President Moves Forward on Weaponizing Intelligence Apparatus Against Political Enemies

The news today that President Trump has given Attorney General William Barr enhanced powers  to investigate those who investigated ties between his presidential campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election should, at a minimum, end any discussion as to whether impeachment against this president is warranted.  In using the tools of law enforcement to hunt down those who worked to defend the United States against a very real assault by Russia and examine very real links between that assault and Trump campaign officials, the president has placed revenge and personal power over any notions of patriotism, national security, or the constitutional order.  Particularly chilling is the certainty that a normal investigation, while uncalled for, would doubtless conclude that, contrary to the paranoid and self-serving propaganda of the president and his allies, there is no deep state involving hundreds of people who conspired with a corrupt Obama administration to take down the coming savior prophet presidency of Donald J. Trump.

We can be assured, though, that this will be no normal investigation, but one intended to reach the fake conclusions it start with.  As a former CIA chief of staff tells The New York Times in reference to the president’s order to intelligence agencies to declassify information to assist the investigation, “It’s dangerous because the power to declassify is also the power to selectively declassify, and selective declassification is one of the ways the Trump White House can spin a narrative about the origins of the Russia investigation to their point of view.”  And this is in addition to the more basic problem of undermining intelligence work by possibly exposing sources and methods of U.S. intelligence.  You don’t have to be an unswerving supporter of the CIA and FBI to be appalled that a president would endanger American security for the sake of his job security.

Remember — President Trump has already proclaimed that those involved in the Russia investigation are guilty of treason.  This investigation is intended to prove the president’s slander.  In this respect, its basis in the world of intelligence is a perfect cover, as the president’s political enemies can be targeted not only by selective declassification of intelligence, but also by allusions to made-up intelligence that they will say must remain classified.

It is still an open question as to whether an impeachment inquiry would have any chance of weakening or removing the president, or would further strengthen his hand; at this point, I’m inclined to agree with those who argue that the brokenness of the impeachment route is another sign of our broken political system.  At a minimum, Democrats need to raise holy hell about this, targeting not only the president but all those Republican politicians who give him their vocal or tacit assent. But there is no question that the president has crossed yet another red line in super-charging his vendetta against his political enemies by enlisting the powers of the intelligence community against them, even at the expense of creating actual national security dangers.  The president is signaling more strongly than ever that there are no lines he won’t cross to protect himself.  He would destroy this country to save himself.

Reading the Congressional Tea Leaves on Impeachment

Line of the day: “While Pelosi and her allies have been figuring out the best way to turn up the temperature, the president and his allies—flouting laws and resisting subpoenas at every turn—have been burning down the house.”

But this whole piece by Alex Shephard is a good rundown on the state of play of the impeachment debate among congressional Democrats. It’s been my sense that at some point, the Democrats would not so much have to make a choice about impeachment as have it forced upon them by a reckless and autocratic president whose only path to avoiding jail time or removal from office is to destroy our country. That point seems to be arriving. I also note for reference the tension Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be struggling with between pushing forward a Democratic agenda and fearing the public will see Democrats as overly preoccupied with impeachment. Shephard has some good critiques of this, and I hope to offer a few more soon.

Rich People Using Loopholes to Avoid Paying Taxes? I Think We Can Trust Elizabeth Warren to Come Up With a Plan for That!

This is something that we’ve already heard a lot about, and will continue to hear more about - that the social programs proposed by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and other Democratic candidates for president will cost more money than the country can possibly afford.  It seems to me that this article today in The Washington Post, titled “Warren’s ambitious agenda relies on a massive wealth tax that the rich may evade,” is pretty typical of the mainstream coverage of this issue, for good and for ill.

The article’s framework is one of the most venerable in political reporting: is a candidate over-promising to her voters?  After noting some of Warren’s pre-eminent budget proposals — free public college, universal child care, and student debt cancellation — and how she plans to pay for them via taxes on the rich, the article identifies two possibly mistaken assumptions in the senator’s logic: “First, that the country’s wealthiest taxpayers won’t find ways to evade the targeted tax hike she proposes; and second, that new entitlement programs won’t result in ballooning costs that plunge the federal government deeper into debt.”

These are reasonable questions to raise, and I think even Warren partisans know that they need to address them.  But on both points, the article feels blinkered, perhaps inevitably, by received wisdom and a lack of appropriate context.  It is a given that the wealthy will attempt to pay as little in taxes as possible, and that they will pull out the stops to minimize payments of the sizable wealth tax Warren is contemplating.  But while the article notes the success rich people have had both in the U.S. and abroad in evading such taxes, it crucially ignores a few things.  Passage of such tax policies would be both the product of, and a further catalyst for, a re-calibrated public understanding that the rich need to start paying their fair share.  It seems highly likely that this would mean both heightened public awareness of tax avoidance by the rich, and a redoubled effort to head off loopholes and other such tactics.

It also seems more than reasonable that Warren, and other Democratic candidate with similar plans, recognize that their proposals are meaningless without effective tax collection.  The wealthy are not currently aggressively minimizing their taxes simply because they can afford great lawyers and accountants (though that’s a contributor), but because our current tax laws enable this, in combination with tax evasion enabled by an Internal Revenue Service that has been gradually gutted by anti-tax Republicans over the last 20 years.  Criticism of the uselessness of taxes on the rich based on the rich’s lawlessness seems less a valid critique of such taxation, and much more an urgent wake-up call to bring the scofflaw wealthy to heel.  It’s remarkable that such a middle-of-the-road article can note law-breaking in the highest echelons of society as simply an immutable fact of life, and not the rotten result of particular political conditions that might be changed.   

The article’s second major critique — that Warren’s new social programs may involve far greater costs that will “plunge the federal government deeper into debt” — is another valid and important criticism that nonetheless is based on assumptions worth examining.  First, that increased social spending might entail deficit spending is tightly tied to the first critique that her proposed taxes on the wealthy will be insufficient; again, it seems within the realm of possibility that a political consensus that allowed such social programs to pass would also include a determination to close off tax loopholes for the rich as much as possible.

Second, does it even make sense to talk about the federal government’s deepening debt anymore without noting that the Republican Party has been explicit about its goal over the last two-plus decades of choking off social spending by cutting taxes and exploding the debt?  Or to state that debt is a problem when none of the dire consequences forever predicted ever seem to come to pass?  As many have observed, debt only ever seems to become a crisis when it can be attributed to social spending that helps broads swathes of Americans. The underlying false assumption that debt is always a bad thing also ignores what is actually a crucial premise of all this proposed spending by Warren: that it will actually help economic growth over the long haul, aiding millions to climb into or grow more secure in the middle class, and raising the overall tax base, to boot.

Finally, the article notes criticisms by some economists that higher taxes might lead to less saving and investment by the wealthy; but this only reinforces the point that an economy in which the wealthy are such outsized drivers of our economy is an economy badly out of joint.   This ties into another unexamined premise that is found not only in this article but in writing about taxation more generally: the idea that taxed money is simply taken out of the economy.  This, however, is not true.  Apart from money that goes to debt service, government spends the money it collects through taxes, so that it is not taken out of the economy but in fact put into it.  You can certainly make the case that government does not invest money as productively as private investors, but this is not an argument proponents of greater social spending should shy away from.  In fact, how you define what is productive — is it simply growing the GNP, or growing the GNP at the same time that you enhance people’s educations and health in ways that promote both long-term, sustainable growth and a happy citizenry — should be at the heart of debates about the economy and the budget.

