The On-Line Propaganda War of 2020 is Already Underway

Last week, Politico reported that widespread on-line election interference against Democratic 2020 presidential candidates is well underway.  Although the data scientists and campaigns don’t have a clear idea of who’s responsible for these cyber operations, they seem to be a combination of individual actors but also, and more worrisomely, coordinated campaigns.  The degree of sophistication so far exhibited is unsettling; the coordinated actors are employing techniques that make their efforts appear more organic and real than, say, more easily-detected efforts employing bots.  And perhaps most troubling of all, some of the coordinated campaigns seem to have state-level sponsorship, including from North Korea, Iran, and Russia.

Their objectives appear to include exacerbating racial divisions, spreading lies about candidates, and “[dividing] the left by making the Democratic presidential primary as chaotic and toxic as possible.”  In this respect, those seeking to sabotage the electoral process have elements of reality on their side; this is shaping up to to be the largest field of candidates in years, at a time when the Democratic Party is fighting over its basic identity.

But the fact that there are real conflicts and high emotions involved in Democratic politics should not distract us from the overriding, incredible issue: once again, the American political system is under cyber-propaganda attack, and the U.S. government is fumbling the response.  The first of level of failure is that the U.S. response after 2016 has been insufficient to deter further attacks.  And this failure, of course, is inseparable from the horrific reality that has been facing us the last couple years: that just as he benefitted from foreign attacks on Hilary Clinton and propaganda in support of himself in 2016, Donald Trump is now the beneficiary of similar, early attacks on a new wave of his opponents.  Indeed, any framing of the situation as merely attacks on Democrats, rather than efforts in support of Donald Trump, is to tacitly abet the nefarious ends of those committing these actions.  

The Politico article strongly makes the point that the Democratic campaigns are not ready for this propaganda onslaught.  While this is true, it elides the larger point: that it is the responsibility of the U.S. government, particularly its intelligence and defense establishments, to stop cyber interference in the U.S. election process, whether it be primaries or general elections.  Only the U.S. government has the resources to do so; this role is also, not incidentally, the government’s actual job.  Suggestions that individual Democratic campaigns are simply too weak or incompetent to defend themselves plays into Donald Trump’s preferred narrative of dominance and submission, and accepts his framing of the situation as one in which individual candidates are somehow to be separated out from the integrity of the American electoral system of which they are a part.  

And this brings us back to the point I made a moment ago.  The context for these attacks is advancement of the re-election prospects of President Trump; and so the fact that the president has not only spent the last two years rejecting that there were such efforts in 2016, but has only undermined government-wide efforts to the protect the U.S. going forward, means that what the Democrats are experiencing now can be clearly traced back to the president’s own self-interest.  Throw in the unresolved matter of whether the president’s campaign coordinated with such cyber efforts in 2016, particularly those propaganda efforts by Russia, and we find ourselves face-to-face with a nightmarish scenario in which an American president cultivates interference in our elections.

Reporting on ongoing efforts at cyber sabotage and division is crucial; all Americans need to be aware of this unacceptable behavior, so that we can pressure our government to stop it, and so that Democrats can play out their political conflicts while keeping in mind the reality of outside pressures to force the party into unnecessary fights.  But this is only part of the story, and it must never be separated from an examination of both the interests of foreign powers to influence the election in Donald Trump’s favor, and the president’s unforgivable willingness to condone this assistance from America’s enemies.

By the same token, this is also a test of the Democratic candidates’ ability to defend the U.S. They obviously have an interest in denouncing such interference, as it impacts their own electoral prospects; yet anyone worthy of the presidency will be able to balance this self-defense with a larger defense of America’s democracy, will be able to make the president pay a maximal price for his complicity while being sure to avoid playing the assigned role of victim or weakling.

In Emergency Declaration, A Dark Glimpse of a Winner-Take-All Vision of American Politics

Nearly as worrisome as President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a wall along the southern border has been some of the Democratic rhetoric in opposition: warnings from politicians like Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Trump is setting a precedent by which a Democratic president could declare gun control or global warming to be a national emergency as well.  At one level, these counter-examples are clearly meant to grab the president’s attention, or at least the attention of those Republicans who were already thinking of the downstream implications when their party no longer holds the presidency.  Yet Democrats’ framing of any counter-argument as a case of “how’d you like it if we did this, too?” indirectly legitimizes Trump’s actions, as I suspect many or most Republicans believe Democrats would indeed do this if they won control of the government.  Rather, the Democratic position should be that they would simply never do this because they believe in democratic governance, full stop.

Observers of authoritarianism have been pointing out that emergency declarations are a sort of gateway drug to dictatorial rule, in which supposedly dangerous circumstances are used to justify a suspension of the rule of law.  Remove the excuse of an emergency, and you see that we’re basically talking about a situation in which the executive alone claims to be the whole government.

Assessing the dark place in which Trump’s declaration has left the country, Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall makes a point that might at first seem counter-intuitive: that authoritarianism is often birthed by incompetence and mismanagement.  For Marshall, Trump is a prime example of this: he was unable to get funding for his wall, essentially through his own shortcomings as president, and so has turned to undemocratic means to get what he wants.

Marshall goes on to note an observation originally made by Will Saletan at Slate: That “the GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord,” adding:

Trump is unable to govern as a normal President because his policies are unpopular and he’s completely unable – in policy terms or characterologically – to at least attempt to build governing coalitions as almost every President in US history has at least attempted to do. His hold on power depends on keeping his minority faction in a state of maximal aggrievement, activation and confrontation. That’s what this wall battle is, of course, about.

In this sense he has made the US not a failed state but a failed politics. And thus, here we are.

Marshall has made these points before in other contexts, but they seem more resonant and suggestive than ever in our present moment.  Partly, it’s because of how explosively and toxically a couple of basic elements come together in the border wall emergency declaration.  Trump has not only been driven by his personal incompetence to seek extralegal solutions to building a wall, but the need to build the wall is rooted in satisfying the clamor of a base that blames both personal ills and national challenges on immigrants, rather than in the wall serving a defensible public purpose.  The warlordism analogy seems particularly apt here: Trump serves not the nation, but the people who elected him, and he will maintain their favor by whatever means necessary.   This is clearly not an emergency situation: at bottom, it’s about the president’s attempt to build a monument to racism and white nationalism. 

The Democratic rhetoric I noted above strikes me as particularly inauspicious given Trump’s decision to govern as head of a subset of the American people.  In doing so, he shows only contempt for the larger American struggle towards diversity, tolerance, mutual support, and equality.  Just toying with the idea that the Democrats might play this game, too, is a dangerous turn for our country.  The Democrats should never suggest that the United States is made up of irreconcilable sides, and that Democratic governance would mean their opportunity to move forward Democratic goals by whatever means they can get away with.  It is not hard to see such arguments on the Democratic side rooted as being rooted in variants of the incompetence and mismanagement that underly Trump’s authoritarian slide; after all, it has taken a series of catastrophic missteps on their side to surrender both the mantle and reality of the Democrats being the party of working and middle-class Americans, with the built-in majority that status would ensure.  The Democrats need to make change the old-fashioned, democratic way: by winning elections, building governing coalitions, and passing laws that carry the legitimacy of constitutional procedure.  If building a durable majority means choosing to represent working Americans at the cost of pissing off a handful of irritable billionaires, so be it.

One great danger, in other words, is that Trump’s mode of governing for only a subset of Americans be adopted by the opposition; that it becomes normalized.  This, after all, would be in keeping with the anti-democratic spiral described in How Democracies Die, where for the sake of survival both parties must continually embrace increasingly corrosive governing practices lest they lose the struggle for power.  In a somewhat paradoxical move, for Democrats to be the defenders of our democratic order, they need to be willing to lose, even as they’re sustained by the faith that enough Americans still believe in democracy that they can build sustainable, significant majorities; majorities that will allow them to push through reforms of both American politics and an economy that’s sucking away wealth to the richest among us, and that may help restore faith in our common enterprise.  We also have to reckon with the fact that, though Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves are a combination of personal inclination and political incompetence, he has found a receptive audience in both the Republican party and in a great number of American voters. 

