Author: mjohnson

Civil Liberties, History, Trump, World War II

And then it was too late…

Posted on by mjohnson

“This is the United States of America. It isn’t Nazi Germany.”

                                  – Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), in an interview on MSNBC, about the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border.

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The venerable Senator Feinstein is correct; we are not Nazi Germany – at least not yet.

But we are beginning, in some remarkably troubling ways, to resemble the ill-fated Weimar Republic that preceded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. A chilling new book – The Death of Democracy – tells the story of how a cultured, sophisticated people – Weimar Germany was the land of Richard Strauss and Bertolt Brecht, the home to Nobel Prize winners – tumbled into deep political division and then widespread street violence and then a dictatorship and tragedy.

Historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes that the 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic “created a state-of-the-art modern democracy, with a scrupulously just proportional electoral system and protection of individual rights and freedoms.”

There is an authoritarian playbook

“If Germany had long prided itself on being the ‘land of poets and thinkers’ then in the 1920s it seemed to surpass even itself. And yet somehow, out of this enlightened, creative, ultramodern democracy, grew the most evil regime in human history.”

We still wonder how it happened and why.

Part of the answer, Hett writes, was a breakdown in what was regarded in Germany as acceptable political behavior. Brown shirted toughs took to the streets intimidating political opponents and “others” – Jews and Communists, in particular. German politics became deeply polarized, while nationalism and a national sense of grievance grew. Jews were scapegoated as part of a vast global conspiracy that was somehow tied to Communism.

Hett argues, compellingly and disturbingly, that the rise of the Nazis was in large part a response to globalization and economic change. Major Nazi political theorists actually adopted a policy of “autarky,” the notion that “a country can cut itself off completely from the world economy and rely on its own resources, no imports, no exports, or foreign investments.”

Proving the old saying that “the only thing new is the history we haven’t read” is this remarkable statement from Hitler in 1928. “The German people have no interest,” he wrote, in a “German financial group or a German shipyard establishing a so-called subsidiary shipyard in Shanghai to build ships for China with Chinese workers and foreign steel.” Such an arrangement would not benefit Germany since, Hitler said, jobs that should benefit Germany would not be created in Germany. As the historian Hett notes, “The political mobilization of the late 1920s, especially among those Protestant groups who would become the Nazi base, was mostly about Germany’s vulnerable position in the world economy and financial system.”

German President von Hindenburg with Hitler in 1933

When the German conservative establishment – business leaders, the military, Protestant evangelicals and importantly Great War hero Paul von Hindenburg – eventually turned to a bombastic Austrian veteran who preached a virulent form of nationalism heavily doused with racial animus – Jews were his “vermin” – Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. His Nationalist Socialist Workers Party had never commanded more than about 30% of the popular vote before he reached the top of German politics.

“These conservatives could have stopped Hitler in his tracks,” Hett writes. “Instead, they chose to use him.” Business leaders liked his talk of an expanding German economy, higher tariffs and his plans to crack down on labor unions. Military leaders, smarting from how the Great War had ended, appreciated Hitler’s pledge to rebuild Germany’s armed forces. Evangelical Christians flocked to him because he seemed to promise that he would marginalize other Catholic backed political parties.

Within a matter of weeks after being appointed chancellor, Hitler, a brilliant communicator with a flair for the theatrical, had consolidated power to himself. The burning of the Reichstag – the German parliament building – four weeks after he took office was a galvanizing event, an excuse to create a police state. Hitler blamed the fire on Communist conspirators, almost certainly a lie, and historians still debate whether the Nazis staged the whole thing.

Without regard to facts, Nazi paramilitary brown shirts began locking up political opponents, silenced the independent press and deepened the Nazi party’s appeal to very conservative German farmers and small business people who craved stability.

The Reichstag burns in 1933 – the pretext for Hitler’s police state

“The key to understanding why many Germans supported him,” Hett writes, “lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world. Hitler himself, in the words of his biographer Joachim Fest, was ‘always thinking the unthinkable,’ and ‘in his statements an element of bitter refusal to submit to reality invariably emerged.’”

Hitler assumed dictatorial powers in Germany thanks to a series of lies, boasts, grand promises and raw appeals to emotion, racism, hatred and strength. Many Germans thought the strutting, one-time postcard painter with the pasty complexion simply wouldn’t last. But while he played his role Hitler could be a necessary evil – a tool – to crush the liberal left, the trade unions, intellectuals and elites. History is made of such horrible miscalculations.

There are, of course, no perfect historic analogies. Each generation stumbles ahead or falls behind on it’s own accord, but it is also true that history contains valuable lessons that we would be wise to heed. This is such a moment.

Dehumanizing…

When politicians say, as the American president did recently, that “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents.” We would be well advised to take them at face value. The American Constitution, of course, guarantees due process – to everyone regardless of legal status.

