We've Allowed Our Kids to be Terrorized for Too Long, and Now It's Time to Make Things Right

Something really basic to the student-led gun control movement finally hit me as I watched the coverage yesterday — these kids are truly scared for their lives.  Up to that point I’d mostly marveled at their civic engagement and energy; it took their weekend occupation of the national stage to drive home the scale of their fear.  And it also struck me how the U.S. has done an amazing job over the last 70 years of making its citizens, particularly its young citizens, fear for their lives.  I see a parallel between the specter of nuclear war that led to preposterous “duck and cover” drills and existential dread in millions of students during the Cold War, and the anxiety that haunts students today, when the innocent act of entering a classroom could be akin to signing their own death warrant.

Our political system having failed the young, the young have chosen to re-define the political system as including space for those purportedly not yet old enough to participate.  In turn, adult commentators have expressed gratitude to these kids for showing us what hope looks like, for bringing energy that might break the logjam of gun control in this country.  But however inspiring this youth movement is, it’s also an indictment of our politics, and a challenge to adults to step up to our collective failure to protect our kids and to right this failure.

To hear the NRA attacks on the protesting students is to be reminded that too many well-meaning Americans have let themselves get psyched out by a deranged and paranoid right-wing organization.  Apparently, the students marching and giving speeches in favor of changing laws are actually violent radicals who are also stooges for dangerous socialist forces.  Say what?  Such are the out-of-touch ramblings of a morally compromised organization that itself places violence at the center of its political agenda and that backs extremist right-wing politicians.  These offensive comments are sure to alienate far more people than they activate to support the NRA, and suggest that the NRA is more vulnerable than most had supposed.

For decades now, the NRA and its political supporters have fostered a culture of death in the United States, based on an extremist reading of the Second Amendment.  This culture has insisted that Americans are always and ever at the peril of being killed, and that the only way to protect ourselves is to own guns so that we can shoot those trying to kill us.  In doing so, they’ve ensured not only that guns of all kinds are plentiful in our country, but that any restrictions are always seen as making us less safe.  The resulting permissiveness has helped create a culture of mass shootings, and ensured that guns feature in far more common incidents like domestic violence.  They’ve also created a situation where easy access to guns means that around half of all gun deaths are suicides.

Now students are calling bullshit on this situation, and we all need to back them up.  They’ve gotten the ball rolling, but it’s up to adults to carry this fight, to right the wrong that we’ve allowed to fester and kill far too many of us. 

What Does It Really Mean to Take the Trump Challenge Seriously?

Whether or not the Trump administration was ever competent enough to consciously implement a shock and awe strategy against the U.S. government and the American people, as Steve Bannon dreamed, a sense of being overwhelmed in ever-fresh and perilous ways has been our lot ever since a certain special someone took the oath of office back in January of 2017.  The volume and depth of offenses against our common morality, democracy, and safety have made us feel like we’re constantly scrambling on at least two fundamental levels: simply keeping up with the news, and trying to find a stable place of perspective to put it all together and understand its larger meaning.

These universal challenges come together every time I think about what I want to write about.  How to prioritize?, is the fundamental question.  Probably like a lot of writers, I let my personal interests guide me, both because a) why write otherwise? and b) it resolves the prioritization conundrum (to get anywhere, you have to start somewhere, as some ancient folk saying undoubtedly says).  But this isn’t a cure for the sense of being overwhelmed; it’s just how I cope.

These past few weeks, I’ve been feeling acutely overwhelmed, as the number of unsettling stories and their dark implications for our country have seemed to escalate.  Dig into it, and any single outrage contains multitudes of perfidy and stupidity; try to take a step back to find some perspective, and you reel with the thought that our mechanisms for addressing such levels of craziness are at best exceedingly slow-working, and at worst, broken.  Scandals that would wreck any ordinary presidency explode like fireworks, not firebombs.  Their sheer number seems to work in the president’s favor, with the stories seeming to cancel each other out or to fade away given the implications of even larger offenses.  Why fret about the travel spending of cabinet officials when the president might be a Russian patsy, right?  And the sheer outrageousness also seems to provide cover to this administration.  The spy novel amazingness of a president blackmailed or otherwise indebted to a hostile foreign power is only the grandest of our threads.  What about the news that Jared Kushner may have encouraged U.S. backing of a war against Qatar as revenge for that country refusing to provide financial backing to the Kushner family?  The deeds are so vile that even opponents of the Trump regime are taken aback.  THIS is our reality now?

Grappling with all this, I keep coming back to a counter-intuitive point that doesn’t even totally make sense to me.  As much as many millions of Americans are paying attention, and are angry and motivated to fight for change, I keep thinking that we are having difficulty comprehending the depth of the depravity and the scale of the response that’s required.  Yes, the amount of energy we see going into Democratic and progressive efforts to re-take the House and Senate in 2018 seems to be hitting historical levels; in the face of an anti-democratic president, millions of Americans are doubling down on our institutions and the electoral process.  This is very good news.

But playing by the rules and norms of our democracy isn’t how Donald Trump got elected.  He got elected by — at a minimum — accepting the assistance of a hostile foreign power; by mainstreaming racist and white nationalist sentiments; by denying his sexual predation against numerous women; by blaming immigrants for every problem under the sun.  Beyond this, he benefitted from a media that amplified nonsense attacks about Hillary Clinton’s email use and an FBI head who broke protocol by announcing a re-opened investigation against Clinton days before the election.  Trump broke the rules, but so did other major players in our national power structure.

For all the energized opposition, it too often feels like the initiative remains with Donald Trump.  We all wait for the next blow to fall: Will he fire Robert Mueller?  Will he start a trade war?  Which African-American woman will he insult next?  I know there are real structural reasons for his ability to maintain this initiative — he is, after all, the president — but there must be ways to blunt this advantage.  Taking Trump and what he represents seriously means figuring out a way to take back control of our national conversation.  Maybe what I’m getting at is this: to fully grasp how dangerous and destructive this administration is, we also need to more fully articulate and fight for what we actually want than ever before. 

White Like Trump, Revisited

Last week, in “White Like Trump?  Plenty of Americans Are Saying No Thanks,” I argued that many white Americans are being spurred to re-evaluate what it means to be white in the face of Donald Trump’s unabashed appeals to racism.  But at the time, and haunting me even more over the last several days, is the plain fact that I really don’t know if this assertion is true.  I know it’s true for me that I’ve been thinking about how Trump has troubled my relationship not only to great swathes of other white people in new and profound ways, but with my own whiteness.  Yet I’m instantly aware of the layers of potential bullshit in making a claim like this.  For example, it’s not like I’m risking anything by exploring this sense of rift or alienation: no matter how I pretend to enlightenment, I’m still a white person who enjoys the status and privileges that this random accident of birth brings to me every day of my life.  It costs me absolutely nothing to acknowledge this privilege.

But allow me to double-down and make the case that there are strong reasons that my feelings of repugnance and alienation should be shared by other white Americans, and that this could be something new and potentially transformative for our society and politics.  First, at a profound level, by making explicitly racist, white nationalist appeals central to his presidency, Donald Trump is presenting white Americans with a choice that no president in any of our lifetimes has.  By asserting again and again that his base is the only constituency he cares about, and that he intends to unite this base by explicitly racist policies and propaganda (including lesser but telling offenses, such as asserting in his Pennsylvania speech yesterday that 52% of women voted for him in 2016, when in fact it was 52% of white women who voted for him), the president would have us return to a time when full citizenship was synonymous only with white skin.

But this is not 1900, or 1950, 1975, or even 2000.  Reality, in the form of political and social change, has slowly ground away the capacity of a political movement to sustain an explicitly racist appeal.  White people have friends of other races; they work with people of other races; they marry people of other races.  Trump’s appeal may work with some white people, but our reality puts a cap on how many it can work with; it’s a hard sell to ask someone to turn against their friends, or co-workers, or relatives, on the basis of the color of their skin.