To Fight the GOP's Turn to Authoritarianism, Democrats Need to Talk About It

At the risk of turning The Hot Screen into a Jamelle Bouie fan club - if you’re not reading this New York Times columnist on a regular basis, you’re seriously depriving yourself of one of the sharpest political analysts of these upside-down times.  In Monday’s piece, he makes a point — and gives it resonant historical context — that has been haunting the edges of my consciousness for months now: in confronting Trump, his opponents would be wise to maintain the initiative against him.  This is much more than some Art of War-type banality, as it invokes not only Trump’s unprecedented ability to shape media coverage of him and his administration, but also that unspoken thing that holds back some of his opponents without the notion ever being fully articulated: overestimation of the president’s strength. 

The president and the GOP intend to use all the powers at their disposal to continue pushing forward policies supported by a minority of the public, such as draconian immigration crackdowns, a gutting of regulatory protections of workers and the environment, and now, apparently, war with Iran.  They also intend to use these powers to delegitimize and even criminalize the Democratic Party, whether through increased voter suppression measures, tacit encouragement of foreign involvement in the 2020 elections to spread disinformation and distrust, and criminal investigations of Democratic politicians (if you think this is going to stop with the Democratic presidential candidates, you are surely dreaming). Democratic opposition on the first front has been fierce, but has been limited by the party only holding the House.  On the second, the Democratic Party has been less organized in its resistance.

Trump and the Republicans also maintain a certain initiative by acting in ways that are outside the bounds of what has historically been acceptable behavior, both morally (I am thinking here of the cruelty toward undocumented immigrants, such as family separations and children held in inhuman conditions) and in terms of American democracy (the president pressuring a foreign power, Ukraine, to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son): activities to which our political system might be said to lack adequate responses, since they’re both outside the framework of known politics and essentially defy both the rule of law and common adherence to humane norms on which our politics depend.

If I’m sounding unexpectedly sympathetic to the opposition’s plight, I suppose that is how I’m feeling right now.  When one party is trying to break our democracy, there is no ready playbook for how to fight back.  But in moving toward a response, a couple points are becoming clearer.  The first is that the Democrats are only hamstringing themselves if they fail to see this moment for what it is: an existential fight to the finish with a GOP that has gradually transformed into an authoritarian, anti-democratic party.  Part of the reason I say this is because this is how the GOP itself already sees the situation.  This is a party that for literally decades has seeded the judiciary with a cadre of Federalist Society attorneys and their ilk, who importantly for our fraught moment seem to worship the centralization of all power in the hands of the president (unless he’s a Democrat, in which case the president is always grossly abusing his powers of office); that for years has fought to change the rules of voting in states across the country so that Democrats can no longer win power by winning the majority of votes, and must work harder than ever to even win a majority of votes in the face of voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics; and has happily existed in a symbiotic relationship with Fox News, a partisan broadcaster devoted to spreading fear, hate, and racism to its all-too-credulous viewers.

From this perspective, the debate (such as it is) over the wisdom of impeachment is both totally appropriate and also wildly missing the point.  Impeachment is a specific tool, to bring the power of the legislature to bear on a lawless executive, but in its apparent inadequacy to our present circumstances, it can also be seen as the founders’ tip of the hat to the idea that democracy will come under threat, sooner or later, from perennial human urges to unfettered power.  In the face of a concerted, decades-long effort to roll back American democracy, impeachment of the president seems a puny tool; potentially resonant under the right circumstances, with symbolic heft, but inadequate to win the larger fight against an anti-democratic movement that goes far beyond the current president.  

So recognizing the stakes is requisite to formulating a response.  But after that point, the Democrats and other opponents of this right-wing movement face difficult, even paradoxical questions: How do you employ the law in a struggle against those who no longer adhere fully to the rule of law?  How do you fight against an opponent who fundamentally believes you have no legitimate claim to hold power?  These are enormous questions with no ready answers, but to ignore them and not at least attempt to answer them is to court disaster and defeat.

One point, though, is clear: democracy is far less likely to prevail if its defenders fail to call out and name the anti-democratic aims of its opponents.  This includes describing for the broader public how seemingly disparate pieces of legislation and executive policy together add up to a broad roll-back of American democracy.  And this point is why shivers went down my spine when Joe Biden declared last week that President Trump is an anomaly compared to the rest of the Republican Party.  While there are strong arguments to be made that it’s good politics to reassure Americans that there is a great middle ground where the country can find consensus and move forward, it is a far different matter to provide the GOP with bipartisan cover for its slide to the authoritarian right.  This crisis is not just about Trump, and it is something of a comforting fairy tale to keep saying that he’s a unique problem we’re facing.  This president would be nothing without the way he’s fused his governance with a pre-existing set of Republican policies and attitudes.

Which brings us back to the points made by Jamelle Bouie that I started off with: taking back the initiative and refusing to overestimate the president’s hand. From collaboration with the Russians to refusal to hand over the president’s tax returns, Trump and the GOP are on the wrong side of the law and of public opinion in a hundred different ways. Democrats should be making the case every day that the president’s lawlessness and the GOP’s complicity undermine the rule of law, but also are interfering with the ability to move forward with laws and policies that actually help Americans. The president has nothing to offer but more of the same: more hatred, more scapegoating, more destruction of our democracy. Make the GOP own their authoritarianism, their defiance of majority rule. Never, under any circumstances, act as if their behavior is acceptable.

It's Not too Late to Make Immigration Stance a Liability for Trump and the GOP

One of the most urgent questions of this dangerous era is how we have so seemingly quickly arrived at the precipice of authoritarianism, the guardrails and traditions of American democracy trashed and abandoned in the space of a mere couple of years.  A good part of the answer will lie in the gradual transformation of the Republican Party into a proto-authoritarian party over the past decades, in no small part driven by whatever anti-democratic measures were necessary to suppress minority voters, distract white voters from the inequality and corporate exploitation destroying the American dream, and enact the misogynistic and homophobic dreams of people who dared to claim, against all rational and moral evidence, that they acted in god’s name.

But the flip side to our crisis is that too many Democratic politicians, as well as millions upon millions of American voters, still don’t recognize the scope of the challenge, don’t understand that this is about much more than Donald Trump, who has brought to the fore ideas that have been latent in Republican politics, but which were bound to break out sooner or later given white panic over demographic change, growing economic inequality that inevitably heightens everyone’s status anxiety, and the inexorable growth of the executive power under presidents of both parties.  Every day, I am feeling more and more that all the emphasis on Donald Trump’s role in our crisis is leading us astray, as it distracts from the equally pernicious role of a GOP that enables his worst impulses, and whose regressive social and economic agenda he has been happy to embrace as his own.

Part and parcel of this failure to fully recognize the direction the GOP has been pushing our politics is an abysmal failure on the part of Democrats to offer a robust countervailing vision of a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive America. The good news is that our time of crisis has sparked such a reckoning among Democrats; probably the key question for their large field of presidential candidates is how much fundamental change will need to be part of defeating Donald Trump in 2020.  A related piece of good news is that Democrats seem to recognize the importance of hashing out this question.  I feel like a good rule of thumb is that Democrats are generally on the right track the more their discussions of the future aren’t simply about countering the president, but about outflanking and obscuring his dour and regressive agenda.

Yet on a central issue, Democratic failure to define the terms of debate continues to offer the president a path to mayhem, division, and long-term damage to both the American soul and American economy.  Exploiting racial and economic fears by demonizing and abusing Latin American immigrants is his premier strategy, but this has only been possible due to Democrats’ politically unwise choice to continue fighting more or less within the terms of debate Trump has laid out.  Immigration is central to Trump’s political vision, but it’s also critical to America’s identity, economy, and future; it’s far past time for Democrats to hammer home Trump’s vulnerabilities on this front, and to stop playing defense.

