Are Democrats Ready to Give Workers a Real Say in the Economy?

Eric Levitz at New York Magazine has a piece out about an intriguing policy proposal for all congressional Democrats to embrace in the midterm elections: a law that would require all large companies in the United States to each have a third of their boards of directors elected by their workers.  This arrangement, called co-determination, is widely used in Western Europe, and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin has put forward a bill to implement it in the United States.

Levitz folds his proposal into a larger argument: that ideas around larger government involvement in the economy have found a receptive audience among both Democrats and Republicans, and that an idea previously seen as of the left might not be perceived by the public as such.  His description of how the debate over co-determination might play out suggests why it might scramble ideological categories.  Republicans would inevitably be put in the position of arguing that working people aren’t qualified to help run a company, a bad spot for any political party to be in, and forcing the GOP to side with bosses over the working class.  This is not a good look for a party that has long fought to persuade voters that it’s not the defender of plutocrats.

But co-determination also scrambles ideological categories for two particular reasons.  First, it cuts the political conflict more clearly into an axis of the 99% versus the 1%, rather than left versus right.  Second, when viewed as a left-wing policy, it’s effective because it provides clarity that liberals stand for enhancing the political and economic power of those who work against those who profit off their work.

Co-determination also seems like a strong palliative to the broad perception among working class people that too much of our economic direction has been ceded to highly educated, supposedly non-ideological experts who it is clear actually have their own biases about the nature of the economy.  This is not to say that only working class people would be represented on the boards of directors as the “workers” contingent, but it would open up a whole new perspective on whose opinions should be considered at both the level of the company and of the economy as a whole.

Levitz also suggests that the default GOP argument that particular economic policies should be opposed because they primarily or disproportionately benefit minorities would be ineffective here, since co-determination would apply across all large companies and not have any discernible racial angle.  I feel less sanguine about Republicans’ capacity to resist racializing even a broad-based policy like this.  At a minimum, though, I think there’s no overestimating the hysteria of GOP politicians’ response were the Democrats to advocate for co-determination on a mass scale.  Their billionaire and millionaire donor base would open the taps as never before to defeat such a fundamental pro-worker change to the economy.  It is also quite possible that such opposition to a policy that would benefit millions of Republican voters would create explosive rifts in the GOP.

But I fear that the very reasons that would drive Republican officialdom to call out such a Democratic policy as the communistic-socialistic end of America as we know it are the same reasons the Democrats will not adopt co-determination as a broad, unifying proposal for the midterms.  Too many Democrats not only don’t want to piss off their own wealthy donors, but also are believers in an economy that puts employers over employees and capital over labor.  But even if we’re not ready for this to be the decisive issue for 2018, it’s not too soon for progressives to push it in primaries against their more centrist opponents, and to cudgel their Republican opponents with it in the general election.

Make Love, Not Space War

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Donald Trump, the most belligerent of presidents, who sees every issue as a fight, from trade tariffs to a war on immigrants, eventually came to project his aggression onto the biggest canvas of all: outer space.  From here on out, space will be known not as the final frontier, but as the ultimate sinkhole for Pentagon dollars, a vastness not to be explored so much as made to reflect worst of our president’s, and so humanity’s, impulses in the direction of dominance and destruction.  The idea that Russian and Chinese militarization of space should be matched by the U.S. jumping on the bandwagon, rather than inspire efforts to head off a costly arms race that serves the people of no nation, seems to go unquestioned.  

The problem is not a Space Force per se, or even Donald Trump's enthusiasm for a new military branch, but the general idea of militarizing space.  We can only hope that the ludicrousness of the Space Force nomenclature will focus public attention on this larger travesty of the Pentagon finding our planet insufficient for its perpetual war-making, and now looks to the stars, or at least beyond the atmosphere, for fresh pastures.

It’s telling that the official announcement of a plan to create a Space Force is more outlandish than a related piece of out-of-left field space news: that Patrick Stewart will be reprising his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in a new Star Trek spinoff, an announcement that appears to have caught even Stewart off guard ("Set your phasers to stunned," as one CNN writer accurately observed).  One can only wish that Donald Trump had watched a lot more Star Trek, and had spent a lot less time playing the part of the blustering tycoon, so that his ideas of space were more informed by the optimism of that show and less by the dark needs of his mangled psyche.

Canny observers are asking what business interests, including those who have contributed to Trump and the GOP, stand to benefit from the creation of a Space Force and militarization of space.  But even as those questions are run down, the Trump 2020 campaign itself is already working to make money off the proposed new entity, with a plan to sell Space Force-themed merchandise, and an ongoing solicitation to Trump supporters to vote on the Space Force logo of their choice.  It’s not clear whether this logo vote would also result in an insignia for the actual Space Force, in which case we would have the sorry phenomenon of only Trump supporters being allowed input regarding a public entity, and raising the possibility that the eventual winner will manage to incorporate references to “Crooked Hillary,” Benghazi, and the fine Trump line of luxury hotels. 

Politics Is an Art, Not a Science

Frank Bruni’s latest New York Times column makes a case for optimism in the Democrats’ quest to re-take the Senate.  In surveying their long but improving odds, he indirectly raises an issue with contemporary political prognostication that has received insufficient attention.  Over the last few decades, and certainly over the last ten years or so, as American politics have become more polarized and close or funky outcomes more normal (e.g., two presidential elections out of the last five in which the popular vote winner did not win the presidency), coverage of politics has been subjected to increasing levels of professional, political science-type expertise that has made polling and other expert research a larger and more familiar part of the public discussion.  As a former poli sci student myself, this development in some ways deeply pleasing — welcome to my world, America! — but unfortunately all this professionalism has obscured the fact that political science is not actually science with verifiable theories and predictable outcomes.  Exhibit A is election night of November 2016, when we witnessed the upset of the century in terms of polls and the expectations set by the common wisdom.

Of course politics can be measured and surveyed to greater or lesser degrees.  The problem, though, is not just that there is a general tendency to forget the limitations of this approach, but that we might allow this forgetting to in turn blind us to the possibilities of politics, and to turn the prognostications into self-fulfilling prophecies.  Some of the dangers along these lines can be seen in discussions around not only the fate of the Senate, but around the Democrats’ possibility of taking back the House of Representatives.  The generic ballot polls asking people to choose between Democrats and Republicans has narrowed significantly since blowout numbers earlier in the year, yet any on-the-ground assessment shows massive and arguably growing Democratic enthusiasm to support their candidates, kick the GOP’s racist ass, and get out the vote in a highly fire and fury manner.

Bruni’s reference to trends being in favor of the Democrats gets at a particular limitation of an overly analytical political model.  It is simply part of reality that political opinions can move and that change can happen; too obsessive a focus on the state of play each minute of each day can systematically blind us to these basic facts, which are of course also necessary aspects for democratic politics.  It may be that the political polarization that helped usher in this deep-focus political coverage also carried with it a bias against seeing the possibility of change in such an environment.

For the sake of our democracy, it's critical that the Democrats win back both the House and the Senate, but it is as important that they run on a progressive, pro-democracy platform that signals a clear repudiation of Trump’s efforts to subvert our system of government and run working Americans into the ground.  The immediate battle is Election Day 2018, but the larger fight will continue well after that: to reform U.S. politics and the economy so that our nation cultivates and empowers citizens who are dedicated to our commonwealth, and no longer mass produces marks for whatever Trump 2.0 the GOP might try to inflict on us next.  We need to make profound change that can’t just be measured in poll results and survey responses.

Time to Say Bye to Stock Buybacks, Part 2 (aka the Long Goodbuyback)

Even readers with Memento-like short-term memory problems (no judgment!) will recall The Hot Screen going googly-eyed a few days ago over a recent report by the Roosevelt Institute that zeroes in on the economic harm inflicted by the widespread practice of stock buybacks.  We’re not the only ones flabbergasted by this research: at The New Republic, Alex Shephard ties the practice to Apple’s much-publicized crossing of the $1 trillion market capitalization threshold last week.  Shephard states that, “Apple’s recent success on Wall Street isn’t due to its technological innovations or its sleek products.  Instead, its stock has been juiced by a record-breaking number of buybacks.”  Zeroing in on Apple is instructive, as the numbers are mind-boggling: it plans $100 billion in buybacks in 2018, and its $285 billion in cash means it can potentially buy back even more.

However, Shephard’s critique stumbles when he asserts that the situation is as straightforward as Apple’s buybacks being used to compensate for declining profit margins, and leading to a lack of investment in the company.  While for most companies this critique of buybacks is on solid ground, Apple presents a rarer case: a company that, whether or not it is suffering from declining profit margins, is nonetheless churning out massive and increasing levels of profit based on its current business practices, including what it views as adequate and acceptable levels of investment.  Apple thus also highlights a central pro-buyback argument: that as a successful business that has more money than it knows what to do with, Apple is at least rewarding its shareholders using money that it has earned, money moreover earned based on those shareholders' existing investments in the company.