Dehumanizing your opponents is a tried and true tactic of authoritarians. When the president of the United States calls Hispanic or Latino human beings “animals” or “thugs” or “vermin” and refers to an African-American congresswoman as “an extraordinarily low IQ person” it is impossible to see such language as anything but dehumanizing.

By responding to the congresswoman’s incendiary and profoundly improper encouragement of harassment against Trump Administration officials with his own taunts – “be careful what you wish for” – the president doubles down on a politics of confrontation and demonization.

The United States, 1942

Former first lady Laura Bush explicitly compared the administration’s recent border separation strategy with the infamous “internment” of Japanese-Americans in 1942, one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in modern American history. The actor George Takei, who with his parents was interned in one of the camps, has written that two big lies, including the fiction that a law exists demanding the separations, have fueled the authoritarian border policy.

“The second lie is that those at our borders are criminals, and therefore deserve no rights. But the asylum-seekers at our borders are breaking no laws at all, nor are their children who accompany them. The broad brush of ‘criminal’ today raises echoes of the wartime ‘enemy’ to my ears. Once painted, both marks are impossible to wash off. Trump prepared his followers for this day long ago, when he began to dehumanize Mexican migrants as drug dealers, rapists, murderers, and animals. Animals might belong in cages. Humans don’t.”

As the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum wrote last week: “It is worth noting how often the president repeatedly conflates refugees with illegal immigrants and MS-13 gang members. This is not an accident: He has targeted a group and given them characteristics — they are violent, they are rapists, they are gang members — that don’t belong to most of them. He then describes them with dehumanizing language. Democrats, he has tweeted, ‘want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13.’ The image of ‘infestation’ evokes, again, vermin and lice. A few weeks earlier, he spoke of MS-13 as ‘animals,’ once again making it unclear whether he meant actual gang members or simply those who distantly resemble them.”

Or as conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote recently, “Dehumanization has a natural progression. It starts by defining a whole race or ethnicity by its worst members — say, rapists and other criminals. It moves on to enforce generally applicable laws and rules that especially hurt a target group. Then, as the public becomes desensitized, the group can be singled out for hatred and harm. It is the descent, step by step, into a moral abyss.”

Fearing Globalization…

When the president of the United States, against most credible advice and in the face of much history about how global trade works, imposes tariffs on imports from the nation’s closest allies and threatens retaliation against American companies it’s difficult not to conclude that he is playing on old fears about globalization.

Denigrating a Free Press…

When the president of the United States on a daily basis denigrates “the fake news” and criticizes news organizations and reporters by name it is impossible not to see parallels to the Nazi manifesto that declared that editors and contributors to newspapers “be people’s comrades” and that “newspapers which violate the general good are to be banned.”

The president has now actually uttered the words “enemy of the people,” a term Stalin often used, to label the press that routinely still calls out his lies and incompetence.

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            “One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialed in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.”

Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times

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Americans, long content to embrace our myth of “exceptionalism,” now are grouped with a growing list of nations around the world where democracy is in retreat. Yes, it is happening here. We are exceptional, but not in the way Ronald Reagan or Franklin Roosevelt envisioned.

A new report by European researchers contend that 2.5 billion people – a third of the world’s population – now live in countries where democracy is on the run. As the study indicates, “In recent years, the number of nations that are becoming more democratic has declined, while the number ‘registering significant change toward autocracy’ has increased. Even worse, ‘the population living in the 24 countries backsliding on liberal democracy”—a list that includes Russia, India, Brazil, and, yes, the United States—‘far outnumbers the population living in advancing countries.’”

“A much larger share of the world population is experiencing autocratization [than] democratization,” the researchers note. “This translates to a major reduction in the enjoyment of rights and freedoms.”

One can look back over the tumultuous last 18 months of American history in one of two ways.

One type of analysis would say: True enough, Donald J. Trump has upset a lot of traditions and norms in American politics. Other presidents have been liars, exaggerators, provocateurs who upset the status quo. We may not like all his language or emphasis, but the United States has been around a long time and navigated many challenging times. Trump has attacked judges and journalists, trashed Democrats and tarnished his GOP critics, but the system still works. We’ll be fine.

Another version of the same facts might well reach an altogether bleaker conclusion. The systematic dehumanizing of refugees and immigrants will last well beyond the current occupant of the White House. The disparagement of the independent press undermines, perhaps permanently, a vital check on misconduct and abuse of power. The criticism of judges, the claim that a special counsel investigation is “a witch hunt” and the suggestion that due process is an outdated concept are broadly damaging to the concept of the rule of law. The widespread abrogation by Congress of oversight of the executive branch – few oversight hearings, little if any complaint about manifest ethical transgressions and embracing policies and approaches Republicans would once have rejected totally – is an historic erosion of the time-tested systems of checks and balances. Nationalism, anti-globalism, trade wars, a growing cult of personality around Trump all show a clear and dramatic break with American values. This cannot end well.

