It's Way Too Soon to Bemoan the Democratic Presidential Primary

A Washington Post analysis by Dan Balz last Friday argues that “there’s been little that has given Democrats the confidence that their nomination process will produce a challenger strong enough, appealing enough and politically skilled enough to withstand what will be a brutal general election against a weakened and vulnerable president,” and that the Democrats should be worried that no clear front runner has emerged in the race at a time when Trump is both reeling and loaded with campaign cash to pummel his potential rivals.  But while Balz is not wrong in the abstract that most Democrats would feel some relief if they had already settled on their nominee, a state of tension and even anxiety while debates are had, minds made up, and votes are taken is a feature, not a bug, of this thing we call democracy.  A variety of gargantuan moving political parts form the whirring existential stage of the Democratic primary, including a debate over the relative liberalism of the party and the prioritization of a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.  But these political puzzles needs to be resolved by discussion and consideration, not by diktat from a non-existent authority on high. For Balz to be sounding the alarm when we are still months away from the first primary feels extreme.

It does absolutely suck that Trump and the GOP are able to hit Biden, Warren, and others while Democrats hash out their differences and settle on a nominee, but this is the nature of the game under any primary campaign where a president is up for re-election.  At the same time, one could argue that as Trump besets our democracy with the threat of authoritarianism, the Democrats are providing a powerful lesson to the country through their deliberate, open, and yes, sometimes agonizing, nomination process. Practicing democracy in the face of its enemies is always a show of strength, not weakness.

By the same token, the settled race on the GOP side is a sign of the degraded state of the Republican Party, in which no significant challenger has had the guts to challenge the authoritarian monster in their midst.  That the Republican Party and base is united behind Trump so solidly at this point may be a strength versus the Democrats, but it’s equally a sign of the very political bankruptcy on the part of the GOP — a bankruptcy rooted in white identity politics, authoritarianism, and corruption — that the Democrats must diagnose for the public and defeat in 2020, up and down the ballot.

Balz’s logic that the Democrats’ alleged disarray is somehow accentuated by how weak the president appears right now is also peculiar; as Balz puts it, everything that happened last week, i.e. Trump’s stumbles and revelations of lawlessness, “was grounds for optimism for Democrats,” before he turns to the Democratic debate as an example of something that is NOT grounds for optimism.  Yet Balz’s framing of a corrupt and authoritarian president as somehow a net win for Democrats isn’t entirely logical.  Donald Trump has shown an escalating strategy of holding himself above the law, willing to collude with foreign powers to sway the 2020 election and incite violence against those oppose him.  These are reasons the Democrats need to defeat Trump, and reasons people should vote for them, but you can hardly call them grounds for optimism, except in the most superficial sense, in the same way that a burning house is grounds for optimism that citizens will vote for a tax hike to fund their fire department next year.

Balz’s closing observation pushes his attempt to frame this as a normal election to the breaking point.  “Trump might look like a weakened candidate, but he will be a tenacious campaigner, willing to do anything he can to demonize and defeat his challenger. Democrats have many choices but are anxiously wondering which one of them will get the party to the White House in 2021.”  “A tenacious campaigner” who will “do anything he can to demonize and defeat his challenger” is an awfully polite way to describe someone who has literally committed high crimes and misdemeanors in a corrupt scheme to subvert American democracy.  Attempting to handicap the race, Balz provides a description of the president’s election strategy that downplays the actual crisis we’re all in.  There’s not a credible Democratic candidate for president who doesn’t realize the unique circumstances of this race, which is the first in American history when the survival of our democracy is on the ballot.  The reality is that there is no single person who, as a presidential candidate, would be able to defeat a president who considers himself beyond the rule of law.  Beating Trump will take a movement, a tidal wave of democracy in which the right candidate is necessary but hardly sufficient in and of itself. 

Sondlandia, Season I(mpeachment)

Disclosures and leaks as to what ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified in response to congressional questioning on Thursday have been scant, but he did release prepared remarks prior to his testimony.  They demonstrate a man clearly concerned with covering his ass while not pissing off the president, which appears to have led to a strategy of professing ignorance of the president’s plan to pressure Ukraine in order to subvert the 2020 election.  At multiple points, Sondland emphasizes that prior to the release of the between the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and the fact that Hunter Biden sat on the company’s board, and by extension his ignorance of the fact that when the president pressed for investigation of Burisma, this meant creating dirt to sully the Biden family’s reputation.

But as Jonathan Chait effectively demonstrates, there is no realistic way Sondland could have been unaware of the Burisma-Biden connection as he worked to follow the president’s directions on Ukraine.  Chait notes that The New York Times ran multiple stories on Trump’s strategy of using Ukraine to bludgeon Joe Biden; the first of the articles ran on the front page, and included the word “Burisma” some three dozen times!  Even if the ambassador was unaware of this mainstream coverage about a country that Sondland proudly testified was within his portfolio, Chait continues, the right-wing media was even more ablaze with stories linking Biden and Burisma.  He concludes:

There is no way Sondland believed Trump was taking a personal interest in withholding diplomatic recognition of an important ally out of some idiosyncratic obsession with tighter regulatory scrutiny of one particular energy company. If Sondland is trying to maintain that he was handling American policy toward Ukraine over a period of months, during which he failed even to peruse a single headline pertaining to the president’s obsessive interest in that very country, then he should be charged with criminal stupidity.

With this reality check in mind, Sondland’s testimony reads like a house of cards, ready to blow over at the first irrefutable evidence that he was aware of the Biden connection to Burisma. As Chait reminds us, testimony earlier in the week from Fiona Hill, former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the White House, revealed that “when [then-National Security Advisor John] Bolton told Ukrainian officials in July that Trump would not meet with Ukrainian president Zelensky, Sondland contradicted him to say that Trump would hold the meeting if Ukraine investigated Burisma, the Ukrainian firm that had employed Joe Biden’s son.”  Sondland was deep into enforcing the quid pro quo of an investigation in exchange for a meeting; his knowledge that the investigation was meant to attack Joe Biden would mean he was a full co-conspirator in the president’s scheme, and not just a witless participant as he’d have us believe.