If the case against buybacks is to take hold, it needs to account for companies like Apple that can plausibly say that because they are investing in themselves sufficiently, they are entitled to spend their remaining profits as they see fit.  After all, it is extremely difficult to see Congress passing any laws mandating that companies spend a certain percentage of their profits on investment, hiring, or pay increases.  As I noted before, the question of limiting or eliminating buybacks is closely linked to the question of raising taxes on corporations: if they are making so much money that they don’t know what to do with it, then they are making a strong case that their taxes are too low, particularly in the context of starved public services, crumbling infrastructure, and ballooning deficits due to the Trump tax cuts.

However, Apple raises a central assertion that opponents of ending buybacks, and supporters of increased taxes on corporations, need to be able to make: that by taxing a company’s profits, the government will make efficient use of the revenues it brings in.  Apple and other corporations with massive profits provide an opportunity to revisit and renew a fundamental argument for taxes and government spending: that we as a nation need to spend money on collective goals not provided by the market.  Defenders of buybacks would argue that only individual companies can be relied on to most efficiently spend their own money, even if that’s for stock buybacks; but buybacks push this argument to the point of least persuasiveness when placed against the very real public good that buyback money would do in a variety of public contexts, from health care to education.  Buybacks can even make conservative arguments against the inefficiency of government spending versus the private sector look laughable: what’s more inefficient, after all, than simply pumping up your share price?  

Two final, semi-related points about buybacks.  First, proponents say that they’re a fair reward for stockholders, but stockholders are already rewarded when their investment is successful and the stock price goes up; there is a subtle but pernicious suggestion that they wouldn’t be making money if not for buybacks, which is just silly.  Second, investors who don't worry about a company not maximizing its money on internal investment and development are investors who have lost sight of the idea that a company needs to build long-term value.  There is little doubt that buybacks now means less returns in the future, making them effectively a short-sighted investment that drags down overall economic performance in the bargain.

Focusing on Apple is illuminating not only in what it says about buybacks, but about the probable difficulties in rolling them back.  Many people will feel like they’re losing money if buybacks go away, and the arguments that the overall economic health of the country will be helped need to be air-tight and persuasive.

To Negotiate Demographic Change, Americans Need to Talk More. A Lot More.

If there has ever been a single statistic that made me despair of the fate of the human race, it's the finding in recent surveys that white Americans believe there is greater prejudice against whites in the United States than against African-Americans.  I suspect that some of my initial shock at this finding will linger forever; that it will always feel like the worst statistic in the history of the world, suggesting a socio-political catastrophe of Biblical proportions: of history flowing backwards, of victors perceiving themselves as victims and the victims as oppressors, of delusion overcoming reason, of fiction beating out fact.  It is also profoundly, darkly funny, in that the denial of the relative extent of white prejudice towards African-Americans in itself might be viewed as validating and verifying that very prejudice.  It is delusion on a society-wide scale, a virtual conspiracy of self-pity and paranoia.  In short, it is shocking to me in the way that the election of Donald Trump was shocking, betraying a sense of historical progress and shattering a belief that America has moved beyond its darkest impulses (though of course it bears some connection to his election).

Luckily, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists are made of sterner stuff than myself, able to bear the troubling nature of their own findings and to press on with their research.  Studies like the one that sent me reeling provide invaluable evidence of 21st century racial dynamics that are profoundly shaping our society and our politics; a future in which white Americans will no longer be a majority in this country.  The election of Donald Trump and the rise of a Republican politics of white supremacy embodies the dark path the U.S. can go down as a response to this change.

As depressing as attitudes like the one I started with can be, and even as I semi-joke about my own weak-kneed inability to face a reality of racism and denialism, there is in fact no way for this country to move forward in the coming decades if we do not collectively acknowledge our demographic changes and the fears they are provoking.  In the first place, the demographic transformation of America is something that currently exists in a sort of twilight consciousness: deeply felt by millions of Americans, yet at the same time not explicitly discussed nearly enough in proportion to the unease it is causing.  Donald Trump’s demonization of Latino immigrants is the single most dramatic example of this dynamic.  By primarily attacking undocumented immigrants, he channels the fears of his white base about larger demographic change: after all, it is not undocumented immigrants but documented immigrants who over the years have most seriously shifted the ethnic make-up of our country.  The president attacks the idea of America changing without having to say his beef is with non-white immigrants and new Americans, which would be more explicitly racist.

As a country, the United States has short-circuited any discussion of our changing demographics, moving swiftly from an era when we might have seen general discussions about this fact straight to a narrative driven by extremism, scapegoating, and white fears of no longer being the majority.  The idea of a United States no longer being majority white has not been sufficiently talked about; instead, the public debate is driven by the racist and xenophobic backlash to this fact, without the fact itself being fully acknowledged.  Perhaps a better way of putting it is that Donald Trump in particular has short-circuited our discussion, exploiting the fears of change before we’ve been able to have a more rational, public discussion of the fact of the change, in which we could have an airing of not only the anxieties, but also the great possibilities, of such a change.  Instead, the actual underlying changes remain occluded, repressed, making it easier for white Americans to project all manner of fears onto them.

As even casual readers have likely picked up on, The Hot Screen has frequently argued for a view of our political reality that carves out a large role for economic malaise as a negative force supercharging racial and gender revanchism in our country.  Simply put, economic insecurity is real, and opens up our politics to racial scapegoating in a variety of ways, from unscrupulous politicians using racism to distract workers from the way the rich gobble up the lion’s share of our country’s wealth, to low-income workers’ fear that immigrants will take their jobs.  Throw in difficult to define but real fears of “cultural” changes, and the overall situation, as it more fully embraces reality, accordingly reveals itself to have many interrelated and moving parts.

Both a bottom-up and top-down approach is needed to navigate our current crisis.  That is, we need to tackle these challenges of race, economics, and culture at both their individual and interrelated levels.  We can reduce irrational white racial anxiety by fixing our economy so that it works for all, and we can improve our economy by making the case that immigrants and other newer Americans make our economy stronger, not weaker.  But perhaps particularly with racism, as this is the most fraught and emotional of the various realms of social conflict, we need to publicly explore the dynamics head on.  If Donald Trump has more successfully mainstreamed racism into American politics than any other previous president, then to counter it we need a strategy that opens up to public scrutiny the unacknowledged factors that enable him to do so, and that identifies and disassembles the forms that white racism takes.

As I discussed recently, the task at hand is not so simple as calling out racism wherever it happens, though some form of this is surely part of the solution.  But the psychology of prejudice, and the way that racial resentment is supercharged by economic fears in particular, means that we need to fully understand the nature of white racism and racial fears if we are to collectively work to transmute these attitudes into a renewed sense of connection and solidarity among all citizens, regardless of skin color or place of origin.  Because it has functioned as my own point of extreme disbelief and discouragement, the statistic I began with — the white perception that they suffer greater prejudice than African-Americans — feels like the right place to start, at least for me.

I’ve already expressed my visceral sense that this attitude on the part of so many whites is deeply absurd.  But the architects of the survey I noted above were also exploring a theory of racial perceptions that is both fascinating and a potentially huge clue to the persistence of racism in America: that white Americans have “a view of racism as a zero-sum game,” in which any gains for African-Americans necessarily come at the expense of whites.  This zero-sum mentality would be a more essential problem than whites seeing more bias against themselves than against black Americans.

Obviously, there’s more than a grain of truth to the idea that whites will be more powerful collectively in a regime of white racial dominance than otherwise.  What’s interesting to me, though, is the sense of ongoing and perhaps never-ending diminishment due to a perception of growing African-American success.  It raises the possibility that white Americans’ sense of racial threat is so deeply ingrained that they can’t imagine any other possibility than that African Americans’ success is somehow diminishing their own prospects.

The picture is complicated by the fact that since the 1970’s, our economy has seen both an increasing stagnation and a shift of economic rewards to the top of the economic ladder, irrespective of race.  Is it simply all too easy for white Americans to ascribe their increasing economic anxiety, and related sense of diminishing power, to perceptions of African-American success?  I say “perceptions” because the negative effects of the 2008 financial crisis and aftermath have fallen much harder on African-Americans than whites, putting an end to any sort of factual basis for arguing African-Americans are somehow doing enviably well in today’s economy.

Or could it be that the zero-sum mentality is closely connected to the perception of prejudice against white Americans?  Could there be a sort of white guilt or perhaps white pessimism at play here, a sort of assumption that African Americans and perhaps other racial minorities are sure to mirror the same racial animosity towards whites that whites had historically shown them?  This feels like a hideous twist to the cycle of racism: whites imagining that minorities will essentially seeking payback, a hallucination of certain revenge that in turn justifies the perpetuation of white racism.

Perhaps we are still at a point where there really is no clear path to unknotting an attitude of white racism that's as old as our country; but surely there is no way forward that doesn't involve bringing it to light, and puzzling over it together.  There is an optimistic part of me that thinks even survey results like the one I started with might be part of the solution, if enough whites would only realize how absurd their fears are when stated so openly.  At any rate, we will never move forward if we let demagogues and bigots like Donald Trump frame the discussion.

