No Prisoners

Now that Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi has green-lighted an impeachment inquiry against President Trump, it’s urgent that his opponents fully embrace the reality that the corrupt and authoritarian threat he poses extends far beyond the White House, to the Republican Party at large.  To date, the GOP has acquiesced to every undemocratic, authoritarian, treasonous, and racist tendency of this president.  The GOP nominated Trump; has supported Trump with only the barest and most fragile dissent since his election; and has remained quiescent in the face of the president’s numerous impeachable acts up to now, whether it’s his collusion with Russian in the 2016 election and subsequent obstruction of its investigation, his embrace of white supremacist immigration policies, or his instigation of violence against minorities and the free press.  As I’ve argued many times before, it is not simply that the GOP has given in to Trump; prior to Trump, and more so since his election, mainstream Republican policies and practices have moved in a racist, authoritarian direction, from a reliance on gerrymandering and voter suppression to gain political office, to a decades-long plan to stack the judiciary with right-wing judges dedicated to promoting the interests of the rich and powerful over ordinary Americans.

So although the impeachment effort has been sparked by the president’s recent attempts to leverage Ukraine into his political vendetta against Joe Biden, the Democrats’ use of impeachment will be a failure to the degree it is abstracted from its overwhelming historical and political context.  One of the major arguments against impeachment has been that the GOP-controlled Senate would never vote to convict the president, which would mean the process would inevitably end in failure, and perhaps even in an affirmation of the president’s power.  Yet, as increasing numbers of politicians and observers are arguing, impeachment can put not only the president, but his defenders in the GOP, on trial.  If what Donald Trump has done as president truly requires his removal, then GOP senators (and representatives, for that matter) will be forced to either break with the man, or to effectively embrace his corruption as their own.

It is extremely likely that GOP congresspeople will defend and acquit the president, because the GOP itself has essentially declared war on American democracy, driven by a recognition that the party is doomed to minority status due to demographic changes and a growing embrace of liberalism by American voters.  Beyond this, the Democrats as a whole have not yet reckoned with the fact that Trump and the GOP simply refuse to believe that the Democrats are a legitimate political party, that the Democratic Party even has a right to exist.  (GOP politicians uniformly refuse to use the Democrats’ actual name!)  When you have internalized such extremism, can it really be any surprise that even presidential treason can be justified against the Democrats as an act of patriotism against internal enemies?

Only by acknowledging the full scope of the crisis, and communicating it to the public, will Democrats be able to employ impeachment to maximum advantage: not simply as an attempt to rebuke and rein in the president, but as a cudgel to indict the GOP as a whole and lay the groundwork for a cataclysmic, generational repudiation of the party and its authoritarian mindset.  Only politicians blinkered to the true depth of our situation would see the GOP’s embrace of such a president as somehow harmful to the Democrats, rather than as the death grip of a party so far gone that it can no longer tell patriotism from treason.

As they face the inevitable pushback from the president and his defenders in Congress, Democrats also need to grasp that Trump and the GOP are acting out of weakness, not strength; why else would they be so eager to seek foreign assistance in the next election?  Just as the GOP sees gerrymandering and voter suppression as essential to maintaining power despite the party’s dwindling base, so the party must look to allies abroad to hedge against its failure as a major American political party.  In the face of multiple polls showing Trump’s extreme weakness going into 2020 — whether it’s the way he trails the leading Democratic presidential candidates, or how his support among white working-class women has fallen off a cliff — for the Democrats to act as if the slightest misstep will result in their electoral annihilation is bizarre.  Why on earth should they be on the defensive when it’s Trump and the GOP who are losing popular support?  Beyond this, in the case of the Ukraine scandal, the president’s actions are literally directed at the ability of the Democrats to compete in 2020.  The idea of sitting tight and waiting for 2020 is tantamount to embracing a suicide pact; some Democratic politicians may be content to do so, but this would be a betrayal of the rights of American voters.

Since Trump’s election, the GOP has signaled its contempt for American democracy and liberal values by its support of this cruel and lawless president.  In covering for his collusion with Russia and now his attempts to enlist Ukraine in his war on the Democratic Party, Republican Senate and House members have chosen party over the fair play of democracy.  The Democrats can’t shy away from what has become an existential fight for American democracy, and to press the vulnerability of Republicans to maximum advantage.  The uniform GOP defense of Trump has so far protected the president, but it has also opened the party up to catastrophic collapse.  Should essentially all GOP congresspeople continue with their lockstep support of the president, individual politicians will be tainted and taken down by their association with this corrupt man.  Yet if even a small number of more honest or cunning members break with the president, they will expose the president’s remaining supporters as mindless lackeys, and themselves to judgment for their prior aid and comfort to a lawless chief executive. The Democrats can’t shy away from raining fire and brimstone onto a party that has so badly lost its way.

A Couple Intriguing Data Points for Understanding 2020 Elections

For anyone worried about the prospects of booting Trump and his lockstep supporters in Congress out of office in 2020, this Washington Post story documents heartening signs of panic among Republicans seeking to hold the House and Senate, as well as evidence that the suburban voters who carried Democrats to victory in the House are continuing to abandon the GOP.  Interviews with Republican politicians and voters in battleground districts in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania suggest Trump will be an albatross around the necks of many in the GOP come the next election cycle.

But what particularly struck me are the suggestions that things that Trump sees as his strengths — his position on immigration, his trade wars, his combativeness — seem to be driving away former Republican or Republican-friendly voters.  Changing attitudes on the question of gun control are especially eye-catching, as rising numbers of younger voters, combined with a shift in perceptions about the need to do something to stop the violence, suggest that hewing to the NRA line has become increasingly toxic for many GOP politicians.  Even as Trump’s base of support seems never to break below a certain level, voter attitudes nonetheless seem to be in flux in districts where such shifts could make a big difference, at least in the House, though some Republicans also see a threat to their hold on the Senate.

Along similar but more ambiguous lines, another pair of recent articles raise intriguing points about demographic changes in the Midwest that could impact the 2020 elections and beyond.  As Thomas Edsall summarizes, a rising proportion of the population of some states is living in urban areas (which seems to be related to in-state migration from more rural regions), which “combined with the decline of pro-Republican rural communities [. . .] may improve the odds for the Democratic Party and its candidates.”  At the same time, another study shows that the populations of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin saw their populations of 65-and-older voters (who tend to favor the GOP) grow twelve times as fast as their populations of 18-35-year-olds (who tend to favor Democrats) — a demographic shift certainly not in the Democrats’ favor, and a significant detail as we try to understand our current political and cultural conflicts.  

That same Edsall piece also bring up another fascinating bit of research, this one by John Austin, the director of the Michigan Economic Center and former head of Michigan State Board of Education.  In an article at Politico, Austin presents a counter-intuitive case about the effect of an improving economy on Trump’s re-election chances:

[If] you look at the Trump-voting districts that flipped to Democrats in the 2018 midterms, it starts to look like the conventional wisdom is wrong. Contrary to the perception that a rebounding economy will work to the president’s benefit, there is growing evidence in Michigan and throughout the Rust Belt that metro areas that are bouncing back—and there are a bunch—are turning blue again. Indeed, communities that continue to flounder—and unfortunately there are still many of those, too—are likely to double down on Trumpism.

I did a mental double-take when I first read this, but Austin goes on to make a persuasive, or at least, provocative, case:

In communities that aren’t what they used to be, with grim job prospects and battered community pride, voters may continue to respond to someone who talks tough to America’s adversaries, promises to bring back the good old days when these communities were—at least in nostalgic hindsight—working-class utopias, and pins blame on immigrants for problems.

But there are many communities in the Rust Belt that have found ways to transition away from the single-industry model, be it cars or steel, that sustained them for so much of the 20th century. No longer is Minneapolis the "Flour City," Pittsburgh the "Steel City," or Cincinnati “Porkopolis”—a nod to its history as a slaughterhouse center—but diverse, dynamic urban entrepots. Among smaller cities, Akron, Ohio lost its title as “Rubber Capital of the World” but has found purchase with a revitalized downtown and growth in emerging polymers and plastics, advanced manufacturing industries, and as a transportation and logistics crossroads.

What these communities have in common, aside from better job prospects, is a generally more forward-looking view that is less responsive to Trump’s economic nostalgia. They also tend to be younger (thanks to colleges and universities and their ability to draw newcomers) and more diverse. These voters are more focused on basic kitchen table issues—good schools, affordable higher education, health care, decent roads—and less inclined to reward nativism and economic nationalism.

A major appeal of Austin’s take is its suggestion that positive material changes in people’s daily lives effectively helps drain the swamp waters in which Trumpism festers.  Start doing better, start seeing a future, and “you’re less inclined to reward nativism and economic nationalism.”  This reminds me of a darker notion I’ve had from time to time, which is that Trumpist politics and economics is basically self-perpetuating, as it continues to funnel money to the rich and to distract people by inciting their hatred against scapegoats.  If the economy is doing well for more middle-class and working-class Americans in some parts of the country, it may well be despite Trump’s economic policies.  Austin’s argument also means that an economic downturn may well supercharge Trump and the GOP’s chances in 2020, creating fertile ground to ramp up the hatred even more to distract from their economic failures.  At the same time, given Trump’s extreme emphasis on the health of the economy as the result of his efforts, it seems he may not have such a clear-cut case for blaming everyone but himself if it goes south.

Will Luntzian Lust for Life Save GOP From Suicide-by-Climate-Change Denialism?

