up to the president to defend the country by whatever means necessary?  Yes, the rationalizations are there for the taking, as they've been for other presidents before him.

It’s time for the American public and its elected representatives to lay down a bright line against presidential war-making.  Democrats Senator Ed Markey and Representative Ted Lieu introduced a bill back in September 2016 to constrain the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a declaration of war from Congress, and this legislation should be passed.  But Congress also needs to make it clear to the president that any military action against North Korea would require a declaration of war.  After all, even conventional military action against a nuclear power means it can escalate to all-out nuclear war, and the Markey-Lieu legislation would be insufficient in that scenario.  And in turn, the American people need to make it clear to Congress that they expect their elected officials to put the brakes on presidential belligerence.  This is a situation we must all turn our attention to, sooner rather than later.

Is Representative Greg Walden Oregon's Very Own Master of Disaster?

In his Sunday piece, Oregonian columnist Steve Duin calls out our state’s sole GOP congressman, Greg Walden, for his predatory and unproductive push to make timber industry hay out of the devastating Eagle Creek fire that ripped through the Columbia River Gorge last month.  While the fires were still smouldering, it turns out, Walden was busy putting forward legislation that would expedite salvage logging operations, smother environmental reviews, and severely limit public input following natural disasters not just in the Gorge, but in any National Scenic Area. 

It is one thing for Representative Walden to ill serve the citizens of his own district; they deserve better, but they are also the ones who have chosen to elect him, repeatedly.  But Oregonians have already seen him play an outsize role in attempts to dismantle Obamacare — a cynical unwinding that would not only disproportionately hit Walden's own district, but severely affect the health care and finances of the state at large, not to mention cause wholly preventable suffering to millions of Americans nationwide.  And now, following a man-made fire that has turned to ash some of the Portland area’s most beautiful forests, he is backing a plan that puts timber industry greed ahead of both the entire states’s interest, not to mention scientific good sense.  

Some have urged hope in the aftermath of the Eagle Creek fire, arguing that the forest will inevitably fully recover — if not necessarily in our lifetimes.  But when politicians like Greg Walden hurry to take advantage of disaster, and prioritize rewarding their donors over letting the land regenerate for future generations, it’s easy to see how exploitative politics, greed, and climate change might combine to result in a permanently diminished state of nature in Oregon.  Now is the time to summon the political will to make such a dystopian possibility unthinkable.  We can’t risk losing forever what we’ve already lost for the foreseeable future.  Concerned citizens and politicians need to speak out against Walden's gambit, including Democratic politicians who Duin rightly calls out for ducking the issue for fear of crossing the timber industry.

And progressives need to serve notice to Walden that these legislative efforts that would diminish us all have now legitimized a statewide effort to replace him with a better advocate for our state in the next election.  

Will Alabama Senate Candidate Moore End up Being Less for the GOP?

The Republican primary in Alabama to choose a senatorial candidate for the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions has startled many in the GOP establishment.  In part this is because President Trump himself supported and in fact campaigned for the losing candidate, Luther Strange (who currently holds the seat via gubernatorial appointment).  The significance of the outcome is also bound up with the fact that Moore is a long-time extremist and all-around weirdo whose possible election to the Senate portends a further move rightward for the Republican Party.  As the New York Times details, many Republicans see Moore’s victory as a clear signal that the GOP base has turned against its current leadership, though the conclusion of Republican strategists that “the conservative base now loathes its leaders in Washington the same way it detested President Barack Obama” seems like a unresolvable question, akin to that old theological debate about how many profound hatreds can dance on the head of a pin.

Due to his political extremism, many Republicans wonder if Moore might lose against the Democratic candidate in bright-red Alabama.  As summarized at Talking Points Memo, “Moore is a hardline religious conservative who was twice kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to obey the rule of law and disregarding higher court rulings, first for erecting then refusing to remove a monument of the ten commandments a decade ago then for rejecting the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage.  He’s said homosexual conduct should be illegal, suggested the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks happened because America has turned away from God, and claimed that parts of the American Midwest were living under Muslim Sharia law.”  Moore had also argued that Democratic representative Keith Ellison should not be seated in the U.S. Congress due to the fact that he’s Muslim. 

