White Supremacism Renders Trump Unfit for Office

Given President Trump’s determination is to leave no doubt that he considers himself to be the white-supremacist-in-chief, it’s worth remarking anew, in the face of his racist tweets today targeting four U.S. representatives, how grotesque an error Democrats have made in not making his animating racism and white supremacist project the focal point of the party’s opposition to his misrule.

The task before the Democrats has always been crucial and inescapable, but in no way complicated or even overly difficult.  This is a president who, from the start, has bared his racism for all the world to see, a racism that has in turn informed and lent consistency to all he seeks to do while he occupies the Oval Office: restrict the political power of non-white Americans; shape the economy so that it benefits those who are already rich and predominantly white, while distracting his supporters as he picks their pockets; enact mass cruelty and human rights crimes against brown-skinned immigrants at the southern border.  The principle of opposition isn’t hard to articulate: a man such as this president, who views whites as the natural top tier of American society, and who views non-whites as neither full citizens nor, to be blunt, fully human, lacks the moral authority to be president.

There are other explanatory frameworks through which to view this presidency - misogynistic, plutocratic, kleptocratic - but the white supremacist aspects are dominant, and bleed into the other dark tendencies of this White House.  The promotion of racism serves to distract Trump’s base from the many ways in which the president serves them badly, whether through tax cuts that benefit only the richest among them, disabling climate agreements that would keep the planet from spiraling into uninhabitability, or foreign policy blunders that raise the probability of wars both costly and catastrophic. 

The white supremacist narrative also has the benefit of being affirmed on a near-daily basis by the president himself.

Let me put it another way: the president wants everyone, both this base and his opponents, to know that he’s a racist.  This may enthuse many of his supporters, but it also carries great danger for him, as it serves to create a cap in the number of people who will ever support him.  However, what the president is betting on, in part, is that this cap can, somewhat paradoxically, be lifted as a direct result of his explicit racism.  Part of a president’s traditional power is that of persuasion; together with the authority of his office, he can change what many people consider to be acceptable to think, feel, and express.

This means that Trump’s blatant racism is inevitably a test for the Democrats: if they fail to counter it with sufficient force, they will lend his vile ideology a sort of tacit acceptance, when what they need to be doing is making it clear such white supremacism is unacceptable in a civilized society such as ours.  The Democrats have, until now, been failing this test, by not identifying the president’s racism as sufficient grounds for implacable opposition to him.  The good news, if you can call it that, is that the president has constantly offered them a second chance to make up for this error.  His tweets this weekend are such a second chance.  I think it’s an error to say that these tweets are a distraction: they are, in fact, very much the thing itself, the basic statement of Donald’s Trump argument for why people should support him, and what sort of governing we can expect for the rest of his first term or, god forbid, another four years beyond that.

So make the president double-down on his remarks (he will never apologize for them).  Make the whole GOP defend the indefensible.  Let them all go on the record saying that only white-skinned Americans are actually Americans, or refuse to answer the question, or break with the president.

It is a secondary issue, but not too much so, that the president’s tweets today might be held up by some as a shining example of how he maintains the initiative in our political discourse, by shaping the conversation through the power of the presidential tweet. A better way of viewing what has happened is to observe how Trump has once again acted consistently with his prior actions and all that we know of his despicable character. There is no worse thing that the president is distracting us from than his white supremacism; if he thinks he is, then he’s mistaken. And if he thinks that this is a winning subject for a summer weekend, then it is largely proof that the moral rot that drives his racism has also led him to an overly cynical view of the American public. We all owe it to each other to call the president’s racism by its true name, and to re-affirm that the only acceptable way forward for this president is resignation or removal from office. A president who doesn’t accept that nearly half the citizenry is even American defiles the Oval Office and has proven himself unfit to govern, or to be trusted with equitably executing the laws of the land.

Concentration Camp Debate Suggests How to Defeat Right-Wing Propaganda

I’m not surprised that Jack Holmes’ article on applying the terminology of concentration camps to the Trump administration’s migrant border facilities has reached something of a critical mass as a public discussion point.  It’s  been retweeted and commented on by Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, which in turn provoked a predictable and telling response from Republican Congressperson Liz Cheney; a few weeks on, it remains part of the fabric of discussions about the border crisis.

Holmes spoke with scholars of concentration camps about the detention of migrants who’ve crossed the southern border, and both he and these experts make the case that concentration camps are exactly what the U.S. is running.  But as fascinating, provocative, and horrifying as the article’s argument is in and of itself, it should also provoke a reckoning with basic questions of language and politics that are central to our Trumpian moment.  Many people of good conscience and deep opposition to the Trump administration will likely hear the term “concentration camp” applied to what are commonly called migrant shelters or detainment facilities, and think that this is going too far.  After all, Dachau was a concentration camp, and the U.S. government is not working immigrants to death or gassing them.  The language may seem to them incendiary, and the more philosophically-minded might make the case that such overstatement of the case actually gives the Trump administration more latitude for further cruelties against detainees.  In fact, this is a rough account of my own thought process when I saw the article’s headline —and I don’t think I’m alone.

But reading the article changed my mind.  It did so by providing context for what the United States is doing by comparing it to the actions of other countries, by detailing the conditions and treatment of migrants within the camps, and by laying out definitions of what concentration camps are by those who study them.  Here’s a powerful sample:

“Not every concentration camp is a death camp — in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning.  Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions [. . .] systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies—as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War—as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”

That first line chills me every time I read it, and for good reason: it hits on the way that I think most of us too naively believe evil always shows up in full, recognizable form, and how instead a complex interaction of factors — individual malfeasance, bureaucratic inertia, indifference, and a failure of the public imagination — can build into catastrophes that no moral person would hesitate to condemn.  The article goes on to make two key points: one, that the U.S. detention system fits under commonly understood definitions of concentration camps; and two, that there is every reason to worry that conditions will deteriorate beyond even this early point of immoral treatment of the detainees, with or without deliberate choices by the Trump administration to make things worse.

I don’t think any Democratic politician can walk away from the article and in good faith not refer to the facilities as concentration camps, as both a matter of accuracy and of ending them.  But at the same time, such powerful language will be most effective as a weapon in the fight to end these detention practices if it’s accompanied by some version of the context the article provides.  Otherwise, what could be deeply effective in changing the debate might contribute to the same propagandized language environment that benefits the president; of which, in fact, he is a master.

Donald Trump would seem to do the opposite of what I’m advising: indeed, the Trump years have been an object lesson in the power of language to shape people’s perceptions of reality, and more specifically, in the way that language can be used to pervert perceptions of reality.  At the most extreme, he empowers himself by calling things what they are NOT, and asking people to share his vision.  Migrants are vermin; Mexicans are rapists; immigration is invasion.  More broadly, he uses language not to accurately describe reality, but to arouse various emotions — anger, fear, envy — to gain political support.  He incites, he manipulates, he deceives.

But here’s one point that I’m trying to work through: obviously, I’m not saying Democrats should use the term “concentration camp” simply because it’s the most accurate term for the migrant facilities, but also because of its tremendous emotional connotations — its power to shock the conscience, change minds, and provoke political change.  In fact, I would not be surprised if relatively few Democratic politicians follow Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s lead in employing this term in the immediate future, because of the perceived risks I mentioned above: fear of overstating the case in ways that provoke a backlash from otherwise persuadable voters, and that provide cover for further depredations by a Trump administration willing to point to full-on death camps as the only yardstick by which to measure its depraved actions.

While these aren’t unreasonable fears, they are symptomatic of larger difficulties around language and its relation to meaning that continue to dog the opposition.  In politics, if you cannot bring yourself to call a thing what it is, or lack a word for that thing, then you are inevitably hobbled.  On top of this, I think Democrats are rightly cautious to mimic the propagandistic language of Donald Trump.  This is partly tied to their general approach to governance; unlike Trump, they are not working to stir up enmity against whole groups of people based on race, nationality, or religion, and so in basic ways have no need for such language.  Put another way: the president largely plays to negative emotions that are, generally speaking, not applicable to Democratic politics, which are on the one hand generally more policy-driven, and on the other, rooted in coalition politics that can’t really be reconciled with the us-versus-them mentality behind much of the president’s hateful and provocative language.  It is true that many Democrats feel anger and even hatred toward Trump, as well as at the voters who elected him and continue to approve of him in polls — but this animus at Trump voters isn’t supercharged by the same racialized and primal sentiment Trump would have his supporters direct towards the Democrats.  At a pragmatic, electoral level, Democrats have not been willing to write off whole swathes of the electorate as Trump has (the president clearly sees a possible path to re-election that, as in 2016, does not require him to win the popular vote).  At a moral level, Democrats don’t see hate as a legitimate basis for political appeals.