It’s no coincidence that this year of climate catastrophes — from horrifying fires in the Amazon to Hurricane Dorian’s pulverizing of the Bahamas — is also seeing significant shifts in the number of Americans who view climate changes as a crisis.  Even coming decades later than it should have, the turn in public sentiment towards consensus is good news in a 2019 of very bad climate news.  

A new poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation is the latest to document this movement. The top-line results suggest that Americans should be receptive to actions necessary to slow and stop global warming: 38% say climate change is best described as a crisis, another 38% say it’s best described as a major problem, and only 8% say it’s not a problem at all.  What’s even more hopeful are the results based on party affiliation.  Some 60% of Republicans agreed that climate change is due to human activity.  This is a heartening figure, all the more so because of the relentless war on climate science conducted by the right for decades now; that reality is beginning to cut through the propaganda is reassuring.

Yet, as Dave Roberts describes in a Vox piece, the GOP’s leadership is very far from consensus on the importance of acting on climate change.  Indeed, the dominant party line remains one of denial of the basic facts of the existence of global warming.  But as Roberts details, some in the GOP are beginning to realize the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change — not simply for the survival of the human species, but for that equally important objective: the survival of the GOP. I was startled to read that none other than Frank Luntz, the GOP pollster and propagandist who pressed the party to use the term “climate change” rather than global warming many years ago, and who urged the party to keep alive questions about the science behind the issue, has done a 180-degree reversal.  Not only does he admit that he was wrong about the magnitude of the threat, he’s arguing that Republicans risk electoral disaster if they ignore the support in the party rank and file for action.

Luntz recently polled support for a carbon dividend tax, under which revenues raised by a carbon tax would be directed to taxpayers.  The results were startling; the policy “got 2-1 support among Republicans, 4-1 support overall, 6-1 support among Republicans under 40, and 8-1 support among swing voters under 40.”  Roberts cautions against placing too much reliance on this single survey, but he points to other Luntz-led surveys that further evidence a sea change in the GOP:

58% of Americans — including 58% of GOP voters under 40 — are more concerned about climate change now than they were only one year ago. The appetite for seeing real action is palpable to voters of both sides.

Three in four American voters want to see the government step in to limit carbon emissions — including a majority of Republicans (55%).

69% of GOP voters are concerned their party is ‘hurting itself with younger voters’ by its climate stance.

Let’s pause for a moment to note how significant and remarkable this overall shift is.  Republican leaders, in concert with oil and coal interests, have engaged in a decades-long campaign to cast doubt over whether human-caused global warming even exists in the first place.  A generation of GOP politicians followed in lockstep as the policy of denialism became the official party position.  Yet reality is breaking through, particularly to the younger Americans on whom the GOP’s hopes for the future necessarily rest.  And so Luntz and others grasp that the war on the planet is also a war against their own party’s survival.

Against the Luntzian effort to sound the alarm about the GOP’s failure to keep up with its base on this issue, enter Grover Norquist, the GOP powerhouse whose absurd anti-tax pledge all GOP politicians feel enjoined to take.  In the face of early talk about support for a carbon tax, Norquist is laying down the party line — that opposition to such a tax, as to all taxes, is absolute.  

At a purely pragmatic level, it’s hard to overstate what a golden opportunity this nascent Republican civil war is for those who want the Democrats to take a decisive role in fighting climate change.  Too many GOP politicians have committed themselves to an absolutist stance on both global warming and the changes necessary to tax and spending policies for any shift in the party’s stance to be easy or quick, let alone even possible.  That opposition to new taxes is such a stumbling block on climate change action points to even larger, structural impediments to a GOP about-face.  The party is ideologically opposed to the sort of large-scale government action that global warming requires; and the Trumpian direction of the party also means that the sort of American leadership and internationalism necessary to the effort are being wrung out of the party on a daily basis.  Beyond this, the GOP, particularly in its embrace of Trump, seems committed to an ethos of greed above all other considerations — against the long-term good, against patriotism, against democracy itself.  Even when Trump is gone, such rotten ideas will linger in the party for some time to come.

On the near-term question of defeating the current president, the latest polls on rank-and-file GOP attitudes shows why climate change is a huge opportunity for Democrats even in the short term.  The Post-KFF poll found that while a scant 9% of GOP voters disapprove of the president’s performance overall, 23% disapprove of Trump’s handling of climate change.  While this issue may not be paramount for most Republicans, it would be foolish to treat either its relative importance or this already-high disapproval number as static.  It’s noteworthy that Republicans are dissenting from the president’s policies in relatively high numbers on an issue where the evidence of their own senses contradicts the president’s own casual dismissals of extreme weather events. 

In other words, as marshaling a national and global effort to stop and ultimately roll back global warming rises as a public priority, the Republican leadership will likely find itself unable to accommodate quickly-shifting public sentiment.  Meanwhile, the Democrats are already being pushed by growing political movements on the left to propose large-scale action, now.  This hardly means any of us can start breathing easier.  The Democrats are still far from the commitments necessary to the moment, much less from holding the political power necessary to make such changes.  And the Post-KFF poll contains cautionary news for Democrats: while Americans trust the Democratic Party over the GOP to handle climate change by 38% to 17%, some 35% say they don’t trust either party on the issue, including 56% of independents.  Additionally, even though 66% percent of Americans surveyed agreed that Trump is doing too little, 56% had the same response when asked about the Democrats.  Such results suggest that the Democrats can gain politically from unambiguous and bold action.

The Post-KFF poll also reveals challenges to forming a response to global warming that would seem to favor the Democrats over Republicans, even as it provides evidence that political savvy and a larger effort toward economic equality will be required.  The results show clear limits, at least at present, to how much Americans are willing to sacrifice economically in order to save the planet.  Almost half indicated they would pay a $2 monthly tax on electricity to fight global warming, but only around 25% would pay $10 extra each month. Yet 68% favor raising taxes on the rich to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and 60% support raising taxes on companies that use fossil fuels.  Democrats need to understand that political justice and political reality dictate that the climate fight must be largely funded by those who can best afford it, and by those who have outsize responsibility for the perilous place we’re at.  As advocates of the Green New Deal have been saying, there’s no separating out issues of climate change from issues of economic fairness.  At bottom, it’s just political common sense: we can’t expect ordinary Americans to sacrifice if the rich and powerful aren’t made to sacrifice commensurate to their ability and responsibility.

The GOP has plenty of vested interest in denying climate change simply based on the economic priorities of the rich and powerful, but Democrats and progressives need to be aware that the economic and social disruptions due to climate change can easily be used by right-wing and authoritarian movements to bolster their claims to power.  There will be millions upon millions of climate refugees worldwide in the coming years; a cryogenically-preserved Donald Trump would doubtless use the purported menace of so many of these people wanting to come to the United States as ammunition in his war to end immigration by the non-lily white of the world.  So would other authoritarians around the globe; and it’s not hard to see a vicious feedback effect taking hold, in which every nation looks out for itself, choosing conflict in place of cooperation.

(From this perspective, the hundreds of billions of dollars going to the U.S. defense budget every year can be seen as a massive misunderstanding of what we must “defend” ourselves against; we build military might to triumph in future wars over the dwindling resources of a dying planet, when the actual defense we need involves massive investments in renewable energy, environmentally resilient urban planning, and remediation of natural systems like forests and marshland that will help mitigate and eventually stop rising temperatures.)

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But if the Democratic Party has the potential to claim leadership on climate change on the American political scene, a large challenge faces the party: navigating the fact that any full-scale effort will need to emphasize not just protecting Americans, but protecting millions of people around the world facing far more catastrophic futures than we are.  From island nations facing disappearance due to rising seas, to areas of the world becoming too hot for human habitability, global warming means that Americans need to step up and help protect not only fellow citizens, but simply our fellows, based on our common humanity.  Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix have written a great essay that gets right to this point; they argue that our ecological crisis calls for a revival of the idea of solidarity, a concept that may not have a single settled definition, but involves seeing fellow human beings as our equals in the name of working for a larger, shared cause:

Unlike identity, solidarity is not something you have, it is something you do — a set of actions taken toward a common goal. Inasmuch as it is something experienced, it is not a given but must be generated; it must be made, not found. Solidarity both produces community and is rooted in it, and is thus simultaneously a means and an end. Solidarity is the practice of helping people realize that they — that is to say, we — are all in this together.

This suggests to me a further challenge and necessary goal for Democrats in the coming years: embracing a solidarity with people around the world who are also threatened by climate change, while also defending national interests and finding the balance in what sacrifices Americans can be asked to make for the greater national and international good.

Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix have many nuggets of wisdom and insight, but their summary of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s early studies of solidarity caught my attention, in how it provides a clue to how solidarity can be better woven into our everyday politics:  

Durkheim also set out to discover what created solidarity and held societies together. Durkheim writes that solidarity is generated through a shared sense of the sacred. Every society, he observes, has a set of rituals around what its members consider sacred or profane. And these rituals — these sets of collective actions — knit us together. [. . .]  But these inchoate understandings of social belonging soon began to erode under the corrosive pressures of modern industrial life. Modernity made the individual sacred, producing a paradoxical effect that still hangs over us. We are held together by our recognition of individual rights — yet our individualism is overpowering our sense of community and starting to eat away at the fabric of society.

This makes me wonder if the challenge to our very existence on the planet has brought us all face to face with having to understand what is sacred in our world, and to the unavoidable conclusion that what should be sacred and central to how we all live is that which promotes life itself.  Confronted with a planetary doom of our collective making, we are being returned to questions of first priorities and meaning.  Self-interest and collective interest would seem to coincide; there is no saving ourselves without saving each other, a conclusion that reaches beyond logic to a more intuitive and even spiritual dimension.