The idea that Sondland was ignorant of the true ends of the policies he was charged with implementing is further undermined by testimony by another State Department employee. According to George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine, Sondland, along with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and special U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, were tasked with pushing Ukraine policy outside of normal diplomatic and internal channels.  Kent also testified that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney headed up a meeting last spring in which the three men were given this role.  To echo Chait’s line of criticism, Sondland would ask us to believe that he was the least inquisitive, most naive diplomatic in the history of the republic, not knowing why he was being tasked with such a special role outside the usual lines of communication.

Without a fuller picture of how he answered Democrats’ questions on Thursday, it’s difficult to know what Sondland’s role will be in the impeachment proceedings going forward, particularly as to whether he will be willing to turn on the president if caught out in a lie about his involvement.  By my reading, his prepared testimony passes the blame to other actors - including Guiliani and perhaps even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - without offering much new evidence of the Ukraine plot. But this last week also brought more reporting on Sondland’s record as EU ambassador, and it provides some clues as to his willingness to expose himself to legal and political harm in service of the president. 

First, according to The New York Times, Fiona Hill had harsh words about Sondland’s professionalism, testifying about

her fears that Mr. Sondland represented a counterintelligence risk because his actions made him vulnerable to foreign governments who could exploit his inexperience. She said Mr. Sondland extensively used a personal cellphone for official diplomatic business and repeatedly told foreign officials they were welcome to come to the White House whenever they liked.

Ms. Hill said that his invitations, which were highly unusual and not communicated to others at the White House, prompted one instance in which Romanian officials arrived at the White House without appointments, citing Mr. Sondland.

Ms. Hill also testified that Mr. Sondland held himself out to foreign officials as someone who could deliver meetings at the White House while also providing the cellphone numbers of American officials to foreigners, the people said. Those actions created additional counterintelligence risks, she said.

Hill also testified about Sondland’s involvement with Ukraine issues, including the explicit statement Chait noted as to Trump’s willingness to meet with the Ukrainian president being contingent on Ukraine investigating Burisma.  Suggestively, Hill’s boss, national security advisor John Bolton, appeared to have no reservations about Sondland’s complicity in an off-the-books plot; Bolton indicated that he did not want to be part of the “drug deal” that Sondland and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney were working on.  To those interacting with Sondland and trying to suss out what he and others were up to, the idea that going after the Bidens was at the center of it was quite clear, again raising the unlikeliness that Sondland, a direct participant in the plot, did not know the plot’s actual point.

Unconnected to the Ukraine scheme, but going to questions of Sondland’s character, The Washington Post reported on the nearly $1 million in renovations Sondland has been making to his ambassador’s residence in Brussels on the taxpayers‘ dime, including “more than $400,000 in kitchen renovations, nearly $30,000 for a new sound system and $95,000 for an outdoor “living pod” with a pergola and electric heating, LED lighting strips and a remote-control system.”  (The “remote-control system” reminds me of an earlier story of how, as ambassador, Sondland carries a buzzer with which he can request that staff bring him refreshments during meetings, like magic!). Sondland has argued that the residence was badly in need of updates, but the details suggest he has taken advantage of the situation: 

The renovations at the E.U. ambassador’s residence, which include $33,000 for handmade furniture from Italy, appeared driven by Sondland’s lavish tastes rather than practical needs, people familiar with the matter said.

Two former U.S. officials said Sondland delighted in the trappings of being an American ambassador in Brussels.

“He got addicted,” one former official said. “The way you’re treated as a senior U.S. official, there’s nothing like it in terms of adrenaline and ego boost.”

Also troubling is the fact that some of the renovations are intended not for diplomatic purposes, such as entertaining, but for the particular comfort of the ambassador:

The records show $82,000 was spent on a bathroom renovation labeled “backside office.” Renovation of a restroom in a vestibule, a more public space, cost about $54,000, the records show.

Sondland has also tried to upgrade the offices where he and the staff of the U.S. mission to the E.U. work, former officials and colleagues said.

“He had a weird obsession with creating a snack room after he visited Uber headquarters in the Bay Area,” a former U.S. official said, referring to the ride-hail service headquartered in San Francisco.

“He was often trying to use his own money for renovations that weren’t allowed,” the former official said.

It is difficult to read such details and retain much sense that Gordon Sondland sees his ambassadorship as an act of public service, rather than an act of self-service.  Someone who’s rich enough to throw in his own money once he’s fleeced the public sufficiently would seem to have broken loose of the basic sense of mission and purpose involved in diplomatic service.  To my mind, this small-scale corruption, conducted out of view of the public eye but at the public expense, makes his conscious involvement in the president’s plot against the United States more plausible.

This sense is only strengthened by what we already know about Sondland’s willingness to embrace Donald Trump in order to advance his long-standing interest in being an ambassador: recall that Sondland had backed out of a fundraiser for candidate Trump in 2016 based on Trump’s disparaging remarks about the Muslim parents of an American soldier killed in Iraq, yet then funneled $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.  The ambassadorship soon followed (talk about a qui pro quo!).  But now we have reporting that Sondland has set his sights higher; as The Washington Post reports, “Current and former U.S. officials and foreign diplomats say Sondland seemed to believe that if he delivered for Trump in Ukraine, he could ascend in the ranks of government. A person close to Sondland disputed that notion, but other officials said Sondland had been talked about in the administration as a possible successor to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.”  Once again, public service seems the farthest thing from Sondland’s mind; service to Trump seems all-important, as a means to self-aggrandizement.  Having made himself so pliable to Trump’s ends, let us hope that this has, in turn, made him vulnerable to congressional and public pressure as the impeachment seeks to lay bare the details and mechanisms of the president’s plot against the 2020 election.

Did Bleak Future of Boycotts and Social Shunning Lead Portland-Hotelier-Turned-Trump-Lackey to Say “Cacao”?

Since The Hot Screen dove deep into the tale of Portland boutique hotel maven turned Trump co-conspirator Gordon Sondland a few days ago, the story has seen some dramatic developments.  First, Democratic Representative Early Blumenauer, whose congressional district includes Portland, released a statement calling for a boycott of Provenance Hotels, the boutique hotel chain Sondland founded and of which he was CEO until he became the U.S. ambassador to the European Union last year. Sondland’s attorney quickly hit back against Blumenauer’s boycott recommendation, calling it an "irresponsible attempt to hurt a homegrown business that supports hundreds of jobs in our local economy."