Yikes.

It’s not much of a stretch, though, to conclude along with TPM that Moore won not despite his extremism, but because of it.  His positions are no mystery to Alabama voters, and we also have to weigh in the fact that they had plenty of cover to vote for Moore’s opponent via President Trump’s backing of Luther Strange.  Steve Kornacki at NBC argues that not only is a GOP base voter insurrection underway, but that it’s part of a larger pattern that has played out for the past ten years, in which extremely conservative candidates ride to primary victory on a wave of voter disgust with the GOP establishment.  This movement has encompassed the rise of the Tea Party movement and failed senatorial candidates like Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell and Todd “legitimate rape” Akin.  Kornacki not surprisingly includes Donald Trump in this anti-establishment movement, and makes the point that Trump “cracked the code” of the Tea Party — that it was not about “policy or ideology,” but about cultural rebellion.  As confirmation, he points to Trump’s lack of legislative accomplishments in contrast with his endless enthusiastic culture-war battles meant to rouse and pacify his core voters.

In this context, Roy Moore’s victory seems more like a vindication or continuation of Trump’s strategy than a repudiation of the president.  Like Trump, Moore practices a politics that foregrounds cultural resentments and the notion of a haggard people besieged by godless others.  Moore, after all, has made his reputation by provoking culture war-type fights.  Kornacki is right on in playing up the continuities between Trump and Moore — and indeed, Donald Trump immediately began signaling his support for Moore following his victory, even going so far as to delete previous pro-Strange tweets.  He also observes that though Strange was Trump’s pick on the basis of mutual loyalty, it was Moore who could more strongly make the case that he’d be the the one more likely to fight against the GOP establishment and give Trump political room to be himself.

Moore’s election is one of several looming insurgencies that challenge Republican incumbents, which many believe may raise opportunities for Democratic candidates.  In fact, a recent piece in Politico details how Democrats are closely watching races in which Republicans are poised to field and perhaps select extremist candidates.  But as one Democratic party strategist observes of how the ground has shifted in the last seven years, “Unfortunately, the goal posts have moved on what’s considered sane and reasonable now.”  Indeed — and Donald Trump is Exhibit A. 

Over at New Republic, Jeet Heer goes all in with dunking nascent Democratic optimism in cold water, pointing to the last eight years of politics as evidence that excited predictions of Republican collapse are always proved premature.  He writes:

What’s striking is that this so-called war between the establishment and the populists always ends in the same way: with the establishment absorbing elements of the populist agenda to win elections. Seen in this light, these so-called insurgencies or civil wars never really hurt the Republican Party. Rather, they give it more energy by riling up the base. The gamble that [Steve] Bannon is making is that religious extremism will create a more powerful GOP.  Alas, there’s no reason to think Bannon is wrong.

I’d agree that Heer has got recent history on his side — however tenuous and fraught the GOP’s balancing act seems, the party does keep ending up ahead.  But he importantly notes that it’s not just the base’s energy and the establishment’s ability to keep channeling that energy (while of course also being changed by it) that’s helped the Republicans move to control all three branches of government.  As Heer puts it, even with the burden of candidates who appall the middle, “a Moore-style GOP can remain an electoral force in the same way that the current GOP does: with a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Senate and Electoral College’s overrepresentation of small, rural, overwhelmingly white states—their bias toward conservative voters, in other words.”  These additional factors are in fact necessary for the Republicans to continue achieving electoral success.  Unfortunately for them, these are all practices against which Democrats have a fighting chance, in that they are uniformly anti-democratic arrangements that thwart the will of the majority, and that in the case of gerrymandering and voter suppression are based on immoral and racist foundations.