Trump Resumes Taxi Driver Reveries As Presidential Team Scopes Out California Homeless

As the Trump administration once again voices false concern about our national homeless crisis, skepticism needs to be the order of the day.  A few months ago, President Trump first raised his concerns about homelessness — concerns being a polite way of saying that he was personally offended by the aesthetic blight of homelessness, as opposed to being moved to compassion for the actual human beings suffering it.  He also clearly saw the issue as a way to bash Democratic opponents.

Today’s news that his administration has just sent a fact-finding team to California as part of a federal initiative on homelessness should fill any reasonable citizen with doubt and dread.  As critics interviewed by both the The Washington Post and The New York Times note, the Trump administration has spent the past three years making things worse for homeless Americans and others, not better.  National Low Income Housing Coalition president Diane Yentel notes that “The White House this year proposed cutting the HUD budget by about 20 percent, eliminating the programs that build and preserve homes for the lowest-income people,” and “has also proposed cutting federal rental assistance for a quarter of a million families, as well as evicting 55,000 children from subsidized housing.”  The Coalition also noted in a statement that:

The solution to homelessness is affordable homes — not further criminalization, punishing poor people for their poverty, sweeping people experiencing homelessness into increasingly unsafe areas or warehousing people in untenable and unsustainable conditions, all of which are proposals that the White House is seriously considering.

Indeed, given the precedent of the inhumane and dangerous conditions in which migrants are being held along the southern border, it should sent a chill up every decent person’s spine to read that “among the ideas under consideration are razing existing tent camps for the homeless, creating new temporary facilities and refurbishing existing government facilities.”  The idea that this administration would make any effort to provide homeless folks, one of the least politically powerful classes of people in our country, with safe and dignified housing, doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.  

The administration makes no secret of the fact that this latest move is simply a continuation of the president’s desire to attack his political opponents.   According to a White House spokesman, “Like many Americans, the president has taken notice of the homelessness crisis, particularly in cities and states where the liberal policies of overregulation, excessive taxation and poor public service delivery are combining to dramatically increase poverty and public health risks.”  Democrats are apparently the cause of homelessness, and are the real target of this vague yet ominous planning.  Nowhere in evidence is any expressed interest or sympathy in homeless individuals themselves, which would be the simplest thing in the world to do as window dressing; but the sociopath’s White House cannot even accomplish this fakery.

What’s particularly galling about this cynical and worrisome Trumpian faux interest in taking care of homelessness is that his critique of liberal cities is not without some merit — but not for all the reasons he thinks.  There is plenty of NIMBYism that has stymied efforts at higher density and more affordable housing in cities like Los Angeles, and this is shamefully self-interested behavior by people who might otherwise believe themselves to be progressively minded.  Likewise with the refusal of some Democratic politicians to push for sufficient taxes to provide needed shelter.  Yet these are not failures of liberals, but of all Americans, as such policy failures are echoed in locales where both Democrats and Republicans hold office.  And in point of fact, Los Angeles has indeed raised taxes and passed a bond recently to build housing for the homeless.

These new moves by the president show the dystopian direction in which our politics can head when liberalism fails to live up to its ideals.  Homelessness is deeply intertwined with the growing inequality of American society, economic disruptions like the Great Recession, and the lack of a comprehensive social safety net.  Having shied away for too long from the structural and democratizing changes needed to create a fair economy and ensure that anyone who needs a home can have one, progressives have been complicit in a growing socioeconomic morass that Trump now exploits.  Just as Trump has no real cure for the economy’s ills, he has no real plan for the homeless who have been mass produced by incredible economic pressures and insufficient public support.  Instead, homelessness becomes yet another area in which he tries to perform his authoritarian strong man act, taking care of a complex humanitarian issue by dehumanizing a whole population, no people too vexing a problem that they can’t be handled by putting them in a shitty camp somewhere far from prying eyes.

A Hopeful Sea Change In Southern Plantation Tours

The Washington Post has a fascinating story about the increased discussions of slavery at tours of plantations like Monticello and other historical sites.  The movement towards greater openness and confrontation with the harshest facets of the American past has increased attendance at some locations, particularly among African-Americans, but has triggered others — predominantly white people — to make complaints about the emphasis on slavery.  While there’s a dark gut-level amusement in visitors posting their ignorance and bigotry for all to mock on Trip Advisor, the willingness of historians and curators to insist on the primacy of the enslaved in any discussion of plantations is a victory for our common humanity and shared history.  The present-day transformation of one of America’s two major political parties into a white people’s party, along with the centrality of racism and bigotry to our current president’s electoral appeal, are evidence enough that the insane attitudes of dehumanization alive in North America since the 16th century continue today in mutated but recognizable form.

It’s not a shocker to say that someone like Donald Trump could rise to the highest office in the land because this country has failed in many ways to fully confront its racist past, which of course has translated into a racist present.  Talking about history inevitably involves value judgments that lead us to focus on certain aspects more than others.  In this light, the long-time policy of downplaying or ignoring the fact that there was slavery at slave plantations has been a distortion of history rooted in the prejudices of the now.

The short-sightedness of not fully engaging the darkness of the American story as well as the light (setting aside the very real political and power dynamics that have kept the story of slavery as a backdrop rather than a central feature of plantation histories) means that many white people end up over-identifying with the white slaveholders of the American past, missing or rejecting the opportunity to make a morally imaginative connection with American slaves: to imagine themselves in their place, to understand that despite this identification they never would have been in their place, and to do the hard work that true American citizenship demands of sorting through these tensions and paradoxes.  The ultimate point is not to assume a mantle of guilt, as some of the troubled white visitors think must be the point of a more three-dimensional history, but to understand that being fully American necessarily involves empathy, stepping outside yourself, imagining yourself as someone wholly unlike you, and being empowered to see how the conflicts of the past flood into the present; not some distant settled archaeology, but a torrent that carries us along, whether or not we wish to be aware of it.

Some of those visitors who object to the more honest plantation tours complain about “politicization” of history, but it’s a closed mind that doesn’t see that true politicization comes in the form of suppressing the most salient facts of our shared past: a politicization that, in this area, might better be named “white supremacy.”  I’m reminded of something that became glaringly obvious two or so years ago, at the time of the white riot in Charlottesville and the increased awareness of how cities and towns across the South are blighted by monuments to Confederate “heroism” — monuments largely put up not in the direct aftermath of the war, but as a visible means of consolidating the defeat of Reconstruction and the institution of what would turn out to be nearly a century of Jim Crow racial apartheid.  Some suggested that the statues be replaced with African-American heroes, such as soldiers who fought for the Union, or those like Harriet Tubman who resisted slavery by other means.  The idea that that Americans of any skin color could identify with them as our heroic ancestors feels so radical, and so right to me: a case of telling a truer story about our past that could help re-orient collective ideas about patriotism and our fellow Americans in the present.

I also don’t understand the attitude of plantation visitors like the Thomas Jefferson admirer whose disappointed review stated that “to have the tour guide essentially make constant reference to what a bad person he really was just ruined it for me.”  If you are a Jefferson fan who refuses to deal with the man’s hideous racial views, then are you really a fan, or just a worshipper of an incomplete caricature of a person?  It’s naive bordering on fantastical to want your heroes to be pure, or to refuse to acknowledge their complexities.  To more fully grasp the past doesn’t mean being trapped by it; it also holds the key to liberation, or at least, however fitfully, progress. The alternative is to believe in a myth that serves no one well.

Feeling the Greenland Blues

More than the zaniness, more than the grandiosity, more than the sheer what-the-fuck quality, what should have been most remarkable about President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland is how the idea completely ignored the concept that Greenland residents should have any say in the matter — through, say, a democratic mechanism such as a vote.  It’s fair to say that democracy was far from the president’s mind when the idea began to percolate in his tuna melt sandwich of a brain; instead, what dominated was a combination of avarice and vainglory.  “The world works by rich people buying things” seems to be a fair summary of the president’s world view.  But the fact that nearly all the criticism focused on the silliness and randomness of the notion is a little bit of an indictment of the rest of us, too; because at this point, we should be far better attuned to violations of democratic procedure, whether at home or abroad.  The sickness of the idea that the United States could just go ahead and purchase a people’s land without their having a say in the matter should have been much farther up the list of public outrage than it was: not only for its own immorality, but as another sign of the president’s inability to comprehend our own country’s democracy.

GOP Tax Scam Helps the 1% Build a Private Infrastructure for the Wealthy

The New York Times has an investigative report out this weekend on how the creation of “opportunity zones” created under the 2017 tax bill has been working out.  Ostensibly intended to direct investment at impoverished areas, the whole idea has largely turned into a scam by which the rich get richer, and everyone else gets left further behind.

The basic idea is that in exchange for investing in an opportunity zone certified by the U.S. Treasury — there are around 8,800 — wealthy investors would be able to defer or even eliminate paying capital gains taxes on previous investments, and also possibly avoid paying taxes related to these new projects. The zones are supposed to be areas below the median household income that would particularly benefit from an influx of investment money; but while “[n]early a third of the 31 million people who live in the zones are considered poor — almost double the national poverty rate [. . .] there are plenty of affluent areas inside those poor census tracts. And, as investors would soon realize, some of the zones were not low income at all.”