Of course, a shocking percentage of the white population did vote for Trump, and does continue to support him, which is a decent counter to my arguments for the power of our multicultural reality to blunt his white nationalist demogoguery.  And Trump’s racist appeals are inextricably linked to white fears of economic backsliding and loss of social status, both of which fears continue to be amplified by our increasingly unequal and potentially unstable economy, and so can be counted on to supercharge Trump’s race-based strategy so long as he remains president.

* * *

Over at Slate this week, Jamelle Bouie comes at the question of Trump’s white nationalist appeal from another angle — the backlash it’s potentially provoking among non-white Americans.  But first, his overview of the resurgent role of race in American is bracing and not to be missed.  Drawing on the work of Nils Gilman, Bouie notes that from the 1970's through the Obama era, a national consensus existed in which overt racism was not to be tolerated, but in which structural racism was allowed to continue.  Barack Obama “stood as the embodiment and apotheosis of racial liberalism, promising racial transcendence and an end to the tribal conflicts of the past.”  But now we’re seeing the end of this era, with the rise of both white nationalism and a growing civil rights movement that views institutional racism as unacceptable.  Bouie sums up our current situation thus:

Politically, the new equilibrium of American racial politics is still taking shape.  Yes, Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office, and Democratic politicians are increasingly willing to condemn “institutional racism” and call for the removal of civic symbols tied to white supremacy.  But the institutional Republican Party has still not fully embraced the president’s demagoguery (even as it remains complicit in giving it a platform), while the Democratic Party has only taken small steps toward a message and platform of racial egalitarianism.  Here, the parties are lagging somewhat behind the public.

I’d say that the GOP, with its party-wide emphasis on voter suppression and gerrymandering, has gone further in with the president’s racism, or is at least well on course to do so, than Bouie indicates — but his assessment that we're in a situation of political flux rather than some new end state is incredibly important for understanding our political situation and figuring out how to fight for progressive, egalitarian goals.  We’re in a place where actively and loudly discussing the forces in play, in defining the terms of debate, can make a huge difference in where we end up going.

Relating this back to what I’ve been trying to work through about white people becoming more aware of the need to pick a side: whether or not white people actively feel revulsion towards Trump’s racism, a progressive politics should encourage people to understand the choice Trump is giving them, and argue with all the logic and passion at its disposal to urge white Americans to reject this noxious and evil path.

But Bouie goes on to talk about another enormous factor in halting and reversing the tide of white nationalism: the racial awareness and equality-mindedness of the millennial generation, particularly among its millions of minority members.  Check out these statistics:

Millennials, now the most diverse generation of adults in American history, are at the vanguard of a shift toward greater color-consciousness in American politics.  Fifty-two percent point to discrimination as the main barrier to black progress, a 14-point jump from 2016, when just 38 percent agreed with the statement, according to the Pew Research Center.  Similarly, 68 percent of millennials (and 62 percent of Gen Xers) say that the country needs to “continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.”  Millennials show the highest support for immigrants and immigration, and are most likely to oppose a border wall with Mexico.  In a separate Pew poll, 60 percent of white millennials said they supported the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bouie cites other figures to back up a case that millennials are more aware than previous generations of discrimination and inequality in American society (likely, one suspects, because more members of this generation have been subject to or otherwise aware in their own lives of such realities).  He concludes that while white nationalism may be on the rise, the attitudes and political power of millennials are an enormous counterforce that stands in opposition to it.

As I’m sure Bouie would agree, the rising power of this diverse cohort is one of the changes in America that politicians like Donald Trump are drawing on to stoke white fears of diminished economic power and social standing.  Not surprisingly, but still depressingly, white millennials hold more regressive opinions on race than their minority counterparts: "59 percent believe blacks should overcome prejudice and 'work their way up' without any 'special favors,' and 48 percent believe discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as that against nonwhites."  The good news is that white millennials are still more progressive than previous generations.  The bad news is in figures like those 48% of millennials who believe that they are somehow subject to discrimination, let alone discrimination equal to that against nonwhites.

The tendency of whites to increasingly see themselves as a besieged and belittled group needs to be viewed not only through the lense of other groups achieving greater equality and relative economic power, but crucially as the victory of politicians who use racial animus as a smokescreen behind which the upper reaches of our society take more and more of the collective economic pie.  Put bluntly, whites wouldn’t be nearly so receptive to the argument that they’re losing their relative position in society if, for the past 40 years, most people hadn't seen their wages and wealth stagnate.  Trumpism is both the logical endpoint and most glaring example of this dynamic: a millionaire president who claims to advocate for his white base while passing laws and regulations (a regressive tax bill, roll-backs of safety rules that protect blue-collar workers, steel and aluminum tariffs that will hurt more working Americans than they help) that benefit the rich at the expense of other Americans.  And as I’ve pointed out before, this approach is self-reinforcing: as Trump and GOP policies continue to squeeze working Americans, white Americans will continue to be vulnerable to explanations that involve the scurrilous behavior of blacks and Latino immigrants as the actual reason for their economic malaise.

And so I end where I began, wondering what combination of logic, moral suasion, and reminders of our lived, shared experience as Americans will suffice to break the hold of racist appeals that dehumanize non-whites, degrade whites, and defile our American experiment. . .

In Supporting Republican Banking Bill, Democratic Senators Are Helping the GOP More Than Themselves

The decision by 17 Democratic senators to vote with the GOP majority to undermine the Dodd-Frank regulations passed in response to the 2008 financial crisis is a harsh reminder that too many Democratic politicians still exhibit loyalty to their big bank donors whose bad behavior laid waste to our economy a decade ago.  At a minimum, as Brian Beutler argues this week, there’s something deeply telling about the fact that the Democrats demanded absolutely nothing in the way of more progressive concessions as the price for their votes, suggesting this is more about currying favor with the financial sector than casting votes in line with the wishes of an increasingly progressive Democratic base.  

Assessing the desire of many of these senators to appear bipartisan through this vote — particularly those from red states — Jamelle Bouie sees a parallel with the efforts of some Democratic senators in 2009 to water down the economic stimulus package in order to appear more centrist and fiscally-disciplined.  As he notes, the outcome then was a bill that wasn’t big enough to quickly pull the U.S. out of recession; beyond that, only one of the senators who pushed for the changes was re-elected in the two subsequent election cycles.

Whatever the legitimate fixes that the Dodd-Frank legislation requires, this current bill clearly moves the overall emphasis from protecting consumers and the economy at large in favor of making it easier for banks to make money.  That so many Democrats feel comfortable supporting such a step backwards shows that the progressive shift of Democratic voters hasn’t filtered up to the top of the party yet.  Beyond this, it’s also a disheartening reminder that even with the GOP as a whole increasingly compromised by its embrace of Trump and its embrace of his multi-layered corruption, many Democratic politicians aren’t afraid to share what are essentially 1% policy positions with their GOP colleagues.  Moreover, in supporting policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many, these Democrats are making it harder to tie these unjust laws to the other forms of corruption overflowing from the White House and being given cover by a Republican-controlled legislature that refuses to engage in its oversight duties.  That is, they’re helping undermine an opportunity to paint the GOP as a party interested only in protecting its donors and its own.  In the face of other anti-consumer moves by the Republicans — such as the gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — this also muddies the idea that the Democrats can be relied on to protect average Americans from the predations of big finance and big business more generally.

This dispiriting behavior by so many Democrats highlights another worrying possible dynamic as the GOP tends rightward and towards ever more plutocratic territory — rather than seeing this as an opening to make an argument for progressive policies, many Democrats see this as reason to appear “bipartisan” or moderate, when in fact those positions have drifted further and further to the right as the space between the Democrats and the modern-day, radicalized Republican Party has widened.  In a larger sense, it’s the difference between Democrats who think that things were basically going OK up to 2016, that Hillary Clinton only lost by a hair’s breadth, and that no major Democratic shifts are needed, and the perspective that the rise of Donald Trump and a reactionary GOP constitutes a wake-up call for our democracy, and for a Democratic Party dedicated to equality under the law, electoral fairness (i.e. an end to gerrymandering and voter suppression), and broad economic reforms that benefit the working majority.