So how does anyone make an argument based on what seem like abstract principles, in the face of visceral impulses that one’s own side should win and push through laws that intuitively feel right and reasonable?  One thing that has been all too slow to dawn on me is that abstract principles are indeed difficult to defend.  In this, the Trumpian approach has a built-in advantage, appealing to people’s most powerful, if toxic, impulses around race and status over their less visceral commitment to their fellow citizens and the nation at large.  But is it possible that calling out this understandable yet corrosive impulse can help us understand and better practice a democratic politics that combines the pragmatic and the aspirational, the selfish and the empathetic?

Can the Wealthy Be Trusted to See Capitalism Clearly?

Howard Marks, co-chairman of the asset management group Oaktree Capital and a well-known dispenser of investment advice, has weighed in on the incipient Democratic presidential race in his latest memo to Oaktree clients.  CNBC has excerpts from the memo, and has also interviewed Marks, which together provide an intriguing snapshot of a Wall Street-centered perspective  on the Democrats’ inchoate movement toward broad-reaching economic reforms, revealing underlying assumptions and attitudes that will need to be confronted if we are to achieve progressive reforms in the American economy.

The first thing that jumps out at me is Marks’ general assessment of this moment.   “There is a rising tide of anti-capitalism and we should be concerned about that. [. . .] We have a machine in this country that makes it successful — based on democracy, our freedoms and also I think the economy and the way it operates in a free-market mode."   This is such a great summation of the  basic terms of the debate!  There is something good that is working to make America succeed; there is also this rising tide that for some reason doesn’t want us to have this successful system.  It is a tale familiar from many of our childhoods: the goose that laid the golden egg, and the fools who seek to cook it.

As examples of this “anti-capitalist sentiment,” Marks calls out the proposal by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to tax income above $10 million at a 70% rate, as well as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a 2% annual wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million.  "Americans generally accept the concept of progressive tax rates. But they must not be punitive and demotivating," Marks writes in his memo.   To say these measures are anti-capitalist, though, is to ignore their stated intention: to make sure those who are more able to pay taxes, pay those taxes, so that the great majority of non-rich people can benefit from the fruits of our economy and society via social spending that benefits all; and to reduce the record levels of economic inequality in this country that are shifting ever more political clout to the richest among us.

But to Marks, such taxes are indeed an attack on capitalism, presumably because they would take money from the wealthy and not allow them to invest it in the economy as they see fit, thus depriving the economic system of the fuel needed to keep it chugging along.  What is curious about this line of argument, though, is that it assumes that only rich people can invest in capitalism.  The problem is, redistribution of wealth via taxes doesn’t mean that capitalism and investment come to a standstill; on the contrary, it means that that more people are able to invest.  For example, if you tax the rich and use it to pay for better health care, then the great majority of Americans should end up with more discretionary income, not less! Sure, maybe they’re not individually able to buy millions of dollars of stock in exciting new startups and the like — but collectively, they would be.  Marks and other defenders of the current order generally argue that the market is an accurate assessor of value (at least over the long-term; Marks actually has some quite interesting things to say about market cycles and the market actually not often being right at any particular moment but accurate as to assessing value over many years); it seems to me that the possibility of more people participating would improve its success rate.

The argument that capitalism will be seriously weakened if taxes are increased on the rich also assumes a deliberately obtuse understanding of how government and taxes actually work.  At its most extreme, it relies on an idea that taxation is equivalent to expropriating a rich person’s deserved millions, piling it in literal bales of cash, and setting it on fire for the sheer glee of watching it burn.  At a lesser extreme, the argument holds that the government will never spend money either correctly or efficiently, and that all investing decisions are best left to the market.  But this argument, too, is basically poppycock, as there are many areas — infrastructure, education, health care — where the government needs to make the investments because the private sector does not see the possibility of an adequate return, or any return at all; and where, moreover, the decisions as to how to invest are best left to democratic processes and accountability, not to mention human needs (as is the case with health care and education, among others), and not to profit-seeking interests.

Marks’ characterization of the wrong type of progressive taxes is suggestive.  He warns against “punitive and demotivating” rates on the rich.  Yet what two words could better describe the current tax and economic arrangements for the majority of Americans?  We work harder and longer than ever, yet face stagnant wages and wealth, the solution to which, we are told, is to keep doing more of the same, and never, ever think about tampering with the golden goose that keeps laying ever-shrinking eggs for us, even while we can see the wealthiest becoming still more unimaginably wealthy.  What could be more punitive and demotivating than that?

Under our current circumstances of gross and undeniable inequality, it must seem to the ultra-wealthy that the great majority of the country must surely want to rip them down, storm their virtual (or actual) gated community, and feast on their wealth in an orgy of socialistic revenge and righteousness.  Locked into an attitude of selfishness and self-aggrandizement, they literally can’t conceive of people choosing to act in any other way.

This helps get to the contradictory heart of Marks’ comments.  He is clearly a great believer in investing in the economy and letting the capitalist process create wealth for companies and for investors; yet this system is closed in any meaningful way to most Americans, due to the fact that they lack the discretionary income to actually participate in the stock and bond markets.  To most Americans, the rising stock market seems like a joke, helping you do better as long as you’re already doing well.  Pointing to the general creation of wealth by our present economic arrangements, when most people are either falling further behind or constantly plagued by fear of doing so, is to define success down into its opposite, at least in most people’s lived experience.

It is not just Marks, but a broader mindset, that implicitly argues that capitalism as it currently exists is in fact a platonic ideal of capitalism: it is perfect, and we know it to be perfect, and to tamper with it is to tamper with the natural order of things.  But the truth is that what we have now is what men have put in place, not what the universe has ordained.  A basic understanding of human psychology suggests that the wealthy defend present arrangements so vigorously because they benefit so greatly.  To be generous: from their perspective, a situation in which a radically enriched upper crust benefits is indeed ideal.  For the rich, money makes capitalism transcendent.  It transforms them into gods, into prophets, into leaders, into forces of righteousness.  This, in turn, allows them to act as if they are the caretakers and experts on capitalism, when they are simply its greatest beneficiaries, and in this way blinded to its downsides.

I do not mean to single out Marks, but to suggest that his assumptions are widely-held by many of wealth and power in this country. They are a combination of tautological and self-serving: the best economy is always the one at the current moment, and it is the best because the rich are rich. Intriguingly, they embrace our current moment, of grotesque insecurity and inequality, topped off by an environment destabilized by unbridled greed, as the best we can ever do. Well, maybe it’s just the best that they can do.

Will the White Nationalist GOP Learn to Regret Its Ralph Northam Pile-on?

We look for good news where we can find it, and one glad tiding is that long-time Hot Screen fave Jamelle Bouie, formerly a writer for Slate, has moved on to become an opinion writer for The New York Times.  That a much larger audience will now be exposed to his incisive writing on U.S. politics feels like a win for the good guys.

His column today makes a couple essential observations around the blackface/KKK getup scandal that has, for all practical purposes, brought an end to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s political career.  First, Bouie reviews why blackface is such a horrifically racist and unacceptable practice; it not only works to dehumanize African-Americans, but also to suggest their unfitness for participation in a democratic society.  

But as awful as the latter-day indulgence of a discredited racist minstrelsy may be, Bouie goes on to make a point that has lurked within the whole sordid Northam story: that there is a basic problem when public opprobrium “treats expressions of racist contempt or mockery as the most egregious forms of racism, when that distinction should belong to the promotion of racist policies and ideas.”  If signaling hate toward African-Americans by choice of attire is inexcusable, then how much worse is political action that directly seeks to denigrate African-Americans, or other minorities more generally?

Bouie nails the logical consequence of this situation:

If racism is principally a problem of power and resources — of race hierarchy and the denial of life, liberty and opportunity to blacks and other nonwhites — then our political culture ought to expand the offenses that earn the kinds of swift condemnation we’ve seen over the last few days. Voter suppression and the lawmakers who back it deserve the same contempt we save for open racial bigotry; officials behind policies rooted in prejudice, like the travel ban or child separation, ought to be forced from office.