Rather than creating a flood of investment to neighborhoods that desperately need it, wealthy individuals and companies have zeroed in on those “affluent areas” included in the opportunity zones.  There is opportunity, all right — to make a killing for the rich, by building out real estate for the rich. And so “billions of untaxed investment profits are beginning to pour into high-end apartment buildings and hotels, storage facilities that employ only a handful of workers, and student housing in bustling college towns, among other projects.”  Adding to the portrait of one-percenter corruption, the president’s own businesses, family, and cronies are seeking to take advantage of this tax provision.  It’s almost as if they wrote the laws to. . . benefit themselves?

It was bad enough that the Trump administration’s biggest idea for helping impoverished neighborhoods was a plan to enable the richest people in American to avoid paying taxes.  But even on those contemptible terms, the plan is turning out to be what critics said it would be: a way to make the rich richer at the expense of the rest of us.  Not only is the tax break component a way for rich people to pad their wealth by ensuring they don’t pay their fair share to the Treasury, these investments are literally helping build a physical infrastructure for the wealthiest Americans to live apart from the rest of the U.S.  And the fancy hotels and condos are not only valuable commodities for the investors, but are valuable investments for their wealthy purchasers as well.

The Hot Screen got an early warning of this large-scale grotesquerie last month, when our hometown paper The Oregonian ran a story on an unprecedentedly upscale condo and hotel project to be constructed smack in the middle of Portland’s downtown.  It will be 35 stories tall (which would make it one of the highest in Portland), with 11 floors dedicated to a Ritz-Carlton hotel, and other floors occupied by condos branded by the hotel chain.  The guest rooms will cost $450 a night, about double the most expensive lodgings in the city at present.  Construction costs are estimated to be $600 million — but the whole plan is being enabled because the developer aims to get a whopping $150 million via opportunity zone investments. Another way of looking at it: investors will put $150 million into the project so as to avoid up to otherwise avoid paying $60 million in taxes (based on a 40% tax rate that could otherwise hit those capital gains), and on top of this will be able to reap gains from this new investment with significant additional tax benefits.

Even without the opportunity zone angle, this project would present as a grotesquerie on the Portland cityscape.  Beyond the moral outrage of the city not being able to find shelter for thousands of homeless people, Portland has experienced a more general crisis of affordability for years now, as rapidly escalating rents make less and less of the city affordable for working- and even middle-class individuals and families.  Developers already routinely walk away from obligations to provide lower-income housing, despite having received municipal tax breaks based on promises to do so (afraid of picking fights with developers, the City lets them get away with it).

So it’s a bit of a trip to bizarro world to see a tax provision officially meant to encourage investment in low-income neighborhoods being used instead to supercharge processes that reach beyond simple gentrification, toward something sublimely terrible: the ability of wealthy developers to avoid paying taxes in order to build real estate properties that are so stratospherically beyond the price range of people already barely able or unable to afford to live in Portland, when that very same tax provision was promoted as benefiting ordinary Americans.  And so our city will be graced with a federally-subsidized hotel and condo complex that 99% of us can’t afford to live in or stay at.  Adding insult to injury, apart from the short-term construction jobs created, employment in the building will involve catering to the needs of filthy rich individuals; Ritz-Carlton’s motto is “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,” but this Downton Abby-ish phrasing hides the fact that employment there inevitably involves people not being paid nearly enough to make real the fantasies of their social betters.  That it’s all to be done through the miracle of tax laws written by and for the rich should inspire not gratitude that a few jobs have been created, but outrage at the thought of all the better jobs and homes that could have been had through policies truly aimed at benefitting ordinary Americans.

This Portland project also carries a lesson about the larger corruption of Trumpism; it demonstrates how a racist and authoritarian-inclined president can gain and retain the loyalty of his fellow millionaires and billionaires, whose interests he sees best of all. And when a city government like Portland’s ignores the waste of tax dollars and the basic inequity in such a boondoggle, in the name of paltry job creation at the expense of further stratifying our city into haves and have-nots, it lends moral support to a regime overwhelmingly rejected by its own citizens, and tacitly endorses an economic model in which wealthiest accumulate more and more of the nation’s wealth.

Brain Drain

One classic way to view the Trump era is as a series of outrages followed by dashed hopes among opponents of the president that THIS OUTRAGE will finally turn the tide against him, and lead to his disgraceful downfall and exit from the political stage upon which he has strutted and shit for too long now.  I won’t pretend I haven’t been one of these frequently dashed hopers; it takes one to know one, as they say.  But as the outrages have come with increasing frequency — we could say without too much exaggeration that they are now more or less constant — the general feeling that either this one or the next would do in the president seems to have gradually faded.  In part, this hope has been beaten down by reality: get disappointed enough times, and you finally internalize the lesson.

But I’d also like to think it’s faded as a certain related belief has faded - that we can rely on either the GOP or Trump supporters to reach a breaking point at which they desert the president en masse.  It’s gradually dawned on Democrats and others that what count as catastrophes to us count as cool moves to many in the GOP and the president’s base, from his blaming of immigrants for the bulk of our economic challenges to putting a frat boy sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court. (The president’s survival should also have discredited the hope that a vaguely-defined notion of “decency” will somehow sway enough supporters of the president to move out of his camp.  Those who are moved by considerations of decency would never have supported the president in the first place.)

And yet: the discouragement we have felt so far, and the growing faith that Trump’s supporters and fellow GOP politicians will never abandon him, may have led us to be overly pessimistic about possible circumstances under which the Republican Party might actually turn on Trump. I am thinking about this today because I do think we are seeing a meltdown in this presidency that likely will accelerate in the coming months.  (I say “presidency” rather than “president” because it is not just that Trump himself has become more self-absorbed in his pronouncements, erratic in his behavior, and virulent in his hate in recent weeks, but to recognize that this behavior is accompanied by diminishing evidence that any of his advisors, or the greater bureaucracy of the executive branch, can act as a shield against his worst impulses.)  This particular meltdown comes in two forms: psychological, in terms of Trump’s mental health, and economic, in terms of Trump’s stewardship of the economy.

Over the past several weeks, the president seems to have been experiencing an accelerating mental health crisis, in which anger, delusions of grandeur, and panic at a potentially deteriorating economy seem to have pushed the man ever further into a downward spiral.  Need we really say more than the single word “Greenland”? And with his escalation of trade wars and the resulting harm to the U.S. economy, it seems well within the realm of possibility that he will steer the country into a recession.  Either factor — the president’s psychological collapse or the tanking of the American economy — could well be enough to stir Republicans into significant, if not mass opposition, to this presidency.  But in combination, we behold the spectacle of a president who is clearly flailing, flustered, and self-deluded in the face of his own bad economic decisions, unable to admit a mistake; this seriously undermines any claims to strong leadership, presenting instead the image (and reality) of an incompetent man endangering both the GOP’s future prospects and voters’ livelihoods.

The past several weeks have dramatically raised the possibility that the end may come more quickly than opponents of Trump have dared dream — not because of the Democrats’ opposition, which has been sadly far from implacable, but because Republican politicians fear both his clear mental instability and his failing political acumen, and because segments of his base wish to avoid the economic shitstorm he seems determined to unleash upon the nation, whether it’s country club Republicans who’ve had enough (as Matthew Yglesias speculates here) or blue collar women who are already beginning to turn on him and so destroy the “Red Wall” of his working-class base.  At some point, the Republicans may have an overwhelming interest in making Trump the solitary scapegoat of the economic poison he has forced the country to drink, as a way of preventing an electoral wipeout in 2020 and real economic harm: and it is not hard to see his mental unfitness as providing the rationale to remove him, either by invocation of the 25th amendment or forcing his resignation.

There is a right way and a wrong way for this presidency to end: the worst possible way would be for the Republicans to claim full credit for his removal, to propound a story that everything was going great until the president had a mental breakdown because of all the difficult Making America Great Again Work he was doing, a martyr to the “conservative” cause.  This isn’t to say this would be a great outcome for the GOP — many millions of Americans would see through their bullshit — but it would be far less than the apocalyptic reckoning the Republican Party deserves, and would raise serious doubts about the Democrats’ understanding that there is no way forward that doesn’t include discrediting the GOP wholesale.  First and foremost, saying the president is breaking down mentally threatens to excuse the very real autocratic, racist, and anti-semitic ideas he embraces and propagates.  This confusion of authoritarian intent and mental erraticism can be found in much commentary: as just one example out of many, here’s CNN’s Brian Stelter making the case for Trump’s increasing erratic behavior:

The list includes Trump making racist comments about Baltimore and Democratic lawmakers; repeating ridiculous claims about voter fraud; retweeting conspiracy theories; bragging about his visits to hospitals in Dayton and El Paso; and denying things everyone heard him say. At one point he called Meghan Markle nasty on tape, then claimed he never said it.

Yet it is also possible — indeed, it is correct — to read this list and see Trump simply doubling down on the white supremacist, anti-democratic attitudes that form the core of his political identity.  The president may or may not be personally deranged, but the fact of the matter is that his politics are unquestionably so.  From declaring Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to be “evil,” to telling Democratic congresswomen to go back their countries of origin, to telling American Jews that they are “disloyal” if they vote for Democrats, the president’s politics are beneath contempt, the stuff of dictators and the Ku Klux Klan.  In the face of this evidence, arguing that the president is unfit for office because of his mental incompetence suggests that we not take seriously his vile beliefs, as if they are simply the emanations of a befuddled mind. 

Unforgivably, this tack provides unwarranted cover to all those who support both his vile beliefs and his actual war on American democracy.  As dangerous as Donald Trump is, personally, to our country and to the world, any politics that purposely or incidentally detaches him from the larger right-wing movement centered on a Republican Party that both shares and has supplied him with so many of his noxious ideas, and that has supported him wholeheartedly through his descent into authoritarian, racist rule, is catastrophically misguided and short-sighted.  As Donald Trump founders, the only rational political approach is to ensure that he takes down as much of the Republican Party as possible; that we do not simply label him as unfit for office on grounds of mental incompetence, but that we label his ideas, and those of the equally noxious GOP, as having no place in American democracy.