In a recent piece, Matthew Yglesias of Vox describes in clear, logical fashion the various ways in which immigration has been a net good for the American economy, building our country into the powerhouse it is today in ways that are rarely reflected on.  It is hard to come away from his article and not conclude that opponents of immigration simply have no idea how economic growth comes about, and that they have relied on bad-faith and just plain wrong arguments to accuse immigrants of taking more than they give to the country.

And a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll suggests that Americans are deeply receptive to the truth about immigration.  Even as the Democrats have inexplicably allowed Donald Trump to retain the initiative on this issue, it turns out that the president’s immigration policies are quite unpopular with middle of the road voters.   Post columnist Greg Sargent reminds us that the president’s effort to make the 2018 midterms about invading immigrant caravans did nothing to preserve the GOP’s house majority (though others have argued that it may have helped them preserve seats in the Senate).  I’ve said before that I think Trump has played a meta-game with immigration, in that his abuses against Latin American migrants force the Democrats to spend time defending non-voters, playing into Trump’s goal of making them seem more supportive of non-Americans than citizens.  But these poll results suggest the opposite may also be true - a lot of voters are on to Trump’s con game, in which he’d rather talk about hurting immigrants than helping Americans.  Not everyone, it seems, thinks immiserated refugees are either a safety threat or an employment challenge; and this is without the Democrats offering a full-bore challenge to the president’s false premises.

Americans know hate-mongering when they see it.  Some revel in it, and are with the president; but most are appalled by it.  The more Democrats can take the wind out of the sails of Trump’s claims that immigrants are stealing jobs, or wreaking havoc, the more he’ll be reduced to anti-immigrant appeals based purely on racism and hate, which most Americans will be able to judge and condemn on their own.

Citing Possibility of 2020 Trump Coup, Pelosi Prescribes Unnecessary Electoral Bar for Democrats

This weekend’s New York Times interview of Nancy Pelosi contains the jaw-dropping news that the House Speaker is worried Donald Trump will refuse to recognize any 2020 Democratic presidential win short of a decisive margin of victory.  She uses this menacing and all-too-believable threat to back her argument that the Democrats’ chance of such a victory will be to “own the center left, own the mainstream,” rather than to push more fundamental reforms backed by some of the party’s presidential candidates.

Pelosi’s concern that Trump isn’t going to leave office unless defeated by a big enough margin raises troubling questions.  If Pelosi’s assessment of the man is correct, then there is likely no margin of victory he would accept as legitimate.  Indeed, a larger victory could conceivably lead the president to accelerate arguments that the vote was rigged or that millions voted illegally, because otherwise how could the loser Democrats have won so big?  This isn’t crazy speculation: this is exactly what he did in 2016 to explain away his massive popular vote loss.

Pelosi’s argument also signals to Trump that he has veto power on what might constitute a Democratic victory.  Will his majesty find a 2% victory margin by the Democratic candidate insufficient?  Will 3% do?  I understand Pelosi’s message that he must be repudiated thoroughly and unambiguously, and agree with it, but to say that an overwhelming victory is necessary in order to secure Trump’s assent to yield power is a step too far.  The Democrats need to win under the current rules; they cannot assent to new rules imposed by an authoritarian-minded president, and must call such a possibility what it is: a coup by a tyrant that the great majority of the American people would reject.

(The NYT piece notes that Pelosi was worried about such a delegitimization effort had the Democrats not won a resounding victory in the 2018 Congressional elections. It’s worth noting that the Democrats indeed had to win a tremendous margin in the popular vote in order to take back the House with the size victory they did; via gerrymandering and voter suppression, Republicans have already enacted the new set of rules for Democratic victory that she fears Trump will impose via Twitter incitement.)

Pelosi’s remarks also elide the counterpart issue to any worries about Trump’s refusal to leave office: what the Republican Party would do in such a situation.  But her concern about a Trump refusal scenario necessarily involves broader GOP backing of such an anti-democratic move; otherwise, Trump’s theoretical refusal to leave office could simply be laughed off, with the man bodily carted out of the Oval Office and remanded to the swank, sleazy halls of Trump Tower.

Speaker Pelosi’s diagnosis of the need for an overwhelming Democratic victory in 2020 leads her to prescribe an electoral strategy that appeals to moderate voters; “Own the center left, own the mainstream,” she says in the NYT interview.  Pelosi has previously made clear her interest in protecting newly-elected representatives from swing and more middle-of-the-road districts, and her strategy is of a piece with that — essentially, repeat the successful strategies of 2018 in the 2020 race.  Yet the specter of the Democrats appearing to be the party of the status quo, against Donald Trump’s resonant message that he will tear that status quo down — if only to move the country backwards — leaves me with a queasy feeling.  In the 2018 election, candidates could fit their pitches to individual districts; in 2020, the Democratic presidential candidate won’t be able to hedge his or her stands in such a way.  

Nancy Pelosi and other long-time leaders of the Democratic Party have yet to fully grasp the reality of our situation: that with one party having abandoned its adherence to democracy, the only way forward is for the Democrats not simply to beat Trump, but to discredit and delegitimize the contemporary GOP.  Not work with it, and find middle ground; but to name it for the authoritarian, white-supremacist coddling, inequality-embracing monster it has become.  This will necessarily involve re-setting the terms of debate decisively in favor of democracy and equality.   The GOP has basically embraced the terms of absolute destruction, with their complicity with Trump’s obstruction of the Mueller report and apparent determination to back Trump’s use of the Justice Department to go after his political opponents.  The Democrats cannot reciprocate by calling their opponents criminals, and threatening to prosecute them, but they also cannot hold back from condemning the GOP’s breaking of faith with the Constitution and American democracy. This is the high road, and it’s the right political road.

In this sense, Pelosi’s prescription is correct, but for broader reasons than she gives: the Democrats need a large margin of victory in 2020 not in order to placate Trump, but to repudiate the entire rotten project of the GOP.  In this sense, Pelosi’s note of defensiveness and caution again strikes me as the wrong one.  Against Trump and the GOP’s dour vision of an America closed to immigrants, beholden to the wealthy, and inciting hatred against everyone from journalists to Muslims, the Democrats can’t hesitate to talk not only about everyday issues like health care and a living wage, but the larger vision of America such policies enable.

I suspect Pelosi’s contradictory comments are her way of threading the needle of this upset and upsetting political epoch.  Acknowledging Trump’s likely willingness to contest presidential election results lets the left wing of the party know she understands their concerns; her strategy for dealing with this pins the party’s hopes on the politics-as-usual-but-on-steroids that won the Democrats the House in 2020, reflecting a belief that Americans as a whole are not yet in the mood for massive progressive change but need to be casting votes for something positive, not simply against Trump.  But with a possible presidential candidate like Biden, who is enacting a variation of Pelosi’s strategy in his appeal to middle-of-the-road voters and refusal to condemn the GOP for Trump’s sins, would the Democrats be able to convince enough Americans that moving past Trump is enough to earn their votes?

For an Opponent of Undocumented Immigration, Trump Sure Hires a Lot of Undocumented Immigrants

Donald Trump and his allies have turned the full force of the right-wing propaganda machine to protecting the president from the Mueller report’s documentation of obstruction of justice and complicity with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.  In the face of this, with Democrats already hamstrung by their own too-slow grappling with the unprecedented treachery and lawlessness of this White House, it can sometimes seem like Trump’s future hinges on this single, albeit deeply important, issue.