Next, on Friday, came news that Sondland had reversed his position, and was now willing to testify to Congress, going against the State Department’s instructions not to appear (though he still intends not to produce any documents, in line with the State Department’s directions).  Given Sondland’s central role in implementing Donald Trump’s scheme to pressure Ukraine into manufacturing dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden, this reversal does not bode well for the president.  Just as the ambassador’s original decision not to testify signaled his willingness to abet the conspiracy of which he’d been a part, his reversal means he may be able to put on the public record damning evidence about the plot that’s at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.  Beyond this, the fact that a man who has served the president loyally for the past year seems willing to go against him in order to save his own skin speaks to the limits of Trump’s power to intimidate or otherwise block witness testimony.  In turn, this suggests a potential breaking of the dam in terms of administration officials willing to defy the president.

Then last night, The Washington Post published a preview of some of Sondland’s planned testimony, based on information from an unnamed source familiar with the ambassador’s intentions.  It seems likely that this source was acting at the behest of Sondland, as it paints a picture of the ambassador as naive and even somewhat clueless as to the scope of the scheme he was so busily enacting.  Yet, while self-serving, his planned testimony does not look good for the president at all.

First, Sondland intends to provide vital information around a text he sent to acting ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor that Trump’s defenders, and indeed the president himself, have been holding up as clearing the president of wrongdoing.  In response to Taylor’s texting him that “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Sondland replied several hours later, “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”  Sondland will testify that this reply “was relayed to him directly by President Trump in a phone call,” and that he does not know whether the president was actually telling him the truth.  This is significant because the administration has pointed to Sondland’s text as some sort of objective verification that there was no plan to withhold military aid in exchange for a smear campaign against Joe and Hunter Biden; the fact that Sondland was merely relaying the president’s own words mean this defense is now meaningless, based simply on the president’s assertion.

Perhaps equally significant is the fact that Sondland appears unwilling to simply take the president’s side.  According to the Post’s source, “Sondland’s testimony will raise the possibility that Trump wasn’t truthful in his denial of a quid pro quo as well as an alternative scenario in which the president’s interest in the scheme soured at a time when his administration faced mounting scrutiny over why it was withholding about $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine and delaying a leader-level visit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”  The first possibility is of course the one all current evidence says is correct; the second seems to be a distinction without a difference, since even if the president abandoned the scheme, his having pursued it is in itself impeachable.  In either case, it seems that Sondland is willing to acknowledge the existence of a presidential scheme to pressure Ukraine.

But what follows in the Post account demonstrates the degree to which Sondland is attempting to tell a story that excuses his own participation even as he appears ready to provide evidence to House investigators.  Sondland seems to admit the possibility of a plot to smear the Bidens, while absolving himself of knowledge of that scheme: “Sondland appears poised to say that he and other diplomats did not know that the request to mention Burisma was really an effort to impugn the reputations of Biden and his son Hunter, who had served as a Burisma board member. Sondland contends that he didn’t know about the Biden connection until a whistleblower complaint and transcript surfaced in late September.”  As the Post points out, though, Trump’s attorney Rudy Guiliani spoke in media appearances about Hunter Biden’s role as a board member at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

Yet, seemingly torpedoing Sondland’s assertion of obliviousness, Sondland is apparently prepared to testify that he worked at the direction of Guiliani to secure a public statement from the Ukrainian government that it would investigate corruption, including at Burisma, in exchange for an invitation for Ukrainian President Zelensky to visit the White House.  Sondland’s mysterious interlocutor tells the Post that “If people find that [Sondland’s ignorance of Hunter Biden being the target] incredulous, it strikes me that the incredulity is hindsight bias. The things that seem so clear to people now didn’t seem so clear in real time.”  This seems an incredibly weak defense, and more evidence that the Post’s source is working to put the best possible spin on Sondland’s role.  The flimsiness of the ambassador’s position also comes out in his apparent attempt to thread the needle of appearances when the Post source relates Sondland’s understanding that “It was a quid pro quo, but not a corrupt one.”  Again, for this to be true, we have to believe that Sondland thought that all his work on the pressure campaign against Ukraine had nothing to do with smearing Joe Biden.

This sense is only reinforced by further details that minimize Sondland’s role and accentuate his discomfort; the Post is told how Sondland “describes an assignment that begins with excitement and enthusiasm and ends with concern about how the Trump administration was pressing Ukraine, a country fending off Russian-backed separatists that relies heavily on the United States for economic and military support.”  Yet, from everything we know, Sondland nonetheless continued to be a central figure in “how the Trump administration was pressing Ukraine”; and so he clearly sees his path to exculpation running through a defense that he knew nothing about the president’s effort to pressure Ukraine to assist his re-election campaign.  The Post’s source goes on to make an even more explicit pitch as to Sondland’s innocence; as the newspaper summarizes, “By Sept. 9, Sondland, however, had grown increasingly concerned, as military funding for Ukraine now appeared tied to the statement as well. The person said Sondland was never briefed about Biden being part of the issue and was not aware of it until the transcript of the phone call was released. ‘If he had known earlier, he never would have touched this.’”

Sondland’s almost comically rantic efforts to get out from under the falling impeachment anvil don’t appear limited to the EU ambassador alone. The Post suggests that some of the main conspirators, including Giuliani, Sondland, and special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, may be starting to form something of a circular firing squad that speaks to their desire to escape accountability.  Sondland refers both to acting at Guiliani’s direction and having a “very limited role over the summer”; meanwhile, the Post, referencing conversations between the paper and Guiliani, indicates Guilani “described Sondland’s role as more expansive” and that “He seemed to be in charge. It just seemed like he was more decisive.”  The Post also notes that “Sondland, while acknowledging a close relationship with Trump, viewed Volker as more of a presence on the Ukraine issue.

(As some have been noting, the fact that Sondland, a State Department employee, was apparently acting at the direction of Guiliani, the president’s private lawyer, is an angle meriting scrutiny by the Democrats).