Blaming Trump and GOP for Crisis Won't Absolve Democrats From Needing a Vision

Jeet Heer takes apart the folly of any opponents of Trump (he singles out comedian Bill Maher) hoping a recession will arrive in time to spoil the president’s chances of re-election.  Taking the long view, Heer argues that while a recession may well help kick Trump out of the White House, it will pour fuel on the fire of the reactionary politics that Trump has glommed on to:

While bad economic times, if they come, will help defeat Trump and the GOP in 2020, they’ll also sow the seeds for an even more reactionary politics in the future. If history is any guide, an economic slowdown will make the American people more racist and less open to progressive policies, a likelihood increased by the fact that the current Trumpian moment is already a product of the Great Recession of 2008, the scars of which are still felt by many ordinary people.

Indeed, the concept that Democrats need only bide their time until things naturally turn their way (embodied perhaps most catastrophically in the idea that demographic change would inevitably and automatically deliver a permanent majority to Democrats forever and ever, amen) should make tingle the political spider sense of even the most arachnophobic among us.  This attitude contains various poisonous assumptions: that substantive change to the U.S. economy and politics aren’t necessary; that the party need not fight for any particular ideas with any special effort, or take positions that might lose it some votes in the near term; that the Republican Party will sit back and not try to maintain power by hook or by crook.  Such a description may seem like a caricature, but these tendencies have been demonstrated again and again over the past few decades, from President Obama’s decision not to pursue a fundamental reformation of the economy (such as of the financial sector that played such a huge role in gutting the financial livelihood of millions of Americans) to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that the Democrats can stand back and let Donald Trump “self-impeach.”

Heer notes that, perhaps contrary to many Democrats’ beliefs, recessions generally make voters more resistant to change (the major exceptions being the Great Depression and possibly the Great Recession, though the progressive possibilities of the latter were largely left unexplored by the Democrats).  He observers that, “If there is an imminent recession, Democrats need to see it as not just an electoral opportunity but also as a political problem. How are they going to keep the public receptive to transformative policies, when recessions typically make voters more skittish and less generous?”  The solution, he suggests, is to go big:

The New Deal example shows that an economic downturn doesn’t have to mean a more reactionary politics. But to avoid a shift to the right, the Democrats have to be as bold as Roosevelt. If there is a recession they have to pin the blame squarely on Trump—and create a lasting narrative of how his xenophobia and reckless policies squandered Obama’s legacy. They have to offer a robust alternative to the status quo. And they have to uphold the values of pluralism even as nativist and racist voices grow louder.

What Heer describes is a sort of one-two punch approach that in fact contains multitudes in terms of how Democrats should think of politics and what forms of governance and legislation they should push.  The idea of blaming Trump for any recession, and putting together a (truthful) story of how his policies contributed to it, is essential.  This is something the Democrats failed to do to George Bush in the aftermath of the 2008 elections, in part because the Democrats themselves were implicated in so many of the bad laws and policies that enabled the financial meltdown.  This time around, they can’t make that mistake again.  But the story we tell about Trump must reach beyond the president and the economy, and include how the GOP as a whole has supported not only his bad economic ideas, but a whole raft of authoritarian and racist policies that have no place in America.  Just as the Democrats rightly court charges of incompetence when they fail to make the case that our economic straits are due not to impoverished immigrants but to nearly half a century of increasing corporate power at the expense of all workers, they also masochistically court electoral disaster by failing to hold the GOP accountable not only for Trump’s extremism, but for its own: the deadly fealty to keeping weapons of war on city streets, the unending effort to keep women and gays as second class citizens, the racism that may be better disguised than Donald Trump’s but is no less the expression of a deep-rooted white supremacism.  

While there have been many promising signs that the Democrats are increasingly aware they’ll need to address how the GOP has gamed the political system to maintain political advantage — whether through racist gerrymandering or abuse of the Senate filibuster — there seems to have been less attention paid to systematically making the case for why the GOP has been in the wrong on these and other issues.  A key reason is that telling a story about what the Republican Party has done to shift the country rightward over the last several decades also requires the Democrats to tell their own story: one that has included laudable advances, but more than that, countless desultory compromises and demoralizing defeats.  Unless they want to continue to be complicit in the steady drift rightward, this leaves the Democrats with no choice but to make the case for progressive ideas going forward; as Heer puts it, Democrats must “offer a robust alternative to the status quo.”  The steady advance of the GOP, and particularly the crisis of Trumpism, could only come about because of the vacuum the Democrats created through their reluctance to fight for the non-wealthy majority, including, crucially, the blue-collar white workers who swarmed to Trump like moths to a flame.

Swede and Sour

Sensitive readers may still be reeling from last year’s Hot Screen post excoriating Denmark for its harsh treatment and deranged rhetoric toward immigrants that it had only recently welcomed into the country.  It may or may not come as a relief, then, that today we will leave Denmark be, to stew chastened in its nativist juices, and turn our attention to its northern Nordic neighbor, Sweden, which has been pursuing its own version of the same racist story.

The New York Times has begun an investigative series called “The New Nativists,” which seeks to “examine the evolution of hard-line immigration politics,” and the first stop in its world tour is Sweden.  In the last election, the Sweden Democrats won 18% of the vote; with roots in a neo-Nazi party, and placing blame on immigrants for all of Sweden’s problems, the ascent of the Sweden Democrats should be shocking to anyone who’s grown accustomed to that country’s reputation as a tolerant social-welfare state.  But, as the Times story suggests, the social welfare state has turned out to be the way to amp up anti-immigrant resentment.  For the Sweden Democrats, 

[n]o longer was the issue framed in terms of keeping certain ethnic groups out, or deporting those already in. Rather it was about how unassimilated migrants were eviscerating not just the nation’s cultural identity but also the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state.

Under the grand, egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another, Swedes pay among the world’s highest effective tax rates, in return for benefits like child care, health care, free college education and assistance when they grow old.

The safety net has come under strain for a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood. But in the Sweden Democrats’ telling, the blame lies squarely at the feet of the foreigners, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in education and economic accomplishment. One party advertisement depicted a white woman trying to collect benefits while being pursued by niqab-wearing immigrants pushing strollers.

Sweden clearly has an economy and society shifted far further in the direction of a social welfare state than the United States, but it is remarkable to see far-right politicians there, as with the Trump-Republican Party in the United States, put the blame for economic problems on immigrants (though, to be fair, the Trump administration also points the finger at foreigners in general for not playing fair in the world of trade).

But it turns out there are plenty of reasons for why the anti-immigrant movement in Sweden has much in common with what’s going on in other countries.  Sweden Democrats have extensive connections with other far-right European governments, such as Viktor Orban’s authoritarian regime in Hungary.  They’ve also received extensive behind-the-scenes support from Russia; there is ample evidence pointing to a concerted effort by that country to promote right-wing Swedish news sites, which the article details extensively.  Chillingly, the Times also documents an incident in which Russians claiming to be journalists attempted to pay immigrants in Stockholm to start a riot so that they could film it; this occurred two days after Donald Trump’s false allegations last year about immigrant-spawned violence in Sweden.  It is also beyond disturbing that the Sweden Democrats look to the presidency of Donald Trump, and find solace and inspiration in his misrule.

Sweden has obvious challenges to its culture and to its social welfare state due to the number of immigrants it’s generously let into the country; as an Iranian immigrant notes, “the sheer number of refugees had overwhelmed the government’s efforts to integrate them,” allowing the Sweden Democrats to gain a large hold on power when other parties “didn’t have any answers.”  But this article raises provocative questions about the nature of the global anti-immigrant and far-right populist movement, including the tension between whether it’s happening organically and democratically based on unavoidable cultural and economic forces, or is quite consciously being made to happen, both by opportunistic politicians and by authoritarian countries like Russia that seek to use the movement to advance their own goals.

It has also gotten me back to wondering whether these far-right movements honestly see immigrants as hurting the economy, or whether this is a cover for basic racism and cultural antipathy.  I also wonder about the moral foundations and even sanity of previously ethnically homogenous countries like Sweden and Norway in which significant percentages of the population are inspired not simply to object to, but actively hate and despise, newer arrivals to their country.

Beyond this, it seems clear that immigrants are being scapegoated for economic problems that are due to the dark turns of capitalism over the past several decades: as I’ve read elsewhere, the far-right groups in Sweden started popping up in the 1970’s, around the same time that major industries in Sweden began pushing back against the extent of the social welfare state.  To what degree is the anti-immigrant far-right a stalking horse for corporate interests that want to escape blame for the economic changes they’ve managed to implement so far, and which may underlie the actual challenges to the Swedish welfare state?  I also wonder about the true goals of the far-right politicians themselves.  If they’ve identified the wrong sources of Sweden’s, or Denmark’s, or Germany’s troubles, and they have no real plan for fixing them, what’s the point of being in politics?  Is it ultimately about a will to power, about a basic authoritarian desire?

What Happens in Hong Kong Matters to Supporters of Democracy Everywhere

To observe the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong is to feel a mixture of admiration and dread: short of standing down, the city seems to have no chance of escaping a brutal Chinese crackdown, except by somehow bringing to bear a combination of moral and political force and arriving at a compromise currently difficult to imagine.  But although it’s easy to feel helpless as well, Americans must bear witness to the bravery and spirit of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hong Kong residents who have chosen to participate.  