It’s also important not to misinterpret the cultural resentments that provide so much of the political fuel for Republican politicians.  A progressive politics can’t and shouldn’t match ideas like anti-immigrant hatred or homophobia, but it can put forward policies that address the economic insecurity that make people so receptive to illiberal, tribal appeals in the first place.  The GOP is already behind in numbers — the party can only suffer so many voters being peeled away before what seems like impregnability will turn to catastrophic vulnerability.  And if Democrats can come back enough, they can pass laws to eliminate the anti-democratic tools Republicans have used to secure their majorities in too many states.  There are worse platforms to run on than defense of democracy.

Which brings us back to Roy Moore and the race in Alabama.  He's a politician so extreme, so contemptuous of the rule of law, that the Democrats would be fools not to make support for him a litmus test for other Republicans, and to fully back former state Attorney General Doug Jones against him.  This is not because they will necessarily win, but in order to draw a bright line between what is acceptable and what is not.  And it turns out that in addition to his disdain for the Constitution, separation of church and state, and human equality, Moore’s biggest backer is an outright modern-day secessionist who apparently mourns the South’s loss in the Civil War.  With such an association, Moore pushes the definition of right-wing past the breaking point — if you accept money from someone who literally doesn’t even believe in the existence of the United States, we are well beyond conservative politics and into some new-fangled hodgepodge of farce and disqualifying anti-Americanism.  It is inconceivable to me that with this sort of neo-Confederate, un-American baggage, a well-funded, intelligent Democratic campaign could not give Moore a run for his money.  At the very least, it's an opportunity for Democrats to highlight the absurdity of a GOP that flaunts its patriotism while acting in a way that's anything but patriotic.

Are NFL Players Really the Ones Who Need to Show a Little Respect?

One silver lining in the imbroglio over NFL players daring to kneel during the national anthem is how deeply the whole affair has galvanized my understanding of white privilege and white supremacy in America — a selfish perspective, sure, but in my defense I will call upon my own white privilege one last (OK, maybe) time.  The way that so many have used the alleged infraction of the players against the honor of the flag to ignore the issues the players are seeking to highlight has hit me like a ton of bricks.  And once Donald Trump stepped in, you’d have to be willfully ignorant or complicit with his intentions to claim that racial animus has nothing to do with what’s going on.  The story has continued through much of this last week, with the president talking about how the owners must be afraid of their players.  Yes — he is talking about how the 99% white owners must be afraid of their 75% African-American players.  Tired racist trope, anyone?

My understanding and ire have grown together, particularly cemented by encountering a white Facebook riot in which commenters piled on about the players’ lack of civility, privileged status, and of course contempt for the flag, anthem, and all veterans of all wars ever.  The clincher was when one writer praised some players for protesting the “right” way — just not during the national anthem! — as if they had finally learned their lesson.  The lack of shame in presuming to tell African-Americans exactly how they should protest was my a-ha! moment — they just needed to learn some respect, you see, that was their whole problem.

An assumption of malevolent intent on the part of the players is obviously batshit racist on its face.  But I will note that the use of this assumption to essentially refuse to consider the players’ stated reasons for protest — police abuse against African-Americans and by extension racism more generally — elevates a supposedly color-blind patriotism into a weapon of white supremacy.  The harder they hold to the idea that patriotism and veneration of the flag and anthem are the starting points for any further discussion of ANY issues whatsoever, the more they drive home the fact that by their own terms they are placing an abstract nationalism and unity over compassion towards living Americans — living Americans who it is no coincidence happen to be African-American.  And by making the national anthem and flag all about veterans and those who have perished in war, they not coincidentally construct a clear hierarchy in which dead soldiers are more important than dead black folk any day of the week.  Try to say with a straight face that this is not part of the shtick around this amazing new taboo against protesting during the national anthem.

I will be honest: this take-a-knee-or-not moment has left me profoundly disturbed at how the most naked racism is being propounded not just by the president, but by so many white Americans for whom their own racist reasoning should be obvious to them.  Of course, part of what’s so illuminating about this moment is that many of these people don’t actually believe they’re being racist; they think they’re simply being right, without realizing that the reasons they think they’re right (love of country comes before love of living Americans (who happen to be black)) are actually pretty racist.