Trump's War on the Free Press is a War Against Us All

Yesterday’s exchange between CNN reporter Jim Acosta and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in which Sanders declined to say whether she disagrees that the media is “the enemy of the people,” is yet one more piece of evidence that Donald Trump’s attacks on the media are a crisis for American democracy.  As I wrote a few days ago, treating this as a situation in which the media should be left to defend itself on its own against the president is absurd, and indeed, is just how the president wants to frame this assault on American democracy.

While it’s entirely understandable that Acosta, who has patiently weathered the deranged howling and threats of countless Trump supporters, would want to query Sanders on whether she supports the president’s authoritarian position, Sanders chose to spin his remarkable question into a complaint about the personal attacks that have been made on her.  In this way, she suggested that Acosta’s complaint was simply personal, and that the larger issue was actually the alleged incitement of violence against a member of the Trump administration.  Needless to say, this is a typical Trumpian reversal of reality.  It is not that Acosta did something wrong so much as demonstrate the structural limitations to journalists being forced to defend themselves.  The Trump administration is all too eager to make such defenses seem simply personal and tied to a vendetta against the president, even as Trump and his staff pretend that their self-serving attacks on the media are actually being done in the name of the public good.  Another way of putting it: Acosta asked a question that no reporter should even have to ask a press secretary in the United States — a press secretary, moreover, who clearly would refuse to answer the question or signal disagreement with the president.

It’s also worth noting the related news that Ivanka Trump, when asked the same question, replied that she doesn’t believe journalists are the enemy of the people.  That this is even news is another sign of the larger free press crisis.  After all, acknowledging the legitimacy of the media is a baseline assumption for democratic citizenship.  What is really newsworthy is a president who had adopted a perspective and a language shared by authoritarians and other killers of journalists. 

When the American president attacks the free press for simply existing, it cannot be left to journalists and opinion editors alone to point this out and offer a defense.  In the first place, this plays into Trump’s specific strategy of trying to personalize this fight and isolate the media.  Second, and more importantly, a free press is so central to our democracy that all of society should take part in its defense.  In particular, Democrats should be making news by talking every day about how this language demonstrates Trump’s unfitness for office, and by proposing legislation that increases criminal penalties for threatening or killing journalists.  The idea that the media is the one on the defensive is absurd.  The president stands in contempt of American democracy, and should be on the defensive over this every day.  

If you want additional motivation for why we need to collectively mount this defense, look no further than the feral and benighted supporters who show up at the president's rallies to scream insults and threats at the reporters who are there to simply do their jobs.  Think about the mentality of a person who has adopted the authoritarian mindset that you must simply shoot the messenger and replace him with a pliant mouthpiece who echoes everything that dear leader wants him to say.  Every American has a choice as to how they get their news and information; anyone who chooses only to listen to the propaganda of Fox News and other conservative outlets dedicated to fetishistic worship of President Trump have committed dereliction of their democratic duty.

The president would be well within his rights to criticize particular reporting by any media outlet he wanted.  However, he’s chosen to do something else entirely.  He attacks the free press simply for existing; attacks the idea of reporting as itself intrinsically treasonous.  Such a mindset is so far outside the bounds of American democracy that some may have trouble believing that this is actually happening.  But this is not a case where his supporters can remotely claim that this phenomenon is being misreported by a hostile media.  In this matter, at least, the president’s own words can be counted on to tell the true story.

For Donald Trump, fake news is simply accurate news, news that reports the facts.  He has not a quibble with Fox News, whose reporting ranges from tendentious to purely fictional, but has the virtue of nearly always casting the president in a positive light.  And it is also clear that the president’s anger against the media, apart from being a deliberate strategy to create an enemy for his base to rally against and for him to exert fuller control over what information his backers believe, is also founded in its accurate reporting about his own misdeeds.  He is not attacking the media on principle; he is attacking it as a personal enemy.

Time to Say Bye to Stock Buybacks?

I first learned about stock buybacks a few years ago, when I was given the option of directly investing my 401(k) in companies of my choosing and started to educate myself about the stock market.  My initial reaction, as far as I remember, was to take them for granted, just as I did most everything I learned about investing.  They were widespread, they were good for stock prices, and everything I read and heard treated them as normal parts of the stock world.

At some point, though, they began to strike me as in opposition to the basic tenets of investing I’d read about: that one should invest in companies built for the long haul, and that companies invest in themselves in order to become more successful businesses.  The idea that companies would spend their profits on reducing the number of their own shares in order to raise their stock price seemed like a short-cut, a sugar high boost to stock prices instead of underlying value.  But the sense that all companies seemed to be doing it made me think that maybe I was missing something, that this wasn’t such a big deal, that there must be economic arguments I was missing.

Recent studies, including one by the Roosevelt Institute and National Employment Law Project highlighted in this recent Atlantic article, are making the case that stock buybacks are in fact a much more objectionable and even destructive element of the modern economy than I’d hazarded to guess.  The amount of money shoveled into buybacks, particularly when expressed as a percentage of company profits, is shocking.  According to the Roosevelt Institute study, retail companies spent an average of 80% of their profits on buybacks, while food-manufacturing firms spent 60%.  The restaurant industry, though, spent an amazing 140% of profit on buybacks, which means they not only spent their profits but cash reserves or even borrowed money to do so.  

The study looked at these three particular industries because their workers have particularly low wages, and to support a central critique of buybacks — that they essentially constitute a decision to pay workers less in order to reward shareholders more.  The company by company breakdowns are frankly shocking.  “Lowe’s, CVS, and Home Depot could have provided each of their workers a raise of $18,000 a year,” The Atlantic notes, “while Starbucks could have given each of its employees $7,000 a year, and McDonald’s could have given $4,000 to each of its nearly 2 million employees.”  Such figures dwarf the meager payouts that have trickled down to workers under the Trump administration’s trillion dollar tax cuts for businesses and the wealthiest Americans.  The money has been there all along to boost worker pay; the bosses have just chosen not to.

Critics speculate that the buybacks feed into diminished growth throughout the overall economy.  The choice not to pay workers more means millions of Americans have less money to spend and thus to stimulate the economy.  Every dollar on buybacks is also another dollar companies don’t spend making themselves more innovative and competitive, such as by training workers, spending on research and development, or improving equipment.  This, too, results in economic drag at both the individual company and macro level.

Common to both these major critiques is evidence that those whom we’d assume are most devoted to capitalism — the managers and directors of American corporations — lack a sense of the basic elements of how capitalism actually works.  If people don’t have money to spend, then how can they buy what those companies have to sell?  And if companies don’t invest in themselves, how can they hope to compete in the marketplace?  This seems an example of short-term greed over long-term thinking, and critics point to buybacks as a possible culprit for the depressed wages and lackluster growth of the U.S. economy in recent decades.  One research paper cited in The Atlantic article uses the term “investment-less growth,” which should send a shudder down the spine of anyone who’s been led to believe that companies are worth investing in because they actually look to improve themselves, and not just grow on paper.

Buybacks also reinforce arguments that corporate taxes are too low.  A common refrain against higher taxes is that corporations spend money more efficiently than the government.  This is already a questionable and misleading argument, but the existence of buybacks weakens it even further.  The government spending money on almost anything would be a more efficient use of resources than spending money to jack up stock prices.  And when you put the opportunity cost of allowing buybacks and not raising corporate taxes in concrete terms — using higher government revenues to put people to work improving America's infrastructure or hiring more teachers — you get even more of a sense of how flimsy the pro-buyback, anti-tax argument really is.

I was unsettled to learn that stock buybacks were actually illegal until the 1980’s, with the major critique being that they constituted an illicit way for companies to boost their share price.  The Atlantic notes that several Democratic senators have proposed legislation around this issue, but I would not underestimate the degree to which this issue will be a difficult one to address, even if its damage to the economy makes action necessary.  Millions of middle-class Americans have money in the stock market, and the practice of stock buybacks has given them a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.  More insidiously, it has effectively set their interests against those of working people, and even themselves, when the question comes down to buybacks versus wage increases.  The sticky politics of the situation point to the need for a wider economic argument that fits a reversal of buybacks into a larger assertion that we will collectively benefit more when we all share economic gains more fairly.

Democrats Can't Let the Free Press Stand Alone Against the President

Donald Trump’s attacks on a free press were disturbing the moment he began making them as a candidate for the presidency.  And when he started to incite the anger of campaign crowds against journalists in attendance, his war on journalism disqualified him from ever being considered a legitimate president of the United States.  Attempts to discredit and intimidate the free press, whether by legal or physical means, are the mark of an authoritarian mindset, not a person fit to be the American president.  Even more than his “fake news” refrain — as self-serving a term as any tinpot dictator might come up with — nothing captures this anti-democratic attitude more than the president’s increasingly frequent declarations that journalists are "the enemy of the people.”  If this phrase sounds foreign and weirdly translated from another language, that’s because it’s been previously employed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Even putting aside that provenance, it’s a phrase that’s curiously propagandistic and absolutist, and alien when compared to the generally uplifting sloganeering of American politics.