These protests may have their origins particular to Hong Kong politics, but they’re happening in the context of a global movement towards authoritarianism and illiberalism that makes them both inspiring and a warning sign.  China is deploying the tools of authoritarianism to control the narrative, poisoning media with state-sponsored propaganda in order to influence the mainland Chinese population as well as members of the Chinese diaspora; against this, it’s even more important that we see events for what they are. That the Hong Kong protestors fight against such overwhelming odds is remarkable; that it is taken as a matter of course that China is a totalitarian state that can do what it wants with its Hong Kong territory is a grotesquerie. And the intersection of this conflict with the global economy, given Hong Kong’s outsized role in finance and trade, is also worth remarking, as if the world were being forced to choose between democracy or capitalism.

The Chinese government is already using the idea of American support of the protests to try to discredit them.  The joke, of course, is that we currently have the least democratic president in our history.  Donald Trump, an admirer and avowed friend of authoritarians, doubtless looks out on the protestors and sees a people to whom he can’t begin to relate, given the gulf of democratic intentions and skin color.  It’s notable that he has had plenty of harsh words about China’s trade policies, but only mumble-jumble to say about the potential of a deadly clampdown on unarmed civilians.

Regardless, it seems both deeply said and incredible to me that the United States would not make it clear that any escalation of violence against the protestors would have repercussions for the entirety of the U.S.-China relationship.  I have zero confidence that the Trump administration will do the right thing here.

If the United States were to assume its proper role as an advocate for democracy, the inability of Chinese citizens to elect their leaders would offend us far more than whether they’re a currency manipulator, and whether a Hong Kong protestor could get a fair trial would matter as much as whether China was stealing American trade secrets.  This, above all, is the context to keep in mind when viewing how this story unfolds: China lacks the most basic legitimacy or moral standing when it denies protestor calls for democracy and due process. These are not outrageous demands in any shape or form; they are basic human rights. What we are watching may be deeply familiar, but we can’t let that obscure the shocking obscenity of telling people they can have no say in their own affairs. That simply makes no sense, and should never be treated as if it does.

Shirking War on White Nationalist Terror is an Impeachable Offense

We are now past the point at which congressional Democrats, and the party more generally, must  place opposition to white nationalism, in both its political and its violent modes, as one of the party’s highest stated priorities.  Two mutually reinforcing factors demand this: the escalation of white supremacist violence as the leading form of domestic terrorism, and the synergy between this violence and the Trump administration’s white nationalist rhetoric and policies.  On the second point: not only is it irrefutable that the president’s language is giving aid and comfort to far-right extremists, and inciting violent acts, but we have learned in recent days that the Trump administration has opposed dedicating resources to fighting domestic terrorism, and sought to hide from both Congress and the public the evidence of this escalating threat.  

Last week, CNN reported that “White House officials rebuffed efforts by their colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a year to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority.”  This effort by DHS occurred during the construction of the National Counterterrorism Strategy, which was issued in the fall of 2018.  One paragraph addressing domestic terrorism was eventually added; according to CNN, this bare mention is 

all the more stark given that FBI Director Christopher Wray's July testimony that there have been almost as many domestic terror arrests in the first three quarters of the fiscal year  about 100 – as there have been arrests connected to international terror.  Wray noted that the majority of the domestic terrorism cases were motivated by some version of white supremacist violence.

A Trump administration official told CNN that they are “surging resources” to domestic terrorism matters, but that “they’re behind the curve because of a lack of support from the White House.”  This source also pointed to Trump as being a major factor in why the White House resisted highlighting domestic terrorism; the source indicated that Donald Trump’s “reluctance to criticize white supremacists was part of ‘an overlay’ of all these discussions, and added, “"You know it will trigger the boss.”

In other words, setting the full law enforcement power of the United States government against terrorists who seek to kill Americans for the color of their skin or country of origin, and whose end goal is the overthrow of American democracy, is something that makes the president uncomfortable, or perhaps even angry.  Now, these are the words of a single, anonymous source – but the larger story is more broadly sourced, and does any observer of this president really doubt at this point that investigating white nationalists might upset him?

Almost inconceivably, though, the story gets even worse, with new facts lending a yet more ominous cast to the behavior documented in CNN’s report.  According to Raw Story:

The Trump administration has known since at least April that alleged white supremacists were responsible for every single act of race-based domestic terrorism in the U.S. in 2018, yet not only took no action to combat the growing right wing violent extremism, but actually substantially reduced or even eliminated funding and programs that combat white supremacist extremism, violence, and terrorism – and then blocked the data from reaching the hands of Congress.

According to the blocked report, there were 32 domestic terrorist incidents in 2018.  White supremacists were behind them all.  

The Raw Story piece notes that Congress should investigate why the Trump administration blocked this date from Congress, to which we can only say: yes, and a hell of a lot more.  There is now sufficient evidence in the public record to credibly suggest that the Trump administration is not only actively downplaying the threat of white nationalist violence, but actively resisting taking action against it.  If true, these are impeachable offenses.  The president took an oath of office to protect the U.S. against enemies foreign and domestic; a reluctance to defend us against the latter has emerged, and must be explored further. 

Of course, the rise of white nationalist terrorism is only one half of the story, the other half being a president who has placed appeals to white nationalism at the dead center of his presidency and re-election effort.  There really is no separating these two sides of what is actually a unified narrative: a growing terrorist movement that the White House is reluctant to take action against, and a president who promotes ideas that align with those of this violent movement, and whose words incite their violence.

The fusion of these two stories needs to be treated as the crisis it is by Democrats nationwide.  The U.S. must be defended against these right-wing militants, and against a president willing to suppress the overwhelming evidence of the threat they pose.  This is no time for caution or feeling out the political winds.  As this New York Times piece out today reminds us, when a Homeland Security Department report came out in 2009 warning of “race-driven extremism,” the Republican Party went absolutely apeshit over it:

[W]hen the report was made public, it ignited a storm of protest, mostly from the right.  Mike Pompeo, then a Republican congressman from Kansas and now secretary of state, said focusing on domestic terrorism was a “dangerous” undertaking born of political correctness that denied “the threat that radical Islamic terrorism poses [. . .] The multipronged Republican backlash included criticism of the term “right-wing extremism,” and a near disavowal of the existence of domestic terrorism. Republican politicians and pundits echoed Mr. Pompeo’s assertion that the idea of domestic terrorism was a feint, born of political correctness, meant to distract from foreign terrorism.

The story reminds us of how the Obama White House rescinded this threat assessment weeks later, partly out of “concern that highlighting the issue would only fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories or give unwarranted publicity to fringe figures, according to six former administration officials.”  But the right-wing backlash was clearly decisive in the administration’s lamentable decision to essentially allow itself to be cowed into downplaying a threat, which, ten years on, has only grown, and is now amplified by our most despicable of presidents.  

The Times report notes the political challenges to fighting right-wing extremism, citing the Obama administration’s backing down on the threat assessment and civil liberty concerns on the left in targeting domestic group, yet this history pales in comparison to the preponderance of facts and overwhelming current reality: the GOP has stuck up for right-wing extremists for a decade and more now, and is currently led by a president for whom these extremists are fine people.  The idea that there is some sort of equivalence between the ACLU raising objections on the left and the president and leading members of the Republican establishment sticking up for white supremacists on the right is to manufacture a false equivalence out of the flimsiest of materials.

The fight against right-wing terror poses a political conundrum only for those unconcerned about defeating it.  For those who look to defend the United States against political violence, there is no course forward but to commit fully do defeating violent extremists and their elected enablers.

Why We Write: Betting on Persuasion in the Age of Trump

One of those broad-consensus, everyone-knows-it truisms of the Trump era is that the insults and attacks this president perpetrates upon our country are so ceaseless and numerous that we are collectively benumbed and overwhelmed, barely able to react to one as the next comes hurtling at us through the media.  Ancillary to this consensus is a critical debate about how the media can best serve the public in its coverage of Donald Trump — should it highlight every single offense, even at the risk of overwhelming its audience and its own reporting resources, or go in the opposite direction, giving less play to his most provocative maneuvers and more to the larger context of the great political forces and trends of our time?

But an important question has been obscured by the mixed reality and perception of Trump’s ability to overwhelm our capacity to process things, and by the related debate over how the media might best cover him: what’s actually the point in writing about Trump?  I don’t say this to be flippant or provocative, or to sound despairing.  I get the overall reason: to inform the public, as all news is ostensibly meant to do.  I am thinking here more specifically of opinion and analysis of the Trump administration.  After all, there is no doubt that the public is deeply polarized for and against Donald Trump.  If you are writing a piece that argues for the nefariousness of this presidency, you will likely not have the satisfaction of convincing very many people to your side, as those people probably won’t read you anyway, seeing as our political polarization extends to choices of personal media diet and the tendency to place ourselves in self-reinforcing opinion bubbles.

Another way of posing this question is, What is there left to say?  What more do we need to write about this vile man and his lickspittles in the GOP?  Isn’t it true that the people who are already convinced to oppose him can be convinced no further, and that those who support him obviously won’t be persuaded to change their minds at this late date?  For the anti-Trump reading public, the question is complementary: What is there left to know?  Why torture ourselves with yet more analysis of what Trump does and why he does it?