Bouie’s analysis has helped me to understand my visceral disorientation and disgust at the stream of Republican politicians calling for Northam’s resignation, and chiding him for his racism.  A party that has placed white nationalism and the suppression of minority voters at the center of its political identity simply has no leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing the racism of an opposing politician, however merited that critique may be in abstract terms.  Not surprisingly, the greatest nausea was induced by the president himself tweeting about Northam’s unfitness for office, as there can be no question, given that terrible man’s long history of enmity toward African-Americans and current enactment of racist policies, that the president’s racial offenses are orders of magnitude graver than the Virginia governor’s.

It is no surprise, of course, that the president and other Republicans would seize on photographic documentation of racial animus (whether or not Northam appeared in the photo, it was on his yearbook page) as the worst racial offense imaginable.  Not only is it a tactical embrace of anti-racism to take down a Democratic politician, it suggests that racism is solely a matter of dressing up in a KKK outfit or in blackface; it is the same mentality that would say you aren’t racist if you don’t use the “N” word.  The reality, though, is that the GOP is guilty of far worse than Northam; and yet we are left with the dizzying reality that the proponents of actual, state-sponsored racism are not forced to give up their seats, as Bouie suggests they should; are not subject to public repudiation and disdain.

The fact that Donald Trump felt free to weigh in is not simply a measure of the man’s poor impulse control, although there’s that.  In addition to sticking another shiv in Northam’s governorship, I think he was also seeking to reassure his supporters that neither he, nor any of them, can be considered real racists; it’s those freaky Democrats who think they’re Al Jolson and put shoe polish on their faces to enhance their Michael Jackson routines who are.  This may be the underlying strategy of other Republicans as well.

But the president’s tweets highlight how this sort of strategy really does depend on the media accepting the president’s terms of debate; that he somehow has standing to criticize another politician on grounds of racism without inviting a closer look at his own offenses.  This strikes me as not a completely sound assumption at this point.  By making bad-faith arguments based on the unassailable idea that racism is bad, the president invites the obvious question of why, then, would he himself propagate policies, and deploy rhetoric, that says quite the opposite: that racism is the health of the white nationalist state?  I am not so sure that the GOP as a whole has really thought through the long-term damage they may be doing to the party by not sitting this one out, trading short-term gain for long-term, and well-merited, pain.

CBP's Harassment of Portland Comic is a Sick Joke

The anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration have introduced an indelible, low-level thrum of horror into American life.  Rooted in a white nationalist mindset, this presidency has done its damnedest to restrict, harass, and punish those who have done what countless generations of Americans have done before: come to this land seeking a better life.  Equating undocumented immigration with criminality, and denying any standing to long-term undocumented residents, including those brought here at too young an age to have had a choice in the matter, Donald Trump has propagated a vision of a United States suffering literal invasion.  This has been the basis for numerous measures that defy both the American spirit and basic human rights; carried out in the name of the American people, they bring shame on us all.

At the same time, due in part to the administration’s conscious strategy, these measures have been kept somewhat abstract for most Americans. No one with a conscience has been untroubled by the separation of immigrant children from their parents, or the placement of these children in overcrowded camps and cages; yet these abuses have largely been conducted out of the public eye, with the media’s ability to gain access to such facilities severely restricted.  Likewise, the escalated harassment of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol  have been invisible to most of us.  We know this is happening all around us, yet the lack of visibility lessens the sense of moral urgency, even as it seeds American life with a sinister undertow.

This, as at least, is my current theory, as I consider the deeply unsettling and visceral impact on me from news last week that Portland-based stand-up comic Mohanad Elshieky was harassed by CPB employees while returning from a gig in Washington state.  Elshieky, a Libyan citizen granted political asylum in the U.S. in October 2018, was riding a Greyhound back to the city after a gig in Washington state when CPB officials boarded his bus in Spokane.  The agents asked Elshieky and a few other passengers for their IDs; when he was asked if was a U.S. citizen, Elshieky replied that he’s a Libyan.  From there, the interaction grew into a sadistic and unnerving display of anti-immigrant fervor being brought to bear on a documented asylee.  Although he provided them with a driver’s license and a work permit, the agents insisted he was illegal (a spokesperson for the CBP subsequently asserted that all people granted asylum must carry a particular document at all times; Elshieky says his lawyer told him the documents he carried would be sufficient).  Disturbingly, he overheard a phone conversation in which a CBP official verified his legal status, yet an agent at the scene still insisted that he was illegal.  Elshieky was informed that the documents he carried could be faked.  He told the agents that what they were doing was not legal, and that he would contact his lawyer.  After 20 minutes, the CPB officials finally sent him on his way.

Elshieky subsequently wrote a tweet about his experience that got widespread attention in the Twittersphere, and his ordeal was covered by major media outlets.  Clearly, what happened to him happens to many, many other people; but in this case, Elshieky is a media-savvy and eloquent narrator of his own experience.  Just as much as undocumented immigrants can be said to live in the shadows of our society, the same seems to be true of the actions of immigration agents: their actions must be conducted away from scrutiny and public exposure, lest their odiousness be observed and rebuked.  Part of what rankles about his story is that Elshieky has been granted political asylum, not an easy bar to reach, particularly under this malicious administration.  Asylum is not meant to be simply the opening gambit in a sadistic game in which the asylee can then be tripped up in a dozen different ways and deported back to his or her place of origin.  The agents’ presumption of Elshieky’s guilt would turn political asylum into a sick joke.

But the most twisted part of the story may be the fact that Elshieky is exactly the sort of immigrant we should welcome to our country and encourage to become a citizen.  He enriches our culture through his sharp and incisive humor, and proves himself more in the American grain than those CPB agents, by standing up to their bullying and abuse of authority. As someone who has had the pleasure of seeing Elshieky perform, it is painful for me to witness the Trump administration hit so close to home, its pursuit of a racially purified nation leading to this cruel and disheartening experience for a comic who has enriched the lives of Oregonians and others lucky enough to have heard him.

There is something obviously authoritarian and beyond redemption about a government that has unleashed its vast powers in such an indiscriminate fashion that a comic granted political asylum must be treated as an enemy of the state until proven otherwise.

There is a twist to the story, though, in that we can make an argument that Trump’s eager agents do actually have grounds to fear immigrants like Elshieky and others like him — though not for the reasons the agents would claim; not because these immigrants are criminals, or steal American jobs, or suck away social services, but because they have a more visceral attachment to actual American ideals than these uniformed officers of a white nationalist regime; because they know authoritarian bullshit when they see it and have come too far to accept it here.  In an ironic turn of events, the actions of ICE and CBP, and of the Trump administration more broadly, themselves lend weight to arguments that Americanness is not restricted to being born here, but can be rooted in belief in notions of individual autonomy, self-determination, and ambition that are not restricted to any race or nation.  I am once again wowed by the smallness of the Trumpian nationalist vision: demented by racism and dedicated to the preservation of maldistributed wealth, they can’t even seen how big America can be, how we become greater by embracing those who want to be here for the best of reasons.

Hysteria in Havana?

Readers will not have forgotten The Hot Screen’s previous coverage of the mysterious goings-on at the American Embassy in Havana that started in 2016 and ran into the following year.  First one, then two, then increasing numbers of American (and later, Canadian) diplomatic personnel experienced a variety of neurological problems, including dizziness, nausea, and memory loss, often reported to have been proceeded by odd noises.  The U.S. ended up pulling most of its embassy staff out of Cuba, accusing the Cubans of carrying out attacks on U.S. citizens via an unidentified technology.

Officials speculated that the Cubans may have employed some sort of advanced sonic weapon, or that the country’s surveillance technology somehow interacted in dangerous ways with another electronic system.  But as described in “Hear No Evil,” published in the February issue of Vanity Fair, U.S. officials with an interest in pinning the blame on the Cubans dismissed any explanations that did not involve malign intent on the part of that country.  And so investigations of how a high-tech attack was mounted continued on, including the involvement of “Jason, a secretive group of elite scientists that helps the federal government assess new threats to national security.”  (It is not much of an exaggeration to say that a technological explanation would require that the long-embargoed Cubans had developed a form of weapon so advanced that their American opponents could barely even comprehend what it was, much less how it might have been deployed.)