But aside from its generic oddness, it’s a phrase that, particularly when spoken by the president, constitutes a declaration of war on the United States.  There really is no other way to consider Donald Trump’s phrase, given the reality journalists, editors, photographers, and others are the cornerstone of American democracy itself.  After all, there can be no democracy without public access to information, and a journalistic profession that presses our government to provide that information.  

We have long been able to see that for Donald Trump, the only way the press would not qualify as “the enemy of the people” would be for it serve as an unquestioning outlet of state propaganda.  Accordingly, the one news outlet he considers legitimate is Fox News, which at this point is indistinguishable from a government television service dedicated to the protection of Donald Trump.

Many have long warned that, apart from being a transparent attempt to protect himself from bad deeds by discrediting those who would bring the truth to the light of day, the president’s extremist rhetoric would inevitably lead to violence against journalists.  This fear was realized in Maryland last month, when an Annapolis newspaper suffered a mass shooting - the worst single loss of life of media professionals since 9/11.  An ordinary person might be chastened by such an event, and lay off the “enemy of the people” rhetoric.  Unfortunately for our country, Donald Trump is no ordinary person, resuming use of his anti-democratic language a mere week after the slaughter.

For the president, this return to form was a real two-fer, because these new tweets were in the context of his upcoming trip to Helsinki to meet with Vladimir Putin.  Putin, a master dissembler in so many ways, doesn’t bother to dissemble when it comes to a free press.  Journalists who get out of line are beaten or killed as a matter of course in Putin’s Russia, which Donald Trump is aware of, and which he effectively endorsed when resuming his attacks on the free press so close to the Helsinki meeting.

As enraging as the president’s incitement of violence against journalists and clear wishes to substitute a regime of propaganda in place of a free press, though, is the general lack of an adequate response on the part of America’s elected officials.  Republican silence has edged into complicity with this man’s deranged war on journalism, and stands as one more firm reason why the Republican Party must be routed in 2018, in 2020, and beyond.  And though Democrats have been far more outspoken in criticizing these attacks, the party as a whole has failed to recognize, and respond to them, as the unforgivable, code red attack on American democracy that they are.  If journalists cannot do their jobs, then it matters not at all how progressive and assertive the Democratic Party becomes in the coming years.

There seems to be too much of a mindset across the political spectrum that the press is fully capable of defending itself — but this is a complete misreading of where we are, and plays into Trump’s fake critique of the media.  The adversarial relationship between the press and the government holds true when we are talking about the general idea of reporters trying to cover a particular story, but not when the government, in the form of the president, is attacking the press for simply existing.  Such an attack is so far outside the bounds as to necessarily trigger a political response from other major actors in American society, particularly the other branches of government.

The events and stories out today related to a July 20 meeting between New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and Donald Trump only reinforce the point that this is no longer a situation in which we can say that the press should simply be left alone to battle the president.  The narrative goes as follows: On July 20, Sulzberger met with the president, at the president’s invitation.  The meeting was off-the-record, but on Sunday Donald Trump tweeted the public’s first news of the meeting, writing, “Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!”

Sulzberger soon responded to the president’s tweet, which made it sound like he had acquiesced to the president’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” rhetoric.  Sulzberger said he had in fact accepted the meeting mainly in order to raise his concerns with the president’s anti-free press language, and that he pressed this point during the meeting, including his belief that such language will lead to violence against journalists.  There is no reason to dispute Sulzberger’s summary of the meeting, and at any rate, the White House has not challenged it thus far.

This means that Sulzberger met with the president off-the-records to defend the free press, only to have Donald Trump use the meeting as fodder for his anti-free press message, suggesting that Sulzberger actually agreed with him.  

Even for this president, such a maneuver is grotesque.  Trump essentially turned a meeting in which a major American publisher attempted to privately communicate his concerns about the president’s rhetoric into yet another example of his anti-press vitriol.  One can critique Sulzberger’s decision to take the meeting, and his relative level of naiveté in thinking anything good might come of it, but any debate over whether Sulzberger made the wrong decision pales in comparison to the monolithic bad faith and anti-democratic darkness of this president.  It is yet one more demonstration that the president’s overriding interest is in constructing a storyline that journalists are "the enemy of the people."

As if to hammer home the point of his own perfidy, Donald Trump has now responded to Sulzberger’s version of events by a series of tweets calling the media “very unpatriotic,” and accusing journalists of putting lives at risk — an obvious black-is-white, up-is-down response to Sulzberger’s critique.

At this point, it is clear the press can offer no facts or other rational response to counter the president's accusations, since they are accusations based not on reality, but on an overriding desire to discredit the work of the one force in our country holding this president to account more than any other.

The overwhelming silence of Republicans over the last two days only highlights the peril of this moment, and the need for Democrats to make the defense of a free press both a central piece of their critique of Donald Trump and of a positive vision for America that aims to restore the presence of local and independent news sources across this country. 

Is the Con Man Starting to Con Himself?

A recent New York Times piece recounts President Trump’s insistence that televisions on Air Force One be uniformly tuned to Fox News.  He made this requirement known after apparently throwing a fit when discovering that Melania Trump’s TV was showing CNN.  Perhaps most disconcerting about this episode is the suggestion that Donald Trump, rather than just employing the term “fake news” to discredit legitimate coverage of him and his administration, may actually himself believe that only Fox reports the truth.  To attempt to deceive the American people about the nature of a free press in service of an authoritarian agenda is chilling enough; the possibility that he believes his own propaganda is a whole other layer of crazy piled atop the proto-fascist mindset.  I would expect even the most cold-blooded propagandist to keep one eye on what actual reporters are reporting and what the truth actually is, if for nothing else than to effectively craft a twisted and tendentious response to the facts.

Intriguingly, Andrew Sullivan argues that in Trump’s taped 2016 conversation between him and Michael Cohen that was leaked last week, we heard a Trump who behind closed doors is far different from the one we see on TV and reflected in his tweets.  Sullivan remarks on how in control and in his element Trump sounded, “a world-weary operator in sleaze and outright deception, dealing with an item of everyday business.”  This is hardly the only time people have pointed out the distance between the buffoonish version of Trump easily inferred from his media appearances and the actual man.  

But in light of the Times report about his CNN-Air Force One air rage incident, I wonder if I’ve too readily discounted the argument that Donald Trump is as out of control as so much of his public persona would suggest.  Has the man changed since the tape was made in 2016?  A possibility arises: that the pressure of the presidency, and particularly, the pressure of facing the consequences of his likely collusion with the Russian government, is beginning to drive the man a little batty.  After all, keeping all the lies straight must in itself be a full-time job, right?

In the Sullivan piece noted above, he frames Trump’s frantic behavior through a parallel or possibly alternative explanation: Trump is essentially a con man, and is stuck in the unenviable position of keeping his con going long past the point of good sense, at a level higher than he’s played at before: the presidential stage.  Apart from a measurably increased rate of lying, Trump also recently made his most far-reaching statement about “fake news” to date, telling supporters that “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening [. . .] Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.”  Sullivan is a great fan of George Orwell, but he interprets Trump’s statement as less reflective of a totalitarian mindset and more the evidence of a “con man getting a little rattled, as his trade war is beginning to wreak havoc in the Midwest.”

Of course, even someone who might fundamentally just be a con man out to grift the American people can still do immense damage when he’s found that the best way to make a killing is to rally his base via an authoritarian nationalism.  The situation is compounded a hundred-fold when we remind ourselves that the problem is not simply Trump, but a GOP that has decided to embrace him more or less wholesale, and which has already long embraced anti-democratic approaches to governance, from gerrymandering to voter suppression to covering up the Russian attack on the 2016 election.  But any insight into Trump’s mindset is important, because it can be used to fashion an appropriate response to him.  And if we are beginning to understand that the president has embarked on a multi-layered scam — encompassing collusion with the Russians, an effort to shower the 1% with more riches than ever, and of course an overarching effort to aggrandize his own family’s wealth — then it is useful to understand the problems that any con man begins to encounter when he’s forced to run his scam past its expiration date.

As chilling as I found Trump’s exhortation to essentially ignore reality and only believe him, making the case that his reasoning is indistinguishable from that of a grifter may be a way to start breaking his rapport with his base supporters, and to encourage less determined supporters to take a more critical perspective.  Sullivan notes the tug of war between the grifter’s con and reality; when Donald Trump begins to ask his backers to ignore a reality that includes the very reasons they supported him to begin with, a crack in the foundations of his support begins to appear, even if it’s not immediately obvious.  The president can ask them to ignore everything but his own words all he wants, but he has no way to ask them to block out their daily experiences of the world.  No con is that good.  One day, you wake up, and can’t ignore that fact that despite the president’s words, your pay still hasn’t gone up, and your health insurance still hasn’t come back.

Will Trade War End Up Sparking GOP Civil War?