White Like Trump? Plenty of Americans Are Saying "No Thanks"

In his recent essay “We All Live on Campus Now,” Andrew Sullivan argues that a “cultural Marxism” gestated on college campuses has erupted into the mainstream: a perspective in which “the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation,” in which the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping away, and whether the idea of “individual merit [. . .] is increasingly suspect.”  This sort of critique of academia is pretty long-standing, but the change Sullivan identifies is the way this campus framework for viewing the world is gaining wider acceptance outside universities.  I don’t intend to be dismissive when I say I don’t have the expertise or interest to engage fully with the scope of his claims — but I do wonder about Sullivan’s claim that Donald Trump’s embrace of white identity politics has helped create an “equal and opposite reaction” from other groups.  Although he doesn’t really explore what this reaction consists of — I can only assume the increase in the idea that people of a certain race or gender are tending to primarily identify themselves by that group identification — I would suggest that the real world response to Trump that I’ve experienced and observed demonstrate that fears of this sort of balkanization of the American people are overblown and pessimistic.

First, when a president deliberately targets particular groups — Hispanics, African-Americans, women — for special contempt and blame for our nation’s ills, it’s inevitable that people who belong to those groups would grow even more aware of belonging to those groups.  A reaction along these lines isn’t perverse or necessarily damaging to our democracy, but common sense.  Indeed, we could argue that recognizing your common interests with others is a key building block in democratic politics.

This gets at one of the things about critiques of “identity politics” that staggers me.  There is a sense from writers like Sullivan and others that African-Americans, or gays, or Filipino Americans, or any other group that has sought to advocate for issues as a group, does so out of a fundamental sense of perversity, out of a wish to tear down a sort of melting pot harmony which is our country’s natural state.  But it seems obvious that people organize along lines of ethnicity, national origin, or what have you specifically because they have been discriminated against or otherwise not fully included as equal citizens and members of our society, not because they’ve decided to abandon their identities in a Borg-like collective. 

I understand Sullivan’s concern about the individual subsuming him- or herself to a particular group identity.  In theory, this sounds horrifying, the opposite of every person being a free and equal actor in our society.  But in actuality, is there a single American who truly puts a particular group identity over their sense of being their own person?  I don’t buy it.  Individualism is so strongly woven into our culture that it’s like the air we breathe.  We literally can’t even see it.

The most telling evidence that the term “identity politics” obscures (and slurs) more than it illuminates is calling women’s efforts to gain full equality in our society a form of identity politics.  A movement that would advance the rights of literally more than half the U.S. population might more accurately be called “politics.”  That women have interests not inherently shared by men — calls for equal pay, full health care that includes female-specific medical concerns — only makes those interests “special” or “factional” if we take men’s interests to be the normal, baseline interests that a citizen is to subscribe to. 

I can’t help delving a bit into the identity politics question because it’s been purported to be the source of a split in the Democratic Party, against those who would rather talk about economic or other supposedly neutral issues everyone can rally around.  It seems to me, though, that no particular group has one issue that concerns them, and that many of the issues that do concern them share broad commonalities, like a wish for economic fairness and to be treated fairly under the law.  You are simply not going to stop people from caring about what their situation in life — based on race, economic status, gender, or sexual identity — forces them to care about.

And it’s here again that the slams against “identity politics” seem to be all about a strawman argument.  Critics act as if people are randomly or perversely choosing to identify with a particular group, when the truth is that a great deal of that impulse is the result of our society and political system having long denigrated those people, hammering into their heads that their identity is indeed deeply entwined with being a poor African-American woman or a Mexican immigrant.

Rather than the Trump Administration accelerating trends towards a harmful balkanization of our society, there are in fact signs that many Americans are not being split apart, but brought together in healthy ways.  The Trump administration may indeed be a stress test of sorts for American social cohesion, but I’d hazard most Americans are passing the test fairly well.  When Donald Trump says Mexican immigrants are rapists, or casts aspersions on African-American football players who take a knee to protest police violence, members of these particular communities may feel a tightening of internal bonds — but these attacks also are causing many, many Americans to feel sympathy and, yes, identity with the groups under attack.  For other vulnerable groups, the attacks arouse sympathy, because they know what it is to be targeted by the most powerful man in the land.  And for those who don’t necessarily feel threatened or that they might be targeted, there’s still an impulse to sympathy, and to stand with the vulnerable. 

I also think that a particular dynamic is playing out in how white people are reacting to Donald Trump’s threats against minorities.  Donald Trump may be the de facto leader of a white identity movement in America, a dangerous mindset that would have us believe that whites as whites are being oppressed in this country — a racist and refutable notion if there ever was one.  When he identifies minorities as threats to American stability and prosperity, these threats are in fact an important way of rallying white people to his racist cause.  What’s been less noted, though, is the way this explicit appeal to white identity has the potential to expose to scrutiny and repudiation the white supremacist thinking that underlies it (and that in fact constitutes its true identity), specifically by alienating and indeed repulsing many millions of other white Americans.

For all that he’s managed to con so many Americans and appeal to the darkest impulses of the citizenry, Donald Trump has reminded millions of others of the evil and immorality of racism and misogyny.  He’s one of the worst spokesmen for backwards beliefs that you could have wished for, a person in whom stupidity and prejudice can be observed in full, noxious synergy.  For many white Americans specifically, to look upon Donald Trump is to look upon a model of how you would never in a million years want to be, and to entertain or embrace the idea that you have more in common with minorities in America than with other white Americans.  And crucially, for millions of white women, Donald Trump undermines his appeals to white solidarity every time he lets his misogynist freak flag fly, implicitly telling them that the white supremacist movement is also a male supremacist movement; if you are not a white male, then you are not a full American citizen.  Conversely, this rampant misogyny subverts Trump’s possible appeal to white males who aren’t down with the president’s gross and gropy hatred of women.  There’s a dynamic playing out that refutes Andrew’s Sullivan’s fear that being aware of your “identity” is an inherently bad thing.  If Donald Trump is making millions of Americans more aware of their whiteness, and reminding or causing them to realize that they don’t want to be white like him, then this is progress for America.

Rising Stock Market and One-Time Bonuses Are the Embodiment of Inequality

You may have noticed that we here at The Hot Screen like to talk about economics a lot.  This might lead you to think that we actually like economics, but the truth, as they say, is a bit more complicated than that.  We certainly like economics more than we used to, though this realization feels a bit shameful, like confessing to a guilty pleasure that reveals your true character to be a lot duller than you’d like everyone to think.  But our attraction to learning more about economics, apart from the at-this-point undeniable fact that we find it sort of interesting, has also been driven by a gradual awareness that something boring and basic and in plain view for all to see is actually a lot more central to our lives, our society, and our politics than most of us fully grasp.  This has been my experience, anyway.  It’s got a decoder-ring appeal.

Then along came Trump, with his combination of faux populism bound up with authoritarianism, as if to provide us all with an object lesson about being economically ignorant at our collective political peril — because perhaps the most terrifying thing about his presidency is his desire to push for policies that will make most of us poorer, and not incidentally create even more people resentful and angry enough to fall for his racist, misogynist snake-oil cures for our ills.

So two recent articles in The New York Times have grabbed our attention, in that they’re both about issues central to our well-being and relate directly to gibberish the president frequently spouts — a real two-fer, in The Hot Screen’s book!  First, Eduardor Porter’s “Big Profits Drove a Stock Boom. Did the Economy Pay a Price?” hits on a topic near and dear to the president’s heart — the idea that the rising stock market provides infallible proof that all is right with the universe.  Well, it may surprise you to learn that this proof may not be infallible after all!  Porter highlights how the large corporate profits that are helping drive stock prices are accompanied by lower rates of investment by companies.  This lack of investment contradicts mainstream economic theories, which would indicate a ripe environment for such investment given where interest rates (and thus borrowing costs) have been for a good long while.