This lack of honor among thieves isn’t surprising, but it’s something of a relief to anyone who wants to see Trump impeached and removed from office for offenses already evidenced by things like the summary transcript of his shake-down call with the Ukrainian president.  They may have engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the 2020 elections, but now that they’ve been caught out, we are seeing decisive signs that the conspiracy did not cover what they’d do if they were discovered.

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Sondland seems a particularly weak link in the president’s defense.  I’ve been reading some of the reporting about him out in the last week or two; the picture that emerges is of a man who hasn’t been particularly ideological (though he’s given far more money to Republicans than Democrats over the years, and is a big Ayn Rand fan, which in a just universe would have disqualified him from holding a position of public trust), who carefully built his reputation as a philanthropist in Oregon and elsewhere, and who badly wanted an ambassadorship and was willing to pay to get it, even at the risk of doing some damage to his reputation (he funneled $1 million to the Trump inauguration through limited liability companies rather than directly in his own name, which suggests he was aware of the dangers to his reputation and business).

Yet Sondland’s story is not without elements of pathos and sympathy; his parents were Jews who fled Nazi Germany and resettled in America, and he was, at least until now, an American success story.  The Seattle Times quotes David Nierenberg, an Oregon investment manager involved with Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, as saying that, “Sondland ‘was not reticent’ about his pursuit of a diplomatic post, preferring a German-speaking nation, which would have meant a son of Holocaust refugees ‘would have come full circle.  This is what he wanted and long sought.’”

Sondland may have been driven to become an ambassador, but nothing in his history suggests he took the role with the intention of participating in a plot to literally attack the American system of government.  Yet his cancellation of a planned fundraiser for Trump in 2016 in the midst of the candidate’s attacks on the Muslim parents of a slain U.S. soldier shows that Sondland was well aware of Trump’s depravity; and by the time he took the role of EU ambassador, he had been witness, along with his fellow Americans, to the racism, corruption, and authoritarianism of the Trump administration.  Even knowing this, though, he would not allow his dream to be deferred.  

Another intriguing bit of information as we try to assess Sondland’s character and what role he might play in the impeachment inquiry: The LA Times dug up a 2016 interview in which Sondland speaks about some of his limited political experience, in this case helping Democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski work with the George W. Bush administration.  As the Times summarizes:

[Sondland] portrayed himself as a master of the quid pro quo, the practice he would later deny in his text concerning the Ukraine matter. “We would make these requests and they were done quietly.  They were done with rifle precision and there was always a quid pro quo,” Sondland said in the interview. “The governor would help the president with something, and the president would help the governor with something. And it was very transactional.”

One gets an idea of Sondland as a person who wants to be in the mix, who wants to be important, suggesting he may have been a receptive vessel for carrying out plans that the president clearly held to be of the highest priority.  It’s also of note that Kulongoski’s former spokeswoman disputed the role that Sondland claimed for himself, saying, “If the governor needed to speak with the president or someone in the White House, he didn’t need an outside party to facilitate it.”  If Sondland exaggerated his role in order to seem important, this could provide a small clue to how he’s approaching his congressional testimony.  The question, of course, is whether he wants to be important in the eyes of the president, or in the eyes of the public.

If Ambassador Sondland is willing to testify truthfully, and in doing so plays some part in ending this presidency or at least moving impeachment forward, then he will have made up for some of the shame of participating in this parody of an administration.  The most important matter before us, after all, is to stop this president from doing any more harm to the country and the world.  But to the extent that Sondland was aware of the corrupt plot in which he played a key part, he needs to be held accountable, by the legal system for any laws he might have broken, and, particularly if that punishment does not occur, reputationally.  No charity, university, or politician should ever again accept his donations, and he should be shunned from polite society. 

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Finally, to circle back to Representative Blumenauer’s call for a boycott of Sondland’s hotel chain: yesterday, Provenance Hotels itself filed a complaint against Blumenauer over his boycott recommendation.  A spokeswoman says that, “We believe Congressman Blumenauer’s actions constitute a potentially serious violation of Congressional ethics as outlined in multiple sections of the House Ethics Manual by threatening an administration official over a disagreement.” The hotel also alleges that donors to Blumenauer may benefit from his calls for a boycott.

I would note that I was somewhat surprised to read of Blumenauer’s boycott statement.  A boycott is completely justified, but outside of the ethics violations asserted by the hotel, it strikes me that this may be a case of the representative unnecessarily reaching beyond his powers and role as a congressmen involved with the impeachment inquiry.  Rather, the impetus for a boycott would be more effective and proper coming from members of the public; the public, after all, is who would be implementing the boycott, not Blumenauer.  Already, it seems that the congressman’s statement is creating an unnecessary (if minor) distraction from Sondland’s role and the best way to put pressure on him so that he ends up serving the public interest.  

At the same time, the assertions by Sondland’s attorney that a boycott will hurt the employees of the hotel chain is the same old argument used by the management of any company subject to a boycott.  If Gordon Sondland were truly concerned about his employees’ job prospects, then he should have thought twice before accepting a position with an administration as vile and venal as the one over which Donald Trump presides. Most Americans are obviously not millionaires like the ambassador and Trump’s other wealthy donors, and so we must make a virtue out of necessity, and choose to not spend our money in order that our collective voice be heard.

The Dream of Aiding and Abetting Impeachable Crimes is Alive in Portland

The television show Portlandia, along with supporting fire from bands like The Decemberists and basic undeniable facts of life in the city, have painted Portland in the nation’s eyes as a twee and self-parodying locale ultimately harmless in its navel-gazing.  So it has surely come as a shock to millions to have learned this week that a key player in President Trump’s plan to blackmail Ukraine into kneecapping Joe Biden’s presidential prospects is a millionaire Republican hotel owner from Portland named Gordon Sondland. Who would have guessed that Portland incubates treason as well as innovative tech firms, boutique donut chains, and CBD-infused IPA’s?

Following a long and grotesque tradition in which ambassadorships are awarded to wealthy donors, President Trump named Gordon Sondland as his ambassador to the European Union, a position to which he was confirmed in mid-2018.  He apparently made a great impression on his fellow diplomats; as the Wasington Post recounts:

In Brussels, Sondland garnered a reputation for his truculent manner and fondness for the trappings of privilege. He peppered closed-door negotiations with four-letter words. He carried a wireless buzzer into meetings at the U.S. Mission that enabled him to silently summon support staff to refill his teacup.