In the matter of the camps (and this is a conundrum that can be applied more broadly to the overall challenge of the Trump administration), the Democrats face two dangers: either understating or overstating their case.  It will not surprise you when I say that, on the subject of migrant detention, understating the case is a political and moral failure for the Democrats, and a political win for the president.  But how to avoid overstating the case?

The article I started off discussing offers some major clues.  First, historical context is vital.  The widespread phenomenon of concentration camps over the past century is deeply chilling, yet the silver lining (if we might call it that) is that there is a measurable baseline against which the U.S. camps can be measured.  Put very basically: calling these sites “concentration camps” is more persuasive when the term isn’t just thrown out to provoke, but also to educate and illuminate.  Particularly striking for me is how learning that concentration camps can encompass, but are not exclusively, death camps, in no way makes this terminology less politically and morally useful than thinking that only death camps qualify as concentration camps.  Instead, the term captures a continuum of degradation, abuse, and potential horror rooted in real-world examples that can help focus shame and condemnation on current American practices.  To make the obvious point: a camp doesn’t have to be Auschwitz to be horrific and unacceptable.  For me, the larger matter in this moment is the way U.S. camps are undergirded by a basic disregard for human rights, a de facto strategy of dehumanization, and a legitimization via racism shared by past concentration camps.  It doesn’t matter if these aren’t Nazi camps; what they’re intended to do is still evil, un-American, and unconscionable.  No patriotic American would want to see their country defiled by such practices.

The use of incendiary language that twists basic facts and truths about the world is how the president propagates a myth about America and his place in it.  As in his attempts to re-brand the 4th of July as a celebration of Donald Trump and how he saved America, his methods depend on excluding history, reality, and truth, except to the extent those things can be filtered through a distorting Trumpian prism that twists them into barely-recognizable forms.  And so, on the immigration front, he dismisses vast swathes of individuated humanity as faceless, predatory hordes coming to take America’s wealth.  There is no Latin America, with its various countries, their stories, and their individual and collective past relationships with the United States.  There is also no acknowledgment of the billions upon billions of dollars of wealth contributed to our country by prior and current Latino migrants, documented or not, as they worked our fields and built our houses and cooked in our restaurants.  Instead, below the Rio Grande is simply an amorphous blob of geography and humanity, who all mysteriously speak Mexican even though they’re not all from Mexico but who knows what other countries might be down there?  The world south of the border is a punching bag, not a place, and all the humanity there faceless if not outright symbolic.  As a danger that transcends history, any measures, not matter how cruel, are justified.

And so facts, historical context, and accurate language are how we break the myth-making.  Just as the president is advantaged to the extent he is allowed to talk about migrants as if they are not individual human beings, and about Latin America as if it’s not an actual place, he’s also the beneficiary of the opposition’s failure to use the right words to describe his administration’s treatment of immigrants.  If there is a case to be made that the Trump administration is running concentration camps, then Democrats need to make that case.  The Democrats must do everything they can to rob immigration of the symbolic power Donald Trump has invested in it as the premier threat to the United States, both in order to defeat the infliction of cruelty, and to deny him the ability to blame all America’s ills on immigration.

Allowing immigration to dominate the political discussion will always be a net loss for Democrats, because the meta-message telegraphed to the electorate, rightly or wrongly, is that Democrats care more about protecting immigrants than working for American citizens.  The president, even if he is lying and deeply misguided about his approach, is at least able to consistently articulate that he is inflicting pain on migrants in order to protect the United States. The Democrats’ case, in contrast, is that they are protecting migrants in order to actually protect the migrants, and secondarily in order to prevent the United States from inflicting on itself a moral and humanitarian catastrophe.  The Democrats have an ethical imperative to do so; but they also need to figure out a way to simultaneously inflict maximum pain on the president, that holds his inhumanity to account.

They cannot stop the president from talking about immigration, but surely one way to neutralize him is to make sure the full story of immigration is being discussed: that it is an integral part of America’s history, and that the migration from south of the border has long been part of our development, and is not a terrifying new thing, but a situation to be managed without cruelty or terror.  They can also make sure to highlight ties between the president’s white nationalist agenda and his war on brown people at the border.  And fighting big lies doesn’t just require dramatic truths — the opposition shouldn’t afraid to appeal to pragmatism as well, and to make the case for how immigration helps us economically. We are already seeing how the president’s powerful lies are leading to measurable, real-world atrocities — countering them grows more urgent by the day.

Working Out Trump's Fireworks

In his planned colonization of the Washington, D.C. 4th of July celebrations, President Trump has inadvertently recharged a welter of questions about this dark age and his role in it.  Is he a dictator in waiting, or simply a draft-dodging pudding-for-brains who likes big tanks because they remind him of a long-lost toy truck, a la Kane’s Rosebud?  Is he merely ridiculous, or a mortal threat to the republic?  Is he self-defeating, or growing his power with every norm he knocks over?  Is he a solitary threat, or inseparable from a complicit and equally illiberal GOP?  Is the key to defeating him ignoring him, or engaging with every last provocation?  Will public opinion ever reach a decisive turning point against him, or are we stuck in a Western Front-style stalemate in which every new fact and circumstance reinforces pre-existing convictions all around?

Until the past few days, this last pair of questions had been my framework for viewing Trump’s decision to stake a beachhead at the Lincoln Memorial from which to convert the nation’s birthday into a campaign rally.  This felt so obviously self-serving, such an obvious distortion of the holiday, that it didn’t seem so much different from Trump dressing up as Santa Claus come Christmas and inviting Christians everywhere to worship him as the second coming of you-know-who.  You’d either see it for the travesty it is, or you wouldn’t.

In this, I was clearly also falling on one side of another of the set of questions I started with, opting to ignore rather than engage this specific violation.  I don’t live in D.C.; I want to enjoy my holiday on my own terms; I don’t want to think about Trump on the 4th. But a piece yesterday at the Plum Line blog, which I’ve been praising to the skies lately, has helped bring me fresh perspective, not only on why we should pay attention to the 4th of July shenanigans, but on how we need to talk about Trump if we want to stop him.

Plum Line writer Greg Sargent begins by describing how the president’s actions match those studied and documented by scholars of authoritarianism.  This early paragraph contains the mini-thesis of the piece:

The historians tell us that this is what authoritarian nationalists do. As Harvard’s Jill Lepore puts it, they replace history with tried-and-true fictions — false tales of national decline at the hands of invented threats, melded to fictitious stories of renewed national greatness, engineered by the leader himself, who is both author of the fiction and its mythic hero.

Sargent goes on to describe how Trump’s application of this authoritarian principle has led him to try to make images of resurgent military might his own, as a token of how he’s delivered on his promise to make America great again; in doing so, he seeks to cover himself with borrowed glory while turning a unifying public celebration into a divisive personal rally that seeks to meld leader and state.

It is a fascinating and I think accurate read, but I want to share the larger revelation that it gave me: that time and again, the outrageous actions that Trump and the GOP take are not only reported and discussed without adequate context by the news media, but also by the president’s opponents.  That is, the truly overwhelming number of assaults on American democracy are too often viewed in piecemeal fashion.  In the first place, the president’s critics fail to connect them to each other.  In the second, though, his offenses are simply not often enough discussed in the context of the authoritarian impulse that is their common thread.

Now, I realize how this might seem to contradict the reality of much coverage of Trump.  It’s not just Sargent who gets it, after all — a LOT of people have been ringing the alarm about the anti-democratic GOP and Trump’s disregard for the constitutional order.  But what I’m realizing with this Independence Day grotesquerie is that the need for context isn’t just important — it’s essential, because of the very nature of authoritarianism, which seeks to impress a sense of its own power on every aspect of society and every member of it, and whose advance is conducted by a multi-pronged strategy that overwhelms a democratic society, in part by preventing that society from comprehending the totality of the attack. 