He zeroes in on one particular theory as to why this disjunction may be occurring — the fact that many major corporations no longer have true competition.  This means that they don’t need to worry so much about investing — why bother improving products when no one’s nipping at your heels to take away market share? — and that they can squeeze both customers and workers as they wish.  (The economics profession, dedicated to obscuring as much as possible in order to maintain its claim as a high-falutin’ field that the hoi-polloi need them to interpret, confusingly refers to these high returns gained through uncompetitive practices as “rents,” rather than a more accurate and helpful term like “margin of rip-off” or “magical profit in defiance of poorly conceived economic theories.”)  Donald Trump can point to the rising stock market as a growing source of wealth for those actually invested in the stock market; but the same factors that make the stock market a great investment mean that the people with lower incomes who could benefit the most don’t have money to invest in the first place, for the very reasons that the stock market is doing so well in the first place.  

The article concludes with the observation that this trend looks likely to continue, although “This is not the kind of economy proposed by classical economic theory.”  Apart from being yet another example of the sort of wizened fatalism that we’ve grown to expect from mainstream news sources (nothing will ever change, even though we’ve just told you about why it really should!), we’re also left with the question of why something as intrinsically obvious as big corporations preferring monopolistic powers over actual competition is somehow in defiance of “classical economic theory.”

The quick answer is that, just as economics has been left out of politics for a whole bunch of bad reasons, politics has in turn been left out of economics.  Big companies end up re-writing the rules of the game, up to and including exerting influence over the government in the form of lobbying dollars and other forms of power, to help preserve and protect the lack of competition that pads their profits.  I feel comfortable making this observation because the topic that Porter touches on — the role of monopolies in the U.S. economy — has been the focus of a growing movement in U.S. economics, perhaps most notably by economists like Barry Lynn and his Open Markets Institute.  Lynn and others have been writing about these ideas, and influencing progressive politicians in what can be seen as a sort of rational, fact-based effort to right the misdirection of the U.S. economy, against the hate-mongering and cronyism that the right would offer instead.  We're hoping to talk more about his ideas soon.

Bookending Porter’s piece on the stock market, “Where Did Your Pay Raise Go? It May Have Become a Bonus” by Patricia Cohen lays out evidence that over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly turned to bonuses rather than pay raises to reward their workers.  The major downside here is that the bonuses have not nearly compensated for the lack of wage increases; in effect, they’ve given businesses the flexibility to reward and retain workers while also allowing them to gradually stop increasing workers’ wages as much as our frenemy, traditional economics, would expect as the labor market tightens.  This trend had already started before the Great Recession, but the economic downturn only reinforced it, as companies learned that they would be more likely to survive by cutting costs in anticipation of an inevitable future slowdown.  In other words, expectations of the next bust in our boom-bust economy seem to have finally hammered home the message to employers that they really can’t afford to pay workers more.  

You can’t read about this and not be struck by the ignorance and opportunism of Donald Trump’s praise for all the businesses giving out one-time bonuses attributable to the Republican tax cut plan.  Forget about the lack of presidential pressure for companies to give their workers permanent raises — crediting businesses for bonuses that excuse them from permanent wage gains is to actively participate in a cycle that’s increasing inequality and ripping off employees.  And when businesses curry favor with this administration by referencing the tax bill as justification for handing out bonuses, you see more than an inkling of how politicians and the ownership class mutually support each other at the expense of the people actually doing America’s work.  

Democrats Go AWOL On Rational Dialogue About Pentagon Budget

At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart points to the recent budget bill to remind us that the Democratic Party as a whole appears to have given up on any critique or meaningful challenge to the ever-bloating Pentagon budget — and by extension, the ever-increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy.  Beinart refutes President Trump’s claims that the defense budget atrophied under President Obama, and reminds us that despite the Pentagon’s failure to audit its own spending — in contravention of laws passed to this effect — experts agree that there are literally tens of billions of dollars that the Pentagon could save by rationalizing various functions.  Other reports have suggested that many more billions of dollars are simply wasted every year — which hasn’t stopped military leaders from claiming that any failure to give the Pentagon as much money as it wants constitutes a threat to national security. 

I can understand why the Democratic leadership would not want to pick a fight with the president and Republicans over the defense budget.  What politician wants to seem weak on defense, which is just another way of looking weak in general?  Conversely, what better way to appear “strong” by larding the Pentagon budget with more dollars than anyone can count?  But by tacitly embracing Trump’s lies that the U.S. military is in a beleaguered state and that the armed forces are the nonpareil symbol of American greatness, the Democrats have ended up bolstering Donald Trump’s claims that he’s the president who’s going to make America great again.

The military budget is no secondary issue.  By dominating discretionary spending, increased dollars to the armed forces squeeze out funds for civilian use — you know, things like actually investing in our country.  Beyond this, treating the defense budget, and by extension, the U.S. military as something sacred and beyond criticism bolsters the tendencies towards militarism and war as a first resort that have done as much as anything to degrade our democracy and our actual security in the world.  From an imperial presidency whose dangers so many are now waking up to, to U.S. wars that have helped destabilize the Middle East, the escalating primacy of violence as how America makes its way in the world has left a dangerous legacy that a true movement for democratic renewal will need to confront and reverse.  There is a deep, subterranean link between Trump and the rise of authoritarian politics on the one hand, and the U.S.’s intervention across vast swathes of the planet on the other — due both to the destabilization this has led to, and due to the links between the impulse to violence and the willingness to embrace authoritarian solutions to public problems.

Part of the irony and agony of this moment is that much of the American public is clearly exhausted by the wars of the last couple decades.  People know in their gut that the people doing the fighting and dying have primarily been from the lower rungs of our society.  They know billions of dollars have been spent for no good reason.  They know that in the case of Iraq, we literally invaded the wrong goddamned country.  Trump understood this public mood better than Hillary Clinton, and so he criticized the Iraq invasion, even though he’d previously supported it.  

But Trump also knows that many Americans are irrationally scared of the world’s perceived dangers, and seems to share their belief that simply throwing money at the military, even as he’d promised not to get us into new wars, would not be perceived as any sort of contradiction.  (Indeed, in light of the lack of actual strategy by either party, the shoveling of money into the military is the whole point.  It is not rational in any way — if anything, it’s more akin to magical thinking, as if we were casting a spell to ward off unspecified demons).  Of course, Trump soon enough revealed himself to be a president actually more likely to get us into war than his average predecessor — not simply on account of his own personal maladies and ignorance, but because he surrounded himself with supposed experts who’ve apparently managed to convince him that a war with North Korea might constitute a rational and defensible act, despite the potential loss of millions of lives and the likely irreversible destruction of U.S. leadership in the world.

But this only renews the urgency of the question — when we are faced with the possibility of wars that would come at unsupportable costs, and when we see the chaos that our recent wars have unleashed, why are we still acting as if the military is the one thing that can reliably keep us safe?  We need look no further than the true existential crisis of our times, climate change, to see the folly of this monomania.  It’s a challenge with no military solution (even though the Pentagon is already looking ahead to the political chaos that will surely result, and seeing still more roles for itself).  The Democrats seem to be committing the same mistakes they made on gun control, embracing a tired fatalism at the exact moment it’s time to question all the rotten assumptions about where we are.

Can We Really Address Gun Mayhem Without Understanding America's Broader Addiction to Fear and Violence?

One of the obvious obstacles to gun control over the last several years, despite a series of mass shootings that could potentially have catalyzed this movement, is the argument that no law, or even handful of laws, will have much overall effect on gun violence.  As I noted last week, many people are beginning to challenge the fatalistic assumptions built into this thinking — since when is doing even a little not better than doing nothing, and wouldn’t even some movement open the way for larger reforms and begin to change the culture around the role of guns in our society?