Sondland seemed to chafe at the constraints of his assignment. He traveled for meetings in Israel, Romania and other countries with little or no coordination with other officials. He acquired a reputation for being indiscreet, and was chastised for using his personal phone for state business, officials said.

But despite such humility and diplomatic savoir faire, things got real weird real fast, as our new ambassador to the European Union began to demonstrate a particular focus on the affairs of Ukraine — a country which is not actually part of the European Union.  A rush of revelations and news reports over the past two weeks have brought sinister color to an attention that had seemed merely puzzling to observers, as Sondland’s role in implementing the president’s scheme to pressure Ukraine into aiding his re-election campaign plan came into focus.  Sondland appears to have played the role of presidential fixer where Ukraine is concerned, working with other diplomats to convey a basic message to the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky: Ukraine would not receive an urgent delivery of weapons and other aid, as well as a coveted invitation to the White House, unless Zelensky authorized an investigation into discredited allegations against Joe Biden, and assisted with crackpot theories that Ukraine, not Russia, had hacked the 2016 election.

The key to understanding Sondland’s role, and the scorn I’m arguing that he merits, is that he appears to have been acting on the president’s orders in pursuing this corrupt path, acting as a conduit for a plot hidden from the view of other government officials; The New York Times notes that “Mr. Sondland interacted directly with Mr. Trump, speaking with the president several times around key moments that House Democrats are now investigating, including before and after Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.”

Many of the details of his activities are damning, but there’s one that stands out.   According to the Times, “text messages provided to Congress [. . .] showed that Mr. Sondland and another senior diplomat worked with Mr. Giuliani on language for a statement for the Ukrainian president to put out in August that would have committed him to the investigations sought by Mr. Trump. The statement was seen as critical to getting Mr. Trump to agree to a coveted White House visit sought by Mr. Zelensky.”  Such a statement was never released by the Ukrainian government, but enough information has emerged to show how utterly corrupt this effort was.  Not only would it have been the illicit quid for the president’s quo, but the very nature of the statement itself would have run afoul of American laws.  As described by Asha Rangappa, a former FBI Special Agent and current CNN legal analyst, “The White House was attempting to employ an illegal, covert propaganda operation against the American public”:

A unilateral statement from Zelensky would manipulate the American public into believing that Ukraine had independently reached the conclusion that there was a basis to investigate the Bidens and the origins of the 2016 U.S. election interference. By cloaking his own role and motives behind the statement of a foreign country, Trump could corroborate his own claims and have “proof” that his views were not politically motivated, but instead grounded in real facts.

In short, the Trump administration was using a propaganda technique to covertly plant credible seeds of doubt about a political opponent and the Russia investigation in anticipation of the 2020 election so he could capitalize on it.

So it is no wonder Democrats had requested that Sondland testify to Congress this week, or that the Trump administration ordered him not to proceed with his testimony at the last minute, despite the assertion by Sondland’s attorney’s that the ambassador had been looking forward to testifying, and despite the president’s own tweets that Sondland’s appearance would have been great for him.  As Talking Points Memo notes, Sondland can easily testify (special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker testified last week after resigning from the State Department); doing otherwise “is simply choosing to make himself part of the cover up, presumably out of political loyalty to the President.”  

However, some degree of fear may be compounding the moral cowardice Sondland is displaying in his refusal to cooperate with the impeachment proceedings.  I would speculate that his prior experiences as a hotelier did not exactly prepare him for the catastrophic downside to the international man of democratic sabotage role he has so recently taken on.  The switch from manager of a line of boutique hotels in hot American cities to pivotal role in a plot to subvert the 2020 election, ratfuck the Democrats, and engage in black propaganda against the American people is not what most of us would consider a lateral move; it’s more like an express elevator to hell.  Such a sudden embrace of what any honest citizen rightly sees as anti-democratic depravity would make more sense if he were a long-time friend and supporter of Donald Trump; yet, back in 2015, Sondland canceled a fundraiser for the candidate because of Trump’s attacks on Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier killed in the line of duty.

Like many other Republicans, Sondland came crawling back to kiss the ring of power once Trump had won the presidency, but in guarded fashion; he donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration, but hid the source of the money by donating through the use of shell companies.  This sense of the damage his association with Trump might do to his business continues through to the present; in recent days, his name has been removed from the website of the Provenance hotel chain he founded and manages.

And here is where Portlanders, joined by other Americans, might find an intriguing lever to make their displeasure felt at the ambassador’s anti-democratic hijinx.  New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has tweeted about the possibility of a boycott against Sondland’s hotel chain, as has Hot Screen fave Brian Beutler over at Crooked.com.  As a response to Sondland’s secretive work, a public boycott seems democratically empowering and karmically appropriate.  The Trump administration sees no legal limits beyond which it won’t go to advance the president’s re-election efforts, which should provide a wake-up call to anyone wondering what individual citizens can do as Congress and the president face off in an impeachment fight.

The plain fact is that Donald Trump has no intention of allowing a free and fair election to proceed in 2020 so long as he occupies the White House.  Impeachment is a powerful weapon to stop him, but we should not lose sight of the fact that nothing enjoins us from other collective action appropriate to the peril of our moment.  A key insight I’ve seen bandied about is that we have no idea what will finally turn the tide and send the Trump con crashing down.  It is hardly the wildest idea in the world to experiment with putting the fear of financial doom into his high-dollar supporters and lackeys.  Did Gordon Sondland really expect to endanger his hotel chain when he became a Trump appointee?  Perhaps not, but it would seem awfully generous for the public to continue to treat his businesses as respectable when he himself has been busy abetting the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors, and in so doing demonstrated not only disrespect but contempt for all of us little people who also happen to be potential customers.  