Rather than being a silly distraction from worse offenses, it now strikes me that Trump’s 4th of July plans are both an escalation and a desperate warning of how dangerous this moment is, and how important it is to respond in rhetorical force to his attacks on genuinely unifying traditions and our shared history.  By providing essential context for how Trump is acting like other authoritarian nationalist leaders in the past (and in the present, too), Sargent is able to make us all reconsider the true and scary import of what the president is attempting to carry off.  Talking about how Trump’s actions fit into familiar patterns of authoritarianism raises awareness of behaviors and ideas that in isolation seem merely worrisome, but collectively present a clear and present danger to the republic. 

But the specifics of the authoritarian self-mythologizing that Sargent describes also suggest a pair of complementary reason for why this context is essential.  As the authoritarian leader tries to tell a false story about himself and his role as the savior of the country, this totalizing effort to retell history and rebrand the present require a strong countering effort to remember our actual history and what constitutes true patriotism.  The authoritarian has the advantage of pressing a unified story that flatters him and his followers; meanwhile, those who oppose him will inevitably possess competing and often contradictory notions of the country’s past and present, which is rightly the nature of a democracy.  Rather than mirror the authoritarian in like fashion, the better option is to call out his lies and insist on the complex reality of our democracy, which of course involves not just warts and horrors, but a real-world magnificence, not least that it is a project in which all of us — not just the president and his adherents — can have a voice.

But something else came to mind as I wondered about my own initial resistance to paying closer attention to the president’s 4th of July plans.  This is pretty speculative, but I’m wondering if part of my reluctance was due to an unconscious recognition of the power of what Trump was attempting to pull off; that some part of me knew that if I paid attention to his spectacle, I might actually be. . . impressed.  This made me think of an extreme example: even if you hated Trump, there would be something awe-inspiring and intimidating if he were to marshall, say, a thousand tanks to the nation’s capital and draw all our attention to the unprecedented display he had created.  Obviously, Trump is only putting on a fraction of such a scene, but aiming to overwhelm is the intent.  As Sargent puts it, “what it all amounts to is larger than the sum of its parts.  The naked audacity of the usurpation is itself the point.”

But I would add that this event “larger than the sum of its parts” is larger, partially, because the effect it achieves goes beyond rational thought.  We are meant to be wowed, intimidated, overcome.  This isn’t a merely incidental authoritarian tactic; it is key for anyone wishing to subvert the mutual respect and equality that are democracy’s ideal.  Trump is not trying to provoke awe at how great our country is: he is attempting to identify himself with our country, through an identification with its military might, literally at the expense of every other American for whom the 4th is intended to be a celebration.

This is only more reason that explicitly identifying the president’s authoritarian project is so important — to combat its unconscious power and appeal to many people.  This unconscious power is akin to, but not the same as, the general idea of normalization that has been much discussed in the Trump years: generally speaking, the way that outrageous behavior comes to seem acceptable or normal through repetition and because it is being carried out by the most powerful elected official in the country.  There is a reason that someone like Trump deploys spectacle and seeks to identify himself with the state: because these symbolic moves affect people’s perceptions in ways that bypass rational thought.  You might hate him; but the authoritarian makes you feel relatively powerless to do anything to change things. He has agency; you do not.

This unconscious angle got me thinking about the role of mockery in undercutting the pretensions of Donald Trump and other would-be authoritarians.  We can defend ourselves by making ourselves more aware of what’s going on — in this case, picking apart what the 4th of July spectacle is intended to do can help drain it of its overwhelming power.   But when it still happens, we have only partially protected ourselves; the “naked audacity of the usurpation,” as Sargent puts it, is inevitably a blow against the body politic.  Here is where I think there is an incredibly powerful role for satire — but satire that doesn’t start simply with the premise that the president is a pathetic powerless man, but rather that acknowledges the real danger he presents as part of the reason for tearing him down.  In other words, we make fun as a way of taking seriously, as opposed to making fun because we don’t take him seriously.

Channeling Travis Bickle, Trump's Comments On Homelessness Implicate a Nation

It should surprise no one that Monday night, in an interview in the safe space of Fox News, Donald Trump turned his attention to the plight of the homeless, and it is not too much of a plot spoiler to say that his views lacked any vestige of fellow feeling or empathy..  After all, there really is no group of vulnerable people in America whom the president does not despise, be they immigrants, the disabled, or African-Americans.  So when the Washington Post writes that the president indicated he wants to address “the crisis of people on the streets,” in the paper’s phrasing, the phrasing leaves ambiguous what it should not: since the crisis the president actually identifies is the terrible offense that people living on the streets give to passers-by, as opposed to the urgent moral need to relieve their suffering; the plight of the homeless turns out to be the plight of everyone but the homeless. From police “getting sick just by walking the beat,” to office workers forced to “walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago,” to world leaders visiting the United States who “can’t be looking at that,” Donald Trump is appalled by the pain inflicted on the non-homeless. He speaks almost as if it were an aesthetic issue for him, a matter of city surfaces that just need the filth scrubbed away.  

For Trump, there is no context, no interest in why a person might end up on the streets, and no apprehension of any humanity behind the eyesore.  His ideas for how to resolve matters are both all-encompassing and ominous.  “We have to take the people.  And we have to do something [. . .] They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco . . . So we’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.”

But as concerning as the president’s language is, and how revealing it is of Trump’s essential brokenness — he doesn’t even bother to fake the empathy he’s incapable of feeling — it wouldn’t be half as ominous if it weren’t a close cousin to the attitude regularly displayed by countless business associations and government officials, who talk about homelessness less as a humanitarian crisis and more as a problem that hurts profits and threatens tourism.  And it is also not many more steps removed from the postures of disregard and borderline cruelty that I often hear from otherwise normal, indeed liberal people here in Portland, too many of whom see our municipal and collective failures to end homelessness as convincing evidence that the homeless themselves must be to blame, with all the destructive and dehumanizing consequences of that conclusion.

In these respects, then, we should be worried not simply about the president’s personal attitudes, but in the way that what comes across as more or less outright sociopathy is shared, if in varying degrees, by millions of other Americans.  That the president has cycled to this issue, however incidentally and temporarily, adds new evidence to a sense that the U.S. has catastrophically failed to gauge the degrading impact of the homeless crisis, not just on its victims, but on our common morality and democracy.  We have all woven into the fabric of American society a weave that also, paradoxically, lies outside it, serving as a constant reminder of how hideously low it is possible to fall in this country, while providing the most financially strapped reassurance that at least their plight isn’t as bad as it could get.  In tolerating the intolerable, and by convincing ourselves of the limits of our individual responsibility, of how far society’s protections extend, and of government’s allowed scope of action in preserving the civil and human rights of all Americans, the spectacle of homelessness has proved fine training to prepare us for the likes of Donald Trump.  So perhaps when the president’s remarks, chilling and oddly abstract, catch our attention, and invite condemnation, we would do well to follow them to their collective source.

In Seeking to Reassure the Ultra-Wealthy, Joe Biden Disquiets the Rest of Us

I realize the comments Joe Biden made at a Wall Street fundraiser a week and a half ago are the very definition of yesterday’s news, but their unsettling nature, and the insights they provide into the presidential candidate’s thinking at a point early in the race before he’s had a chance to react to criticisms and potentially change course, are worth a little more time.  Paul Waldman at The Plum Line (which, with Waldman and Greg Sargent tag-teaming the site, has been absolutely on fire lately) does a whiz-bang job of explicating Biden’s remarks and what they say about the former vice president’s political philosophy; re-reading Walden’s post today, I’m still almost shocked by how sharp (though necessary) a scalpel he’s taken to what Biden said.

Biden’s remarks about working with segregationist senators have received the severest working over by Waldman and others, but I agree with Waldman that what Biden said about economic inequality and how the rich have nothing to fear from a Biden administration is also “startling.” First, here’s what Biden said that got people talking:

You know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change. Because when we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. [...] It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the other, the other. You’re not the other. I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down.

Biden’s comments that “nothing would fundamentally change” have been criticized the most, as a sign that he doesn’t believe the American economy needs any significant rejiggering in terms of a remedy for inequality or the distribution of economic power.  They also remind me of President Obama’s remarks during his first administration, when he told a group of bankers that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks.  I think the same accommodating spirit is at play in Biden’s remarks: the people are mad at you, but if you trust me, I’ll find a middle way where both sides can win.  In both Obama’s and Biden’s cases, the message is similar; as Waldman puts it, it’s that we have to take economic action not because it’s the right thing to do, “but because if we don’t, the masses will rise up in anger and you never know what might happen then.”  Along with his attempts to flatter (“rich people are just as patriotic as poor people”) and cajole (“you all know in your gut what has to be done”), it sounds like Biden is telling his wealthy listeners that they are reasonable people who are smart enough to let him help them protect their basic place at the top of the American pyramid.