The necessity of changing our collective cultural perceptions around guns seems undeniable, and new legislation can both embody those perceptions and drive further change.  For instance, laws that require a high degree of responsibility in gun owners not only have the potential to cut down on their use in criminal activities, but would also be a way to encourage people to reflect on and change how they think about guns, such as in the importance accorded to gun ownership.  Restrictions on magazine capacity and a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons could reduce mass shootings, while also reflecting a larger cultural change about the appropriateness of civilians owning weapons of war.

But as awful and important to prevent as they are — both in terms of lives lost and a more generalized terrorization of our populace incompatible with the most basic definition of a free and open society — mass shootings represent a tiny fraction of gun deaths in our country.  As Eric Levitz writes at New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, over-emphasis on mass shootings as the primary gun control issue could well have effects contrary not only to progressive values, but arguably to values dear to any member of a democratic society, regardless of party affiliation.

And a focus on mass shootings only in schools presents a distorted view not only of the problem — if by problem we mean mass death by gun violence — but of what are considered to be legitimate solutions to gun violence of any kind.  Levitz quotes a mother of a teen killed in the Parkland shooting, who essentially puts forward an argument for turning schools into fortresses.  It’s revealing to think about this “school fortress” idea a little more.  After all, making a school into a de facto prison is rational if your sole concern is to stop a mass shooter from ever killing another child.  I would even say that arming teachers is on its surface a rational response to the desire to kill shooters before they can kill our kids.  But apart from the depressing way they assume that there’s either no will or no legal way to prevent potential killers from acquiring weapons of war, such ideas share a common belief that security flows primarily out of a restriction of personal freedom and the literal barrel of a gun.  That such ideas are receiving at least broad public consideration shows the degree to which our country’s notion of security has been broadly poisoned by these basic misconceptions.

After all, it’s not just in our current gun debate that we find ourselves enmeshed in bad assumptions about how violence and restriction of civil rights is necessary to our security.  At New Republic, Jacob Bacharach makes the case that cultural tendencies in this direction are embodied in government policies, which in turn feed certain cultural assumptions about the role of violence and state power in America:

The political and economic choice to allocate so many of our society’s resources to endless, expanding war-making, to armed cops and barbaric prisons, has a deranging influence on our cultural life. Among other things, it makes warfare—a gun culture—quotidian and banal; it makes weapons of war perfectly ordinary tools; it makes TV cops taking body shots at suspects who are, obviously, always guilty, normal; it makes the idea of turning teachers and principals (and custodians! and guidance counselors!) into armed agents of the state, there to protect children against equally armed citizens, a topic for political debate rather than a notion as insane as fake moon landings and a flat Earth. And this, in turn, makes the billions and trillions we spend on warfare, at home and abroad, likewise seem like something other than the craziness that it manifestly is.

To consider the preponderance of gun violence in American society in isolation from the broader questions of how we allocate our collective resources—of how we determine social value—is inherently self-limiting [. . .]  But in the absence of a larger leftist agenda to move guns and war from their central position in our government and political economy, I find it hard to imagine that there can be really fundamental change, and I fear we will continue this slow drift toward more armed guards, more locked doors, more checkpoints, and more professions—educators now, then what: nurses? doctors? transit workers?—simply deputized as armed agents of a violent state whose citizens in turn enact in ever greater numbers the gun-happy antics in which they marinate every moment of their waking lives.

Bacharach is taking an important swing at an issue that’s difficult for many of us to articulate, a  larger cultural and political context that makes straight talk about gun violence feel so essential, but also so often cut off from a larger cultural discussion.  Here's my swing at posing some ancillary question: Why have so many Americans divided the world into perpetrators and the innocent?  Why do so many of us feel powerless and under assault?  And why do so many tacitly accept that violence is the only way to feel secure? 

Headache in Havana

ProPublica recently published an article that seems to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the strange incidents in Cuba that have stressed American relations with that country and resulted in the removal of much of the U.S. diplomatic presence there.  We've previously professed our fascination with the mystery of what seemed to be sonic attacks on American diplomats in Havana.  Since then, the mystery only seems to have deepened, in that further investigations have still not settled on either a cause or a perpetrator.  This despite the fact that the U.S. government has made sophisticated and extensive efforts to get to the bottom of the affair, which at this point has set back Cuban-American relations, emboldened hardliners, and resulted in injuries to almost two dozen Americans. 

The single strangest element is the fact that no one can authoritatively say what actually happened.  Some 22 Americans and 8 Canadians have been diagnosed with symptoms reminiscent of concussions, including headaches, nausea, and hearing loss.  These injuries occurred over several months in various places; victims often reported hearing a high-pitched sounds or noises akin to the chirping of cicadas.  Yet no one can definitively say there's a relation between those reports and what actually caused their injuries.

The incidents have brought the FBI and CIA into conflict: the FBI has ruled out the possibility that the Americans were deliberately targeted, while the CIA sees significance in the fact that the first four Americans affected were agency officers.  And the U.S. foreign service has experienced disgruntlement in its ranks, with criticism leveled at the embassy leadership for not fully appraising diplomats of the extent and severity of the incidents early on.

The occurrences began right after the election of Donald Trump, which would seem to suggest a political motivation to influence the new administration.  And with the Cubans vociferously denying involvement, there’s been suspicion that this was a Russian operation — yet investigations have apparently not found any evidence of suspicious Russian activity or personnel in the vicinity of the incidents (for what it's worth, the fact that the Russians had just successfully meddled in the 2016 presidential election would seem to me to increase the likelihood of their involvement). And on the other end of the spectrum, there has apparently been speculation that some of the incidents may have a psychosomatic angle, although such an interpretation seems not to have been pressed out of concern for angering and insulting State Department staff.

The fact that U.S.-Cuban relations have been seriously harmed by these occurrences means that behind the strangeness lies real menace: that they will be used as an excuse to further downgrade relations with Cuba, and that an actor or actors as yet unknown have managed to subvert American foreign affairs via physical harm to American diplomats.  It’s long past time to solve this mystery.

Shifts in Florida Show That Political Change Is Never Predetermined

I’ve been wanting to write a little something about this article in The New York Times.  It’s a good piece of reporting, but also exemplifies a fatalistic view of American politics that’s become pervasive not only in reporting, but in a lot of mainstream political thinking by people who frankly should know better. 

Titled “A ‘Blue’ Florida?  There Are No Quick Demographic Fixes for Democrats,” it takes a look at the ramifications of a state ballot initiative to re-enfranchise 1.5 million former felons, as well as of the influx of Puerto Rican refugees in the wake of Hurricane Maria.  The article throws cold water on progressive hopes that these new voters — who tend to vote for Democrats — will actually make much of a difference in the state’s politics.  To back this up, it points to low turnout rates among the former group, and the fact that the split between Democratic and Republican voters in the latter is not so large.  It also notes countervailing demographic changes, including the continued influx of conservative-leaning retirees into the Sunshine State.

On the one hand, the reminder that the Democrats can’t rely on demographics alone is a salutary one — who among us does not feel annoyed by all those prognostications that the Democrats need only sit back and wait for favorable population shifts to deliver them a permanent majority from sea to shining sea?  Particularly when some Democrats took these trends as an excuse not to take more seriously the economic and cultural challenges that have delivered unto us the surprising yet wholly predictable presidency of Donald J. Trump?

Yet a more sobering analysis based on raw numbers and extrapolations from past trends is not so useful if too many progressives take it as predetermined fate rather than important information that might drive action to better their chances of success.  For instance, are we to really believe that organizers in Florida have made such a massive and ground-breaking effort to re-enfranchise felons without any thought to trying to encourage those citizens to use their regained votes?  Likewise, can we really anticipate that Puerto Ricans forced to flee their homeland — in part because of the incompetence of our president — will vote in the same numbers and for the same parties as in past elections, or that no one will bother to rally and organize them?  We should beware a mindset — including in ourselves — that tells us that change is so very difficult, that ignores the benefits of organization and enthusiasm.