But as Tuesday’s reporting from The Washington Post reminds us, taking down this president won’t just be about Trump’s willingness to accept help from a dangerous foreign adversary, but also about attacking the president on multiple fronts: in this case, undermining the president’s war on undocumented immigrants.  As yet another story about the president’s use of undocumented labor, including alleged wage theft and lack of overtime pay, at yet another of his golf clubs makes clear, Donald Trump loved undocumented workers until he started running for president. 

What makes this a vulnerability for Trump, and not just another part of his past he can just shuck off, is that it’s contiguous with a broader vulnerability for the GOP at large.  Trump has brought the Republican Party’s strategy to new heights of bullshit: convince the rank and file that undocumented immigrants are the cause of all bad things in their lives, from losing a job to being threatened by violence, while actually doing nothing that would either substantially slow immigration northward (such as greatly increased economic aid to countries like El Salvador and Guatemala) or punish U.S. employers who hire such workers.  Yet too many businesses continue to rely on the cheap labor of undocumented immigrants for expelling existing immigrants or truly barring further immigration to ever be acceptable to major business sectors/Republican supporters.  Meanwhile, businesses like Trump’s simply continue to hire undocumented workers, who bear the lion’s share of the legal risk of such employment.  A grotesque, quasi-mathematical truth emerges: undocumented immigrants are increasingly desirable as the compensation a businessman like Trump needs to pay them approaches zero.

I don’t doubt that most Trump supporters will dismiss stories like those reported by the Post as fake news, or simply as evidence that Trump changed his priorities once he became president.  But as with many of the obvious faults and failures of Trump’s personality and policies, talking about such issues can peel away at least some voters from his coalition; can help sow doubts that the man really is on their side.  And immigration is Trump’s defining issue, the way that he’s made himself appear strong and managed to inject white supremacist thinking into the political mainstream in the name of defending national sovereignty.  Anything that can be done to mess with perceptions of his authenticity on this front is well worth exploring and exploiting.

Can Impeachment Put the Entire GOP On Trial?

A disquieting paradox may be at the heart of Democratic reluctance to pursue impeachment inquiries against President Trump in the wake of the Mueller Report: to concentrate the party’s efforts on an effort that has nothing directly to do with improving the lives of Americans risks adding renewed energy to the currents of discontent that helped Trump win the White House in the first place.  This seems to underly the frequently-heard position that the Democrats should seek to repeat their 2018 strategy in taking on Trump in 2020, with an emphasis on down-to-earth issues like health care.  An analysis yesterday from The Washington Post surveys this perspective pretty thoroughly, and it is perhaps best summed up by an advisor to Kirsten Gillibrand’s remark that, “If in a year I am talking about the Mueller report, I am losing.  Because the election is going to be about the economy.”

Democrats have inevitably been placed in a fraught position by the corrupt and authoritarian Donald Trump, and by the GOP that enables him.  To an alarming degree, politics is no longer the realm that most Democratic politicians are accustomed to thinking of it, where the long, slow slide of the Republican Party into a proto-authoritarian entity could be excused as hard-ball politics or simply a change in quantity not quality, and where Democrats could persuade themselves they were competing on the basis of ideas within a common framework of accepting democratic governance.  But Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and what we have learned to date, up to and including the Mueller report, of both the president’s efforts to deny that interference and to obstruct its investigation, have helped demolish any lingering faith that we are still practicing politics as usual.

As much as many Democrats would like to make the 2020 election about the economy and health care, seeing that as fertile ground for defeating Donald Trump, and as strategically reasonable as it is to move the terms of the election onto ground that they see as highly favorable to the Democrats, the nature of the acts documented in the Mueller report are not simply the type that can be de-prioritized or set aside.  Cover-up of a foreign attack against American democracy, and a willingness to accept that help, is treachery against every American, regardless of who they voted for.  And for the Democratic Party, the issue is existential: Trump’s willingness to countenance Russian help, and then to seek to cover it up, was a direct attack on the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.

The Trump administration and its allies aren’t going full-bore to discredit and propagandize against the Mueller report because they actually think it’s bullshit.  They’re doing this because they’re fully aware of the mortal threat it poses to this presidency, a threat that the opposition is curiously slow to grasp.  And this may get to the heart of what ails the Democrats.  Too many in their leadership don’t realize that we’re in the late stages of a breakdown that’s been a long time coming, but that’s finally upon us.  It is not just that the Republican Party has gone all in with defending a president who has committed indefensible acts, not only in terms of accepting Russian election interference, but in excusing his inexcusable incompetence on so many other fronts, from the drowning of Puerto Rico to the separation of families and the caging of immigrant children.  It’s also that the GOP has for many years laid the groundwork for this escalation of authoritarianism on the right, with state-level voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and other voter suppression efforts allowing the GOP to win majorities despite its dwindling numbers nationwide, and its transformation into the party of white people, if not full-on white nationalism.  We can’t forget this: in the face of such a tilted electoral playing field, were it not for the massive organizing and outrage that swept the country last year, the Democrats never would have had a prayer of re-taking the House and being able to provide even a modest check on this craptastic regime.

And this misunderstanding of the current crisis has, at least in part, led Democrats to misunderstand the role of impeachment in illuminating the convergence of Trump and the Republican Party.  As Brian Beutler argues at Crooked.com, even as Democrats argue that a Republican-majority Senate makes an impeachment effort futile, they ignore the fact that both the inquiry and the Senate trial would put Republican congresspeople and senators on the public record, both in terms of their complicity with this presidency and in choosing to vote in his defense.  By underestimating the possibilities of even an unsuccessful impeachment, the Democrats are missing an opportunity to permanently brand the GOP the party of Trump, and vice versa, as a prelude to 2020.

In arguing that the 2020 election will be the proper means by which to attempt to eject Trump from office, the Democrats are putting their faith in an electoral process that Trump, as shown by the Mueller report, has no qualms about corrupting.  As others have pointed out, the Democrats on the one hand would have us believe Trump is an unfit president, but on the other undermine their argument by saying that we just have to live with him until 2020 - and if the president “wins” again, by the corrupt means that the Democrats had decided weren’t worth impeachment, well, that’s just how it goes.

Perhaps the short version of my argument is this: the Democrats may think that politics as usual will save them, and the country, but we have plenty of evidence that Trump will not be playing politics as usual through 2020.  Even as the Democrats dither on impeachment, Trump and some in the GOP have indicated their intent to seek revenge against the Democrats for having supported investigating the president in the first place.  Even without impeachment going forward, in other words, the president has no qualms about turning the tables, and seeking to unleash the power of the state against his political enemies.  Here are a couple questions that I’d love for the Democratic leadership answer:

 What will be the Democratic response when the president seeks to criminalize and remove from office Democratic lawmakers?

What will be the Democratic response when malign foreign actors attack the 2020 election in support of Trump, and Trump accepts this assistance, when the Democrats have established that such complicity by the president does not constitute an impeachable offense?  

What will be the Democratic response when the president points to the lack of an impeachment inquiry as proof that he is doing nothing wrong in accepting the help of foreign powers in a presidential election?

Doing the right thing in no way means being politically unsavvy about how you do it.  Democrats must draw as clear a line as possible between any impeachment inquiry and the ability of government to serve the public’s needs, including specific policies.  Any impeachment effort must be accompanied by the Democrats doubling down on a progressive, transformative agenda making clear to the public what legislation they will pass once they have control of the Senate and presidency. Impeachment, somewhat paradoxically, can’t just be about impeachment.