It’s not just that Waldman’s correct when he points out that the GOP and corporate interests have shown no indication of wanting to accommodate workers’ interests, dooming Biden’s approach to failure, or that Biden’s interest in having good relations with billionaires means he lacks interest in changing the status quo, although I think these are the basic problems with Biden’s remarks.  There are actually multiple instances in just this one paragraph of Biden’s speech where his patented earnestness obscures further dubious assumptions and flawed conclusions.

Flattering rich people that they are “just as patriotic as poor people” is, by itself, gratuitous and ingratiating, yet the following line reveals why they’re patriotic, as Biden continues, “we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.”  The rich are patriotic because they’re rich;  what is left unsaid, but implied, is that being rich is patriotic because they help provide jobs and make the economy run.  In other words, Biden sails awfully close to the Romney-Ryan “makers and takers” rhetoric which Democrats have opposed, and opens Biden up to various ripostes: Is it really the fate of the majority to view the rich with gratitude at their job-creating beneficence, and to forever downplay the fact that there is no economy without the great numbers of people who work hard, innovate business in a million creative ways, and yet never receive fair compensation for their labors? 

Biden’s comment that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change” has rightly been criticized as a sign that he won’t push for fundamental change in the economy, as his words seem meant to reassure his rich and powerful listeners that they have nothing to fear from a Biden presidency, such as not being taxed into the poorhouse (or even into having less yachts).  But it’s worth calling out how dependent on audience his remarks are, since the hope of the great majority of Americans is indeed that their “standard of living” will indeed change — for the better.  The lived reality of most Americans is a stagnant or declining standard of living, which is a big fucking deal, to use a Biden-ism, and his concern to reassure those with an enviable standard of living is disheartening.  

After his disquieting standard of living comment, though, Biden said something’s that received less attention: “Because when we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution [. . .] It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the other, the other.  You’re not the other.  I need you very badly.  I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down.”  Something quite odd is going on here, and it’s of a piece with Biden’s preceding mumble-jumble rhetoric that uses ambiguity to allow its listeners to draw flattering conclusions.  Refering to “demagogues” who blame “the other” for the country’s problems, Biden reassures his audience of worthies that they are in fact not this despised other.  These comments are bizarre for at least two reasons.  First, it’s quite possible to interpret Biden as saying that fellow Democratic candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are “demagogues” who vilify the wealthy for the nation’s problems; this would be supported by his preceding remarks reassuring his wealthy audience that they are patriots who contribute to the U.S.  Second, because “othering” is the undisguised strategy of Donald Trump and the right-wing GOP, which identifies immigrants, racial minorities, and women as to blame for America’s ill and undeserving of a range of rights.  However, to draw any equivalence between the left’s condemnations of an upper class that has siphoned off so much of the country’s wealth to itself, and the right’s attempts to criminalize, brutalize, and denigrate various groups of immigrants and Americans, is grotesque.  The number of Americans who are calling for interning the rich in concentration camps is passingly small, while millions support the president’s catastrophic and abusive treatment of immigrants.

I’m sure that, if confronted with this reading of his remarks, Biden would vociferously deny that he was drawing such an equivalence, just as he argued that his remarks about working with segregationists were in no way an endorsement of those men’s racist ideology.  Yet I don’t see how you can read Biden’s words as a whole and not conclude that he’s basically telling rich people that he wants to be president in order to protect them against ravening masses who seek to take their wealth and send them to the guillotine.  That he made these remarks at an event in which he aimed to get as much money as possible from the wealthy attendees is no excuse, and in fact heightens the sense that he’s missing the truth of our historical moment: do we really need another president who thinks he needs to fight for the rights of millionaires and billionaires?  Those guys have plenty of power on their side, lobbyists and lawyers and bought politicians.  It seems to me that Americans need a president who’s on their side.  Indeed, as I argued recently, the idea of fighting for left-behind Americans is a big part of Trump’s appeal, even as his actions undercut any truth to it.  For the Democrats to oppose him by nominating someone who’s literally telling the rich he’s going to fight for them would be totally mad.

Wild Wild Oregon GOP

It’s been a week of mixed feelings for many of us Oregonians.  On the one hand, it’s nice to be garnering some national witness to the freakshow antics and anti-science beliefs of the state’s Republican Party, as all 11 GOP members of the Oregon Senate have gone into hiding in order to prevent a quorum in that body, with the aim of stopping a Democratic-backed cap and trade bill meant to combat climate change.  Democratic Governor Kate Brown quickly ordered the state police to track down the absconding senators and bring them back to Salem, at which point the story took a less comical and decidedly darker turn, in the way that things tend to do in the age of Trump and a radicalized GOP.

In a comment directed at the state police, Republican Senator Brian Boquist told a reporter that they should “[s]end bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon.”  In other words, an Oregon senator warned that he was willing to kill his way out of a quorum.  Perhaps Boquist was emboldened by the offers made by various right-wing extremist groups to shelter and protect the Republican senators, even as the senators turned those offers down.  The shivers of violence were only heightened when the state police advised the senate leadership to cancel a session planned for last Saturday, on account of unspecified right-wing actions at the state capitol; a Democratic senator confirmed that the police had provided notice that the senators and others planning to be at the capitol were in physical danger.

But it gets worse.  The state GOP issued a statement accusing the Democrats of canceling the Saturday session “out of a fear that Republican voters might show up.”  That is, with the state government — not a Democratic state government, or a Republican state government, but the Oregon state government representing all of us — threatened by right-wing extremists, the state GOP chose to lie about the threat posed, turn it into a political hit against the Democrats, and (most damningly) provide rhetorical cover fire for the gunmen behind the threats.  The state Republican Party subsequently tweeted photos of a rally at the capital from weeks ago, indicating that the unarmed protestors were the militia the Democrats feared — once again making threats of right-wing violence into a joke, and spreading lies about a non-existent, peaceful rally supposedly going on that day.

Today, it’s been reported that the Senate’s president, Peter Courtney, doesn’t have sufficient Democratic votes to pass the climate bill, even as politicians of both parties look at the potential of no bills of any stripe being passed should the runaway Republicans not return by the end of the session.  It’s a twist whose meaning will depend on the results of further reporting.  Did the Republican walkout give wavering Democrats cold feet, or cover to change their votes?

Regardless, state Democrats can’t let the GOP sweep under the rug the remarkably anti-democratic events of the last few days.  Senator Boquist should be asked to resign, due to his threats of violence, and the state Republican Party must be held to account for its willingness to play politics with threats posed by right-wing extremists.  Early signs are ambiguous: Governor Brown has called the Republican tactics “not just unacceptable, but dangerous,” and asked “Are they against climate change legislation or are they against democracy?”  It sounds to me like she’s condemning the walk-out, which is indeed an anti-democratic power play by the GOP which, if it continues, could bring the state government to a destructive standstill.  However, the lack of specific condemnation of the GOP’s willingness to cover for violent extremists seems like a regrettable omission.

To combat those who are infatuated with violence and a sense of their own victimhood, there’s a reasonable temptation to downplay their provocations and not give more oxygen to their anti-state threats.  Yet I worry that the right-wingers who inserted themselves into this story will take comfort in the notion that it was their armed militancy that defeated the climate bill; if so, any sign of Democratic responsiveness to such tactics is deeply dangerous, both to our democracy and the possibility of Oregon ever passing progressive legislation again.  I think I’ve made clear in various posts over the years that threats of violence are disqualifying for politicians and parties in a democratic system.  Violence, is, in fact, democracy’s antithesis.  It is the end of reason and debate, and the beginning of rule by the gun and by the powerful.

It is also worrisome to think that the extremists who rushed to give shelter and more to the Republican senators, backed by the barrel of a gun, were emboldened by the right-wing occupation of federal lands at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016: a standoff in which one of the extremists was shot and killed by law enforcement, but whose perpetrators otherwise got off scot-free due to a bungled federal prosecution of their crimes.  Any threats against law enforcement during this current situation need to be taken seriously and appropriately.