The mystery was deepened by the uncanny nature of how the victims described their experiences, many of which were described in this ProPublic article from a year ago.  Some described hearing what seemed to be cicadas, but louder and more mechanical-sounding.  Another described being struck by a beam of high-pitched sound.  There were also strange details, like a newly-arrived CIA operative hearing similar odd sounds despite staying incognito in a hotel.  Not only the technology, but the clandestine prowess of the Cubans, appeared to be without peer.

As “Hear No Evil” author Jack Hitt argues, though, the political agenda of various elements of the American government — including politicians like Florida Senator Marco Rubio and those opposed to reconciliation with Cuba — spurred the U.S. to persist in the “sonic attack” theory despite the lack of any hard evidence.  Although investigators “found that the victims suffered from a wide range of symptoms: balance issues, visual impairments, tinnitus, sleep disorders, dizziness, nausea, headaches, and problems thinking or remembering,”  they did not find accompanying widespread head trauma (leading medical investigators to playfully refer to this situation as the “immaculate concussion”).

Hitt provides an alternative explanation that would not only account for the known facts, but would also resolve the issue of the missing mechanism for causing the victims’ symptoms.  Recounting the way the symptoms seemed to spread from just one, to two, to increasing numbers of diplomats and their families, he points to a well-known psychological phenomenon that fits this situation: conversion disorder, described as the “rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms among members of a cohesive social group, for which there is no corresponding organic origin.”  More commonly (and less accurately) known as mass hysteria, Hitt recounts how there are countless examples of the phenomenon, and notes that the high-stress environment of the U.S. compound in Havana tracks with how the phenomenon strikes “close-knit” groups.

A couple items strike me as particularly persuasive.  First, it turns out that the government studies of the symptoms were not at all well done, including the fact that many symptoms were self-reported and turn out to occur widely in the general population (50 million Americans, for example, experience ringing in the ears.). Second, the first patient — a CIA officer referred to as “Patient Zero” — appears to have played a central and outsized role in the spread of the phenomenon.  The officers’s description of being beset by sounds seems to have established a template picked up by others; he also reportedly took an active role in urging others to report their symptoms.  Additionally, he provides the missing link as to why Canadian diplomats also started reporting symptoms — it turns out that one of the Canadians lived next door to him.

As Hitt points out, though, the fact that Canadians were also affected was eventually left out of the official narrative, as it contradicted the theory that the Cubans were waging attacks against the United States.  Indeed, damningly, U.S. investigators early on raised the possibility of psychological explanations, only to preemptively dismiss them without further consideration — which, as Hitt persuasively argues, left the field open for political agendas premised on Cuban malfeasance.

Not noted by Hitt, but certainly suggested by his reporting, is how the conversion disorder of the diplomats stationed in Cuba was in significant respects mimicked by the official American response.  This would account for the widespread willingness to believe that the Cubans possess mind-bogglingly advanced technology despite all evidence to the contrary, and were for no good reason attempting to destroy the rapprochement with the U.S. they’d wanted for so long. Of course, the situation is a bit more complicated that this simple parallelism.  On the one hand, long before these attacks, Cuba had been the object of mass hysteria on the part of many Americans, who saw it as a canny exporter of revolution and danger to U.S. national security far out of proportion to its impoverished and backward condition.  On the other hand, this fear and revulsion has mostly struck me as ginned up for political purposes, whether to appeal to Cuban-American voters in Florida or to more generally bolster American opposition to socialism in all possible forms.  This concept of “manufactured mass hysteria” may also be the better description of the behavior exhibited by American officialdom in response to the recent mystery in Havana.  Piggybacking off a psychological phenomenon rooted in the very real stresses of diplomatic and espionage postings that inevitably carried the burden of a highly fraught Cuban-American history, elements of the U.S. government seem to have used an episode of conversion disorder to further a long-standing, exaggerated antagonism against Cuba.

Will Republicans Self-Immolate in Their Rage Over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Since the ground seemed to fall away from beneath our feet on Election Night 2016, many millions of us have been trying desperately to fight our footing again, by working to understand a political landscape that has seemed both profoundly changed and hauntingly familiar.  There is plenty of grounds for criticism of the media over its role in aiding and abetting the catastrophe of Donald Trump’s election; yet before the election and after, many reporters and opinion writers have worked to investigate and explicate the truths of America’s economic, racial, and cultural conflicts that have brought us to this awful pass.  There is a liberation in finding out the facts of the case, no matter how bitter they may be, in that it helps the world feel knowable again, and lays the groundwork for making positive change.

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has consistently taken accurate and incisive measure of this Trumpworld in which we find ourselves, in part because he’s keenly aware of the deep links between our pre- and post-Trump realities.  Serwer’s devastating takes on the racial and cultural dynamics of our current moment bring an odd comfort in describing the continuity with what has existed before, and continues to exist, in our country.  To reprise a fundamental, widespread observation about this presidency: it is shocking, but not surprising.

Serwer’s take on Republican antipathy to newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a case in point: by focusing on this one political and cultural flashpoint, he describes broader dynamics, unawareness of which might be said to render any American citizen a relative political naif.  Digging past the basic fact that Republicans have latched onto Ocasio-Cortez as a figure of hatred and revulsion, he persuasively diagnoses the dynamics at play:

More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place.  She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics.  The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to.  And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.

The focus on undeserving minorities receiving unearned benefits at white expense is not an incidental element of modern Republican politics; it is crucial to the GOP’s electoral strategy of dividing working-class voters along racial lines.

It is not too much to say that, in a single stroke, Serwer reminds us that the racial elements of Trumpism have long been at play in the Republican Party, while going straight to the added threat that Ocasio-Cortez presents.  She represents the fear of rising minority power and diminishing white privilege, which is fed by a Republican strategy of stoking fears that minorities basically steal wealth at whites’ expense.  Yet she also represents something of a double threat to politicians who appeal to such anxieties to maintain power: the possibility that a figure like Ocasio-Cortez can cut through such racial fear-mongering via a recognition of shared interests among working class Americans that transcends race, and re-calibrate political awareness more along the lines of a 1% versus 99% dynamic.

Likewise, Serwer contextualizes the basic status threat that minorities pose to whites when they gain positions of power, as noticeably happened in the 2018 midterms, which as Serwer notes resulted in the election of the most diverse Congress ever:

When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system. That poses a choice to those whose access to such cloistered communities is unquestioned: They can recognize that others might also succeed given the right circumstances, or they can defend the inequities of that system in an effort to preserve their self-image, attacking the new entrant as a charlatan or the group they belong to as backwards.

As the coup de grace, Serwer reminds us of how this relentless focus on supposedly undeserving minorities draws the focus away from the actual threats to security and power for white Americans: 

The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans. As long as rank-and-file Republicans are focused on these supposed villains, they won’t realize who is being conned, and who is trying to con them. And it isn’t Ocasio-Cortez.

For anyone who has marveled at the hatred Ocasio-Cortez has inspired — in a sickeningly sexist and racist breach of decorum, she was apparently the only Democratic member of Congress to draw Republican boo’s when she cast a vote for Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker — Serwer offers something of a skeleton key to unpack the mix of irrationality and calculation displayed by the GOP.  He hints at it but doesn’t explore the idea in depth — but clearly what has begun to infuriate the right still more is Ocasio-Cortez’s fundamental composure, righteousness, and fighting spirit in the face of their relentless disparagement (her reply to those GOP jeers? A tweet suggesting that they “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.” ) In this, Republicans may be helping bring to fruition their greatest nightmare: supercharging national focus on a politician who may end up playing an outsize share in helping refute generations of lies and propaganda about how a rise in minority power can only bring ruination upon white Americans.  Republicans also seem blind to the fact that the slings and arrows hurled at Ocasio-Cortez are felt sympathetically by untold millions of voters, minority and white, who understand that there is no more fundamentally American a story than the underdog who takes down those who cling to unmerited power.

Lost in the Suburbs

For anyone interested in understanding how the Democrats were able to flip the House so dramatically last November, even in the face of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, I’d recommend taking a look at this Vox article by Dylan Scott.  That the vote switching of suburban voters was a major driver of Republican losses has been generally reported; less explored has been what this fact actually means.  Scott digs into why so many of these voters switched parties in 2018, which is both fascinating in itself and vital to understanding how the Democrats might build an enduring House majority.