Through the Looking Glass in Mount Vernon

Among the daily horrors and dangers of the Trump administration , a Politico report on the president’s “truly bizarre” (in the words of a tour guide) visit to Mount Vernon last year obviously provides some broad comic relief, and an opportunity to be staggered once again at the president’s narcissism.  Donald and Melania Trump, along with Emmanuel Macron and his wife, visited the first president’s Virginia estate, during which tour president Trump critiqued Washington’s failure to properly brand his estate by naming it after himself:

“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

As many, many people have pointed out by now, Washington was not a complete branding failure, as evidenced by the name of the nation’s capital and his often-crumpled, yet nearly ubiquitous $1 presence in our nations’ wallets, cash registers, and strip clubs.  But Trump’s belief that everything is about himself, and that this is the way that all other people should naturally operate, stands in grotesque contrast to the sensibility of both George Washington and arguably nearly all our preceding presidents.  Washington knew that how he comported himself as president would reverberate through the America political tradition he was helping to establish: and so he notably declined the trappings of a monarch, as well as a third term.  Those who followed him had a sense of being presidents among other presidents.  But not, apparently, Donald Trump, who does not care about what other presidents thought, struggled with, or did.

Trump may or may not be a stupid man, and he may or may not suffer from an undiagnosed mental affliction, but it is inescapably sad, even tragic, that he refuses to take responsibility for, to any degree, the most basic continuity with tradition that his predecessors have.  To lack the most basic respect for American history so that you wouldn’t simply fake interest in Washington’s life - beyond just getting excited when you learn how rich he is, as Trump apparently did during the Mount Vernon tour - is an affront to all Americans.  He may not give a shit - and he clearly doesn’t - but this is our history he’s disregarding, that he couldn’t care less about.  I felt something akin to this when I read early on about Trump’s apparent contempt for the actual White House.

But the most telling reverberant comment in the Politico article comes not from the president, but from an unnamed source “close to the White House,” who according to Politico indicated that Trump’s supporters don’t care if he isn’t into history, and that “if anything they enjoy the fact that the liberal snobs are upset” about his lack of knowledge.  This feels like a crude summation of the political earthquake we are all experiencing.  Conservatives, definitionally those who are interested in retaining some connection to what has come before, now see remembering our history as irrelevant, the realm of snooty liberals.  Liberals are those silly patriots who care about George Washington, tradition, freedom, equality, solidarity; real, conservative Americans know better, and care for nothing but money and power in the here and now.

Though, on further consideration, this may be a little too stark: because history is not entirely dismissed by Donald Trump, but strip-mined to suit present purposes.  George Washington is interesting to Trump because he had lots of money, and this becomes his use to Trump and his supporters in a grotesque syllogism: George Washington was rich; George Washington was president; therefore it is OK for Donald Trump to profit off the presidency, because obviously George Washington did, too (because he was president and was rich and the two are obviously connected).

At any rate, whether or not you voted for the man, we are all degraded by Donald Trump’s non-performance of basic presidential duties, and by his contempt for what common ground we have left to us.  It is the triumph of a fantasy vision of human life, reduced to wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.  It lessens us all.

Do Americans See the Problems Elizabeth Warren Aims to Solve?

This Washington Post analysis of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign captures some of the key possibilities and frustrations of her candidacy, both in terms of its substance but also in the all-important realm of media coverage.  The good news is that the article acknowledges that Warren, beyond the other Democratic candidates, articulates a comprehensive vision backed up by the policy ideas to get there.  The current economic and political order does not serve the interests of ordinary Americans, due to the out-sized power of corporations and electoral corruption; this needs to be fixed, and here are the ways to fix it.  The crux of the Post’s analysis is the question of whether America is ready to listen to her ideas, and it posits a basic tension between an inspiring vision and a more policy-oriented (i.e., Warren’s) campaign.

I think the answer to whether Warren’s candidacy will gather momentum or not lies in how deep a crisis Americans feel we’re in.  If fundamental change feels necessary, then Warren’s bid will be seen as having found the right moment.  This is a senator, after all, who has called for requiring that workers be represented on company boards of a certain size, taxing the wealthy in order to double the amount of children in day care, and building enough homes to pretty much end the housing shortage for the poor.  I wonder if enough people are yet seeing the links between the horror of the Trump presidency, and of a broader crisis of political economy that prepared the ground for his rise, not to mention the Democrats’ complicity in this devolution as they failed to offer a vigorous defense of the public good over the past decades of privatization, outsourcing, offshoring, and historic levels of inequality?  Whether enough do will settle the fate of her candidacy; whether Warren can help enough people see this will be a basic measure of whether she can win.

Democrats, and American more generally, should be deeply skeptical of any Democratic candidate who looks upon our current situation — an authoritarian president and anti-democratic GOP dedicated to elevating the fortunes (literal and otherwise) of the wealthy above all else — and thinks that deep, even radical changes are not called for. 

Why Have Democrats Shied Away From Hammering Home Donald Trump's Documented Betrayal of the United States?

If you’re feeling adrift and aswirl in the wake of the Mueller report (or, more to the point, what we know of it as summarized by Attorney General Bob Barr), wondering how all the documented ties between Trump and Russia could have yielded no affirmative decision on collusion or obstruction of justice, this piece by Mother Jones journalist David Corn may just be the journalistic Dramamine you didn’t know you needed.  Corn systematically runs through the publicly-known facts to establish the president’s betrayal of the United States, whether or not that betrayal involved prosecutable crimes committed by Trump.  Corn sets aside the fuzzy concept of “collusion” to remind us of the overwhelming reality: throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump and his staff encouraged Moscow’s efforts on behalf of his campaign, even as Donald Trump lied to the public about his ongoing efforts to build a skyscraper in Moscow.  His act of lying while Moscow knew the truth meant he put himself in a compromised position vis-a-vis this adversary of the United States.  More damningly, Trump and his campaign continued to deny that there was a Russian effort underway to assist his candidacy, even as the campaign was approached by the Russians and informed of such assistance.  Even more damningly, such public denials continued even after the U.S. intelligence community briefed Trump on the Russian hacking and disinformation campaign.  As Corn writes, “By echoing Russian disinformation—after being informed the Kremlin intended to mess with the presidential campaign to assist Trump—the Trump campaign was making it easier for a foreign power to undermine a US election.”

It is impossible to read Corn’s synopsis — much or all of which will be known to those who have followed the Trump-Russia story for the last two-plus years — and not feel both immense frustration at the apparent outcome of the Mueller investigation, and reassurance that there does indeed already exists a damning body of evidence sufficient to require the president’s removal from office.  It is also hard not to think that too many have been bewitched by the under-examined notions of “collusion” and “conspiracy,” and a certainty that with so much already documented, the president must have broken some laws (which, of course, Trump staff like Paul Manafort have indeed been convicted of).

Corn argues that Trump’s actions constitute “treachery” and “betrayal,” and his evidence backs up use of these terms.  Whatever the level of outright coordination with the Russian government and its lackeys, Donald Trump has acted, and continues to act, in ways that are self-serving and against the public interest, to put it mildly.  Given the point we’ve reached, at which Trump’s grave offenses seem not to constitute prosecutable crimes, it seems worth revisiting the way that the opposition, and particularly the Democrats, have really veered away from framing Trump’s Russia offenses using this language.  Why the emphasis on collusion and the way the notion is embedded in actual law-breaking, rather than making the public case that Donald Trump has betrayed his country?