Will Donald Trump’s escalating imposition of tariffs on America’s trading partners finally break his solid backing by Republican GOP congressmen and senators, not to mention his voter base?  Amazingly, where likely collusion with a foreign power, gross human rights violations at the border, and incitement of violence against journalists have failed to stir them, there are signs that Trump’s war on free trade has finally got the frozen hearts of many a Republican a-pumping with the spirit of resistance.

I’m not the only one who’s wondered how the GOP would continue to square its official support for the free market with the president’s willingness to take a wrecking ball to trading regimes built up over decades to benefit and secure American wealth.  Donald Trump may have zeroed in on the destruction wrought by de-industrialization and his role as rescuer of the working man as his primary electoral identity, but the trading system has benefitted the richest of the rich, who see little need to tweak a system that has padded their portfolios, opened up foreign markets, and allowed them to use labor more easily exploited and paid far less than American workers.

Two particular areas of dissent have appeared.  First, the president’s contemplation of hitting foreign automobiles with a 25% tariff appears to be a bridge too far.  My sense is that among Republican elected officials, this is a case of ideological opposition to the president, combined with a growing awareness among Republicans that he may be willing to do real damage to the economy as he pursues an escalating trade war with the world.  One angle that may have the Republicans up in arms is that trade policy falls well within the purview of Congress, making them complicit in Trump’s policies — a complicity that opponents will be able to highlight.  

The second major area of growing GOP dissent is the tariffs the president has imposed on agricultural imports, which have prompted China and Mexico to retaliate with their own tariffs on American agricultural products.  This retaliation is already causing economic pain among America’s farmers, which in turn led to the Trump administration this week proposing a $12 billion bailout package for those affected.  Intriguingly, the perceived need for a bailout seems to have been the spark that moved the agricultural industry itself into a fuller opposition to the president’s policies; according to reporting by Politico, many in the industry interpret it to mean that there’s no end in sight to the trade war over agriculture, that the president has no strategy for ending the dispute he started, or quite possibly both.

Particularly with agricultural tariffs, you can see how Trump’s blustering attitudes and baseline Republican realities have collided, and will continue to collide, in unpredictable ways.  At the highest level, the reality of Trump’s willingness to risk existing trade agreements, in combination with compensation to some of those hurt by the trade war, has run into at least a superficial buzz-saw of Republican belief in free trade and free markets.  My guess, though, is that the GOP and other elements of the farm lobby are not able to separate these abstract ideas from the way they’ve been applied to policy over the years: trade arrangements with other nations that, more often than not, allow American businesses to make money selling goods to those countries.  The result is that many Republicans strongly believe in free trade as a principle, particularly because in reality they tacitly understand it’s an arrangement, when implemented in the real world, that makes them money.  Trump, in promising better arrangements, is upsetting a system that is already working pretty well for them; accusing Trump of retreating on free trade allows them to make a principled argument when their main concern is that they’re going to lose money.  

The fact that their actual business is under threat is of course another major point of conflict between Trump and the agricultural industry, indeed the central one.  The fact that the industry as a whole is pretty much turning up its nose at the $12 billion bailout (which apparently would hardly make most businesses whole from the losses they’ve suffered) suggests that the president has misjudged the nature of this economic sector.  Unlike the steel industry, which has long been beleaguered, or individual steel workers who are willing to suffer some pain in the present for hope of long-term gain, the agricultural industry is a lot healthier, and so has more to lose.  Additionally, though the industry as a whole has done much to obscure this fact, it is hardly the plucky conglomeration of simple family farmers that it would like us to believe.  The agricultural industry has undergone heavy consolidation for more than a generation, yet part of me wonders if Trump has made the catastrophic mistake of thinking he’s dealing with a rabble of hog farmers and corn shuckers, rather than a highly sophisticated industry.  This sophistication includes a keen collective knowledge of how trade policy works and how it affects their profit margins, a point currently reflected by the quick response of major farm trade organizations in opposition to the ongoing escalation of tariffs.

The conflict between Trumpian attitudes and Republican realities offers the possibility of a world of troubles for GOP politicians caught in the middle.  Politico observes that in their planned meeting with President Trump in Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds and Representative Rod Blum “are walking a tightrope — they must express their concerns about the local economic impact of tariffs while stopping short of criticizing the president.”  This seems a particularly difficult tightrope to walk when their constituents are savvy about the tariff issues and well understand the president’s role in creating them.  

Politico also notes that Democrats are seeing opportunity in the unease over the president’s trade policies in Iowa and other farming regions.  Brendan Kelly, who’s running to unseat Representative Mike Bost in Illinois’ 12th Congressional District, seems to be pursuing a smart line — acknowledging there are problems to be fixed, but that “This all-out barroom brawl with everybody — just throwing fists and not sure where the target is going to be — is just going to end up hurting everybody.”  An argument that Donald Trump essentially has no strategy for fixing things has the benefit of being accurate description of reality, one that Republicans are starting to countenance.  This might seem like the most basic thing in the world, but pointing out the disparity between people's lived experiences and Trump’s words is a powerful tool for Democrats, particularly since painting a deranged, tendentious view of the world is the cornerstone of Trump’s approach to politics.  Harm to the pocketbook is a hard thing for a person to deny for very long; at least in the agricultural industry, Trump may have shot himself in the foot by inflicting economic pain on people who were doing well enough before he got involved.  Additionally, any area in which Republicans are provoked to criticize the president weakens him across the board; doubts in one area will feed doubts in others, a dynamic that is likely key to eroding his base both prior to the midterms and the 2020 election.

Recent Studies Suggest Progressives Need a Nuanced Strategy on Immigration

Two recent New York Times editorials provide deeply contradictory takes on the role played by immigration in the 2016 election and beyond.  While the perspectives they raise may be irreconcilable, together they nonetheless point to key questions progressives need to be asking about an issue that Donald Trump clearly sees as key to his re-election strategy.

“What if Trump’s Nativism Actually Hurts Him?”, written by a pair of University of Minnesota political scientists, explores the possibility raised by its title: that Donald Trump has miscalculated the role that his anti-immigration message played in his election, and that it was actually Hillary Clinton who benefitted the most from the foregrounding of immigration in the 2016 election.  Their case rests on evidence that anti-immigration voters were already in Trump’s camp anyway, while people more moderate on immigration voted for Hillary Clinton in far higher numbers than they did for Barack Obama in 2012.  They also cite figures that immigration did not result in getting more Trump voters to the polls than Clinton supporters.

Based on this analysis, the authors speculate that playing up racism and xenophobia may no longer work as a political strategy for Republicans.  The possible reasons include the fact that most anti-immigrant white voters are already in the Republican camp, and that further highlighting of the issue will send more centrist voters to the Democratic Party.  They also point out that Donald Trump’s embrace of a bullhorn rather than a traditional Republican dog whistle on issues of immigration may continue to provoke a supercharged reaction on the left.

A year and a half into the Trump presidency, and months after his child separation policy put immigration more front-and-center than ever in the public eye, it seems undeniable that immigration issues are indeed driving an enormous amount of activism and electoral excitement on the left, even as polls show high support for Trump’s cruel policies among his base voters.  As the “Nativism” article suggests, though, whether this energy on both sides will ultimately tilt in Trump’s favor depends on how middle-of-the-road voters respond.

Unfortunately for those hoping for a bit of quick good news in these dark times (though fortunately for those who thrive on complex and ambiguous situations!), Washington Post columnist Thomas Edsall has written a piece that counsels a great deal of caution in interpreting the data and considering the politics around immigration.  Surveying recent research on American attitudes around immigration and racism, Edsall makes a case that the left’s response to Trump’s anti-immigrant incitement requires careful sifting of the full dynamics at play.

The first layer of caution concerns the reliability of the social science research that yielded optimistic results like the ones we saw in the “Nativism” article.  Edsall highlights recent studies showing that traditional polling may have failed to keep up with shifts in actual public sentiment around immigration.  Some respondents may be hesitant about defying social expectations around this issue, suggesting that the data relied on in the “Nativism” article should be taken with a grain of salt (an attitude that also seems in order when a study confirms exactly what you want to hear).

Edsall has steadily preached a policy of never underestimating Donald Trump, and his exploration of recent research on shifting views in the ties between immigration and perceptions of racism backs up this cautious attitude.  After reminding us that part of Trump’s immigration strategy is to invite a backlash in which progressives accuse him and his supporters of racism, Edsall runs through recent studies showing a fundamental divide on whether American voters view immigration restrictions as racist.  While 73% of Clinton voters said it was racist to reduce immigration in order to maintain the white share of the population, only 11% of Trump supporters said this was the case.  In other words, in the context of immigration, “the very definition of racism is deeply contested.”

Such findings become still more fraught in light of other recent research on the self-perception of whites around accusations of racism.  First, increasing numbers of whites hold views that, while empirically racist (such as believing that the white proportion of the U.S. population should be mantained as is) are not believed to be racist by the holders of that view.  This intersects with a second observation: accusations of racism appear to be creating a backlash in white Americans who do not consider themselves racist; as one researcher quoted in the article puts it:

[S]uch accusations are now tantamount to ‘crying wolf’ and have the opposite of their intended effect — whites are subsequently more likely to express racially conservative policy preferences or to condone the target of the accusation [. . .] when they’re accused of being “racist,” some whites either see the accusation as disingenuous, or they see it as a personal, unfounded attack, and they become defensive.”