And in the wake of the mass shooting at a Parkland high school, we see the outlines of how quickly political shifts can happen, particularly when they’re a catalyzing of forces that have long been building up without being effectively channeled.  We’re also reminded how significant political change often doesn’t come from a single source, but through the convergence of overlapping factors.  In this case, Florida suddenly seems like it could take a much more progressive turn because demographic changes, outrage over gun violence, and a vociferous opposition to President Trump may well synergize into outcomes that a more static view of politics would not have anticipated.  It’s a wake-up call that there’s always a point to fighting for change we believe in, even when the odds seem stacked against us: we can never really anticipate when the tide will turn, and citizens formerly on the sidelines rally en masse to a common cause.

Breaking Free of the Violent World Gun Nuts Have Built Around Us

Everything can seem hopeless until suddenly it doesn’t — some form of this thought has been bouncing around in my head since the killing of 17 souls at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week.  The hope, to our country’s credit, is coming from surviving students, who, in the words of one of them, are calling "bullshit” on a state of affairs in which American students are called upon to die by gunfire in escalating numbers so that politicians never have to face the unnerving prospect of admitting they’re wrong and turning against reliable campaign donors like the National Rifle Association and other elements of the gun lobby.  Their willingness to speak out is shaming a nation, both progressives who have not pressed nearly hard enough on this issue in the face of what seemed like daunting odds, and conservatives, who may finally be waking up to the fact that the price of gun rights dogma may be their own children in the next school shooting.

I can say that the sheer scale of school shootings — 290 since 2013 alone — is a stain on our country’s conscience, but this has been said again and again with no action.  Reform founders on the illogic spewed by pro-gun forces, who insist that no particular law could stop any particular shooting.  Many people are beginning to push back on this obscuring argument, whose logic would suggest that passing any law ever on any topic is hopeless since it will not accomplish 100% of what it sets out to achieve.  

The evidence from states like Connecticut that have passed gun restrictions, as well as the sharp increase in mass shootings since the ban on semiautomatic weapons expired in 2004, suggests why gun rights advocates are so opposed to any legislation.  Despite their bad faith arguments, it turns out that even quite limited gun restrictions work in reducing slaughter in our schools and other public places.  And this evidence creates a powerful logic of its own — if a few laws can have an effect, then it follows that more, stronger laws would have an even greater beneficial effect.  And as some are arguing, this will help change the larger culture around gun violence.  This is the truth that the gun rights folks resist, and this is the truth that shows that they own the slaughter that we see in our schools and elsewhere.  They would rather people have an unfettered right to own guns than protect their own children’s safety, let alone the safety of their fellow citizens.

A toxic yet potent combination of commercial interests, racism, paranoia, feelings of powerlessness, and fantasies of control seem to drive the NRA and its ilk.  To a great extent, we are living in the world that they have fought tooth and nail to bring into being over the past few decades, ratified by the decisions of an extremely conservative Supreme Court that sided with their maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment.  And as Kurt Andersen points out in his provocative Fantasyland, the complete victory that the gun rights movement achieved hasn't even been enough for them.  They began to propagate imagined threats to gun ownership, such as the idea that the Obama administration planned to confiscate firearms — a lie that, not coincidentally, escalated firearms purchases by people worried about this impending government crackdown.  And even after President Trump’s election, NRA head Wayne LaPierre warned attendees at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference that the U.S faces renewed threats from violent leftist forces, against which fantasized threat firearms are the obvious answer.

So we are living in their preferred world — and yet nearly all of us are feeling less secure for it.  What their extremism has wrought is a land of mass shootings that are, for all practical purposes, the functional equivalent of terrorism; though nearly all the shootings lack a distinct political purpose, they are in fact having the effect of increasingly terrorizing our nation.  Every time a shooting occurs, setting a new record for number of citizens slaughtered, it raises the anxiety level of all of us a little more.  In no population is this terrorizing function more obvious than in schoolchildren, who have now collectively been subjected to active shooter drills for going on two decades — drills that, on their own, instill fear in those that a healthier society would seek to nurture and soothe. 

It’s ironic, and more than a little suspect, that gun rights advocates, a purported group of libertarian-minded citizens, have done arguably more than any other group to set the stage for a massive enhancement in the power of the state over its citizens.  How else to describe the regime they’ve forced us to implement, in which students are as a matter of course made to play-act that they are in fear for their lives, and to accept the presence of metal detectors in their schools, and to accept the presence of armed security guards in their halls?  By the NRA’s logic of unfettered access to weapons of war for all comers, further turning not only our schools, but all public places, into fortresses of unfreedom is the price we all must pay when they impose their fantasies of individual firepower on the rest of us.

Given that so many gun rights extremists argue that guns give citizens the ability to overthrow a tyrannical government if push comes to shove, I think it’s a legitimate question whether our current bloody state of affairs is not such an unintended consequence of their logic.  After all, what do we make of a government that can’t protect its own citizens — its own children?!  Perhaps it deserves to be overthrown after all!  It’s also notable that a traditional definition of the state is that it’s an entity with a monopoly on the use of violence in society; from this perspective, the assertion that all we millions of citizens have our own right to perpetrate violence challenges this monopoly — it is, in effect, a subtle attack on collective, democratic action as embodied in our elected government, in favor of a brutish vision of every citizen for himself, defending his individual turf by force of arms rather than by relying on the power of laws and duly-appointed officials (aka the legal system) charged with enforcing them.

But the Florida students currently raising holy hell are also calling bullshit on this effort to delegitimize our ability to act collectively and democratically.  By reminding us that the American people are never truly stuck so long as we can speak out, organize, and vote, and that laws are how we express our collective will, they’re helping shake us out of our collective, fatalistic torpor.  We will vote out the bastards who take money from the NRA.  We will vote in people who will work to end this senseless killing.

Embrace of Potential Mass Death Abroad to Protect Americans Is Poisoning U.S. Alliance With South Korea

Paying attention to what’s going on between the United States and North and South Korea is well worth the effort, even at this point of news supersaturation.  It’s not just the high stakes of nuclear confrontation that show in the starkest way possible the incompetence and danger of Donald Trump’s presidency; what’s happening on the Korean Peninsula also reveals broader themes of American blindness to the world that go well beyond this particular misfit administration.

Perhaps surprisingly to many Americans, given the rhetoric of war that we’ve heard so recently from Trump administration officials, the Olympics in Pyeongchang have been accompanied by signs of a diplomatic thaw between the two Koreas.  The rhetoric from the White House has been dismissive of this development, but the administration's attitude may actually reveal the degree to which the United States has lost its way in its relationship with both countries.  In his most recent piece, New Republic columnist Jeet Heer brings us up to speed on some realities that Washington would rather the American people not know.

Arguing that the United States itself has enabled the recent “North Korean charm offensive” — which includes Kim Jong Un’s sister attending the Olympic games and the dictator himself offering to hold a summit with South Korea’s president — Heer reviews Trump administration actions that have served to increasingly divide the U.S. and one of its closest allies.  He points in particular to Trump’s belligerent “fire and fury” language towards North Korea, as well as reports that his administration is seriously considering a limited first-strike against North Korea.  This "tough" rhetoric, whatever its effects on North Korea turn out to be, seems to have had a decisive impact on South Korea: its leadership has taken it seriously enough to explore an improvement of relations with the North.  In a nutshell, the U.S.’s apparent willingness to go to war, at the possible cost of literally millions of South Korean lives, has suggested to the South Koreans that this may not be the sort of alliance that actually keeps their country safe.  