The broad move of suburban voters in the direction of the Democratic Party is striking; drawing on research by The Washington Post, Scott describes how the more densely populated a suburb was, the greater the share of Republican losses.  For instance, in 11 competitive races in rural districts, the GOP lost one seat; but in 9 heavily suburban districts, the GOP lost 6 seats.  

Scott identifies revulsion against President Trump as a prime reasons for this major shift in suburban voting patterns, a dislike amplified by his particularly low ratings among female voters.  But beyond this, these voters’ major political concerns are not shared by the president or the GOP, and vice versa.  First, Scott points to their higher education and income levels as giving them a greater sense of economic security; this, Scott asserts, means that they “don’t respond to Trump’s hardline rhetoric on immigrants and a border wall in the same way rural voters do.”  Likewise, their economic and educational status makes them less fearful of jobs being moved offshore.

Instead, their preoccupations are more “middle-class”: worries about health care costs, and about the Republican tax bill that scaled back breaks around state and local taxes that tend to help higher earners who tend to itemize their deductions.  He also suggests that support for gun control and fighting climate change are also on these voters’ radar.

One might think that voters who’d supported the GOP in the past would reward the party for the strong economy, but Scott observes that, “In an unfortunate paradox for Republicans, the economy mostly chugging along fine freed up these voters to devote more of their time to concerns about the president, who has an unparalleled ability to focus all attention on himself at all times.”   There’s merit in this point, but I wonder if it may understate the degree to which suburban voters were indeed motivated by economic concerns — such as rising health care costs — that the president and Republican Party have failed to address.

While a good chunk of previous GOP suburban voters chose not to support the party in 2018, I think it’s helpful to view this development from the flip side: that the GOP essentially moved away from these voters in both style and substance.  The government shutdown over the last month has hammered home that opposition to immigration, and a broader agenda of white nationalism, is at the center of Donald Trump’s politics - a politics supported with little dissent by the broader GOP.  If this is the new identity of the Republican Party, then a key question is why many previous GOP suburban supporters possess a sort of immunity to nationalist appeals.  After all, other studies have found that Trump’s support, in particular, isn’t necessarily linked to socio-economic status in a direct way; there is plenty of evidence that those not directly threatened by the prospect of an immigrant taking away their jobs are nonetheless supportive of the president’s nativist stance.  My guess is that these voters tend to be more integrated into, and thus more supportive of, an economy that depends on international trade.  Beyond this, perhaps their professional lives bring them into more frequent contact with those from other nations and backgrounds than someone living in a more rural district, effectively humanizing those that the president would seek to demonize.

Given the outsize importance that suburban seats played in the Democrats’ midterm victory, and the need to retain control of competitive districts (I’m thinking in particular of the various squeakers in Southern California), I’m quite curious to see how the Democratic Party will seek to consolidate these gains, and what tensions might emerge between the perceived needs of suburban voters and the progressive forces pushing the party toward goals like a Green New Deal and health care for all.

On Fighting Economic Monopolies and Climate Change, Is a Fresh Breeze Blowing in the GOP?

As much as I try to act as a sober-minded, fact-based (though never poker-faced!) narrator of these tumultuous political times, there are occasions — more frequent than I’m willing to let on — that I feel like a desperate soothsayer wildly scanning tea leaves and watching for symbolic birds to clue me in to the deeper ways of the world.  I’ve got this sensation this morning as I consider a couple political stories that share a common theme: unexpected areas of bipartisan agreement and positively shifting public sentiment on a pair of pressing issues.  

The first: at New Republic, Matt Stoller writes about an emerging cross-party movement to reign in monopolies like Amazon.  I will up and confess to being somewhat shocked to learn that some prominent GOP politicians have been signaling interest in the anti-monopoly effort.  And while it’s true that Democratic politicians and liberal think tanks are the drivers on this issue, the fact that there are limits to what some Republicans are willing to accept in terms of corporate power screwing up the economy suggests in turn that possibilities for reform may not be as distant as I would have thought.  I like to argue for having faith in the ability to change people’s minds, but this hasn’t stopped me from tending to believe that the GOP is basically unreformable at this point.  That’s still my inclination, but it may be that there are some issues — like monopolies — that are so obviously inimical to a healthy economy (not to mention challenging to politicians’ non-monopolistic donors) that some otherwise cautious politicians become willing to take a stand.

The second article that’s got me wondering whether I’m too eager to read big messages in small signs, or just becoming more open to grounds for cautious optimism: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild, author of the must-read Strangers in Their Own Land, has an essay (co-written with her son, a member of the California Energy Commission) arguing that Republican voters may be more open to action to fight climate change than has generally been understood.  As with those Republicans beginning to doubt the wisdom of monopolies, the simple fact of shifting opinions on this subject is in itself remarkable.  I doubt I’m alone in having gradually concluded that GOP opinion on climate change would never alter, and that any solutions going forward would have to be pushed solely by the Democrats, which in turn has cultivated a certain pessimism in light of what a heavy political lift this would be.

The Hochschilds raise a seemingly simple point that has profound implications for how to move forward not only the climate debate, but also the fight against monopolies and other issues where there is broader agreement than previously thought: members of both major parties are heavily influenced by the sources through which they receive information.  They point out that “Many conservative Republicans feel that frightening news of climate change usually comes from alarmist liberals who belittle their religious faith, elitists who condescend to them and a federal government that, until Mr. Trump, had forgotten them.”  But they see possibilities in what might happen were more Republicans, or otherwise trusted sources, to deliver such information:

A talk by an evangelical climate scientist, one study shows, altered the views of climate skeptics studying at evangelical colleges. Similarly, we need to find ways of showing science-doubting Republican oil workers that the leaders of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP have acknowledged the risk of climate change and that steps must be taken to address it. Republicans who greatly admire the military could learn about the ways the Pentagon has already acknowledged the risk of climate change as a security issue and has quietly set about installing renewable energy projects on bases across the country.

Two other points also caught my eye: on climate change, there’s a discernible split between the attitudes of more and less conservative Republican voters, and between the attitudes of voters and elected officials.  Together with the observation about which information sources Republican voters trust, these data points suggest that part of the fight against climate change should involve those on the left figuring out how to reach persuadable voters on the right.

This has come up before in my broader arguments about how best to protect democracy in the United States, and it comes up again in discussions of reining in monopoly and climate change: the initiative on these issues is necessarily from the the left side of the political spectrum, which prioritizes these issues far more than the right.  At the same time, though, the fact that something as basic to our universal survival as environmental protection could be claimed as a liberal issue speaks as much to the pathologies of American conservatism as it does to some immutable description of what constitutes a right versus left issue.  Not for the first time (and here I feel the lure of the soothsayer), I have the sense that policies of great universal appeal have somehow been pigeonholed as belonging to “the left” rather than, say, “all Americans who need to breathe air to survive.”   Will actual conservatism, and not this radical urge to despoil our nation and planet, manage to make a comeback in the GOP?

Can Democrats Remove Trump From Office Without Excusing Republican Complicity in His Offenses?

David Leonhardt has just written a column that articulates, concisely but authoritatively, why the central question of American politics in 2019 is how to remove Donald Trump from office in light of his demonstrable unfitness.  His summation of Trump’s offenses is conservative — he sets aside the issue of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2018 election, not to mention Trump’s attempts to downplay Russian assistance, and also downplays the degree to which U.S. foreign policy now appears to be subordinated to the interests of foreign powers.  Yet even Leonhardt’s more limited case, from Trump’s efforts to profit off the presidency, to the president’s subversion of American democracy, is solidly damning.

It is heartening to see Leonhardt’s piece receiving widespread attention and admiration.  He has articulated what so many of us are thinking: that our country must not endure this president a moment longer than necessary, and that waiting until 2020 risks exponentially multiplying the harms already done.  Yet a key argument Leonhardt makes — that Trump will not be removed from office without the significant support of some Republicans — raises a critical corollary to removing Trump from office that he does not address: that the Republican Party must not be allowed to wriggle free either from its complicity with this horrid man’s rise to power, or from paying dearly for an anti-democratic and plutocratic agenda that has meshed so seamlessly with Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts and drive for personal aggrandizement.