Understanding Ukraine Crisis is Key to Understanding Trump’s Impeachable Offenses

Yesterday, I touched on how the full damning scale of the president’s pressure campaign against Ukraine can’t be understood without being aware of what’s been happening in Ukraine over the last several years, the U.S.’s relationship to that country, and a larger Russian strategy to confront and diminish America’s role in the world.  Over at Politico, Molly McKew provides an excellent in-depth review of this vital context, which if anything made me think I had understated the importance of America’s support of Ukraine.  I suspect that support for impeachment will only increase as Americans come to collectively grasp that Ukraine has effectively been invaded by Russia, is effectively at war with that country, and that Trump’s pressure on the Ukrainian president is already yielding Russia benefits in its subversion of a democratic neighbor.  Americans don’t need to become experts on Ukrainian politics or Russia’s geopolitical ambitions, but to be unacquainted with these basic facts is to not grasp the full depth of the president’s betrayal.

Don't Miss the Big Picture of Democratic Upheaval Beyond America's Borders

I’m sure my political attention and yours will inevitably continue to revolve around the constitutional crisis we’re headed into or are up to our eyeballs in already, depending on your point of view — but it’s worth your time reading this piece by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch about the widespread rebellion and unrest underway today in so many countries around the globe.  In Bunch’s estimation, this is the largest year of upheaval since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Chinese government slaughtered protesters in Tiananmen Square. From Iraq to Bolivia to Hong Kong, he writes, millions of people are protesting against government corruption and ineptitude, mostly but not exclusively representing left or left-of-center movements.  He makes some intriguing points about the origins of the corruption that’s drawn their ire, as well as the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the current situation in countries like Iraq and Haiti.

Bunch doesn’t mention it explicitly, but the fact that the U.S. is facing its own crisis of corruption (and democracy) suggests that we’ve got more in common with these far-flung movements than might be readily apparent (particularly if we’re not even aware of them to begin with).  Not for the first time, I’m thinking that we badly need more international contacts among groups and movements involved in these struggles; it’s impossible not to be inspired by the hundreds of thousands of Bolivians marching to save their forests, and it seems that for Bolivians to know millions of Americans are on their side couldn’t hurt, either.  At the same time, as Bunch points out, several of the Democratic presidential candidates have highlighted the importance of fighting corruption on various fronts, reminding us of the positive sea change that U.S. power, properly directed, could bring about in worldwide prospects for democratic governance and economic justice.  It’s not like we needed more incentive than we already have to bring the Trump administration to justice and focus the nation on building a just and sustainable future for all Americans — but it should help to remember that we’re not alone in our struggles, and that how we resolve our current crisis will have repercussions far beyond our borders.

Washington Post Blockbuster on Diplomats Gone Bad Adds Visceral Detail to Abuse of Power Allegations

The Democratic House leadership’s decision that the Ukraine scandal merits an impeachment inquiry when all President’s Trump’s previous impeachable offenses did not was made for pragmatic as well as existential reasons: multiple representatives have indicated that the relative clarity of the scandal makes it easier to build public support than, say, the Russia-Trump campaign collusion nexus that Robert Mueller investigated.  Yet even this “simple” story has layers and layers, like the proverbial onion, and the Democrats may well run a different type of risk if they decide to narrow the articles of impeachment to too narrow a slice of the Ukraine scandal.  The basic and at this point clearly-evidenced political crime is that Donald Trump tried to use the power of the US government to bully a U.S. ally into investigating one of his political opponents, and to gin up a story that cleared Russia from its 2016 campaign interference.  But though this is one hell of a damning indictment, it’s really only by examining the layers of this rotten high crimes onion that you can viscerally understand the soul-sucking, democracy-crushing corruption in which the president has engaged.  While the Democrats will inevitably rest their case partly on high principle and appeals to abstractions like “national security” and “abuse of power,” the specific extent and details of the corruption need to be communicated and woven together with the high-falutin’ accusations as much as possible.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading last night’s Washington Post page-turner, “Holding Ukraine Hostage: How the President and His Allies, Chasing 2020 Ammunition, Fanned a Political Storm.”  The detailed title is an accurate summary, but also leaves for the reader’s personal discovery the real power of the article: the way it shows how part of the federal government — in this case, State Department officials — specifically enacted the the president’s corrupt intentions.  In relating its tale to strands that have already emerged into the public record (such as the the machinations of Rudy Giuliani), it helps us to understand the nitty-gritty of how the president’s self-serving pressure on Ukraine was implemented.  Just as the summary transcript of Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president clearly documented Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to sully Joe Biden’s reputation, so the narrative pieced together from interviews and texted discussions among State Department officials damningly shows how U.S. government officials had for months been laying the groundwork for that conversation between the two leaders.  In doing so, it illustrates in grim detail what the broad allegations of abuse of power against the president involve: subversion of U.S. diplomacy for partisan ends; the way Trump political appointees are able to direct this subversion and bend non-partisan government officials to their purposes; and, last but not least, how Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors are not simply those he committed, but constitute a “multipronged political conspiracy” (in the article’s wording) that involves the complicity of many people beyond the Trump-Giuliani-Barr-Pompeo junta.  You also get a sense of how such a conspiracy might be able to proceed outside of public view, but in gross abuse of the public interest, by people who have been entrusted to do America’s business with discretion and privacy: a reasonable person might have thought America’s top diplomats charged with Ukraine affairs would be busy supporting that U.S. ally against Russia’s ongoing destabilization, but that person would have been wrong.

And this leads us to a point that’s not directly addressed by the Post article, but which gets to the way the president’s undermining of “national security” needs to be understood concretely and in context.  Ukraine is not simply some random U.S. ally like any other; it is a country that has literally be invaded and torn apart by Russia, as that country first annexed Crimea, and then has orchestrated secessionist movements and occupations of Ukraine itself.  Ukraine is literally ground zero for Russia’s efforts to destabilize Western Europe, advance its authoritarian agenda, and undermine U.S. power and ideals.   It is not an overstatement to say we are in a very hot Cold War with Russia; Donald Trump’s threats against Ukraine, unless it helps him take down Joe Biden and clear Russia of its attack on the 2016 elections, are unnervingly close to serving the ends of our adversary over those of the United States. 