You don’t need to accept this research uncritically to see the underlying truth of the psychological dynamics it suggests.  When a person is accused of something that they don’t want to admit about themselves, it’s common for the person to double-down on their denial about that characteristic.  That this behavior would obtain around something as socially and morally problematic as racism should not be surprising.  It also seems clear that the question of how to address racism at both an individual and societal level becomes more complicated when a central cultural model for addressing racism — calling it out directly — begins to encounter white resentment that, as it becomes more widespread and commonly accepted, also begins to mutually reinforce this resentment.

These observations have profound implications both for how to counter Donald Trump, and, more generally, for addressing what is either a resurgence of racist attitudes in the United States or, at a minimum, an easing of taboos around expression of such attitudes.  On the second topic, some research indicates that fighting racism in a way that people are “freely choosing to be non-prejudiced” can be effective, while simply urging people to comply with social norms around non-prejudice can actually backfire by stoking reflexive or defensive reactions.  This is highly abstract social science research, yet the general ideas behind it offer important clues to how to respond to the clear “white backlash” (a term used in a couple of the articles cited in the Edsall piece) we are experiencing.

Given all this, it seems worth asking the question of whether calling out Donald Trump’s racism on the immigration front is helping or hurting the cause of protecting undocumented immigrants from ICE-inflicted cruelties, as well as aiding in the larger cause of allowing legal immigration into the United States.  This is not to say that the president shouldn’t be held to account for his racism; but we need to assess, in a dispassionate way, whether the ground has essentially shifted beneath our feet, so that white Americans are less susceptible to direct social pressure as a way to check racist thinking, and may even be encouraged in their mindset by such a direct critique.  As Edsall suggests, that the president thinks he has a winning strategy should provoke his opponents to careful consideration of what might be the most effective response. 

Obviously, those who oppose Trump’s policies on immigration aren’t standing in front of cameras or sitting down at keyboards, and simply shouting and typing “Donald Trump and his supporters are racist!” in a manner akin to Jack Nicholson holed up in the Overlook Hotel.  Yet it does seem as if the issue of how we treat undocumented immigrants, and what our attitude should be toward immigration more generally, has been framed by the president as a combined referendum on race, culture, and economics in a way that has set the terms of the debate.  This framing is, needless to say, highly unfavorable to Democrats and progressives.  It is a framing in which the racial, cultural, and economic slurs against undocumented immigrants, and by extension, against all immigrants, each reinforce and give cover to each other.  For instance, if undocumented workers are stealing American jobs, then it helps justify racist sentiment against them; and if a white American has racist sentiment towards Latinos, it make them more susceptible to the idea that they’re stealing American jobs.

Donald Trump’s racism is evil, but there is a difference between highlighting an evil and a successful election strategy.  Progressives must always remember that when they make undocumented immigration a key battleground for challenging the president’s reign, they’re fighting him on terrain friendly to the president.  They risk reinforcing accusations that they care more about foreigners than American citizens; they risk seeming not to care about American job losses; they risk criticism that they do not care about enforcing American laws.  As I’ve noted before, the president has forced this battle on progressives, as no progressivism worth its salt would allow such human rights abuses to be carried out in our collective name; yet there is no reason for progressives to fight the battle on terms set by the president.

If we have no choice but to engage on immigration, then we must do so in a way that maximizes the political benefit to us and maximizes the political damage to Donald Trump.  The president seeks to conflate legal and undocumented immigrants to help propagate a false narrative about the role of immigration in America's economic challenges.   While defending undocumented immigrants from the cruelty of family separation policies, progressives need to keep the economic benefits of legal immigration front and center in any response.  This argument has the benefit of being true, and of appealing to the self-interest of all Americans — who wouldn’t want our country to get richer through the hard work of newcomers?  

In an age of economic anxiety, immigrants are an easy scapegoat for Trump and the Republican right.   Making the case that Trump's overall economic policies will only weaken the economy and exacerbate insecurity, and presenting an alternative vision for an economically healthy America, will put the battle over immigration in its proper context.  Trump would have us blame immigrants for our economic woes; it's time to put the spotlight back on Trump's role in exacerbating our real economic problems, like massive inequality, monopolies that strangle the economy, and laws that deprive workers of their right to organize.

Progressives also need to fully internalize the contradiction between liberal ideals and a population of millions of undocumented immigrants who are both vulnerable to economic exploitation and not fully protected by our legal system.  Even if they are performing jobs American citizens don’t want, this doesn’t mean that they should have to work in dangerous or otherwise exploitative conditions: this violates our most basic understanding of human rights and decency.  Any defense of undocumented immigrants from the depredations of ICE needs to be paired with a realistic vision of how immigrants’ rights should be protected.  The progressive vision on immigration needs to be coherent, humane, and just.  It makes little sense to fight against family separation policies, but then not rise to the challenge of protecting workers from exploitation.

Demonizing immigrants and stoking the fires of racism are of extreme importance to Donald Trump, an empty soul who must provide cover fire for his larger project of the looting of this country by his family and others of already-obscene wealth.  Given the role immigration will have in the survival or failure of his presidency, progressives must counter with a strategy that defeats him on his own turf.  Acknowledging shifts in attitudes towards immigration and race doesn't mean accepting them, but making better arguments for winning Americans over to our side.  The point of politics is not to tell people that they're bad; the point of politics is to persuade sufficient numbers of people to join your cause.

Something Deeply Rotten is Happening in Denmark

Denmark, known to many Americans as the land of renewable energy and the feminist political thriller Borgen, is in the midst of passing a set of legal measures so clearly and nauseatingly racist and authoritarian as to demolish whatever impressions of progressivism Denmark had managed to create in our collective consciousness.  But the dangers these laws reveal are hardly limited to Denmark: they illuminate how President Trump’s own racist demagoguery weakens the position of the United States to credibly respond to clear violations of human rights even in a close ally.

The situation is this: in response to higher crime rates and concerns that recent, mostly Muslim immigrants are not integrating sufficiently into Danish society, Denmark is passing a series of punitive laws that single out populations of so-called “ghetto” neighborhoods.  In other words, where you live, not simply your immigration status, now places you in a separate category in the eyes of the law.  Backers say the laws are meant to control crime, teach immigrants Danish values, and make sure the country’s generous welfare system is not abused; but a clearer eye might see laws that punish people for their religion and country of origin, and whose larger intent is to teach newer arrivals to Denmark that the country’s commitment to a free society is giving way to a Danish brand of illiberalism.  

The measures include: separation of so-called “ghetto children” from their families for 25 hours a week so that they can be taught “Danish values” (this training begins at the tender age of 1); doubling punishments for crimes based on whether the perpetrator lives in a “ghetto” and based on income, employment, education, and “non-Western background”; and prison time for parents who dare send their children on extended trips to their home countries.

If you’re thinking to yourself that placing people in ghettos based on their race and religion, and subjecting them to punitive laws, sounds like a grotesque echo of Nazi policies — well, so do clear-minded Danes.  Member of parliament Yildiz Akdogan notes that, “Danes had become so desensitized to harsh rhetoric about immigrants that they no longer register the negative connotation of the word ‘ghetto’ and its echoes of Nazi Germany’s separation of Jews.”

We will grant that the Danes have an obvious right to fight crime, and the right as well to encourage newcomers to adapt to the country’s existing social fabric.  But the notion that the best or only way to deal with such challenges is via measures so patently racist, anti-Muslim, and antithetical to Western values is totally absurd.  The Danes are looking to govern their society in ways that make it that much less of a society worth protecting; in unleashing majority power against a politically weak minority, they abuse democracy and help discredit, via a damning display of open racism, their own stated goals of a culturally homogenous society.

A disturbing question hovers over what’s going on in Denmark: if the Danes are unable to see the cruelty and evil of their ways, who possesses the standing to point this out to them?  It’s unclear to me that the laws they’ve passed violate any European Union rules on human rights, although it seems preposterous that they would not.  It is sickening to realize that, due to our president’s immoral and un-American sadism on the southern border, the United States cannot speak of immigrant rights on the world stage without being accused, justifiably, of rank hypocrisy.  And in this awful situation, you begin to see how human rights abuses in enough places begin to be self-perpetuating: if everyone is doing it, who’s to say that it’s wrong?  

Rather than using the stick of punishment for real and imagined offenses, why don’t the Danes try the carrot of enticement and engagement?  Such as encouraging immigrants to participate in the political system, creating non-coercive opportunities for natives and new arrivals to get to know each other, and allowing opportunities for Danes to learn more about the newly arrived cultures?  It is easy to guess the reason why: because this would reveal the lies of the racists that the new arrivals are violent, lazy, and irredeemably alien.  As in the United States, the sense that a minority population might threaten the national culture at large bespeaks a deeply pessimistic lack of faith in the vitality of the majority culture.  