Leonhardt argues that Republicans will need to turn against Trump in order for him to be removed or forced from office.  He doesn’t say so explicitly, but he seems to foresee a situation in which enough GOP senators ultimately signal their opposition to the president so that the president resigns rather than face impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate.  He writes that this process would be helped along both by the Democrats assiduously investigating the president’s misdeeds, particularly those, like corruption, with crossover appeal to Republicans, and by former or current members of the administration speaking publicly about the president’s unfitness.

Yet this otherwise logical approach would allow the very people who have enabled Trump’s perfidy to date — those senators and representatives who have sat by idly while the president attacked our democratic institutions, incited racist hatred, and kowtowed to foreign powers, as well as those who carried out his policies as members of his administration — to essentially shift the blame for all Trump’s evils onto Trump himself.  This may contain some measure of defensibility when we are talking about mere complicity in acts that benefitted Trump personally, such as enriching himself via certain foreign policy decisions.  But in the matter of Trump’s white supremacism and authoritarianism — such as his attacks on the free press, his false assertions of voter fraud, and his attempts to demonize undocumented immigrants — his behavior has been simply an enactment of attitudes and policies already long practiced by the GOP.

So there is a basic tension between getting the GOP comfortable with the idea of removing Trump from office, and the reality that the GOP has been A-OK with Trump’s various offenses to date.  I think Leonhardt underestimates the bind the Republican Party is now in — as many have noted, the GOP is now Trump’s party.  To expect GOP politicians to risk electoral obliteration by acting for the good of the country doesn’t seem at all a sure thing.

There is also a second tension that revolves around the the Democrats’ partisan interests and the national interest, on the one hand, and the GOP’s complicity with Trump’s bad acts, on the other.  It seems to me that the Democratic Party would be foolish not to ensure that the Republican Party pay a maximal price for its coddling of Donald Trump these last two years.  Every effort should be made to ensure the GOP wears a scarlet “T” for at least a generation.  

Yet, I do accept the premise that Donald Trump is a singular threat to our country, and to this extent, the argument that Democrats need to prioritize his removal from office, as a matter that reaches beyond purely partisan interest.  (After all, if the Democrats wanted to ensure the Republicans really pay the ultimate price for supporting Trump, they’d just sit back and let him wreck the country for another two years, then sweep in on a “I told you so” platform in 2020.  For the sake of our nation, of course, this is not an option.)  So, realistically, some Republican support is needed.  But this reality does not remove the Democrats’ obligation to make the GOP pay both for its complicity and its continuity with Trump’s impeachable offenses; rather, it requires a careful threading of the needle so that both goals are achieved.

Leonhardt cites the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency as a useful guide to how Trump’s downfall might come about.  He points out that even at the end of Nixon’s presidency, he still had 50% approval among GOP voters, but that political collapse did finally come, as Republican elected officials turned on the president.  But I think we need to consider the possibility that even the most cautious and skillful approach to gaining GOP support for forcing Trump’s removal or resignation will fail; that the same rotten impulses that have led so many Republicans to support and enable Trump will prevent them from ever opposing him, preferring an authoritarian endgame to a democratic resolution.  In such a case, there would be no downside at all to a no-holds-barred effort by Democrats to tie the GOP to Trump, and Trump to the GOP; in fact, the Republicans would have already done most of the work.  As terrible as the short-term pain might be for the country, it is also difficult to see a way forward absent a historical pummeling of the GOP in 2020, that might exorcise the sway of racism, scourge away the endless advocacy for the wealthy, and bludgeon its anti-democratic impulses.

Purported Threat at Southern Border is a Con Job of Epic Proportions

As the government shutdown hits its third week, with the ability for Democrats and Republicans to reach an agreement depending on Donald Trump’s absolute demand for border wall funding, it’s startling to take a step back to remark how he has worked to turn a humanitarian crisis into the preeminent national security and economic threat to the United States.  For a president, with all manner of data and advice at his disposal, to look upon the United States, with its challenges of economic inequality, a shrinking middle class, and mass impoverishment at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, and upon the state of the world, with the threats of global warming and rising authoritarianism, and decide that it is appropriate to shut down the government on the basis of immigration issues in order to get his way, is objectively insane.  At the same time, it’s the ultimate testament to the moral emptiness, demagoguery, and racism at the heart of the right-wing political wave he has both ridden and conjured.  Not only does this politics misidentify impoverished migrants as a threat to the country’s economy and safety, it’s also powered by a twisted combination of racial hatred and white supremacist attitudes that Trump can’t help but give voice to.

This country never should have allowed a situation to develop in which millions of people live under the radar, deprived of the protection of the law and fair wages through their undocumented status.  At a minimum, this was a ticking time bomb that a demagogue like Trump would eventually use against the Democratic Party and against our democracy more generally, even if both parties have been complicit in this situation.  Purely on grounds of justice, no democracy should be comfortable with a vast population of undocumented immigrants vulnerable to exploitation and unable to participate in the political system.  Yet the benefits they brought to the American economy long received a bipartisan embrace: many are the employers who built their wealth on the backs of underpaid, undocumented laborers.

And now, President Trump’s elevation of stopping immigration across the southern border, with broad support from the Republican base, signals what a diminished and petty vision of American is now held by millions of Americans.  Not only does it seek to erase the contributions these migrants have made and continue to make, it seeks to demonize them as some sort of invading army.  Even at this late date, the hypocrisy still astounds.  If the Republican Party really wanted to stop illegal immigration and the supposed threat of these workers taking low-end American jobs, then they could be done with it by passing laws that harshly penalized those who hired undocumented workers.  Instead, amazingly, all blame is placed on people who are doing what so many of our ancestors did — coming to America in search of a better life.

And the racist vision further precludes actual solutions to the flow of immigrants northward, by conceiving of all the vast lands south of the Rio Grande as a demented lawless hellscape of gangs and faceless hordes.  Completely blanked out is the idea that there are actual countries and societies where large-scale, non-exploitative assistance might promote democracy and healthy economic development, and alter the dynamics that send so many people fleeing northward from poverty and violence.

It remains shocking to me that the Democrats have allowed Trump to so thoroughly shape this debate.  His economic premise that immigrants are simply draining our economy is flawed; his assertion that they present a national security threat is laughable; and his racism is contemptible.  It is unnerving that our entire national dialogue has been centered so often on a purported threat that is, in fact, almost entirely illusory.  The con man president has once again conned America.

Though Defeated, Jersey Gerrymander Ploy Highlights Dangers of Anti-Democratic Spiral

Last month, Democrats in New Jersey were on the cusp on implementing a plan to essentially gerrymander their way into impregnable, or at least, highly secured, power in the state.  The plan went awry when enough people on both sides of the aisle paid attention to the effort and those leading it chose to back down rather than risk paying an unknowable public and political price.  

If there’s one thing readers of The Hot Screen have picked up on in the last couple years, it’s probably our belief that political and moral imperatives dictate that the Democratic Party needs to defend and expand democracy in our country.  This is both necessary in pragmatic terms, to win back power, and in identity terms, in that a Democratic Party that fails to do so would not be worth supporting.  Such a strategy necessarily includes opposition to all forms of voter suppression, whether it be arbitrary purging of voter rolls, restrictions on early voting, or, of course, gerrymandering that thwarts the ability of citizens to elect the officials of their choosing.

What transpired in New Jersey has only fed fuel into our righteous fire.  “Beware any politician who wants to avoid a fair fight” is a basic lesson that only grows more and more prominent as a guiding star in how to think about our shared democratic future.  Within the Democratic Party, there is clearly a battle being fought out between certain establishment politicians who’d love to cement their hold on power, alongside those who think fighting dirty is acceptable in order to defeat Republicans and move forward progressive causes, and those who understand that undemocratic means will bring neither accountability nor real progressive change.  A politician who is guaranteed of re-election is a politician that much less inclined to really listen to her constituents; obviously, such gerrymandered seats also stand in the way of the voters’ will when they decide it’s time for a change.