While the Post article is a gripping look at one facet of the Ukraine scandal, it also communicates the kinetic quality of this constitutional crisis; the damning narrative it puts together would not have been possible mere days ago, and yet now we have a fairly nuts-and-bolts understanding of what Trump and friends have been cooking up vis-a-vis Ukraine. Impeachment may center on Ukraine for now, but given how congressional and media investigations have already laid bare the corruption of American diplomacy and the involvement of numerous accomplices to the president’s crimes, it’s hard to see how Democrats will be able to limit the storyline — or why they’d want to, at least this early on.

Finally, I want to emphasize how effectively this article lays out the big picture even as it describes the disturbing minutiae of the Ukraine scandal. It’s admirably clear in what Donald Trump wanted from the Ukrainians: not to investigate Joe Biden and his son, which would rest on the false idea that there’s anything to actually investigate, but to “deliver damaging information on former vice president Joe Biden and undermine the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.” It also makes explicit both the fundamental wrongness of the American diplomats’ actions and the fact that the controversy involves not simply bad acts by the president, noting that, “The exchanges reveal the direct participation of State Department officials sworn to serve the country in events that increasingly bear the markings of a multipronged political conspiracy”; the assertion of conspiracy is well evidenced by the piece, and is crucial to understanding that the president’s schemes are quite deliberate and designed to evade constitutional accountability.

President's Conspiracy Theories Aim to Persuade GOP Politicos of Their Power, Not Their Truth

As the fate of the Republic is arguably coming down to the decisions Republican representatives and, especially, senators make in response to the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, I’ve been thinking about how the extensive propaganda effort at the heart of the Ukraine story — the effort by Trump and his henchmen to concoct a story that Joe Biden is hopelessly corrupt, and that it was actually Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election to help the Democrats — is clearly known by these same representatives and senators to be the fiction that it is.  They’re by and large not stupid people, and they’ve had access to all the same information that has led the Democrats to impeachment. Rather, Trump and company have been propagating this vast fiction, a fiction that reverses all the know facts we’ve learned over the past three-plus years, in order to persuade the Republican base and confuse other voters.

Yet it turns out that GOP politicians are also its intended audience, but in their case, the goal is not to persuade them of its truth, but of its exquisite workmanship: as a glory of 21st century propaganda, a vision of an authoritarian promised land where, through the miracle of Fox News, Twitter, the Internet, and the unmatched hissy-fits of a quite clearly deranged president, many millions of otherwise ordinary Americans are led to believe that up is down, down is up, and something is only true when the president says it is.  Republican senators and representatives are not meant to believe or accept it, but to be persuaded by the degree they think it will persuade the voters they purport to represent.  Donald Trump may be corrupting much of the federal government to help tell a through-the-looking-glass story to save his own ass (whether it be from the whupping he fears at the geriatric hands of Joe Biden or whatever kompromat Vladimir Putin holds over him), but he’s also effectively engineering a way forward for the GOP at large — a way for the party to avoid the justified democratic wrath and retribution that are its due for foisting this wanna-be dictator on us all.

What Donald Trump is attempting is merely a savagely mutated version of what the GOP has been playing at for a long time now: that in the face of a nation trending towards the Democratic Party, the GOP is justified in resorting to unconstitutional and anti-democratic means to maintain power.  Creating a tale in which Democrats have committed crimes of treason and electoral sabotage is in some ways the logical final step — a way to stigmatize the Democratic Party as outside the bounds of acceptability, and to justify any moves that limit the Democrats’ ability to gain office or wield power if elected.  The irony, which hardly needs stating but which I’ll spell out anyway because it’s so absurd you just need to see it in black and white every once in a while, is that the Republicans have enabled a president who himself is the one guilty of a disqualifying treason, and that GOP politicians are increasingly delegitimizing themselves (self-impeaching, if you will) as trustworthy to hold power by their continued defense of a man who is, let us no longer mince words, an authoritarian monster.

At any rate, it seems a cynicism bordering on nihilism that shouldn’t be allowed to slide by unremarked: the degree to which the GOP is willing to defend a president’s deranged conspiracy theories not because they believe in them, but because they admire their utility and the hope they offer for a fully-propagandized future that favors the party willing to rule by lies and ruthless power alone.

Impeach It Like You Mean It

If there’s a great deal of hope to be had from the last week of American politics, one big reason is that we’ve seen how even the most apparently intractable and foreboding crises can be upended by bold and righteous action.  In receipt of strong evidence, via the still-anonymous whistleblower, that Donald Trump tried to bribe and strong arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into drumming up false evidence against Joe Biden and his son, the Democratic House leadership was finally unable to resist long-standing calls to start an impeachment inquiry.  In the face of this assertion of power, the White House fumbled, and fumbled some more, as it released the damning summary of the Trump-Zelensky phone call and then the whistleblower complaint itself.  The two documents worked in catastrophic synergy, the call summary validating the basic accusations of the complaint.  The president and his defenders fell back to their familiar authoritarian responses, telling us that what we could read in plain English was actually the opposite of what the words said, and to attack both the whistleblower, his or her sources, and the Democrats as the real offenders.  It was not long before the president was attempting to intimidate the whistleblower and other leakers, and to suggest that execution should be their lot (as many were quick to note, in doing so, the president was adding to his roster of impeachable offenses).  Generally speaking, it was possible to see a pattern, witnessed before but perhaps never so dramatically, of the way the president tends to melt down and incriminate himself under pressure.

Of course, it wasn’t simply the sense that Trump and his enablers were on the defensive, but that they were being called to account for horrifying crimes against the United States.  This, above all, was why last week brought so many of us a sense of renewed hope: there was a feeling that we can stop this assault on our country.  The world suddenly felt a lot more unpredictable, but in a good way.  Elected Democrats, like most politicians, crave certainty, and this fundamentally conservative instinct has played a role in keeping them from use of the impeachment power, with its infrequent precedents and unknowable outcome.  After all, though it’s powerful, it’s circumscribed by what the Senate chooses to do afterwards; under even the best of circumstances, impeachment is a leap into the unknown.  But as Pelosi remarked (I think honestly), the president had left the House Democrats no choice, given the magnitude of the Ukraine scandal and how it goes to the heart of Americans’ ability to elect their leaders. 