I’m hoping this series of events will be a wake-up call to anyone in Oregon who thinks that the sickness of Trumpism hasn’t reached us, too.  After years of the Democrats winning elections and control of the state government without the gerrymandering and voter suppression that have become standard fare in Republican-dominated states, the state GOP has decided to wreck the state government rather than actually try to become a party that appeals to more voters.  It is sad and lazy, and it’s a sign that Democrats need to figure out ways to keep peeling away voters who still side with the Republicans.  In the case of the climate bill, it seems as if the Democrats have not made a sufficient case that poor and rural residents will be protected from higher fuel prices, which are more than reasonable concerns.  Oregon has a perennial problem with asking fat cat companies like Intel and Nike to pay their fair share into the common good, and the idea that this reluctance causes the party to push legislation less generous than otherwise towards less affluent residents is not a question the party leadership likes to ponder overmuch.  

Will Biden Help Make Case That the (Presidential) Future Is Female?

This might strike you as a report from the Totally Obvious desk: but I’m wondering if the upcoming Democratic debates aren’t going to seriously take away some of Joe Biden’s current momentum, and result in it moving to the female candidates in the presidential primaries, particularly to Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.  On the one hand, I suspect that whether or not Biden’s touchy-ness with females continues to receive coverage, or whether stories like his repeated injunction that parents to build fences around their houses to protect their teenage girls reach and offend more people, his attitude toward his female rivals will include elements of condescension and dismissal that will be illuminating for all voters, but particularly women.  I think this will be doubly illuminating because the female candidates know that they must prove to voters that they’ll be able to handle Donald Trump; in this sense, Biden may serve as something of a stalking horse for the female candidates to show any voters worried about Hillary 2.0 that their fears are misplaced.  The road to a female Democratic presidential candidate is going to go through Joe Biden, not simply as a fellow candidate to defeat, but as someone who I think is inevitably going to take a stance, however subtle or overt, that it’s going to take a man to defeat Donald Trump.

Farhad Manjoo, who started as more of a tech writer but whose increasing forays into politics have been deeply insightful and provocative, wrote a piece last month that makes what I’d call a strong “male case” for the necessity for electing a woman president (I say “male case” because countless women have been writing about this issue for decades).  It resonated with me because I think it captures something of the humility, exhaustion, and assessment of the historical turning point that I’ve been feeling towards gender equality and what seems to have been a great leap backwards for humankind with the election of Donald Trump.  The incessant electability arguments and example of the popular-vote-winning Hillary Clinton as reasons that we must once again defer a female president to the hazy future are, as Manjoo argues, just giving in to and empowering an idiot patriarchy that’s defiled the brains of both sexes for far, far too long; we assume enough people feel like a woman shouldn’t be president, so we individually give up hope, too.  

Of course, it doesn’t help that our first female candidate was denied the White House by such a horrid misogynist.  Anyone who expected to witness the shattering of that great glass ceiling in the sky in November 2016 ended up getting more or less the diametric opposite of what they wanted; cognitive dissonance, and an impulse toward playing it safe, was bound to ensue.  But should either men or women look at the results of the 2016 election and decide that it’s time for women to back off?  Or reach this conclusion after the 2018 elections, which brought record numbers of women to Congress?  It makes as much sense to see so tantalizingly close a Clinton victory as inspiration for redoubled efforts, and to view the clear centrality of gender politics to the current energy in the Democratic Party as further evidence for drawing the opposite conclusion: that the story of America points to Trump’s reign being the reversible last-stand of a morally, spiritually, and politically bankrupt belief that men have a more or less divine right to lead.

The Dialectic of Warren and Trump: A Speculation

In crucial ways, Senator Elizabeth Warren is the anti-Trump.  Where the president has acted to aggrandize power in the demagogic figure of himself, Warren’s presidential platform includes various democratizing measures — not just for the political system, but for our economy as well.  Where the president wields tariffs like an all-purpose instrument of statecraft and calls a tax cut an economic strategy, Warren has developed multiple highly-detailed plans for economic growth.  Where the president mocks and undermines women, Warren’s election would radicalize our collective perceptions of female power in American society.  I could go on.

In other ways, though, some of Warren’s contrast with Trump has been worrisome.  Her decision to effectively give in to the president’s attacks on her claims of Native American heritage, by undergoing and releasing the results of DNA testing, seemed to be a strategic error, an attempt to sate a bully whose temperament is to never be satisfied with whatever humiliation he manages to inflict on his opponents — witness Trump’s continued hedging on whether or not President Obama was a U.S. citizen after Obama made the decision to release his long-form birth certificate.  If their positions were somehow reversed, Trump never would have given ground on this issue like Warren did.  The Massachusetts senator seemed to get outplayed in her attempt to take away the oxygen Trump was using to play his abusive and racist game.

But it is looking more and more as if the ancestry imbroglio, while unfortunate, was a deviation from Warren’s otherwise pugnacious approach both to Trump and to campaigning for president.  In fact, there is one particular Trump-like quality that she seems to embody — her declaration that she’s fighting on behalf of Americans against those forces arrayed against the American dream.  Like Trump, Warren has defined an us-versus-them picture of the world, though with decisive differences: hers is based in the realities of economic, racial, and gender inequality, rather than in the racist hysteria of white Americans facing a vengeful wave of brown-skinned interlopers who steal our jobs at home and abroad.  And her remedy is a universe away from scapegoating immigrants, giving aid and comfort to white nationalism, and turning the White House into a nest of cronyism and corruption.  Instead, it’s a promise to take down un-democratic power arrangements throughout our society, from self-serving bankers to boardrooms that shut out workers’ voices; to propose efforts to end corruption in government and protect our voting process; and to focus on actual measures to grow our economy and battle the inequality that’s turning this country into something out of dystopian sci-fi film.

Trump’s relative success, if nothing else, shows that the U.S. is primed for a more bully-pulpit presidency.  Somewhat unexpectedly, it was reading Joe Biden’s comments a week or two ago about America easily being able to out-compete China that really crystalized this for me.  In his casual dismissal of the idea that Americans might actually feel threatened by free trade arrangements that have at least in part contributed to massive losses of manufacturing jobs in great swathes of the country, Biden seemed to be ignoring key lessons of 2016 and before.  One of those lessons is that those whose livelihoods are threatened by tectonic changes in our economy, whether through foreign competition or automation or the destruction of unions, don’t want to be told that they just need to change their attitudes.  Whatever the particular combination of reasons for American deindustrialization, it’s a phenomenon that has helped mass produce voters willing to give Trump’s combination of fake economic populism and authoritarian race baiting a whirl.

Trump gets that Americans are in no mood to blame themselves for their problems: he told us that he was going to stick it to the Mexicans and the Chinese, and boy is he doing that, even if he’s also sticking it to himself, like a punch drunk boxer socking himself in the face half the time.  Warren understands the basic political reality that a president needs to be sympathetic to voters’ struggles, which is arguably always true but is doubly so in these anxious times, when Americans have a hunger to get to the root causes of why they feel economically insecure even in a relatively roaring economy like we have at present.  What the president has done is to legitimize the idea of making this quest for root causes and comprehensive solutions into an existential battle between success and ruination.  Trump has identified not only other countries, but also non-white citizens and of course immigrants, as the enemies of (white) American prosperity, while essentially running a government that is seeking to siphon, through tax laws and corruption of federal regulatory powers, as much wealth as possible to the richest Americans.  It is a contradictory mess that is authoritarian, racist, and plutocratic in comic book dimensions, but no less pernicious for its contradictions and self-sabotaging dynamics.  So it is not only that Donald Trump has legitimized the idea of the president dividing up the country and fighting for his side, but that he’s done so based on a worldview that is so fundamentally wrong (and self-serving) that it calls out for just the reality-based, democratic, and truly populist response that we are seeing from Warren.