The Danes should have a little more faith in themselves.  A country that leads the world in fighting climate change is clearly a country that thinks about its impact on the greater world.  These shameful events in Denmark should prompt public reflection and a debate about what that country’s deepest values are.  Surely treating new arrivals like second-class citizens isn’t one of them.

As frustrating as it is to contemplate how our current president undercuts the United States’ ability to put moral pressure on allies like Denmark to change their illiberal ways, what is happening in Denmark has made me think a little more optimistically about America’s ability to navigate our current crisis.  Despite the anti-Muslim policies of this administration, the concept of religious freedom is hard-wired into our country, and millions of Americans share a basic belief that whatever god one chooses to worship (or not) is a private matter, beyond the realm of politics.  I believe this view will prevail, if only because the implications of living otherwise threaten too many of our heterodox faiths.  

Similarly, the repugnance I feel when I see a country like Denmark identify itself at least partly on the superiority of a certain ethnic identity, and then act on that identity to treat newcomers as second-class citizens, is balanced by what I see as America’s fundamental commitment to a race-neutral existence.  Certainly, this idea is contested, most notably by a Republican Party that has gone all-in on a white supremacist vision of this country.  But this vision is already faltering, and sooner or later, it will fail, because it is a mindset that can only be perpetuated by anti-democratic and ultimately anti-human measures.

For Both Trump and the GOP, It's Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Collusion Fire

The biggest news on the Trump-Russia front today, in this week of blockbuster news, is a New York Times piece detailing the briefing Donald Trump received from national security officials two weeks before his inauguration: a briefing in which the president-elect was provided with explicit evidence that Vladimir Putin had directed Russian assets to interfere with the 2016 election.  I suspect that this is a deep-burrowing bombshell that will continue to reverberate in the weeks ahead, as it builds on an awareness that began to reach a point of critical mass with the Helsinki Surrender Summit: that aside from questions of whether Donald Trump actively colluded with the Russians to sabotage the 2016 election, since that time he has effectively acted to prevent the American people from understanding the scope of Russian perfidy.  He has, in other words, taken the side of Russia against the interests of the United States.  Whether you call it collusion or treason, it is undeniably a profound and disqualifying betrayal of this country.

Up to this last week, Donald Trump’s strategy has been to combine two critical questions into one, and to answer them with a resounding “no”: Did the Russians conducted cyberwarfare against the United States to assist in Trump’s election, and did Trump and/or his campaign collude with such an effort?  For reasons that remain obscure even as explanatory theories abound, the president has insisted that neither happened, even as information providing an irrefutable “yes” to the first question has cascaded into public view for going on two years.  Whatever his reasoning, we can easily see how denying Russian interference takes care of the question of collusion: without interference, there could be no possibility of Trump working with the Russians to interfere.

But in hewing so vehemently to his denial of Russian interference, Donald Trump has effectively opened himself up to a devastating second front on the collusion question: that his policy of denying the fact of Russian interference would at some point be recognized as itself a form of collusion, regardless of whether he colluded with the Russians during the election, once the gap between his denials and reality became wide enough.  The extremity of his denials reached chasm dimensions when he repeated them standing next to the president of the country that had attacked the United States.  And now, to read that Trump has known for a year and a half that the U.S. government had proof not only of Russian interference, but of Putin’s imprimatur on the interference, only heightens the impression that the president has, at least since the election, been actively protecting Russia from the consequences of its actions.

We have also arrived at the point where we can no longer avoid the fact that this has never just been a Trump-Russia story, but a Republican Party-Russia story as well.  As Greg Sargent at The Washington Post explains, the GOP strategy all along has been to provide Donald Trump a specious “escape hatch” via a corrupt bargain: if he would just admit that Russia interfered with the election and contribute to the impression of a “tough-on-Russia” GOP consensus, then Republicans in Congress would work to defend him on the collusion front by delegitimizing Robert Mueller’s investigation.  Sargent goes on to explain the implications of the New York Times story for this arrangement:

But the new revelations from the Times fundamentally change the situation.  The question is no longer:  Why won’t Trump accept the intelligence services’ verdict on what happened, and act accordingly?  That question can be easily answered, by, say, the idea that Trump’s ego won’t let him publicly admit to anything that diminishes the greatness of his victory.  But the question now is a lot harder:  Why did Trump continue actively trying to deceive America into believing that Russian sabotage didn’t happen at all, after having been comprehensively briefed to a previously unknown extent on Putin’s direct involvement in that sabotage effort?

But the problem isn’t limited to the GOP’s preferred damage control strategy on the Trump-Russia front being blown up.  Public awareness that Trump appears to have been colluding with Russia since the election casts a damning light on GOP efforts to protect Trump from the Mueller investigation, since it essentially makes the Republican Party, at a minimum, unwitting accessories to Trump’s collusion.

We can’t lose sight of the basic fact that a horrifying crime was perpetrated against American democracy, and that Donald Trump has worked over the last year to obscure both the basic existence of this crime and our country’s ability to answer legitimate questions about his possible involvement in it.  (The president’s efforts on this front have included, but are not limited to, the following: firing the head of the FBI; attacking journalists as “the enemy of the people”; attacking Democratic politicians who insisted on learning the truth; and attacking U.S. national security agencies).  In providing cover for the president, the GOP has made itself party to actions that strike at the heart of this country’s essence: self-determination and a government that serves the people’s interests.

Now is the time for a relentless dismantling of the increasingly desperate arguments being made by the president and the GOP.  From Donald Trump tweeting that we risk nuclear war with Russia if we continue to accuse it of election interference, to the GOP’s discredited argument that Donald Trump did not collude but is merely afraid of exposing his election as illegitimate, distractions need to be swatted down and focus kept on big questions like these: why does Donald Trump continue to provide cover for Russian crimes against America, and why is it so hard for the GOP to take America’s side?

Have We Undercut Our Response to Trump By Downplaying Worst Case-Scenarios?

In a recent New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait assembles evidence for the most extreme and disastrous possibility lurking in the Trump-Russia story: that Donald Trump has been under the influence of Soviet and Russian intelligence for the last 30 years.  As the subtitle of the story puts it, it’s “a plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.”

This article provides three great services.  First, it delivers one of the most concise and comprehensive summaries of the Trump-Russia connections that I've found.  Second, it opens the door on a possibility that, as I’ll discuss below, is far more possible than most people believe.  And third, it effectively makes the argument that even if the most extreme possibility turns out not to be true, the Russian effort to influence the election and Donald Trump has been met with a chilling and damning receptivity by the president.

Chait’s article also works as a remedy to the issue I discussed yesterday: the general lack of a commonly-understood and -propagated narrative explaining the already-damning state of knowledge around the Trump-Russia scandal.  Chait identifies this problem right off the bat, and homes in on an obstacle to constructing such a narrative: that attempts to grapple with and fit together the known facts have tended to exclude the darkest possibilities about Trump’s ties to Russia.  The implication is that this has led certain facts to be ignored or downplayed, and contributed to the difficulty in arriving at a coherent explanation of the reality of the situation.

One great strength is that the piece clearly presents its evidence as supporting a theory about Trump’s corruption, not the final truth of his long-time subordination to Russian interests.  It doesn’t matter to our current predicament whether Donald Trump has been subject to Russian influence and blackmail for 30 years or 3 years; either way, it’s a disaster for our country, and the political scandal of the century.  What struck me, though, was that in assembling the evidence for long-term ties, Chait paints a deeply disturbing picture regardless of the degree of Donald Trump’s complicity.  This is a situation where if even a fraction of the possibilites are true — and it’s pretty clear at this point that things like Donald Trump’s knowledge that he was effectively laundering dirty Russian money through his real estate business and willingness to accept Russian help during the campaign are irrefutable — then he is too compromised to serve as our chief executive.  Even if the overall theory turns out not to hold water, it does, as Chait implies at the outset, clarify our ability to better understand and see connections between the known facts.

I want to focus on a few particular points that drew my attention.  First, Chait draws a tantalizing line between Trump’s initial political utterances on the national stage and a visit he made to Moscow in 1987.  It’s not simply that 1987 was the year he signaled political aspirations, but the form they took: a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that attacked Japan for relying on the U.S. for its defense.  Sound familiar?  Chait goes on to note that Trump’s ads “avoided the question of whom the U.S. was protecting those countries from.”  Breaking up American alliances has been a perennial goal of both the Soviet Union and Russia from that time to the present; the continuity between Trump’s apparent blindness to any legitimate U.S. interest in protecting other countries as a national security matter, and turning a blind eye to the threat posed by the USSR or Russia, strikes me as remarkable. 

A related point also leaps out at me — I’ve seen it discussed before, but Donald Trump’s enormous vulnerability to blackmail by Russian intelligence emerges as a glaring possibility.  It’s a general technique employed by the Russians, and the possibility that it’s being used against Trump has been obscured by people thinking of blackmail as involving something extremely embarrassing, such as the activities contained in the alleged pee tape.  Though far less salacious, Trump’s business dealings with Russian interests over the last decade and a half likely contain enough shadiness and outright illegality to provide leverage to anyone willing to use it; and as Chait’s article makes clear, it would have been a no-brainer for Russian intelligence to gather such useful materials.