But now we are at the point of necessary debates about what form impeachment should take — whether narrowly focused on the Ukraine scandal, or more of a kitchen-sink indictment of the president.  I am seeing strong arguments from both sides, which seem to boil down to making a case that is clear and easily grasped by the public, versus exposing as much of the president’s malfeasance as possible.  Those in favor of the former generally seem to think that time is not on the Democrats’ side, and that they shouldn’t appear to be going on a fishing expedition; those in favor of the latter generally think that the full scope of the president’s malfeasance needs to be made known, and that this broad disclosure of information will ultimately benefit the Democrats.

But what just about all advocates of impeachment seem to be agreed on, whether they say so explicitly or not, and what underlies both sides’ arguments, is that the commonly-understood point of impeachment — that it will lead to a conviction in the Senate, and the president’s removal from office — simply will not happen here, on account of the belief that GOP senators will never turn on Trump in sufficient numbers.  This outcome is presented as fact, based on hard-headed political realism.  In other words, everyone (at least everyone I have read to date) believes that impeachment has no chance of accomplishing its logical purpose: conviction of the president in the Senate and his removal from office.  And so discussions of the nature of impeachment revolve around protecting Congress’ credibility and using impeachment to damage the president with revelations of his wrongdoing, even if these revelations will not result in his removal from office.

But the past week has given us flashes of insight into what a distorting effect this realpolitik view of impeachment’s prospects has had on both the dangers in front of us and how they might be remedied.  The Democrats’ decision to pursue an impeachment inquiry has already helped produce damning evidence of the threat that the president poses to American democracy.  In this respect, the “it won’t work so why bother?” attitude up to now has proven not only to be self-defeating, but an actual enablement of the existential threat Trump embodies, helping him to keep hidden some of his anti-democratic machinations for this long.  The Democrats have basically been saying, “We already know we cannot stop the president, so we should not try to stop him.”  Yet, now that they have decided to go through the motions of stopping him, nearly all are still saying, “But of course we know that we can’t actually stop him.”  Even those who see impeachment as a way to damage Trump’s power and foil his re-election efforts (which, to be fair, is pretty much all supporters of impeachment) don’t actually think impeachment will lead to his conviction in the Senate.

In this combination of cynicism and political savvy, the Democrats are making the curious error of a too-literal interpretation of impeachment, as if the process and the guidance in the Constitution were all that mattered.  Like strict constructionists on the right, they risk mistaking the literal text for the spirit of the thing.  The founders didn’t just include the impeachment process as a mechanism for removing a president; the larger message of the power is that some presidents merit removal from office based on the threat they pose to the country.  So while a president damaged by an unsuccessful impeachment process is better than an undamaged one, it’s a mistake for the Democrats to view the Senate vote as the only way to end Trump’s reign.  Based on the chaos and ineptitude with which the White House has met the early impeachment effort, it’s well within the realm of possibility that an avalanche of damning revelations could force the president to resign, independent of a Senate vote — for example, if further revelations caused the president’s approval rating and support among Republican voters to crash downward.  That this is unlikely should not be confused with impossible.

Again, I think the events of the past week should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that our situation is set in stone with totally predictable parameters.  If the Democrats truly think Trump is unfit to hold office, shouldn’t they have faith that even some of the president’s current supporters may change their minds?  There may be massive amounts of tribalism and propaganda holding together the GOP, but will these really add up to continued unswerving support for a president shown to have committed treasonous crimes, and who responds in an undeniably anti-American and destructive manner?  In the face of Republican partisanship, it’s essential that the rest of us keep up the hope that our fellow Americans may yet find limits in their loyalty to a sick and broken man. 

I’m also arguing for what I’ll call “impeach it like you mean it” because I’ve so far seen zero discussion of what the Democrats’ next steps would be if they were to impeach Trump for his bribery/collusion/election subversion in the Ukraine scandal, fail to convince two-thirds of the Senate to convict him, and the next day President Trump held a press conference with the Ukrainian president at which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s treasonous war on America.  If the president is not removed from office, why should we expect mere impeachment to stop him from continuing to commit crimes against American democracy, including subversion of the 2020 election (which the last week has showed us has been his major preoccupation for months now)?   His conversation with Zelensky was literally the day after Mueller’s testimony, when it was made clear the Democrats would not impeach Trump for any of the crimes that Mueller uncovered; why would the result of impeachment without removal be any different in actually encouraging the president’s lawlessness?

The key here is that the crimes of which the Democrats are most likely to impeach Trump — those around the Ukraine scandal — are not just high crimes and misdemeanors, but the highest crimes and misdemeanors imaginable.  Though he deserves impeachment and removal from office for a plethora of offenses, actions he’s taken to assure his re-election — to essentially transform the U.S. into a one-party state — are arguably the worst of all.  This feels like a particularly damning strike against those arguing for a quick impeachment with the understanding that the Senate will acquit.  In that case, we absolutely need to hear the Democrats’ plan for what they’d do in the wake of what Trump would spin as a failed impeachment effort, and likely as a green light for even more aggressively criminal behavior than before.

But advocates of both narrow- and wide-scope impeachment inquiries also have a pressing responsibility to lay out their arguments right now for what impeachment is intended to accomplish in the face of public expectations that it will not result in the president’s removal from office.  Nearly every Democrat I’ve talked to over the last week is worried about impeachment because they think it’s not going to remove the president from office, and may strengthen his hand.  As I’ve been arguing, I don’t think it’s either logical or politically savvy for the Democrats to pursue impeachment without a real strategy for maximizing the chances that it removes him from office.  But short of this, they should be clear with the public about what the intention is, whether it’s to ensure the president doesn’t again commit the specific offenses of which he’s accused, or to make clear to the public that he doesn’t deserve re-election.

Beyond this, as I discussed in my last post, I think Democrats need to be explicit about putting not just Trump but the entire GOP on trial; in particular, they need to be transparent about forcing GOP senators to choose between party and country.  Even as Democrats need to appeal to independent and persuadable GOP voters when making the case for Trump’s impeachment, they need to assure their own base that impeachment will move the fight against Trump forward, not only to keep up morale going into 2020, but in the hope that this will build synergy between public pressure and the Democrats’ commitment to the impeachment effort.

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.