The fight in New Jersey also caught my attention because it was an unpleasant illustration of a topic covered in a book I’ve discussed previously, How Democracies Die.  The authors describe a cycle in which competing political parties begin to change the rules of the game to tighten their hold on power, each move prompting the opposition to mimic it lest they find themselves out of power permanently.  This cycle can be driven by, and further drive, the idea that the opposition is illegitimate, which justifies moves to stymie its future election.  When both major political parties embrace such tactics, the dynamic can be very difficult to reverse.  How Democracies Die cites plenty of examples from around the world; it’s chilling to see even the possibility of such a cycle begin here.

But I think we can cautiously say that the New Jersey story has had a happy ending, at least for now, and shows that a Democratic grassroots awareness of the perils of gerrymandering is only growing. A New Jersey activist quoted by Politico makes the point very well indeed:

“What got us emotionally upset was that here we had fought hard in a certain set of values that we thought Trumpism was an affront to: Lack of transparency, poor policy, power grabbing. We saw Republicans doing that all over the country,” said Sue Altman, a board member of the group South Jersey Women for Progressive Change. “To see our own party kind of make hypocrites of us and to turn it around and do the same thing in New Jersey.”

We couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. We already have one party that has become untethered from democracy, and even that’s one too many.

U.S. Backing of Saudi War on Yemen Is Indefensible

Andrew Sullivan found himself as irate as The Hot Screen at the general reaction to Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan.  He, too, identifies this widespread opposition as the manifestation of an establishment consensus supporting endless American intervention in the Middle East, despite equally endless evidence demonstrating the insanity of such policy.  Of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, he writes, “We should not be asking why Trump has decided to nip this in the bud, following his clear and popular mandate to get us out of the region. We should be asking how on earth did the Establishment find a way to occupy yet another Middle Eastern country without any democratic buy-in at all.”

Sullivan hits several important points that I didn’t touch on in my own piece.   First, he suggests that just as those on the right have been motivated by neo-conservative dreams of U.S. dominance of the Middle East, some on the left side of the spectrum have supported a “liberal internationalism” that supports interventions on humanitarian grounds.  Sullivan argues that this justification was used and discredited in the Obama administration’s forays into both Syria and Libya.  To me, it also suggests the ways in which American military force seems to possess magnetic appeal to those who hold power, a manifestation of that tried-and-true adage that for a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  This bipartisan American belief in the moral use of violence is one of the single greatest character flaws of our nation, abetted by the growth of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic and budgetary power in a way that distorts our politics immensely.

Sullivan also notes the treacherousness of involving ourselves in Middle Eastern conflicts we have no national interest in, like the Sunni-Shiite split that was so great a factor in the Iraq invasion turning into such a catastrophe.  I worry that even at this late date, not enough Americans are aware that the Muslim world is hardly monolithic, and that our siding with one sect over another entwines us in dynamics that are the very definition of none of our business.

Sullivan also elaborates on the connection between our ongoing occupations in the Middle East and the rise of Trump, pointing out that both Obama and Trump ran, and won (though, with Trump, with all the usual asterisks about his victory), on platforms that called for extricating the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan.  He suggests that Trump supporters are opposed to a government that defies the will of the people, and that the wars in the Middle East, in the face of the public’s growing lack of support, helped fuel a backlash in favor of someone who seemed not so beholden to establishment opinion.

But Sullivan’s willingness to credit Trump for his withdrawal decisions, premised on the president carrying out a campaign promise in the face of adverse pressures, fails to persuade me, and seems more borne of Sullivan’s effort to demonstrate how insane establishment opinion is: it’s so crazy that a crazy man was needed to turn things around!  Rather, we have plenty of evidence that Trump is acting due to pressures that Saudis and perhaps Putin have brought on him to make decisions conducive to their interests; in other words, that he is hardly acting out of a hard-headed assessment of the national interest, but in the interests of the only thing that counts — his own.

*

Sullivan cites U.S. involvement in the Saudi-United Arab Emirates war against Yemen as another example of our country’s endless and pointless Middle Eastern interventions.  Indeed, the more you learn about what the Saudi coalition has been doing, and the ways the U.S. has backed it, the more horrified any decent American will surely become.  The Shiite Houthis overthrew Yemen’s president in 2014, and in 2015 a Saudi-led coalition began to make war on the Houthis, who are backed by Saudi Arabia’s enemy, Iran.  The Obama administration made a decision to support the Saudi war, including intelligence and logistics assistance.  Much of the Saudi effort was through an air war, which the U.S. aided via in-air refueling by U.S. Air Force aerial tankers, the provision of mechanics and technicians for the Saudi’s American-built planes, and sales of bombs and other munitions.

As this New York Times story details, such assistance has implicated the U.S. in a variety of atrocities and possible war crimes against the Yemeni people.  These horrors have come about in two ways.  First, more than 4,600 civilians have been killed directly by Saudi air strikes in the war.  This is apparently due in part to the Saudis’ wish to minimize pilot casualties by staying higher in altitude when launching attacks, which diminishes the accuracy of the attacks.  It’s also tied to faulty intelligence.  Overall, though, these mass civilian casualties appear to be linked to the Saudis simply not giving a fuck about the deaths of innocents.

This mass slaughter from the air should be enough to give any decent person pause, and to provoke questions as to the war’s morality and the U.S.’s culpability in such misdirected violence.  The U.S. not only has sold to the Saudis the weapons of war that make these horrors possible, but primes them before each sortie to make sure they can deliver their violence again, and again.  Our fellow citizens are being ordered to participate in this carnage.

What emerges from the tale is a staggering portrait of American decision-makers who have lost their ability to gauge how to defend and promote American interests in the world.  It turns out that the generals who backed selling some of the most advanced warcraft in the world to the Saudis thought they’d never actually use them, viewing the F-15’s as “expensive paperweights.”  The U.S. attempted to guide the Saudis in minimizing civilian casualties, efforts that the Saudi ignored; yet military leaders continued to provide support despite the Saudis’ refusal to abide by their recommendations, then dissembled to Congress about U.S. awareness of some of the mass casualty attacks. 

But the overall effects of the war on the Yemeni people are more terrible by orders of magnitude than the individual air attacks.  The war has led to a breakdown of the country’s economy, and Saudi strikes on its cities and infrastructure have led to malnutrition and the prospect of mass starvation that could kill literally millions of people.  Indeed, between its involvement in errant bombings and this humanitarian catastrophe, Pentagon officials have begun to worry that the U.S. may now be implicated in war crimes.  

The full reality and horror of the immoral U.S. perpetuation of this war seem to finally, sort of, be breaking through to a wider public and political consciousness.  Earlier this month, the Senate voted to end U.S. military assistance in the war,  but the House did not take up the bill.  It’s remarkable that it has taken so long for public awareness and official questioning to build to even this weak point of friction and resistance.  The situation is characterized by a near-pyschopathic official indifference to mass casualties so long as it’s foreigners doing the dying.  The vast amounts of money the Saudis pay U.S. defense contractors are also playing an outsized role, evidenced no more clearly than in Donald Trump’s gleeful accounting of the billions the Saudis are spending on American armaments.  And as with so much of foreign and defense policy, the situation is deemed too complicated for the simple minds of the public; meanwhile, experts have proved themselves incompetent judges of basic questions of good and evil. If there is a way out of this war on Yemen and our other foreign policy catastrophes, it will need to involve a lifting of the mystifications and suppressions that allow the public no clear say or picture of what the U.S. government does in our name.

The President's Recruitment of Service Members Into a War on Democrats is Another Red Line Crossed

It’s reassuring to see fairly widespread critical coverage of the president’s politicized interactions with the military during his trip to Iraq, but there’s nothing new or surprising in Donald Trump’s attempts to cloak himself in the iron mantle of a militarized nationalism.  As so many times before, something utterly predictable, and in fact, familiar, has happened, seeming to provoke astonishment when the more proper response might be a poise of grim confirmation vis-a-vis the man’s authoritarian tendencies.  Nestled darkly inside the spectacle of his actions and the outraged response is a sense that vital assumptions about American democracy are coming undone, or at least being severely challenged, and of an urgent need to revisit first principles lest they be replaced by insidious new ideas about the nature of our country.