I am wondering if part of the explanation may be that betrayal and treason are concepts mostly associated with the political right, which far more than the left is comfortable, and indeed has often relied on, such notions to divide up the body politic between patriots and enemies, makers and takers.  These are concepts, after all, that can also form part of a larger framework of revenge and restoration of some prior mythical order, which not coincidentally a pretty quick description of Trumpism.  Such concepts come less naturally to progressives, who broadly speaking place an emphasis on inclusivity and building a politics that grows into the future, rather than reaches back into the past.  It is also possible that, in part because of how the right has unfortunately coopted traditional ideas of patriotism, the left is simply less comfortable with a formulation of someone “betraying” their country; having unfairly been the target of such accusations, it may feel somewhat taboo to level such charges against political opponents, particularly if it feels like an adoption of the darker us-versus-them, exclusionary strains of right-wing politics.

And yet, it does feel like an inability to confidently articulate a patriotism firmly grounded in democratic, positive values has played a part in our current crisis.  Sure, our situation is more or less unprecedented — as many have noted, the incredible details of Trump’s avarice and serial wrongdoing wouldn’t pass the laugh test in a movie pitch — but something is arguably preventing too many Democrats from using not just the appropriate language, but from seeing and describing (two different things, I realize) what Trump has done in the most accurate and appropriate terms.

I don’t usually like this analogy, because it feels like preaching to the choir, but it’s apt enough here that I’ll risk it.  If President Obama had been soliciting Russian assistance to build an Obama Tower in Moscow during an election campaign, and lied to the American people about these efforts, the Republican Party would never

ever

ever

ever

ever

ever

and I mean, E-ver

have let it go.  

And for once, they would have been in the right.

The question of why the Democrats haven’t emphasized the betrayal angle of the Russia narrative may end up being one of the most important and intriguing questions of our political age.

Is Momentum Finally Growing to Explore Links Between Trump and Right-Wing Extremism?

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post has a column out this week that damningly synthesizes some of the biggest questions around President Trump’s relationship to a terrifying recrudescence of white nationalism and right-wing extremism.  He poses the question of whether Trump’s rhetoric is “emboldening white-nationalist and white supremacist activity at home and abroad,” and the experts and studies he consults indicate that this is chillingly the case.  Sargent provides a concise overview of some of the most crucial issues around the Trump-white supremacism nexus, including the growing international nature of this crisis and the undeniable way in which Trump is untroubled by providing aid and comfort to this anti-democratic and violent movement.

This little passage from an interview Sargent conducted a few months ago with Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst, is a provocative and upsetting distillation of how Trump’s words and actions overlap with those of white nationalists:

Building a border wall, deporting immigrants, a travel ban on Muslim countries — these are themes discussed on white-nationalist message boards and websites for years, now being endorsed and talked about at the highest levels of the government. He’s retweeted messages about Muslims from conspiracy sites. What keeps these groups energized and active is the fact that the administration has mainstreamed their message and tried to put it forth as policy.

The fact that Donald Trump has “mainstreamed” the most noxious white nationalist positions into his governing agenda should come as a shocking wake-up call to most Americans.  Although Sargent maintains an admirable lack of judgment in posing the question of why Trump appears untroubled by acting as essentially an ally to these backwards and violent forces, it’s hard not to conclude that Trump does so because he’s in agreement with their aims.  After all, the president has already made some of their major goals his own. 

So there’s no longer any real question as to whether there is an unacceptable and hateful synergy between this presidency and white nationalism.  The question we are well past time needing to move on to, and answer, is what Americans are going to do about it.  I have been seeing this point made here and there by various commentators, and I couldn’t agree more: one of the first orders of business is to bring all possible light to bear on this obscene political convergence.  This needs to be done by the press, by politicians, and by the public.  Pieces like Sargent’s are essential to a remedy: even if Sargent pulls his punches a little, the questions he asks are devastating, because the answers really are staring us all in the face.

But a decisive and concerted response by the Democrats is equally necessary.  It’s heartening to see that, in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks, the House Judiciary Committee is planning to hold hearings on white nationalism in the United States.  It may feel like the Trump Administration has already provoked a plethora of investigations by the new House majority, but few can be counted more important than this one.  I will not say that the white nationalist movement cannot survive broad public exposure, but I’m sure that most Americans will be shocked to learn of the rapid rise and spread of this movement in recent decades, and will be repulsed by obvious links between its hateful ideology and the policies and rhetoric of this administration.  And I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the Democrats’ credibility as a political party is on the line here.  If the party of multiculturalism and a future that brings broad prosperity does not view a growing white supremacist movement as an existential threat to both American democracy and the party’s political goals, then it is time for a new progressive party.

Likewise, if the Democrats fail to grasp the rare alignment between defense of the nation, and the need to hold President Trump and the GOP at large responsible for coddling and encouraging white supremacists, then there is likewise little hope for the party’s future.  It seems obvious that a president and a party that have no problem embracing ideologies that lead seamlessly to dehumanization of and violence towards vast swathes of the U.S. population must be defeated and discredited at every opportunity.  This is not simply because these ideas are the antithesis of what most Americans believe, but because they threaten the foundations of American society and politics themselves.  A country where Muslims constantly fear for their lives; where white nationalists can seize and trash federal facilities without repercussion (as happened here in Oregon a couple years ago); where Jews at worship can be killed by a gunman inspired by theories given credence by the president: this is not a country where all creeds and colors are equal, and free to live their lives as they please.  And this is to say nothing of the non-violent but clearly anti-democratic tools with which the GOP has targeted minority, young, and poorer voters for years, such as voter suppression and gerrymandering, which must be seen as being on a continuum that joins up with extremist ideology at a point that feels harder and harder to clearly define.

I noted Sargent’s interview with Daryl Johnson, who is actually a pretty significant figure in the story of white nationalism’s rise over the the last couple decades. This is because back in 2009, while working at the Department of Homeland Security, Johnson authored an intelligence report on the rise of right-wing extremist and violence in the United States. The report provoked a minor controversy at the time - and which has become retroactively far more significant - as congressional Republicans objected to the idea of “right-wing” extremism, and also bizarrely took offense at evidence that white nationalists were targeting members of the U.S. military for recruitment. The controversy turned into backlash, as Johnson described in a 2017 Washington Post op-ed:

Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.

I suspect we’ll be hearing more about Johnson’s 2009 report in the coming months, as both the report and the GOP panic over it now appear to be a turning point in the U.S. government’s botched response to what has become the premier extremist threat to American security. One would hope that the Democrats will make that report, and the GOP response to it, a prime exhibit in making the case that the Republican Party has at best fumbled America’s response to a grave danger, and at worst played a decisive role in its continuing rise. If we are to navigate out of this horror show without too much more damage, we are going to need to tell the whole, true story of how we got to this shitty crossroads.

Americans Need to Confront the Full Horror of Their White Nationalist President

We have had plenty of warnings up to this point.  But the slaughter of fifty men, women, and children by a white supremacist at two mosques in New Zealand last week should be a wake-up call that at various levels —governmental, law enforcement, and across society at large — both Americans and the populations of other Western countries have either looked away or failed to acknowledge the rising threat of right-wing terrorism.  And remarks by President Trump both before and after this horrific act remind us that this president seeks to downplay the threat of white nationalism even while stoking the fires of authoritarianism and racist violence.

The day before the Christchurch killings, the president suggested to Breitbart News that his supporters — specifically Bikers for Trump, law enforcement, and the military — might have a point at which they will turn violent against opponents of the president.  The White House denied that this was the intent of his comments, but there is little ambiguity in his discussion of “tough people” who support him who would make things “very bad, very bad” for his enemies.  That the president’s rhetoric was cloaked in a sort of plausible deniability only adds weight to the malign intent behind his words: he knows that this sort of violent innuendo must not be stated outright, but yet he feels compelled to signal it to certain of his backers.