Placing abstract patriotism over the lives of African Americans is a conscious choice, whether anyone wants to admit or not.  Opponents of the players’ actions are behaving as if, while the national anthem was being played, the players were alternately defecating onto the Constitution (not a copy, mind you — the original document); peeing on a Bible; masturbating to a photo of their beloved 14-year-old daughter; and taking a flamethrower to the American flag.  But let’s always remember — they’re merely kneeling, which San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid has pointed out was deliberately chosen as a respectful gesture . 

* * *

In my addled and mildly despairing state, two recent pieces at Talking Points Memo have given me a bit of comfort by providing important context for our little football war.  Neither article addresses this fight directly, but they’ve both got me thinking about why exactly we’re at this racial moment and about how there may be some glimmers of positive change.

The first, titled “What Is White Supremacy,” jumps into a discussion sparked in recent days by Jonathan Chait’s article at the New York Magazine site about the definition of “white supremacy.”  TPM’s Josh Marshall makes the case that our current political state owes much to the fact of declining majority and lurking non-majority status for whites, along with the concomitant rise of minority populations in our country.  In 1970, 89.5% of Americans were white, with 10% African-American (with Hispanics being counted as either black or white and composing another 4.5% of the population).  In 2010, according to Marshall’s figures, whites were down to 72.4% of the population, with Hispanics constituting 16% of the population.

Marshall brings up these figures in making the case that what it means to be a white supremacist or to support white supremacism may be changing along with our demographics.  He approvingly quotes Chait interlocutor Adam Serwer’s definition of a white supremacist as “someone who believes white people are entitled to political and cultural hegemony.”  Marshall’s argument is pretty careful and nuanced, and should be read in full, but it works towards the point that as more whites become fearful that their primacy in the American heirarchy is being actively threatened, and wish to preserve this primacy, effective distinctions between “outright” white supremacists like David Duke and “sort of” white supremacists like Donald Trump become less marked; as Marshall concludes the piece, “Maybe it is that the changes in the country have made the functional difference between the two much less relevant.”  

His observation seems right on, yet his final observation feels like it pulls back from exploring or stating a broader implication — that as the demographic ground shifts in our country, and they feel more overtly threatened by a loss of status, more white Americans are essentially consciously embracing not just the idea of white supremacism (as in, hey, I’m realizing what I’ve got because I'm white, and I don’t want to lose it), but also becoming more willing to embrace the mentality and tools of what we’ve more traditionally considered white supremacism — active denigration of minorities as a political goal, certainly at a rhetorical level but running the spectrum towards voter suppression, through racist policing and other forms of state violence.  Looking at the dichotomy of David Duke and Donald Trump another way, we could speculate that Donald Trump is very much a reflection, if also an accelerant, of a rising white supremacism in which consciousness of wanting to stay on top segues very quickly into embracing racist leaders and strategies for doing just that.

I mentioned that I find some comfort in this piece in the context of the NFL protest issue.  “Comfort” may seem perverse, but I think it does help me to understand why so many white folks are coming across as both virulently racist and newly emboldened.  A rising consciousness in the face of impending loss of majority status, and the possible loss of status that could bring, certainly seem like spurs to renewed racism in our country.  And channeling this fear and animus at African-Americans, who after all are not growing as a percentage of the population, just puts the cherry of stupid on top of this racist layer cake.  In a time of fear, people fall back on familiar patterns, and also prey on the weak — why not attack a non-growing minority group with a weak economic position, when these very facts mean that you are likelier to get away with it all?  Enter Donald Trump and the bet he has made that our country is no better than him.