The main issue is not that members of the military might have brought campaign paraphernalia to a meet and greet with the president, and that the president signed MAGA hats, although this is in fact highly problematic in and of itself.  The idea of members of the military endorsing a particular political candidate cannot be reconciled with either the idea of a non-partisan military or the cornerstone idea of civilian control over the armed forces.  Though the rank and file who engaged in this behavior deserve some form of reprimand, the harsher punishment by far should be levied against their superiors, who never should have allowed such activities.

Yet it is a president and his team who encouraged and indulged such a display who carry the greatest culpability, and who merit the strongest condemnation.  Trump abetted the erosion of keeping the military in its proper place in order to boost his own standing, effectively leveraging his position as commander-in-chief to orchestrate a performance of adulation by those he commands.  However, he went a dangerous step farther by using the event to accuse the opposition political party not only of being feckless, but of being outright anti-American.  When he told the service members that “You’re fighting for borders in other countries, and they don’t want to fight, the Democrats, for the border of our country,” he effectively recruited his military audience into the cause of attacking his political rivals.  Moreover, his lies to the assembled service members that they hadn’t received a pay raise in ten years was an obvious attempt to incite anger against the Obama administration and Democrats more generally, and adds to the obscenity of his behavior.

The president’s subsequent attempts to turn the criticism into an attack on the military — he tweeted that “CNN & others within the Fake News Universe were going wild about my signing MAGA hats for our military in Iraq and Germany” — would have the public ignore the overall context and scope of his anti-democratic efforts to use military support for his personal ends.  Having engaged in activity antithetical to the norms of American democracy, he has tried to turn the conversation to a false narrative about the media hating the military.  

Trump’s behavior is that of a generalissimo in a banana republic. This is not a coincidence, because like other leaders of authoritarian tendency, once you have sloughed off a commitment to democracy and the archipelago of decency, mutual respect, and collective endeavor that it involves, all that is left is a worship of power and violence, and the aggrandizement of the self. Our president is such a man; to not see this is to be either a dupe or a co-conspirator.

Yet Trump can dare to do what he has done because the United States has long been drifting into an unhealthy and unexamined relationship with its armed forces, both in terms of the political system’s and the public’s attitudes towards the military and the missions it has been given.  Since 2001, the U.S. has put war-making at the center of its foreign policy, launching invasions of an unconquerable country, in the case of Afghanistan, and a country innocent of the crimes of 9/11, in the case of Iraq, and eventually expanding military operations to dozens of countries.  And through the last 17 years, most of the public has been satisfied to outsource the sacrifice required to a tiny subset of the population.  As service members’ sacrifice has come to seem more and more pointless in some ways — witness the undeniable disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq — and yet more and more commendable in others — there have been no more 9/11’s, and isn’t that what our leaders promised would be the result of launching wars in the Middle East? — Americans have arrived at an attitude of fetishization of the armed forces.  Polls show that the military is one of the most respected, if not the most respected, institution in the United States, and the mere suggestion that not every last American service member is an outright hero earned NBC host Chris Hayes a public shellacking (even though it is obvious to the non-befuddled that a Marine who slogged his way through Fallujah and was wounded along the way is a hero, whereas a paper-pushing general playing politics in the Pentagon is not).  In a grotesque turn of events, you could count yourself as a supporter of the military not because you engaged in serious debate and prolonged consideration of why and where Americans were dying and whether it was worth it, but because you brooked no criticism of the service members and engaged in blissful ignorance of the whereabouts of American troops as your just reward.

The idea, then, that service members are not only heroes, but also simultaneously fragile victims, is never far below the surface, as the public at large has not been able to fully suppress the awareness that it has chosen not to examine too closely the sacrifices of their fellow Americans, and is ever plagued with an unexamined combination of guilt and doubt.  Not surprisingly, Donald Trump picked up on this strain of victimhood, when he suggested that he could never turn down service members who asked him to sign their MAGA hats.  The notion that warriors would somehow be bereft or heartbroken by the lack of an autograph not only lays bare once again the president’s fundamental narcissism, but this generalized double sense of soldiers as both superhuman and super fragile.  

Trump understands our unhealthy fetishization of the armed forces, and is attempting to use it to burnish his own lagging credibility.  It may not work with most Americans, but the largest danger is that it resonates with his base, for whom Trump has further normalized the idea that the military should be considered a legitimate conservative bastion that might support a good Republican president like Donald Trump when the political establishment turns on him.  It is naive to think that Donald Trump is currying military votes; rather, he is toying with the idea that his legitimacy may not rest on the support of a majority, or winning an election, but on the support of the truest Americans of all, the men and women of the armed forces.

It is a final bit of sickening bullshit that this episode occurred at a base in Germany, a country in which U.S. troops have been stationed ever since kicking the shit out of a regime that is the poster child for the perils of militaristic Fuhrer worship.  

More Than Trump is the Problem with U.S. Foreign Policy

President Trump’s decision last week to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, and half the U.S. force currently in Afghanistan, was generally covered as a sign of mounting chaos in his administration: a president defying the counsel of his advisors, the disregard hammered home by the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.  The particulars of Mattis’ resignation letter added punch to his decision, laying out the ways in which he believes Donald Trump’s approach to defense and foreign policy departs from the mainstream beliefs advocated by the defense secretary.

The president’s decision to act precipitously on both fronts appears to carry real downsides for the United States.  In Syria, it exposes the Kurdish fighters the U.S. has been backing to attacks by the Turks, who view them as terrorists.  And in Afghanistan, the abrupt action seems to have undermined efforts to broker a peace with the Taliban.  But much of the backlash to Trump’s actions, across the political spectrum and in opinion writing, has not only pointed to these specific harms, but has assumed that the president is acting in contravention of mainstream U.S. foreign policy.  As suspect and ill-considered as Trump’s actions might be, and as disturbing is the possibility that he might have made them due to pressure from Vladimir Putin, these bipartisan assumptions are just as crazy.

How many Americans were aware that we have thousands of troops in Syria?  Or that we still have 14,000 troops in Afghanistan?  How is it that, if the U.S. withdraws from Syria, a NATO ally - Turkey - can be counted on to kill U.S. allies?  How is it possible that we have occupied part of yet another country in the Middle East without a declaration of war?  How is it that we’re still in Afghanistan, 17 years after 9/11, with the Taliban gaining strength in that country?  Is it actually within any rational national interest to engage in perpetual warfare against ever-shifting and seemingly indestructible enemies in Middle Eastern countries already long-ravaged by violence and destruction? What, exactly, are the end goals, and are our policies actually achieving them?

But the kerfluffle around Trump’s moves on Syria and Afghanistan reveals a particular tragedy of our Trumpian moment: this man is so awful in and of himself that it is preventing us from re-examining the bad assumptions and self-defeating policies that have arguably contributed to his rise in the first place.  This must be counted as one of the costs of this presidency: that we are distracted from discussions more fundamental than the horrors of this particular man.  Instead, we now witness the obscene spectacle of a broad consensus that we had better just keep doing whatever we’ve been doing in Afghanistan and Syria, because Trump’s policy is even worse.  Completely forestalled is any examination of whether what we’re doing in those counties makes any goddamned sense in the first place.

Much attention has been paid to Mattis’ references to a U.S. foreign policy based on alliances and partnerships, and how he has effectively called out Trump for abandoning this bedrock position of the U.S.  But the idea of the U.S. placing itself at the center of systems of alliances meant to preserve world peace and U.S. security, which has been the case since the end of World War II, is  hardly the whole story.  Since 9/11, something fundamental has changed in U.S. foreign policy, as the U.S. has engaged in a series of wars and generalized violence across the Middle East that rests in dangerous contradiction with the idea that this country is all about alliances that preserve the peace.  What I see in the coverage of Trump’s recent Syria/Afghanistan moves is a general impulse to conflate these two ideas: that in withdrawing from those countries, Trump is undermining our alliances and security.  But being involved in active wars, and deciding whether to continue or end involvement in them, is an entirely different question from whether it’s in the national interest to have allies and security arrangements across the world.