I really can’t overstate the importance of how so much of Warren’s analysis and proposals is based in actual reality, rather than the fever dreams of white nationalists and overemphasis on easy or misleading solutions (see Trump’s endless trade wars).  As Farhad Manjoo observes in a recent column, Warren has taken a risk that most politicians avoid by getting so specific so early on; as he puts it, “she risks turning off key constituencies, alienating donors and muddying the gauzy visionary branding that is the fuel for so much early horse-race coverage.”  Yet, as he notes, this specificity has helped drive the debate among Democrats, and he also suggests that the flip side of being so forthcoming is that Warren can absorb criticism; that is, hers is an agenda that’s responsive to empirical testing, and thus, correction.  This couldn’t be farther from the Trump/GOP vision of an America that’s as much myth as anything else, where a vision of white hegemony as it existed in the 1950’s and where American workers are somehow prosperous even as the rich are allowed to take more and more of the nation’s wealth cannot really be reconciled with or refined by the real world. (Manjoo also notes the hopefulness of the fertile and wide-ranging discussion of democracy, the economy, and beyond among Democrats, despite the obvious temptation to just focus on Trump’s terribleness — another argument that Warren and other status quo-questioning Democrats are just what the political moment requires, and further evidenced by the fact that people are so obviously hungry for this broader discussion).

In a similar vein, we can see how Warren’s self-presentation, via a plethora of detailed plans (as well as a seemingly inexhaustible willingness to explain complicated policy matters in ways that non-experts can understand), might in itself constitute a vision — not just as the articulation of a perspective that sees the powerful pitted against the democratic many, but in a meta sense, in that politics is something that we need to talk about and make conscious, and that ultimately must be testable by facts and common agreement.  In his survey of why Warren has been rising in the polls lately, Paul Waldman suggests as much when he writes that, “what’s in her plans may matter less for the support she gets than for the idea that she’s the candidate who has plans for everything. It means she’s serious, substantive, prepared and ambitious about change. Not coincidentally, these are all things President Trump is not.”  As I hinted at earlier, the more philosophically-inclined might see something of a dialectic between Trump and Warren, the president being the white nationalist yang to the senator’s democratic, patriotic yin.

Trump Doesn't Believe He Has a Country to Defend, Just Himself

“You don’t call the FBI.”

This was the answer given by the president of the United States to an interview question as to what a presidential candidate should do when offered derogatory intelligence on a rival politician by agents of a foreign power.  When ABC’s George Stephanapoulos remarked that the FBI director says that calling the FBI is exactly what should happen, Trump removed all ambiguity as to his position, replying, “The FBI Director is wrong.”

This is an interview that everyone needs to read.  After literally years of the president denying any collusion between his 2016 and Russia, in his remarks to Stephanapoulos he essentially said that he believes the activity he denies engaging in is actually legal and right, and something he would do.  In one fell swoop, the president demolished any plausibility to his years-long defense, and this alone makes his recent words remarkable.

But more than that, what he said hits at multiple pillars of morality and patriotism simultaneously.  This is the actual president of the United States, in unadorned language, saying that there’s no difference between opposition research and a hostile foreign power seeking to influence an election for its own purposes; that the Democrats are such a threat to the country that collusion with foreign spies is nothing in comparison; that there is no right and wrong, only a world divided between the powerful and the fucked-over; that it’s okay to betray your country if it helps you gain power.

This real-life nightmare scenario encompasses not only the president’s disqualifying sentiments, but the lack of outrage from the great majority of his party at what he has said.  More than this, it encompasses a Democratic Party that, for reasons increasingly obscure, has consistently failed to attack the president for what he essentially is: a traitor who, as brutally summarized by David Corn at Mother Jones, encouraged election attacks by Russia, aided and abetted those attacks by denying their existence and failing to mobilize an adequate response or defense once he was elected president, and who now has invited wide-scale foreign meddling in the 2020 elections.  As I’ve noted before, if the shoe were on the other foot, and a Democratic president had acted in this way, the Republicans would have been calling him a traitor from day 1, and for once their otherwise incendiary and over-the-top language would have been totally appropriate.

It’s not surprising today to see the president half-backtracking from his remarks, given the criticism they’ve received in the last few days, except there’s no reason to thinking he isn’t lying now. And although he now claims that of course he would notify the FBI should be notified if a hostile country were giving him dirt on a rival, he’d still look at the dirt. The idea that politicians should have a loyalty higher than to doing what it takes to win obviously eludes the man, even when he’s given the chance for a do-over. The president loves to talk about how you can’t have a country without borders, but equally true is that you can’t have a country when the president is willing to give foreign spies the keys to the White House.

Laughing the President Off the Stage

David Roth has commemorated Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom by taking a stab at what the president really wants — and in his latest column, discerns that Trump’s highest aspiration may be to simply exist among the highest echelons of society, whether royals or the hyper-rich, in a sort of ostentatious and cloistered warm bath of mutual acceptance.  Roth’s take is casually adorned with eviscerating observations of the president’s embrace of gaudy adornment and the clear evidence that some status akin to the queen of England is his de facto dream role.

In verbally manhandling our doughy commander-in-chief, and paring away to get at what faint if twisted light might still flicker in the place where other people have a soul, Roth reminds us of the disorienting doubleness of this strange man: on the one hand, absurdly laughable, and on the other, a deeply dangerous authoritarian figure.  Can both be true?  Apparently, yes — but we would do well to remember what an effective weapon ridicule and ritual dismemberment of a foolish king can be.  Whatever serves to expose the emptiness of this man, and the hollowness of his claims to authority, but without granting him the benefit of a perceived harmlessness, is well worth exploring.  Many of us underestimated Trump in 2016, but more and more I wonder if this has led us to overestimate him today. 

Plum Line Blog Post Nails Down Dissonance on Infrastructure "Debate"

At The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, Paul Waldman makes a powerful case about why no infrastructure bill has yet emerged from the Trump presidency: a point that I think is essential to understanding the current state of American politics.  He starts with a critique of the Post’s own reporting on the subject — specifically, a recent article on the current prospects for an infrastructure bill getting passed by Congress and signed by the president.  Remarking on the article’s references to “partisan impasse” and “the capital’s infamous gridlock” as explanations for why no progress has been made, Waldman cuts to the chase and reminds us that the lack of movement on an infrastructure bill is rooted in deep and largely irreconcilable differences between the Democrats and Republicans both on this specific issue and in “the larger question of legislating and governing.”  His is a point too often obscured in daily politics coverage: Republican goals for governance are limited, and indeed regressive: most of their agenda concerns restricting both the role of government and the rights of Americans.  Meanwhile, the Democrats, as Republicans would agree, largely support an activist government that wants to increase social benefits like health care and education.

It may seem like Waldman is making a partisan point, but this is really just an indisputable statement of fact.  One reason it’s so obscured, though, is that political coverage continues to identify bipartisan cooperation as the highest form of political achievement; another, as Waldman points out, is that politicians themselves continue to say that Washington gridlock is the problem, which will be fixed if you just election Politician A to go to the capital so that he or she can break the infernal logjam.  It is not too much to say that President Trump himself made this argument during the 2016 campaign, every time he identified a problem that he alone would be able to solve.

On infrastructure specifically, Waldman points to a major distinction between Democrats and Republicans: “In simple terms, Democrats want to build infrastructure by building infrastructure, while Republicans want to mostly provide tax incentives to private corporations so they’ll build infrastructure from which those private entities can profit.”  Lest you think this is exaggeration, I’d invite you to read in its entirety the Post article that sparked Waldman’s critique.  While its “pox on both your houses” framing is flawed in the ways that Waldman pinpoints, the article in fact provides plenty of evidence to support his points about the Republican reluctance to fund things like bridges and broadband internet that help a modern nation go round.  His underlying premise is that any pretensions that Trump has a governing philosophy meaningfully distinct from the Republican Party is more or less bunk, and hoo-boy, does the Post article show this.

First, the piece gathers some amazing commentary from Republican anti-tax powerhouse Grover Norquist.  The mere presence of Norquist alone in the infrastructure debate is pretty decisive support for Waldman’s argument that the GOP is opposed to an affirmative role of government, seeing as Norquist is perhaps most famous for his line about wanting to shrink government down enough so that it can be drowned in a bathtub (an analogy whose violence and sadism are increasingly revealed to be among the proto-fascist antecedents to the Trump-led authoritarianism currently struggling to be born).  But Norquist’s comments about why Trump would be right not to work with the Democrats on infrastructure highlight how nearly impossible cooperation between the two parties really is.  Norquist accuses the Democrats of trying to “trick” the president into a tax increase proposal to fund the new spending, so that they could then use the tax hike as a cudgel to beat Trump and the GOP in 2020. In inimitable Norquistian hyperbole, he refers to this theoretical tax increase as “‘fingerprints on the murder weapon’ that would be used to convict Republicans in the next election” — for this GOP heavyweight, politics is apparently not war by other means, but a series of baroque murders for which one continually seeks to evade justice.