I think there are several persuasive responses to this question of why an exhausted populace should still engage with critiques of Trump and his enablers, and why the analyses are still worth writing.  The first is that, despite the deliberate strategies of chaos and seeking to overwhelm media coverage through sheer volume of offense and distraction, an overall picture has formed over the last couple years that was not at all readily apparent at the time of the president’s election.  I think relatively few among us believed that Donald Trump would, three years in, be presiding unabashedly over a white supremacist presidency, with the more or less complete acquiescence of his entire political party.  While this possibility was latent in his election, the reality that has emerged urgently requires description, and to be made known to as many Americans as possible.  And the complicity of the GOP I just noted is another major subject that citizens are well-served to learn about, as this essential fact makes clear that we face not just a Donald Trump problem, but a Republican Party problem.  In turn, Trump and the GOP together pose not simply a white nationalist threat, but an authoritarian challenge to American democracy, built on the president’s demagoguery and the GOP’s willingness to break the structures of our democracy in favor of white rule.

But though these are vital understandings for anyone who wishes to be an informed citizen, being an informed citizen is only the prelude to what all news and critiques of the Trump administration should push toward: citizens taking action to change this country for the better.  And we cannot make the changes we need unless we’re aware of the full challenges we face.  Just as we’re not going to push past the horror of the Trump administration without fully reckoning with the GOP’s authoritarian inclinations, we also need to engage in a full public airing of the menace of white nationalism and white supremacism with an eye to discrediting and destroying these noxious ideologies.

Indeed, sometimes I half-jokingly (and sometimes, not-so-jokingly) wonder if I should end every piece with a tagline along the lines of “Organize. Vote.  Mobilize.  Call Your Congressperson.  Call Your Senator.” as a reminder that political action needs to be the end goal - not simply as a means to knock the GOP out of office, but as a way to affirmatively hash out, collectively, what type of country we want to live in, and work to make it a reality.  One obvious point that gets short shrift is that Americans of good conscience are desperate for hope, desperate to do something to make a difference.  Doing one’s duty by trying to understand our political crisis can be deeply demoralizing and even debilitating, and there is really no better remedy than taking informed democratic action alongside our fellow Americans to improve matters.

Somewhat unexpectedly, what got me thinking the thoughts above was an essay by Rhonda Garelick, titled Surrogate Angels of Death, in which she performs a close reading of the now-infamous photograph of Donald and Melania Trump posing with Paul Anchondo, the two-month-old infant whose parents were killed by the white nationalist terrorist in El Paso last weekend.  Because the reaction of so many who have seen this photo is a combination of visceral revulsion and disorientation, Garelick’s piece is remarkable for holding its gaze on this grim tableau for longer than most of us have been willing to bear.

The photo falls into the long line of Trumpian provocations and outrages that I started off talking about, that steady stream said to benumb us with its rapidly alternating slide show of depravity and cruelty. Garelick understands that, given this oversaturated environment, she can best communicate what she wants to by careful attention to perspective.  And so she begins the piece by asking us to put ourselves in the place of the baby’s dead mother:

Imagine this: A shooter has entered a public place, where you are walking with your family. You have but a minute to realize you can save your 2-month-old by using your own body to shield him from the bullets raining down around you.  Mere days later, your baby, the youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre, will appear on television with the very man who inspired the terrorist who killed both you and your husband.  A photograph is taken, for posterity.

Not only does Garelick introduce context, but she does so through an act of moral imagination, asking us to see through the eyes of a dead woman.  She allows this overt framing drop away as the piece continues, but this initial invitation to see matters from an unexpected perspective counter-intuitively provides grounding in the face of the moral disgrace she proceeds to describe: the vapidity of the Trumps, the least family-oriented couple to occupy the White House in recent memory, taking the place of Paul’s parents; the appalling thumbs us; the thousand-watt smiles; the fatal link between Trump’s rhetoric and the shooter’s decision to kill.  Additionally, Garelick sees a connection to the separation of children from parents along the border; noting that “the abuse and kidnapping of children of color are recurrent themes in this administration,” she sees the photo as a symbolic kidnapping of baby Paul, that stands in for the larger crisis upon us:

All of these ghastly truths make themselves felt in this single photo of the vacuous and smug Trumps masquerading as kindly hospital visitors, seeking to comfort the El Paso survivors. Posing for this photograph, the Trumps remove any last doubt about their dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life [. . .]

Injured, confused, squirming away from Melania’s brittle embrace, and straining toward what’s left of his family, Baby Paul now stands in for all the children — indeed, all human beings — who, like him, have been harmed and are being held against their will by a white supremacist president.  

What broke through to me — what made reading this piece “worth it,” despite the fact that I have no position left to be changed vis-a-vis Donald Trump, nor could be persuaded to despise him more than I already do, nor more inspired to fight to put things right — is that Garelick helped me see that at the bottom of so much of our political crisis is a crisis of our shared humanity.  The Trumps, with their “dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life,” have little in common with the vast majority of Americans.  The president is a broken man, rich in money but impoverished in those things that most of us know are what count in life: kindness, empathy, fellow feeling, a moral compass.  And in turn, the white nationalism on which this administration centers is similarly impoverished, rooted in a denial of our common humanity for the sake of a self-defeating belief that the way to make America great is to deny the basic equality of most Americans.

Gorelick’s article has helped me fight back my own doubts about the power of persuasion in these polarized times.  At the bottom of this administration’s sins are violations of our common humanity so basic that only the most unreconstructed white supremacist should be immune to arguments against white nationalism.  To use a baby as a prop for a hospital photo shoot — a baby already discharged from the hospital, yet brought back to please a president, an infant who had bones broken as his parents sought to save his life with their own falling bodies — when you, as president, have done more than any other single human being to incite acts of violence such as the one that left Paul an orphan?  Words are necessary to mark this moment, but they also begin to fail before the spiritual emptiness they seek to describe. Trump is betting that millions of Americans are as rotten at the core as he is; hope lies in still seeking to persuade these Americans that they are better than this. Against this president’s wholesale manipulation of the media and the cynical effort to divide Americans against each other, we retain this advantage: a belief in our common humanity that cuts through serious but relatively shallower political divisions, and an ability to build solidarity by seeing through the eyes of others.

Media Narrative of Americans Helpless In Face of Gun Violence Shields GOP From Complicity in Reign of Mayhem

Threaded throughout news coverage of the twin massacres of this past weekend have been references to how the shootings have left Americans feeling “despair and helplessness,” as well as “bewildered” and “numb” in the face of such violence.  These are certainly some of the emotions being felt, but it is notable that foregrounding such passive feelings seriously downplays reactions like anger and hatred toward the killers that are also surely coursing through the body politic.  It is also critical for us to realize that the idea of a whole country traumatized and defenseless is very much a part of the cycle perpetuating mass killings generally, whether politically motivated or otherwise.  And in the case of the subset of specifically white nationalist perpetrators, such a public reaction, or the media’s characterization of it as such, validates the use of terrorism as a way of destabilizing our liberal, multi-racial democracy that they ultimately seek to destroy.  When reporting overemphasizes the impact violence has had on our society, when it suggests that Americans have been reduced to an infantile or depressive state, it is an unintended boon to the killers.

In the wake of mass shootings generally, my sense is that this journalistic overemphasis on feelings of national trauma, and underemphasis on the many millions of people for whom each killing feeds a sense of righteous fury and determination to end the violence, is tightly connected with the news media’s inclination to characterize the government’s failure to act meaningfully on gun violence as a bipartisan issue.  But the truth is that it is the Republican Party that, as a matter of ideology and keeping open major spigots of campaign funding, has been dead set against any meaningful gun control measures for a generation and more.  And while the Democratic Party has much to answer for in having deprioritized such measures for far too long, at this point there’s no ambiguity as to which party is backing gun control and which still opposes it tooth and nail.    

Once reporting on gun violence begins taking note not simply of people’s “helplessness,” but of their anger, then there is a logical need to start talking about the targets of the anger, and what the anger has motivated them to do (as opposed to reporting on “helplessness,” which by definition does not move into political action).  And any discussion of anger will at a minimum open a discussion of the blame rightly directed at the GOP for not only standing in the way of even the most minimal gun legislation, but also working in the opposite direction, to help expand the cult of gun ownership and, inevitably, gun violence.  Overly dedicated to providing “balance” in news coverage, the media has deep incentives to play up and even conjure out of whole cloth an idea of American helplessness, as a way of avoiding the unpalatable truth that where guns are concerned, one side of the political aisle is deeply in the wrong.

As damaging as this insistence on a nation benumbed and immobilized is when reporting on gun violence and mass shootings generally, this tendency becomes absolutely toxic when it’s applied to white nationalist terrorist shootings.  Indeed, the intersection of Donald Trump’s white nationalist mindset and political agenda with an acceleration of white supremacist violence across the country presents an enormous challenge to a news media dedicated to a “both sides do it” form of political journalism.  “Enormous challenge” actually understates things; I’d say that this president has essentially blown up the media’s ability to credibly maintain this unhelpful balancing act, certainly on gun issues and white supremacy.  As many have been and are beginning to argue — including leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination — the president is attacking immigrants and minorities with the same language as white nationalist terrorists.  He is inciting violence against these groups, violence that is in fact occurring.  Whether or not individual acts can be tied to direct motivation by Donald Trump is beside the point; he is now the single greatest contributor to an ideology of hatred and dehumanization for which violence is the inevitable conclusion.  And to remove any doubt that such white nationalism is central to his politics, the Trump 2020 campaign has made it clear that it will be centered on fomenting hatred of immigrants and minorities.  