The Trump administration notion that the situation on the Korean Peninsula is all about U.S. security first and foremost was perhaps best encapsulated by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who last month said that “this administration is prepared to do what it takes to ensure that people in Los Angeles and Denver and New York aren’t held at risk from Kim Jong-un having a nuclear weapon.”  As Heer notes, “His words are consistent not just with the madman theory, but Trump’s broader America First agenda.  Pompeo’s statement implies a belief that American lives are so valuable that any threat to them from a foreign power, however remote, is worth a war that would unquestionably cause mass death in Seoul.”  Heer also references a report from Vox, in which a variety of experts assert that a war on the Korean Peninsula might include casualties in the millions.

It seems like it should be unnecessary to point this out, but a declared U.S. policy that accepts the death of millions of civilians — and not just any old civilians, but civilians of an ally — as the outcome of a successful foreign policy is on its face a outright catastrophic moral and political failure.  There is no scenario in which U.S. actions that resulted in the deaths of millions would not permanently destroy our country’s reputation in the world; putting it in terms that these Dr. Strangelovian strategists claim to understand, this would catastrophically undermine U.S. national security, however you wanted to define that term.

In an accompanying tweet, Heer makes the case that not just conservatives, but Americans from across the political spectrum, have been unable to see how such thinking would alienate the South Koreans because of a basic inability to imagine matters from the South Korean perspective; as evidence, he points to various commentary asserting that the South Koreans are simply being duped by North Korea's overtures.  Heer’s retort is that no people understand the threat of North Korea better than South Koreans, and so the openness to better relations with such a brutal and feared regime should be seen in the light of serious U.S. diplomatic failures. 

What really unnerves me about Heer’s point regarding U.S. willingness to accept mass death as long as it happens to non-Americans is that this is hardly a new or unfamiliar mindset.  In fact, if so many Americans seem not to realize the horror of Trump administration policy, not to mention the counterproductive nature of such slaughter, it’s likely because such thinking has been at the heart of the war on terror that’s now fast approaching its second decade.  The idea that the U.S. is always justified in killing people in other countries so long as it can be justified as saving American lives has arguably been THE central tenet of this catastrophic endeavor.  It’s a notion that’s been tacitly accepted across the political spectrum, despite its patent immorality and quite demonstrable counter-productiveness to actual long-term American security.  To see it pop up in the Korean context is illuminating, as it shows how this fundamentally immoral notion becomes demonstrably insane when applied to an actual ally.  It should be obvious that a U.S. policy that results in the deaths of millions of civilians of a friendly nation could in no way be considered a success for America; yet this is the logic to which all Americans are invited to subscribe.

In the context of South Korea, such a policy, if carried out, would embrace such a twisted moral calculus as to permanently change what it means to be an American, re-defining our populace as a nation of sociopaths, without regard for any life beyond our own.  Yet it’s chilling to realize that we’ve already applied this logic for years with nary a public discussion, counting the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan as acceptable “collateral damage” so long as the government could point to American lives saved.  Perhaps now that this logic has officially been taken to its most absurd extreme — contemplating the deaths of millions of South Koreans to save millions of Americans — people will begin to open their eyes to its indefensibility.  The South Koreans, at least, have awakened to this insanity.

I’ll end with this theoretical question: if North Korea’s antagonism to the U.S comes from our alliance with South Korea, but South Korea manages a true reconciliation with the North, so that it no longer fears war, what exactly would be the U.S. involvement at that point?  There is an underlying idea that North Korea is simply crazy, an abstract evil, but this is obviously not the case, but simply rhetoric from the American side.  If the North and South no longer contemplated war with each other, would the United States continue to act as if North Korea were an existential threat to this country, or would we actually stand down?  I sometimes get the sense that the Trump administration feels it needs North Korea as a bogeyman to distract and scare the American people.  I’ve thought before about how often foreign policy seems to just be domestic politics by other means, and North Korea often feels like a clear demonstration of this phenomenon: a way to manipulate and rouse one party’s base, a point only accentuated by the idea that even the most horrific of wars would not spill a drop of American blood, even at the sacrifice of untold numbers of foreign souls.

Porter Scandal Reminds Us That the Moral Bankruptcy of this White House is Bottomless

I take it as a sign of hope that sharp reporting and incisive commentary have been the hallmark of the Rob Porter scandal, even as this incident confirms — as if we needed further confirmation — our worst fears about the morally compromised nature of this White House.  Many in the media are still able to recognize a real scandal when they see one, and the outrage expressed by so many other observers shows that we’re not yet numbed to this American nightmare, even as each week brings new revelations and details about the still-to-be-numbered circles of hell through which the body politic is forced to descend: our own modern-day Winthropian harrowing.

As White House staff secretary, Porter was in charge of passing on state documents to President Trump; but his role was larger than even this important one, as he also performed functions such as assisting in drafting the president’s State of the Union speech.  In other words, he was a man privy to the deepest secrets of our country, and who clearly had the president’s trust.  Credible accusations of his abusive behavior by multiple women, including two ex-wives, meant that he was not able to gain a permanent security clearance, but only held a temporary one for the entire time he performed this highly sensitive job.  One major concern about someone with such personal vulnerabilities is that he could be blackmailed by someone using this compromising information; and this is the reason the FBI ultimately indicated it could not give him a permanent clearance.

The irony is rich here, as Donald Trump’s campaign was likely won on its insistence that Hillary Clinton did not protect national secrets when she used a private server for her emails.  But because everything about the Age of Trump is overdetermined and multi-layered, Porter’s story also intersects with another great theme of our time, the misogyny embodied by the Trump campaign and the #MeToo backlash.  As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg suggests, Porter’s identity as an abuser ensured that he would be welcome at this White House, even if his background would have disqualified him from service in any previous one:

It’s fair to think that Trump sets the bar for what’s considered acceptable in this White House.  Porter’s father, Roger Porter, a Harvard professor who worked for presidents including Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, once wrote of how presidents create administrative cultures: “Scholars of management today write much about the ‘tone at the top.’  Like all presidents, Gerald Ford established a tone that permeated the executive branch.”  Trump, evidently, established one as well.

A telling example of this trickle-down effect can be found in how Porter defended himself from the allegations to other members of the White House.  According to the New York Times, Porter told White House counsel Donald McGahn "about the possible allegations because he was concerned that what he characterized as false charges from aggrieved women who were out to destroy him could derail his F.B.I. background check, according to one of the two people briefed on the matter.”  Could there be a more Trump-favor-currying defense than to suggest that the charges were lies from women "out to destroy him"?  As with Trump's dismissal of the allegations against himself and others, there is an underlying theme of women being vengeful and mendacious for no reason at all but simply out of inherent batshit craziness.  

Vox writer Jane Coaston says that Trump’s own legacy of abusing women set the dynamics not only for the White House’s approach to Porter, but also for its response to the various allegations against White House officials and those it has supported, from Steve Bannon and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to failed GOP Senate candidate and alleged pedophile Roy Moore:

For the White House, the politics are simple: Protect Trump.  Because Trump himself is accused of assaulting dozens of women, they’ve had to lower the bar for male behavior so that even he can meet it.  Any allegation of misconduct made against anyone close to Trump, then, must be dismissed as if it were being made against Trump himself.

This observation captures, simply and directly, the fundamental reason that this White House will ever and always be on the side of abusers of women: to even acknowledge that such abusers exist is to open the door to admitting that Donald Trump could be an abuser himself.  And the deeper source for this logical endpoint is Donald Trump's immoral character, as his abuse of women in the past stems from a place of profound disrespect and arguably hatred for womankind.

* * *

Yet the Rob Porter scandal has exposed one other troubling fact about this administration that is not directly connected to its contempt for women and frat house-like embrace of bros who abuse.  This looks like it may be the incident that finally ends General John Kelly’s position as White House Chief of Staff, as it appears that he covered and advocated for Porter despite knowledge of his abusive past; as such, it’s a good time to remind ourselves of the perniciousness of Donald Trump having brought so many generals into top administration positions in the first place.  Of the three major appointments — Kelly, General James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and General H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor — it's Kelly who has most fully demonstrated the reality of the dangers of bringing military men into civilian roles.