The next day came his reaction to the New Zealand rampage.  In an exchange with reporters, Trump stated that he doesn’t consider white nationalism to be a mounting global threat, and attributed the issue to “a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess.”  He had nothing to say about the fact that the killer cited Trump as a symbol of a resurgent white nationalism.  Some commentators have already noted the connection to the president’s reaction to the white riot in Charlottesville, when he noted that there were “fine people” among the neo-Nazis, latter-day secessionists, and anti-Semites who brought disgrace and death to that Virginia city.  When faced with the most heinous actions committed by white supremacists, the normally emotive president becomes as demure as a parson’s wife.  

But what happened after the president’s initial comments to reporters is equally chilling.  As summarized by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo , the president “proceeded to give a meandering speech about foreign ‘invasion’, i.e., immigrants ‘rushing our border’, calling them ‘murderers and killers’. In other words, moments after denouncing the massacre he went on with a lie-laden screed much of which was indistinguishable from the attacker’s manifesto.”  The president essentially provided two things: justification for the killer’s actions, and ample evidence of a fact that can no longer be denied: that there is no clear line between the president’s attitudes on immigration and those of the most far-right, xenophobic ideologies of our time, up to and including the encouragement of violence as a response.

The good news is that many people have been making these basic points for a long time now, and still others have taken up the cry in the wake of the New Zealand attacks.  Yet there is an insufficiency in the response of both close observers, and of the public at large, that I find chilling if not outright horrifying.  First, it boggles my mind that a president can essentially incite violence, whether against his opponents or against a population such as immigrants or African Americans, and not immediately inspire mass revulsion and calls for his resignation.  This opinion piece by David Leonhardt makes the case for Trump’s culpability on this front (the title is pretty blunt: “It Isn’t Complicated: Trump Encourages Violence”) — yet despite its fairly shocking presentation of facts, what feels equally shocking is Leonhardt’s basic acceptance that this is a state of affairs that is in any way acceptable.

Now, I’m not saying that Leonhardt’s only path to credibility here is for him to end with the admonition that we all join him on the barricades outside the White House; indeed, I quote his peroration in full to help you make up your own mind as to how credible my take is:

It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.

These are harsh, condemning words — so why am I left with such unease that they still somehow miss the gravity of the moment?  Well, on the one hand, it is simply surreal to say that a president is encouraging violence without adding, in the same breath, that this renders him unfit for the presidency.  I am wondering if many of us have lost track of a small but essential truth: violence is the enemy of democracy; it is, in fact, arguably the one thing that must always be excluded from a democracy if that country is to remain viable.  It is not just one thing among many that the president has got wrong; it is, rather, an embrace of democracy’s kryptonite, the elevation of raw power over rule of law.

Somewhat paradoxically, the quite accurate argument made by Leonhardt and others also leaves me uneasy because it suggests a lack of continuity between outright terrorism and killings that threaten our polity, one the one hand, and a whole range of white nationalist attitudes that bend and warp our society in malign directions.  Violence is at one end of the continuum, but the reality is that the assumptions and attitudes of this retrograde mindset make violence its logical outcome.  Once you have determined that one race stands above others, de-humanization of everyone else, and the discounting of their lives as possessing worth, is a logical consequence.  Again, this is a well-established and profound point: the problem I am sensing right now is that American society and politics is maintaining a false distinction between actual calls for violence, and an ideology that legitimizes violence.  This ideology is found not just in the words of Trump, but is now embedded in the Republican Party as a whole, which among other things has normalized the idea that voter suppression, ID laws, and various other disenfranchisement strategies are somehow not clear manifestations of white supremacism, but simply hardball tactics to win elections.

Leonhardt’s use of experts and studies to bolster his case against Trump — quoting political scientist (and Hot Screen fave) Steven Levitsky on the dangers of normalizing violent rhetoric, citing studies about the increase in extremist violence — also curiously got under my skin, which I admit makes zero sense on a first pass.  The facts, after all, bolster his case against both Trump and right-wing violence.  So what’s my problem?

I think it may be this: that the outrage and immorality of the situation are so overwhelming that the mustering of statistics and expert opinion seems somehow adequate to the primal emotions, overwhelming stakes, and clear moral calculus of our moment.  Yes, the statistics about an upsurge in right-wing violence are useful in that they provide objective evidence of dangerous movements in our country, and around the world; but the struggle we are in is moral, and fundamental.  It is about making an overwhelming case for tolerance, equality, and mutual commitment to democracy.  These are not arguments to be won with statistics.  These are arguments that require a powerful articulation of moral clarity, and of a humane and inspiring vision for our society.

Land of No Mercy

Out of a morally rotten combination of personal animus and political calculation, Donald Trump has chosen to make immigration his premier issue.  The man is clearly a racist, and has had no qualms about shepherding the GOP into its current identity as a de facto white supremacist party; a party that has chosen to channel widespread fears about demographic change, economic insecurity, and status anxiety into an ideology that blames all America’s challenges on the depredations of undeserving others.  Whether it’s Latin Americans coming across the southern border, or Chinese ripping us off, there’s a dark-skinned person to blame for every ill.  Apparently, only the Russians, fair-skinned and blameless, are to be trusted in this world.

Pinning society’s problems on minority groups is the strategy of authoritarians around the world, but it’s also been a major thread of Republican politics going back to at least Richard Nixon, so it’s not like this has come out of nowhere.  But we can never lose sight of this critical question: why are Trump and the GOP going full-on white nationalist now?  I’m not so sure myself, though I strongly suspect that it’s due to reaching a tipping point born of a complicated mix of America’s demographic change, a moral collapse among GOP politicians, and those afore-mentioned economic and status anxieties, and of course all rooted in a belief in white superiority that has coursed through our entire history.

Because we are at a point where questions of American identity and relative status have become key features of the political debate — both due to tectonic shifts in American society and the economy, and because Donald Trump in particular has chosen to highlight them — the Democratic Party has no choice but to engage on them.  And indeed, the Democratic Party has done so, having become the party of multiculturalism and anti-racism.  But immigration, as I’ve written before, contains particular dangers for the Democratic Party, of which Trump and his advisors are well aware and are eager to exploit.  As the defenders of a racially harmonious and humane vision of the United States, Trump’s strategy is to define the Democrats as the party not of Americans, but of non-Americans; a party that cares more about immigrants than citizens.  (Of course, a key part of this mindset is to also suggest that Democrats care more about minority citizens than white citizens, but this cannot be stated so explicitly, so immigration becomes a proxy for that key part of his white nationalist appeal).

And so Donald Trump has consistently kept immigration at the center of his agenda, most blatantly and obnoxiously through his come-hell-or-high-water insistence on a wall at the southern border that would in fact function as a multi-billion monument to white supremacy (and which, we all well understand, would likely end up being built in large part by immigrant labor, legal and otherwise.  If I have not said it before, I will say it now: irony is lost on Republicans).  Trump has also foregrounded immigration through various other actions, such as the ban on immigration from various Muslim-majority countries, refusal to reach a deal on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and attempts to implement changes in U.S. immigration policy that would preference white, English-speaking arrivals over those from third-world “shithole” countries, in the president’s infamous wording.