Despite these plain facts — in fact, because of them — leading news organizations and opinion writers are out with editorials this week calling on the president to moderate his language, to repudiate white nationalists, to show moral leadership.  Such calls are nonsensical.  Even if we offer up the most immense benefit of the doubt, and concede that Trump’s words and actions may not have already incited particular acts of violence, and merely acknowledge that they clearly might, then there is no point in calling on him to change his ways; this incitement alone makes him unfit to be president. More insidiously, they suggest that the president can be part of the solution to this crisis, when in fact he is a primary cause.

Beyond this, such “calls upon the president” that suggest Donald Trump might change his rhetoric skip over an even more damning fact: that not just the president’s language, but his very actions and stated legislative goals, implement a white supremacist worldview.  From his lie that millions of undocumented immigrants cast votes for Hillary Clinton, necessitating draconian voting restrictions that would disproportionately affect minority voters, to the horrors inflicted on immigrants crossing the southern border, to his pushing for changes to the census that would undercount minorities, the president has indicated that if you’re not white, you’re not a full citizen, and really not fully human, to boot.  

Having made the argument since day one of this presidency that Donald Trump deserves to be removed from office at the earliest opportunity, I feel in a better position than most to observe that our greatest political problem — apart from an aspiring authoritarian president and a Republican Party comfortable with disassembling American democracy in favor of a plutocratic, apartheid-lite state — is that we are collectively having difficulty comprehending the larger picture of what is happening: namely, the general assault on American democracy by the president and the Republican Party.  This is why it’s so important to be aware of the biases and logical fallacies in reporting on this presidency that distort our collective ability to fashion an effective and appropriate response to what it is not an overstatement to call a crisis of American democracy.

For many reasons, coverage of gun violence brings multiple dysfunctional threads of our national story together.  The shock of escalating white nationalist terrorism has been dangerously obscured by how it appears as simply one small portion of the larger crisis of gun violence, allowing the threat to grow without the public taking adequate notice; yet because this terrorism largely involves gun violence, media coverage has tended to lump it into the same “issue without a solution” category.  A sharper look at the accelerants to gun violence generally, such as the GOP’s lockstep opposition to the most basic regulations, leads inexorably to the connections between the GOP’s ability to defy the will of the majority via gerrymandering and voter suppression, and our inability to pass laws that have huge majority support, such as background checks.  Such an understanding leads in turn to the fact that the GOP has ensured that a growing terrorist threat is well-armed and well-versed in an established, politically-enabled culture of mass shootings. 

In the case of the white nationalist agenda propagated by the White House, it’s supremely dangerous to excuse the inexcusable, or to believe that the president will change his ways.  If we could somehow separate out the violence that this presidency is enabling, such an agenda would still be unacceptable.  It’s un-American to say you’re not a fully citizen if you’re black, or were born in another country. It’s un-American to put kids in cages, and to house immigrants in unhealthy and demeaning conditions.  It’s un-American to encourage your supporters to revile opposition politicians because of the color of their skin or country of origin.  It’s un-American to give comfort and support to the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan. 

Yet, as bad as these outcomes are, the deadliest point can’t be stressed enough: violence is the logical outcome when the highest power in the land employs rhetoric and enacts policies indistinguishable from the wish list of avowed white nationalists.  And the propagation of violence by the White House is unforgivable.  There is no bargaining with such a power, there is no finding a middle ground or compromise.  Violence is the death of democracy, and our single greatest aim must be to ensure that the violence embraced and unleashed upon our country delegitimizes this president’s ability to continue in office.  Such a president, and the party that supports him, must not only be defeated, but utterly discredited.  America needs a real conservative party; it doesn’t need, or deserve, a white supremacist one.

Among other things, what this all should make clear is that the media is not going to save us from this president and this political crisis.  No matter where the facts seem to lead, there is apparently an overwhelming bias, at least for the time being, against making the connections that are staring us in the face.  In fact, we can see how the worse the president and the GOP get, the more powerful certain tendencies in the media will be to pretend that it isn’t so; to choose cognitive dissonance (like the Twitter-notorious Trump Urges Unity Versus Racism headline from The New York Times a day or two ago) over accurate framing and contextualization that would place major media institutions squarely on one side of our great political rupture.  There is no way forward other than to fully acknowledge the depths of our danger, and to organize and mobilize the greatest movement for democracy and justice this country has ever seen.

A President and Party Unwilling to Defend U.S. Against White Nationalist Terrorism Need to Be Turned Out of Office

The escalating tempo of mass shootings, both related to white nationalists and not, constitutes a mortal indictment of both the Republican Party and President Trump.  To consistently oppose stricter, meaningful gun regulations based on a theory of the Second Amendment that was literally invented out of whole cloth in the recent past, while Americans are gunned down by the thousands, at this point signifies that the GOP has given up on the most basic ideas of governance: that legislators should advance the health and safety of their constituents, and address violence that subverts a free and open society that at its most basic requires our ability to go about our daily business without undue fear of being slaughtered.

Beyond this, increasing right-wing violence is contiguous with the anti-minority, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies that have taken hold of much of the political right in the United States.  As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo remind us:

 We don’t make ourselves safer by collectively agreeing to delude ourselves about what is happening. These far-right, white supremacist massacres constitute the violent, militarized version of an ideology we can hear every night on Fox News and other right wing media outlets. Indeed, we can hear it routinely, in some of its most intense and inflammatory versions, from the President of the United States.

The basic terms are familiar: immigrants (focused on Muslims and Mexicans and others from Latin America) are invading our country and replacing white Americans through their high birth rates. They bring an alien culture, crime, violence, etc. Their invasion is being abetted by elites (often Jews) who are themselves betraying America. The tide can only be turned by individual, radical, violent action. The rubric they use is ‘The Great Replacement’, though the concept is customized for use against Muslims or immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries in different regions and contexts.

Indeed, it is specifically President Trump’s cultivation of an atmosphere of hatred and dehumanization towards those he has identified as the country’s enemies, an atmosphere that activates and enables these killers, that should most absorb our collective fury and desire for a change to this evil and anti-democratic dynamic.  In just the past few weeks, the president has made racist attacks against minority members of Congress; stood by while his supporters rabidly chanted to send one of those members back to her country of origin; ridiculed a minority congressman after his home was robbed; and denigrated an American city with a large African-American population as not fit for human occupation.  He has made clear that he intends to center his 2020 re-election effort on overt appeals to white supremacist sentiment.  And beyond this, he has denied the prevalence of white nationalist terrorism, as he has done consistently throughout his term in office.

Donald Trump did not invent white supremacy, and he alone is not responsible for the escalation of its violent manifestations over the past decade.  But he is the single greatest enabler of it, and arguably the lynchpin to what is beginning to appear to be a self-perpetuating torrent of violence by right-wing extremists.  At The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan states the case as plainly as it can be put: “The president may not be pulling the trigger or planting the bomb, but he is enabling much of the hatred behind those acts. He is giving aid and comfort to angry white men by offering them clear targets — and then failing to fully denounce their violence.” And as Hasan also notes, just last week, officials at the Washington National Cathedral concisely captured the president’s role in this wave of white supremacist violence:

These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.

It does not matter whether or not the president intends to incite violence by his words, or simply to incite hatred that propels his base to the polls.  White supremacism and white nationalism are not ideas that can be easily kept hemmed into the realm of words and policies.  They are rooted in ideas of racial inferiority and hatred, and of perpetual threat by anyone who isn’t white; violence is not some unfortunate byproduct, but a logical consequence of this dehumanization on non-whites.

I can’t do better than to quote never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin at this point on the inevitable conclusion to the facts that confront us:

For decades now, Republicans have insisted mass murders with semiautomatic weapons are not reflective of a gun problem. I can no longer comprehend how such a ludicrous assertion is remotely acceptable. But in one sense they are right: It’s not merely Republicans’ indulgence of the National Rifle Association that puts Americans’ lives in jeopardy; it is the support and enabling of a president that inspires white nationalist terrorists — and even denies white nationalism is a problem.

In sum, we are awash in hate crimes and white nationalist-inspired mass murders. We have a president whose words inspire and bolster perpetrators of these heinous acts. That makes Trump not only a moral abomination, which no policy outcome can offset, but a threat to national security. Those encouraged by his words in recent years kill more Americans than Islamist terrorists. If that is not justification for bipartisan repudiation of this president and removal from office at the earliest possible moment I don’t know what is. Those who countenance and support this president for his white-grievance mongering are not merely “deplorable” but dangerous.

This moment requires an all-out governmental mobilization against white nationalists, but this will not happen so long as Donald Trump remains president, because, as Oliver Willis points out, he can’t condemn what he agrees with.  I understand the default impulse for Democrats to “call on” the president to repudiate white nationalism, but at this stage, we know enough to know that such efforts are pointless.  Far better to tell the truth: that the president is complicit in these acts of violence, and that there is no choice but to work to remove him and the party that enables him from office.  On this front, it is promising that various Democratic presidential candidates, including Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Beto O’Rourke, have not hesitated to tie the Donald Trump to the El Paso massacre. The president and the GOP are beyond redemption at this point; there is no use begging those who sympathize with or endorse white nationalism to do the right thing.  The sooner we understand that neither the president nor the Republican Party will abandon their core principles, the better. The way forward is to defeat the Republican Party politically, by never allowing them to escape the stain of their bad acts and philosophies, and by offering an alternative way forward: through a vision that holds all life as precious, that identifies white supremacism as the horror show that it is, that prioritizes dismantling the social and political networks that promote radicalization of white nationalist and other right-wing terrorists, and that idealistically and pragmatically makes the case that there are no litmus tests — whether racial, religious, or otherwise — for who counts as a real American, or as a fellow human being who deserves our respect and compassion.