Particularly telling is the way that Trump, while having represented himself as someone who would be particularly effective on the infrastructure front, has basically retreated to the sanctity if not safety of the GOP’s anti-tax hilltop; the Post article notes that Trump echoed Norquist’s views in a Fox News interview, saying, “What they want me to do is say, ‘Well, what we’ll do is raise taxes, and we’ll do this and this and this,’ and then they’ll have a news conference, ‘See, Trump wants to raise taxes.’”

Of course, the Trump-GOP spin into authoritarianism and unapologetic governance on behalf of America’s uppermost classes involves far worse sins than hypocrisy and incompetence in keeping our bridges from falling down (though people being killed through entirely preventable infrastructure failures is pretty reprehensible).  But infrastructure is an interesting issue because it goes to the heart of the fundamental incompetence of the party’s governing philosophy, such as it is.  After all, how on earth is the American economy supposed to function without spending money on things like highways?  As Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, puts it: “We have to talk about real revenues, which means some form of taxation in some way. You can’t do it with fairy dust.”

Yet fairy dust is apparently not just what the GOP seems to believe in, but has actually chosen to snort into its virtual gaping nostrils, inducing a pseudo-psychedelic trip for them and a waking nightmare for the rest of us.  It’s as if they’ve embraced an imaginary capitalism, in which makers and innovators wave a wand and make jobs and growth happen, and that all the things that support a modern economy — not just infrastructure, but an educated workforce and a stable financial sector — just magically exist and have no need for further upkeep or improvement.  I’m tempted to say it’s a strangely childlike or naive view, but the truth is that it’s more truly an embrace of a full-on cannibal capitalism, that sees nothing beyond the gains of the present moment, the future be damned (witness the party’s indifference to climate change for the ultimate example).  

So the Waldman piece is spot-on about a basic point of American politics that keeps getting lost — that on basic ideas of why government exists, the two parties are as far apart as can be — but to be honest, the reason it truly grabbed my attention is because it helped clarify for me the media’s continuous lack of appropriate context for covering both the Trump presidency and current American politics more broadly.  The Post article in question falls down in a major way by framing the infrastructure stalemate as simply another example of quarrelsome politicos failing to reach an achievable consensus (even as it provides ample evidence of why this consensus is hardly achievable); but taking another step back, you can see that it also sidesteps at least three equally crucial frames: 1) the overall chaos and incompetence of the Trump presidency; 2) the great degree to which the president’s energy has been taken up by evading responsibility for his bad deeds in the 2016 election; and 3) the president’s obsessive focus on immigration and border security as the pre-eminent issue both for the U.S. economy and for his re-election in 2020.

The inadequate contextualization of news coverage appropriate to the moment finds its analogue in the dilemma facing the Democrats in how to deal with Trump: fight him tooth and nail, up to and including impeachment, or work with him?  The infrastructure dialogue between the Democratic leadership and the president brings these two threads together, as the most recent outcome was the president’s declaration that infrastructure legislation would not move forward unless the Democrats swore off further investigations of his administration.  In this case, of course, the philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats would seem to be secondary to the larger political conflict between Trump and the Democrats; but it’s important to note that Trump’s ultimatum only seems reasonable if you choose to pretend that absent the Trump administration’s various illicit activities, the two parties might find common ground.  Ignoring this fact makes Trump seem somewhat reasonable — he just wants to get to the people’s business, if those darned Dems would let him! — but in fact Trump’s embrace of Republican orthodoxy on taxes and spending is already putting agreement far out of reach.

The sheer number of disconnects — between the GOP and the Democrats on basic ideas of why government exists; in the enduring propensity of politicians from both parties to proclaim an undying faith in the bipartisan ideal; in the unwillingness or inability of the media to adequately report these partisan differences; between Trump’s increasingly lawless presidency and the idea that politics as usual can still proceed; in the Democrats’ inability to decide on whether they still want to work with Trump or to impeach him — combine to create a daily atmosphere of dissonance and frequent incomprehensibility that largely serves to hide the radicalism of the GOP and excuse the inadequate Democratic response to our era of political crisis.  Add in the matter of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, and the president’s subsequent obstruction of justice, and you get a fuller sense still of why many people wish to believe that it is all still politics as usual, and why this denial is increasingly part of our collective political problem.

As Trade War Escalates, Have We Lost Track of How Weak Trump's Hand Really Is?

I wonder if we are so used to President Trump driving the headlines and political discussion in this country that we’re all collectively a little blind to the possible self-destructive potential of his escalating trade wars with nations around the world?  There are some good summaries of the trade situation out this weekend, including at both The New York Times and here and here at The Washington Post.  Two things jump out at me: the degree to which other nations’ domestic politics may lead them to defy Trump in ways that he isn’t anticipating, and to which the president is betting that the U.S. economy will better handle any damage compared to its trading partners.  Wielding the blunt instrument of tariffs, as one analyst refers to them, he seems to increasingly be under the spell of his own ability to maintain the initiative. (The linkage he has now established between increased tariffs on Mexico and that country reducing immigration into the U.S. seems a serious transformation of a complicated trade war into something much more complex and intractable, and around which the president may have far less control than he imagines).

But with all the Trump-centric coverage, I doubt that our media has sufficiently covered what other leaders and other populations are willing to do to avoid being steamrolled by the U.S. in these trade disputes; that is, whether we’re too used to seeing everything from Trump’s perspective, and aren’t as aware as we should be of other countries’ agency in these matters.  Likewise, what’s being reported about the harm to corporate supply chains due to various tariffs raises the question of whether Trump doesn’t understand the full implications of his moves for the health of an American economy in which many sectors have built themselves around the assumption of free trade agreements such as NAFTA.

The growing possibility that the reputational damage Trump is doing to the U.S., via ham-handed tactics that treat long-time allies as untrustworthy adversaries (hello, Mexico and the E.U.), and untrustworthy adversaries as long-time allies (hello, North Korea), is also deeply worrisome.  As a law professor observer notes in this Washington Post article, “One of Trump’s major failings is that he only has a hammer.  He has no capacity of looking at the long term and recognizing that the vast majority of our interactions in life are repeat interactions.  I joke with my students that if you treat negotiations as a one-shot deal, it will be. No one will ever want to deal with you again.”  What felt like a theoretical threat a year ago — that Trump might permanently affect the U.S.’s ability to maintain long-term trading and political arrangements with allies and partners — is starting to feel a lot more real.  

It’s particularly horrifying to contemplate that Trump’s willingness to not only maintain but escalate such a self-defeating approach is rooted, above all else, in his determination that this is how he will secure himself victory in 2020.  It is clear he believes that a display of toughness, that he is fighting for his supporters, is key to winning the next presidential election.  Long-term damage to the U.S. economy or interests does not matter; Trump is all.  It is tempting to hope that this self-obsession may yet backfire, that, as I noted earlier, he’s overplaying his hand and underestimating the resolve of U.S. trading partners.  As veteran U.S. diplomat Christopher R. Hill remarks in the Post article, “I know that Trump considers the 2020 campaign as a triumphant march to the inevitable [reelection], but that’s not the way the rest of the world is looking at it.  You’re already seeing the Chinese holding back and saying, ‘We’ll see what will happen over the next 18 months to see if he’s still around and then maybe we’ll do something.’ To some extent, Trump does not have the self-awareness to understand that people are looking at the window closing on him.” Put another way: what interest do other world leaders really have in accommodating Trump when defying him may help doom his re-election chances in 2020?

Assault on U.S. Spy Agencies Should Leave Us All Shaken, Not Stirred

As I discussed a couple days ago, the president’s authorization for Attorney General William Barr to declassify intelligence information behind the government investigation of the Trump-Russia nexus should be cause for foreboding and anger in us all.  Not only is this a clear and dangerous case of the president seeking to exact revenge against his political enemies — a category of Americans identical with those who have sought to protect the United States against an attack by a foreign adversary and complicity in that attack by members of the Trump campaign and administration — but it has also opened up the prospect of the president doing real and lasting damage to America’s ability to protect its secrets and gather intelligence against others.  Barr’s exercise threatens to expose intelligence sources, sabotage work with allies, and benefit malicious foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin by exposing U.S. assets and methods in their countries.