The other TPM piece that caught my attention notes that Richmond, Virginia is planning a monument that will honor Nat Turner along with nine other anti-slavery figures, which Marshall finds striking given the controversy which Turner's actions have traditionally provoked.  Marshall discusses the paucity of anti-slavery monuments in the United States, and suggests that more attention to slave revolts may help open up our understanding of slavery in helpful ways.  The concluding paragraph gets at some of the possible sea change we may be seeing:

[S]lave revolts are inherently violent and uncompromisingly brutal. That is hard for this country, which still honors a legal continuity with a long history of slavery, to grapple with. Because coming to the terms with the brutality of slave revolts brings the brutality and violence of slavery itself to the fore in a way America has seldom publicly faced. It’s like a tight and uncompromising algebraic equation. Honoring Turner means that his actions were laudatory and merit public memorialization. But his actions involved killing families and small children in their beds. If such actions, which are normally among the worst we can imagine, merit praise and public honor, the system they were meant to fight and destroy must have been barbaric and unconscionably violent beyond imagining. Very few of us would contest this description of slavery. But bringing Turner into the discussion of public commemoration will air these issues in a new (I think very positive) and jarring way.

For all the people inspired by the president or unwilling to examine their own illiberal assumptions about their fellow Americans, there are many more who are pushing back against this tide of darkness in a million different ways.  When people try to push racist beliefs into the public sphere, they should be made to shoulder all the hideous history and implications of what they're saying.

Why Is the Trump Administration Taking the Heat Off Right-Wing Extremists?

After the white riot in Charlottesville, and the president’s continued problematic response to the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched, no one can claim that our current day political dangers don't include a re-energized far-right that draws inspiration and solace from the current occupant of the White House.  This piece in the New Republic offers solid evidence for why, at a minimum, these extremists see objective evidence that they have little to fear from this presidency.  Presumably under the cover of trimming the budget, the Trump administration has terminated funding for the Countering Violent Extremism program, which “emphasizes community engagement over aggressive law enforcement,” and includes support for programs that target both Muslim radicalism and right-wing extremism.  The administration has also canned grants that specifically target far-right extremism.

Does anyone else find this chilling?  Why is the first instinct of Trump’s law enforcement team to take the heat off right-wing extremists?  And of course, in the fight against Islamic extremists, it signals a fuller embrace of a militarized and counter-productive approach that sees all Muslims, including American citizens, as potential enemies, and refuses to recognize the primacy of non-military solutions to a fight that too many people who should know better would prefer to treat as a never-ending war.  

Both pragmatically and politically, these problematic cuts to the Countering Violent Extremism program are obvious points of attack for Democrats and other opponents of Trump.  Community-level programs to defuse right-wing extremism should be massively escalated, not put on the chopping block, even as law enforcement should be addressing any criminal activity with overwhelming resources.  Once the president made clear his bizarre reluctance to criticize neo-Nazis and white supremacists, any and all legislative evidence of his ambivalence needs to be highlighted.  This also provides a powerful opportunity to press for increased funding for those community-engagement programs that fight Islamic extremism.  The message is simple: let’s de-energize extremism of all stripes through cost-effective, morally defensible approaches, not throw away some of the most powerful tools we have to combat violent ideologies.

We should make Donald Trump justify his coddling of right-wing extremists and incompetence at combatting Islamic extremism at every opportunity.

It's Time for Trump to Stand Down About Standing Up for the National Anthem

The idea that Americans should be forced to honor the national anthem in precisely the way that the president defines and for the reasons that he defines is the laughable opposite of actual patriotism.  The national anthem and the flag are symbols of the full range of American values and ideals; among the most important of these are the rights to political expression and the idea that we need to continually work to perfect our union.  When a citizen believes that our country is not living up to these ideals, then the single most important thing they can do is to share their discontent with others and persuade others to join them, in a way that conveys the power of their feelings and the reasons for their dissent.  This clearly includes the use of symbolic actions; one powerful such action is refusing to stand for the national anthem.

Peaceful protest is always welcome in our country; when a politician calls for retribution against peaceful protest, this is a powerful warning sign that this politician holds beliefs hostile to democracy.  Enforced political conformity and unreflective worship of patriotic symbols are practices of totalitarian societies, not a healthy democracy.  Donald Trump would have you believe that he’s attacking NFL football players for their lack of patriotism; but what he’s actually attacking them for is their actual patriotism.