Because the president has put immigration front and center, he has effectively set the terms of the national dialogue, and given the Democrats no choice but to respond.  This isn’t just because there is a general receptivity nationally to talking about these issues, but because the president can relatively easily set the terms of the national dialogue; this is just how American politics works.  The danger for Democrats is that Trump and his ilk are on to something: immigration does put Democrats in a weak position, for the reasons Trump believes.  Pushing back against Trump’s absolutist and racist views on immigration inevitably means the Democrats will be defending the rights of non-Americans, at least to some degree — which is exactly where Trump wants them.  The clincher is that Democrats have no choice but to push back against Trump, since a defining characteristic of the values that are at the heart of the party’s identity is a defense of the vulnerable and of the United States as a multi-cultural society.

Because immigration issues touch so profoundly, if often indirectly, on the identity of the Democrats, they cannot shy from this fight.  And to their credit, they largely have not, even as you can quite plausibly make the case that they have done so in ways that have both reinforced Trump and invigorated the Democratic base in what might turn out to be a zero-sum outcome electorally.  

Maybe it is naivete, or stubbornness, or simple ignorance, but I can’t shake myself from thinking that the Democrats may yet find a way to turn the tables on Trump, and make immigration a strength for the party rather than an area of weakness, ideally in a way that would make Trump regret that fateful day in 2015 when he trundled down the Trump Tower escalator and declared Mexican immigrants to be murderers and rapists.  If this is to be done, it’s going to involve calling out the racism and demagoguery at the heart of the Trump/GOP push for a whitened America.

The president’s termination of a program allowing Liberian and other refugees to live in the United States — announced last March and taking affect this month — has added fuel to my righteous fire.  This decision is revolting on various levels: it’s in line with the president’s clear racial animus, affects a vulnerable population, and presents no clear benefit to the United States once you peel away the lies about mooching and undeserving refugees.  

Here’s the background: back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush granted temporary protected status to thousands of Liberians fleeing civil war in that country.  When that program expired in 1999, President Clinton extended their protection through something called deferred enforcement departure, as did presidents George W. Bush and Obama.  DED covers thousands of others besides the Liberian refugees, but the overall numbers are minuscule compared to overall immigration into the United States over the last several decades.

The situation of these Liberian refugees encapsulates much of what is so wrong, and so deserving of opposition, in Trump’s immigration policy.  There appear to be only around 800 Liberians affected by this decision, but the smallness of the population makes Trump’s revocation of their status all the more telling.  There are real questions of whether Liberia is now safe — its first peaceful transfer of power since 1944 was only last year.  Beyond this, the idea that our vast country is somehow being drained by this small group of people is preposterous — but of course, as so often, it’s not the reality, but the symbolism, and the enactment of cruelty based on false premises, that’s the real point.  Indeed, the reality should give all but the hardest-hearted American pause.  All these Liberians have made lives in the U.S. for more than two decades, and are contributing members of society.  The Washington Post has two excellent recent articles about a pair of Liberian women affected by this decision.  One is a health care worker, the other an oncology nurse; no credible economic or social calculus could conclude that they are not adding to the overall national wealth of our nation.

The history of the relationship between Liberia and the United States elevates Trump’s decision on the DED program from one more example of his backwards ideology to perhaps its grotesque epitome.  Liberia, after all, was founded as part of an effort in the early 1800’s to return black Americans to Africa, born out of a racist belief that whites and black could not live together in the United States.  Just as Trump’s wall would be a monument to white supremacism, so the existence of Liberia itself already exists as such a living reminder of this mindset.  In a telling example of how Trump has tapped into long-standing currents of America’s darkest history, one of the immigrants profiled by The Washington Post, Afomu Kelley, is the descendant of a black American who moved to Liberia in the 19th century.  In other words, the same white supremacist impulses that led to the creation of Liberia in the 1800s are now leading the current American president to send Liberians back to that country.

To not call out and question this action is to be complicit in it, and it is some relief that Democratic politicians have been fighting the move (including Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who brought a Liberian threatened by deportation as a guest to the State of the Union address last month).  It seems incredible to me that identifying the historical continuities in this situation, on top of the other sound arguments against such a cruel uprooting of contributing members to American society, cannot be forged into a weapon against Trump and his anti-minority allies.  If Trump can sensationalize murders committed by illegal immigrants, and put forward families of their victims as martyrs to a white nationalist vision, then Democrats should feel free to highlight the fact that actual American citizens — the U.S.-born sons and daughters of these Liberians immigrants — will be victims of the revocation of DED protection.  Parents will have to choose between taking their children to a country with which their offspring have no familiarity, or leaving their children behind: choices that no parent should ever have to make, and with which only the morally compromised cannot empathize.  

Trump’s strategy is to make us believe he’s against illegal immigration, but revocation of DED protection for Liberians and others shows this to be a lie.  He seeks to deport people who have been here for many years, have worked hard and contributed to the American economy, and in many cases have either American-born children or children brought here at such a young age that they have deep connections to the U.S. and might be considered American citizens for all reasonable purposes.  In purporting to enforce immigration fairness, he in fact makes war on our social fabric and the notion that every individual has something to contribute.  More than this, he seeks to make us believe our country is weak, and indeed seeks to weaken it, by trying to make us afraid of the immigrant next door — by making us afraid of each other.  In this, he is a fine advocate against himself.  The Democrats must move out of defense, and learn to use his flawed policies against him.

Climate Change and Gun Violence Make the Case for Lowering Voting Age in Oregon

Democratic legislators here in Oregon have proposed lowering the voting age to 16, via a bill that would amend the Oregon Constitution accordingly.  Backers are pointing to issues like gun violence and the environment as those over which younger voters should have some say.  Both of these particular issues in fact provide ample evidence that 16- and 17-year-olds are ready for the vote in order to engage on these and other matters.  Does anyone really doubt that the direction of the gun debate was not changed by the teenage organizing of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors, who applied idealism and belief in change to their horrifying experience in a way that shamed the nation and opened all our eyes to what is politically possible?  That these organizers were able to make change without necessarily having the vote shouldn’t be a mark against lowering the voting age, but taken as evidence that this age cohort has the intellectual capacity and moral compass to participate fully.

We should also see the looming disaster of climate chaos as a game changer on questions of the proper age to vote, as it is rapidly shifting so many other of our assumptions about how we live our lives.  Those whose adulthood will be seriously impinged if global warming is not addressed in the immediate future deserve an equal voice in our politics.

I also strongly suspect that younger voters who do not feel ready to vote. . . will simply not vote.  On the flip side, encouraging youth to be civically engaged and not waste their vote should provide vital early education on the importance of being involved in politics, and yield higher voting going forward.

It is no surprise, but still sad, to see Republican opposition to this proposed change.  Oregon Senate Republican leader Herman Baertschiger Jr. has issued a statement asserting that adulthood in the U.S. begins at 18.  As evidence, he points to a variety of activities in which 16-year olds cannot participate, including joining the military (actually, 17-year-olds can do so) or getting married.  He leaves out, though, other contradicting facts, such as 16-year-olds being able to drive and being required to pay taxes on their jobs (which they are obviously allowed to perform).  But Baertschiger’s comment that “This is nothing more than an attempt to expand the voter rolls to sway elections” provides an odd reassurance that in Oregon, as in much of the U.S., Republicans are singing from the same anti-democratic hymn book.  The assumption that making it easier to vote is inherently bad, and is part of a nefarious plot to “sway elections,” also reveals the basic GOP assumption that more people voting means more people, in aggregate, voting against Republicans.  It is also of note that he concedes that Republicans would not be competitive with this age group, which is tacitly blamed on the judgment of 16- and 17-year-olds, rather than on GOP policies out of step with the American majority, and, on issues such as climate change, out of step with basic reality.