The article also clarifies the sinister and damning role of Paul Manafort’s connection to the Trump campaign.  For me, this was a case of having read and heard so much about Manafort that I had begun to miss the forest for the trees.  Here, Chait lays out not only Manafort’s clear connections to oligarchs closely tied to Putin (and thus his de facto service to Vladimir Putin himself) but his work as a political consultant in Ukraine in a campaign that strongly echoes what we saw in the U.S. in 2016.  Chait writes:

This much was clear in March 2016: The person who managed the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine was now also managing the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in the United States. And Trump’s campaign certainly looked like the same play Putin had run many times before: Trump inflamed internal ethnic division, assailed the corruption of the elite, attacked Western allies while calling for cooperation with Russia, and sowed distrust in the fairness of the vote count.

While it’s true that a man as immoral and anti-democratic as Trump could have been open to such a playbook from multiple sources, the role of Manafort in his campaign, along with the bounty of other Russian contacts, casts a harsh light on what I had generally assumed was the home-grown nasty nativism of his 2016 campaign.

It’s not central to his article, but Chait makes an observation near the end that captures something that hasn’t gotten enough attention: the fact that Trump has pretty much stopped acting like the Russia investigation will find him innocent.  “He acts like a man with a great deal to hide,” writes Chait, and adds, “Trump’s behavior toward Russia looks nothing like that of a leader of a country it attacked and exactly like that of an accessory after the fact.”  Critically, Chait pairs this with the observation that Trump continually seeks to please Putin in ways that keep alive suspicion that Trump is somehow under Putin’s thumb.  This article was published before the Helsinki summit, but the horrifying press conference in which Trump cleared Russia of blame for election interference may be the most striking example to date of this behavior.  There is an almost uncanny, compulsive quality to Trump’s spouting of pro-Russian positions that only strengthens suspicions of something along the lines of blackmail.

As I’ve weighed the persuasiveness of the case Chait makes, I’ve begun to think there’s a sort of all-or-nothing quality to the general question of Donald Trump’s collusion with Russian interests in the 2016 election.  The more evidence there is that Donald Trump has benefitted from Russian influence and cash — whether it be dirty money that helped fund his real estate ventures or the hacking of Democratic email accounts that embarrassed the Clinton campaign — the more persuasive the arguments that he did so knowingly, because at a basic level the ignorance we are to assume on his part increasingly begins to defy belief.  Similarly, the more evidence there is that he knowingly colluded with Russian interests in the present and recent past, the more persuasive are arguments that this is a long- term arrangement with the Russian government.  This latter point is given particular strength by the fact that we are talking about not just any old criminality, but a criminality that is so heinous — treasonous behavior — that it seems obvious that anyone who would be willing to engage in it now would also be the type of person to have engaged in it years ago.  The nature of the crime points to a debased character that did not come into existence overnight, but that is a long-standing reality.  After all we have collectively observed of Donald Trump's character over the years, can we really say that treason would be a bridge too far for him?

Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together in Explaining Trump-Russia Scandal to the American People

As the sense builds that we may have reached some new tipping point in public awareness and political outrage over Donald Trump’s eagerness to absolve Russia from its crimes against American democracy, I’m feeling wary optimism but also a nagging fear that some dark lessons of the last year and a half have not yet been internalized by opponents of this presidency.

First, I’m thinking of the point Mother Jones reporter David Corn makes in “Donald Trump is Getting Away With the Biggest Scandal in American History,” where he flags the disturbing contrast between the president's easily digested take on the Russia story and the lack of a framing narrative on the part of his critics.  While the president describes the scandal as a “witch hunt” with no basis in reality seemingly every day, those covering and talking about the reality of the story have tended to get bogged down in its vast amount of detail and manifold interconnecting threads.  While Trump essentially repeats that there’s no scandal, no organized force is similarly hammering home the basic fact that Trump and his campaign’s complicity with Russian efforts to subvert the 2016 election are incontrovertible facts through which all further developments should be understood.

Corn’s critique encompasses the media, commentators, and the Democratic Party for falling down on this basic issue of framing —  but from The Hot Screen’s perspective, it’s the Democrats who have had the primary responsibility to provide this, and who have badly failed thus far.  Corn suggests that early on, the Democrats may have shied away from more aggressively discussing the Trump-Russia ties for fear of seeming like sore losers and due to an overall state of disorientation due to the election outcome.  But it seems that the Democrats failed to grasp that Donald Trump’s continued and compulsive need to defend himself and attack all inquiries into what transpired in the course of the election opened a path for the Democrats to put the Russia scandal more firmly in front of the American people.  And as Corn indicates, Democrats also failed to respond in an organized fashion and in a way that insisted on the basic facts of the situation.  My sense is that this extreme caution was heightened by the existence of the Mueller probe.  If the probe ended up exposing damning behavior on the part of Trump, they’d act then; in the meantime, seeming to politicize the investigation could potentially discredit the otherwise game-changing findings of the Mueller investigation.

The imbalance between the president’s ceaseless “Witch hunt!” rhetoric and a scattershot Trump-Russia narrative by Democrats tempers my hope that even Trump’s abject submission to Vladimir Putin at the “Putting the Hell Back in Helsinki” summit will persuade significant numbers of citizens that something was rotten in the state of Finland.  My fears seem borne out even as I write this, as the president is claiming to have simply misspoken one line about the role of Russia in attacking the 2016 election; he is relying on confusion and evasion to save himself, just as he has over the last year and a half.

But I’ve got a more troubling concern about what effect Trump’s behavior in Helsinki will have on his presidency.  Just as the fight against Trump has been hobbled by poor framing of the Russia scandal in general, discussions of how the scandal (and Trump’s other misbehavior) will be countered have largely rested on an unspoken and largely unquestioned premise that there is a breaking point at which the president will lose the support of his own party, and that this will lead to some sort of reckoning for the Trump administration.  However, the GOP response to this abomination of a summit throws that premise into serious doubt.  Although there have been a few strongly worded condemnations of the president’s Helsinki rhetoric, the House and Senate leadership has largely engaged in a two-step critique in which they assert the reality of the Russian attack, yet refuse to engage in any strengthened oversight or investigation of the president’s complicity with that attack.  As this CNN piece puts it, “Republicans are grumbling but seem resigned to inaction.”

While incompetence is a possible explanation for this abdication, we already see some Republican politicians suggesting a bold alternative direction for the party: to fall back and accept the Russian interference, while presenting it as something that every country does to every other.  On the maximalist end of things, Brian Beutler at Crooked.com has been pointing out how the Republicans have effectively been giving the Russians cover by attacking the Mueller probe, even when they’re well aware of the reality of Russian interference; in his latest post, Beutler suggests that many members of the GOP are in fact comfortable with Russian election interference, so long as it targets Democrats. 

While this possibility is nauseating and shocking, here’s what I keep coming back to: in the absence of any substantial Republican pushback, let alone credible expressions of concern, regarding Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and clear subordination to Vladimir Putin, the possibility that this is indeed the GOP’s default position needs to be taken seriously.  Of course it’s not something any Republican official would say out loud; but their steady defense of the president this last year and a half has had the effect not only of slowing efforts to determine the extent of the Trump-Russia ties, but the extent of known Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The question then becomes, has the GOP, without necessarily making a conscious decision to do so, wound up taking the de facto position that election interference isn’t so bad so long as it helps them?  This argument gains more weight when you consider the role of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in vetoing President Obama’s effort in 2016 to issue a bipartisan statement on Russia's election sabotage.  McConnell, as Machiavellian and soulless a figure as you will find in Washington, has made clear during his time in the Republican leadership that a quest for power trumps all other concerns: it is more important than justice, more important than the country’s economic health, more important than democracy itself.  If the ends justify the means in all cases, then why would a hand-up from the Russians be any different for him?

But you don’t have to accept that the GOP tacitly or explicitly supports Russian interference on its behalf in order to see that the assumption that Republicans will at some point oppose Trump on the basis of revelations about his behavior is not a sound one.  To the degree that the Democratic strategy for holding Donald Trump to account for his Russia ties rests on this assumption, then, it seems that the Democrats would be wise to choose a new strategy.  Now, in their defense, many Democrats have been making the basic point that the solution to our mess is to elect as many Democrats as possible to the House and Senate in the 2018 elections.  This argument makes sense in many ways, including the fact that it allows them to campaign on a positive platform of change alongside their critique of Donald Trump’s misdeeds.  However, as I’ve argued before, it fails to relieve Democrats of their responsibility to do whatever it takes to hold Donald Trump to account in the present.  And in a broader sense, they risk letting slip a once-in-a-generation opportunity to permanently identify the Democrats as the party that protects democracy, and the GOP as the party that doesn't give a flying f*** so long as they can gut health care and cut taxes for the rich.