But even as opponents of this deranged president have strong and manifold reasons to denounce his latest effort to undermine the U.S. government in order to aggrandize his power, it feels particularly important to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions of defending the U.S. intelligence community against Trump’s latest machinations.  There is ample history of the CIA using an alleged need for secrecy as a cover for corrupt practices.  Moreover, in terms of its bureaucratic power, separate and apart from its mission, a recent New York Times article correctly notes that, “Traditionally, the C.I.A. has been effective at intramural governmental fights, in large measure because its power comes from its information and its closely guarded secrets.”  So there is healthy reason to be clear-eyed about intelligence community motivations and agenda in its pushback against this move by Trump, without excusing the president’s corrupt motivations.

Not unrelatedly, and captured in the quote above, we are already seeing Barr’s mission being framed as a bureaucratic power struggle with the intelligence agencies.  This is made all the easier because of the CIA, FBI, and other security agencies’ broad insulation from public scrutiny and accountability.  It is not that the bureaucratic struggle angle is not useful or important, but that it threatens to obscure the larger assault Barr has embarked on: he isn’t just undermining particular agencies, but the security needs of the American people, as served by these agencies.  This is not simply a battle between a corrupt president and a powerful intelligence establishment, but a struggle over the defense of the United States, both in terms of gathering intelligence around the world and protecting ourselves from other countries’ ability to do the same.  Interestingly, it’s security professionals themselves who have been hammering this point the hardest in recent days; whether it’s a strategy to gain public sympathy, heartfelt, or a mix of both, they remind us that we’re talking about putting America’s ability to defend itself in danger so that the president can punish his enemies and build his power.

It remains remarkable to me that the Democratic Party has failed to push a line of attack against Trump and the GOP that calls into question the motivation of a party that seeks to demonize as treasonous security agencies that, however imperfect, perform functions vital to our collective safety.  Trump’s aim is clear — to neuter and politicize entities like the FBI and CIA that need to remain nonpartisan both for the sake of our democracy, and so that they do their assigned jobs as free of political influence as possible.  Trump’s nefarious ties to Russian attacks on the 2016 elections would not nearly be as well known to the U.S. had intelligence agencies failed to do their work and examine the suspicious ties and activities in the first place.  This hardly puts the intelligence community beyond reproach, but it should remind Democrats and others that defense of American intelligence and counter-intelligence is patriotic, even as Trump’s attacks make future reform of these agencies necessary in order to preserve both their independence in conjunction with far greater public accountability.  In a democracy, intelligence agencies and the world of spies must always be treated with healthy suspicion, as they stand in unresolvable tension with the openness and information flow of a free society.  But what we’re seeing Trump do right now is abuse their cloistered status, and push them in a direction clearly not compatible with our democracy.

Honor the Troops By Stopping the Endless Wars

There are many ways to honor the sacrifices of the U.S. military this Memorial Day, but I recommend adding to your remembrances some reading about the ways the Pentagon and politicians promote a shallow and cynical exploitation of American service members in order to evade greater public scrutiny of the endless wars in which their sacrifices are currently made.  For starters, I’d recommend this no-punches-pulled piece by Boston College communications professor Michael Serazio, titled “How Empty Displays of Sports Patriotism Allow Americans to Forget the Troops.”  I had not previously been aware that Major League Baseball teams have been wearing camouflage uniforms on Memorial Day to honor the troops, as if catching a baseball were akin to catching a grenade (news flash: it’s not).  Wearing a military-type uniform to honor service members strikes me as a surreal joke, not a sober homage; as Serazio puts it, it “cheapen[s] the commitment of [service members] to mere performance and play, when their occupation is anything but.”  He also notes that the Pentagon’s insinuation of military themes into major league sports serves to “channel our patriotic fervor into contests with unambiguous outcomes and no untimely casualties” — a maneuver, not incidentally, that ascribes closure and meaning to military service that is belied by a series of catastrophic foreign policy decisions by our political leaders.

Successive presidential administration have learned that fetishization of military members’ sacrifice and suffering is the surest way to avoid scrutiny of the dishonorable and murderous wars they’ve been ordered to engage in, and to avoid the incendiary reality that the flip side of American casualties are vast numbers of foreign dead, including almost too many civilians to count.  The truest way to honor the troops is to be damned sure they are never asked to risk life and limb in a war unless that war is absolutely necessary, and to insist that Congress has the cajones to actually pass a declaration of war when one is deemed necessary.  Otherwise, the result is what we see now: an endless sprawl of forever wars, in places most Americans can’t be bothered to find on a map.

Is Not Even the Very Holy Border Wall Sacred from the President's Corruption? (Short Answer: No)

The news last week that President Trump has pressed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to, in the words of The Washington Post,  “award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News,” would be an enormous scandal for any other administration; that it already seems to have disappeared in the tsunami of daily ethics violations and assault on American democracy is no surprise.

Yet the fact that the president would apparently push the U.S. government to violate contracting rules in connection with his preeminent issue — building a wall across the southern border — is deeply revealing of both his autocratic notions of the presidency and of how the American economy operates.  These notions are important not only because they go to the heart of this administration’s fundamental mindset and motivations, but also because they reflect the mindset of millions of supporters who remain loyal to the president despite what the rest of us see as his flagrant unfitness for office.

In this instance, the president’s willingness to put pressure on military officials seems rooted, at least partly, in a personal belief that the wall product of the company in question, Fisher Industries, can be installed quickly and cheaply.  In other words, he sees circumvention of contracting procedures in favor of Fisher’s product as a personalized solution to a personal crisis —how to build a border wall, or great chunks of it, prior to the 2020 election.  From this perspective, Fisher’s barrier product must seem like a no-brainer to Trump (the Corps of Engineers has indicated to the president that it’s cheaper because it doesn’t meet the standards set by the Corps, but when has a shoddy product ever put off the president?).

(It is also worth noting, as another indicator of the impropriety of the president’s advocacy for Fisher Industries, that Fisher Industries is suing the federal government over its border wall procurement process.  And so the president’s corruption expands, to include support for a company that has set itself in legal opposition to the government of which he’s the executive.)

But what would strike many Americans as the president’s corrupt involvement in a process properly left to  a competitive bidding process likely strikes many of his supporters as the president simply doing what he needs to get the job done.  In this, Trump’s actions are those of an autocrat, a form of un-democratic governance his supporters have come to endorse.  Specifically, it’s worth noting how Trump’s judgment is placed over governmental processes intended to both save taxpayer money and ensure they get what they’re paying for.  This mentality is echoed in complaints by Fisher’s president that “bureaucracy” is interfering with construction of the barrier, and likewise in comments by North Dakota Senator Cramer (a recipient of major donations from North Dakota-based Fisher) that Trump was elected to get through Washington’s bureaucracy.  But these businesses and politicians see this corrupt government with clear eyes — in claiming to be in revolt against an unresponsive bureaucracy, they instead grasp a golden opportunity to exploit personal connections and a corrupt president to make major moolah.

This corruption should be repellent to most Americans; the fact that it is not so to his supporters speaks to both their cynicism about how government has always worked, but also, I think, about how the economy itself operates.  Forget about the free market; forget about competition; what is important is to get on your side someone who understands the importance of personal connections, and who will shovel the work and money your way.  The irony, of course, is that this solution only reinforces the problem it purports to resolve; it’s based on a naive belief that a corrupt president would ever actually be on their side, and not more interested in lining his own pockets and the pockets of those willing to serve his purposes.  Not that there are any ethical companies lining up to build the border wall; but are his supporters really served by an economy where those who are awarded such work are those who could afford to make the biggest donations to politicians?  Ordinary citizens may think the president has their back economically, but this personal intervention on wall construction illuminates the devil’s bargain they have made: having lost their faith in the American economy, Trump turns around and simply continues playing the same rigged game that has led to their cynicism, only supercharged with the power of the presidency and with an additional self-serving purity.  When you bet on the corrupt and self-serving to save you, disappointment will be your inevitable lot.

Finally, it’s worth noting, as I feel I’m doing constantly these days, the lackluster framing this otherwise well-reported Post story provides for the corruption it details. “Trump’s personal intervention risks the perception of improper influence on decades-old procurement rules that require government agencies to seek competitive bids, free of political interference,” the author writes, in hideous understatement. The president’s actions as described in the piece already constitute improper influence, whether or not they were successful; the Post’s mischaracterization of its own story is truly bizarre.