As is so often the case with Donald Trump, the tendencies towards authoritarianism are tied up with presidential-level racism.  He brought up the issue of black athletes kneeling for the national anthem at a nearly all-white rally for a Republican candidate for the Senate, and his calls for these athletes to be fired is in the context of an NFL in which 75% of the players are African-American and all but one of the team owners are white.  His tweets suggesting that the football players need to just shut up and play the game because they’re paid a lot of money easily evoke old chestnuts that African-Americans are lazy, and also that they should avoid getting uppity.  And as if determined to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his anger at the players has everything to do with their race, within a day the president was picking fights with still more African-American athletes, not on the national anthem issue, but by disinviting the Golden State Warriors from visiting the White House.

If there are any doubts left as to his alignment with white supremacists, you need only compare Donald Trump’s enthusiastic denunciation of these African-American athletes with his grudging and hedged criticism of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and other avowed enemies of American democracy after the violence in Charlottesville.  As many a countervailing tweet has pointed out in the past 48 hours, the white nationalist marchers were “fine people” in the eyes of the president, while any NFL player who kneels at the wrong time is a “son of a bitch.”  Now that we know that “son of a bitch” is within the president’s wheelhouse of publicly appropriate phrases, the fact that he kept it in reserve when denouncing neo-Nazis pretty much tells you everything you need to know about his moral unfitness for office.

In attacking some of the country’s most popular African-American athletes, Donald Trump is showing us that his racism and war on equal rights are total and all-consuming.  Under cover of defending American values, the president is trying to marshall racist resentment against patriotic Americans who seek to raise awareness and effective change around abusive policing and other expressions of systemic racism in American society.  This is what it looks like when the president is a white supremacist.  His racist provocations will only continue to escalate, and will only be stopped by a countering movement in American politics and society.

Progressives Need to Pick a Fight Over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Earlier in the year, we noted a looming fight over the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as Republicans saw an opportunity to dismantle this important government agency.  But as the New York Times recently reported, even as the financial sector’s hatred of the bureau remains unabated, and right-wing legislators harp on its alleged tyrannical powers, GOP moderates seem to have held back a full-scale assault on the bureau thus far.  Its staying power stems from the fact that it is actually performing as intended, protecting the interests of ordinary Americans by pushing back against predatory financial industry practices.  Since its creation, the CFPB has restrained abusive debt collection, improved mortgage lending, and actually investigated hundreds of thousands of consumer complaints — investigations that have resulted in financial benefits on the order of $12 billion for 29 million people. 

That’s a lot of money, and that’s a hell of a lot of registered voters.

The Hot Screen has previously argued that Democrats need to place a vigorous defense of the CFPB at the forefront of their efforts to retake Congress and the presidency (in this case, the best offense is actually a good defense).  A decade out from the 2008 crash, the financial industry retains its predatory, anti-democratic instincts, seeing the American people as a collection of marks to rip off, rather than a citizenry seeking to build a meaningful economy for themselves and their families.  Amazingly, the financial industry continues to try painting itself as a victim of government overreach, despite massive government bailouts and continued bad behavior that is never adequately sanctioned (hello, crooked Wells Fargo!).

The CFPB is the sharp end of the spear pushing back against the otherwise accountable power of a huge, and hugely important, sector of the American economy.  It’s also a vivid demonstration of the more general proposition that government needs to, and can, serve the basic interests of the public; clearly this is a reason why the GOP hates it so much, and why progressives need to make the CFPB a household name.  The economy as a whole, and our prosperity as individuals, are not well served when we are all being constantly ripped off by big corporations and don’t have enough money to invest in the actual economy.  It is like we are constantly being taxed, with the money going into the pockets of private interests dedicated to giving nothing back to society.

It’s amusing to see Republicans use the elements that make the CFPB such an effective advocate for consumers — its insulation and independence from political pressures — to paint it as an out-of-control government agency.  Irrepressible Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling calls the CFPB “the single most unaccountable and powerful agency in the history of our republic”; apparently, in its short existence, the bureau has managed to surpass even the J. Edgar Hoover-era FBI in its abusive power!