Who can forget those heady early days of Kelly’s tenure, when there was a widespread consensus, across both elected officials and the media, that his appointment was a good thing, since he would bring order to the chaos of the White House?  But very soon, Kelly began to reveal his true character, as a sympathizer and accomplice to Donald Trump’s worst qualities.  Kelly slandered a sitting member of Congress, who just happened to be African-American, and never apologized to her even after the actual facts were made known; he made disturbing statements about American service members being superior to civilians; he recently called DACA recipients too “scared” and “lazy” to seek extensions of their status.  And this is just a small sampling of his misdeeds.

But my point is not simply that John Kelly has turned out to be a morally compromised man.  It’s that both Kelly and the Trump White House sought to employ his military service as proof of his unimpeachable rectitude and apolitical loyalty to the United States over partisanship.  This, we can clearly see, was not only a scam, but a deeply chilling and dangerous one.  Poll after poll shows the U.S. military to be one of the most admired institutions in the United States; I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that it’s become identified with competence, teamwork, and a sort of generic patriotism beyond party or faction (whether or not these are valid assessments of the military is another question).  As Kelly repeatedly acted and spoke in ways that contradicted his technocratic role, criticism of the man was absorbed by the reserves of goodwill based on his military service.  But as time went on, this goodwill began to be depleted, so that at this point it is undeniable that he shares many of the same backwards beliefs as his unfit boss, so that he is no longer credibly seen as some sort of neutral actor.

But to call out Kelly’s bad faith is not enough; we also need to recognize the darker political move in essentially using the goodwill citizens associate with the U.S. military to help advance a host of right-wing maneuvers, from demonizing immigrants to denigrating women.  If nothing else, Kelly’s tenure has demonstrated that concerns about such a move are not at all abstract.  Kelly’s military service was indeed employed in defense of a right-wing agenda, a fact reinforced by solid evidence at this point that Kelly shares a right-wing belief system.  Kelly abused his own service for partisan ends, but the broader offense is a White House that enabled this situation in the first place.

Did NRA Shoot Itself in the Foot By Funneling Russian Funds to Trump Campaign?

As Donald Trump escalates his war against the executive branch he was elected to lead, it’s become clear that his desperate efforts to avoid accountability for his campaign’s collusion with the Russian government have only made it this far because of the Republican Party’s willingness to protect him.  Many commentators argue that the GOP is doing this out of the most basic of political calculations — Donald Trump will sign legislation that Congress wants, and damage to the president will also damage the party.  The Hot Screen has tended to emphasize that the GOP interest goes beyond such a simple calculation, and that the party has long been sliding towards the authoritarian, anti-democratic positioning that the president has fully embraced: from this point of view, authoritarianism is necessity for the president, destiny for the Republican Party.

But recent reports that Russian interests may have funneled millions of dollars to the National Rifle Association’s effort to campaign for Donald Trump raise the possibility that the GOP’s assistance in squashing the Russia investigation may be more directly self-serving than protecting a president who embodies strongman tendencies with which they agree.  A few words about the NRA-Russia connection first, though: according to the McClatchy news service article linked to above, “The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency.”  The NRA apparently spent $30 million to support Trump in 2016, which is three times as much as the organization spent supporting Mitt Romney is 2012.  Moreover, the NRA says it spent $55 million on the 2016 elections — but there are reports that this spending may have been closer to $70 million. It’s also important to note that, as Talking Points Memo outlines, ties between the NRA and Russian interests go back years, beyond these recent financial allegations. 

If this funding story turns out to be true, the narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 election immediately broadens from whether the Trump campaign received support, to whether the GOP as a whole was assisted by Russian intervention.  Even if party leaders merely suspect this to be the case, the idea that Republican senators and representatives may have benefitted from Russian cash is a storyline that should rightly terrify them, and that they’d seek to discredit by smearing or shutting down the more-prominent Mueller investigation.

This Vox article also notes the possibility that the NRA may not have been the only conservative organization to have been infiltrated by Russian interests.  I would note, though, that “infiltration” is arguably not the proper way to look at the relationship between an organization like the NRA and Russian agents.  Not just guns rights advocates, but conservative religious figures and white nationalists, look to Russia and see not an authoritarian monstrosity, but a model of government, pseudo-Christianity, and values worthy of emulation and respect.  I suspect the bigger, more unsettling story is less about innocent groups being co-opted or suborned, but about such groups forming de facto alliances with right-wing organizations abroad.

We still don’t have a lot of information about the full extent of the NRA funding allegations — yet there is already solid reporting in the public record of ties between the NRA and unseemly Russian figures with links both to organized crime and the Kremlin.  It is not too soon to start publicizing these facts: seldom has there been an organization so vicious, repellent, and deserving of being called out for its connections to Russian authoritarians who have no love for our country.  If the NRA has been stupid enough to cultivate ties with such people, it should be made to pay the price in reputation, influence, and political power.

White Collar Unionizing on the Rise While Blue Collar Organizing Founders

To continue the union theme of my previous post, I wanted to talk a little about this fascinating piece from last month’s Atlantic magazine.  Titled “Organized Labor’s Growing Class Divide,” it tells a fraught story that in some ways offers some strains of hope.  Although unionization across the U.S. economy has plummeted over the past 40 years, particularly in the private sector, white-collar workers are currently forming unions in numbers that defy the overall decline in labor organizing.  Some 90,000 people in “professional and technical occupations” joined unions last year, and the number of workers in unions in "law, arts, design, entertainment, sports and media" increased from 4% in 2010 to 7% in 2017.

A remarkable, if explicable, development that this piece highlights is the growing divide in the success of unionizing in the above-referenced areas when compared to industries we more commonly associate with union efforts, such as manufacturing.  In an ironic twist of history, it turns out that the very inequalities that are tearing at the fabric of our country are also creating a divide in labor organizing.  The article notes that while lesser-skilled workers in places like auto plants are less able to find other jobs if their company (illegally) punishes them for organizing efforts, workers in white collar industries have higher confidence that they’ll be able to find another job elsewhere.  Moreover, a higher proportion of white collar workers organizing these days are younger and so less likely to have families that they need to support, and that might limit their ability and willingness to gamble with their job prospects.  It also makes the basic point that white collar work is generally less physically demanding, and so workers literally have more energy outside work to do union organizing.

The article also points out structural changes in the economy, particularly since the Great Recession, that are feeding this disparity: out of around 12 million jobs created, more than two-thirds went to workers with a B.A., so that “[b]lue-collar workers [. . . ] are competing for a smaller and smaller share of jobs in the economy, and thus may feel less willing to commit to labor drives.”

I’m obviously pro-union, but the larger principle I’m arguing for goes beyond the elemental structure of labor power embodied by unions.  The power balance between an employer and employee will always be skewed to the employer; we can either embrace this fact with the free market fundamentalists, and accept the downward spiral in wages and economic success that results, or we can choose to see that employment is a basic human right, that economic power is political power, and that the solution to this imbalance is for the many who are employed to band together to get a fair shake out of the few who employ them.  And if that weren't enough, the rise of Trump and the authoritarian right can be seen as a direct result of a steady diminishment of American prosperity that has been abetted by the de-unionization of the American workforce (as I argued in my last piece). 

My utopian hope is that the principles of solidarity and fairness that drive white collar workers to form and join unions will also lead them to reach across the economic divide and support similar efforts by blue-collar workers.  Self-interest should also be a motivation: these are not competitors for their jobs, but fellow citizens who, at the most basic level, will be more powerful political allies against an oligarchic mindset that has conquered the Republican Party and largely neutralized the labor traditions of the Democrats.  You can't make political change if you don't make alliances based on common interests; wanting sound employment at fair pay is one of the commonest.