Historian Benjamin Carter Hett notes several times in his profoundly important book about the fall of the Weimar Republic that most Germans in the 1920s and early 1930s really didn’t want violence in the streets, didn’t want to see the “liberal” values of an enlightened society crushed, but for most it was difficult to tell in real time how bad things were becoming. And then it was too late.

“Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shooting of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last month of the Second World War,” Hett says in summing up what happened. “It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.”

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GOP, Trump

Democracy Dies Amid all the Lying…

Posted on by mjohnson

“We are in a strange place. I mean, it’s almost, it’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it? And it’s not a good place for any party to end up with a cult-like situation as it relates to a president that happens to be of — purportedly, of the same party.”

— Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), quoted by The Hill.

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Of all the astounding things that have happened since Donald J. Trump took office – the serial lying, the trade wars, the bizarre North Korean summit, the gruesome separation of asylum-seeking parents from their children at the U.S. border, the Scott Pruitt scandals, the indictments, the embrace of despots and the savaging of allies just to name a few – the most astounding thing is how easily Trump has co-opted an entire political party. There is simply no parallel in American history.

Trump salutes a North Korean general

Republicans, most quaking with political fear that crossing Trump or pushing back on his myriad outrages will get them the Jeff Flake treatment have, of course, only themselves to blame. They let an amoral, lying charlatan capture their party and imperil our democracy. Still, amid the craziness, it is an amazing thing to watch the destruction of the Republican Party in real time.

For years most Republicans have chosen to tolerate and then embrace the crazy La-La Land of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, conspiracy theories and systematic denial of obvious truths. Most of the Republican base finally came to embrace the racist notion that the 44thpresident of the United States is a foreign-born Muslim.

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       “There is no seeming consequence to the president and lies. And if we accept that as a society, it is going to have incredibly harmful consequences in the way that we operate going forward, based on the construct of the Founding Fathers.”

– Rep. Mark Sanford, defeated for re-election because he wasn’t Trumpian enough

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The intellectual rot, as Steve Schmidt the GOP strategist calls it, is truly stunning. A tiny handful of principled conservatives – Schmidt, Charlie Skyes, Michael Gerson, Jonah Goldberg, David Frum and Bill Kristol most prominently – have called out this foolishness, but Republican intellectuals appealing for GOP sanity is a lost cause in the Age of Trump.

Steve Schmidt now says he is a non-practicing Republican and he wonders if the party, even after Trump, can ever find its way again. And Charlie Skyes, a conservative with a sense of gallows humor, titled his latest book How the Right Lost its Mind.

The answer to that question is simple: It all began with lying, half-truths, fabrications, blind anger and disdain for the arts of governing.

Romney was for it before he wasn’t…

Rather than offering serious alternatives Republicans chose to demonize Democratic efforts to address the health insurance crisis, turning tail on the very policies one-time GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney embraced as governor of Massachusetts. They spent decades bemoaning spending and debt then passed a massive tax cut for the most well off Americans arguing that their policies won’t balloon the debt and actually help the middle class. The truth is precisely the opposite.

Republicans have doubled down on climate change denial by putting a corrupt grifter in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. They savaged, then abandoned an international agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and now hold their breath hoping to get an agreement as tenth as good with North Korea.

The Republican base now thinks better of a murderous North Korean dictator than of Nancy Pelosi. Let that sink in. And Trump’s efforts to destroy generations of foreign policy consensus regarding NATO, the G7, etc., while celebrating dictators from Moscow to Pyongyang will have lasting impact.

A Republican Party of Ronald Reagan that once celebrated world leadership now celebrates a guy who is on his third national security advisor, his second secretary of state and insists on “happy talk” intelligence briefings because he won’t read his homework. One former senior intelligence officer told the Washington Post that “Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally.”

He barely listens, and won’t read.

In the GOP’s La-La Land one-time critics in the Congress are cowed and running scared. Even worse are the true believers, people like Idaho’s Jim Risch who would have levitated over the Capitol had Barack Obama taken a meeting with the North Korean dictator, handed over concessions and gotten nothing at all in return save a photo op.

Risch, who regularly brags of his many conversations with Trump, dismisses any concern about the president as being the product of “tremendous hate and vitriol against President Trump from the other side in this town.” This isn’t your father’s GOP. It is a cult of personality built on lies, unethical misbehavior, craven love of power and – did I mention – lies?

Lindsey Graham, once verbally assaulted by Trump as a lightweight, now Tweets birthday wishes to the president who called the murderous North Korean dictator “a funny guy” who he trusts. The GOP intellectual rot begins in such fevered brains.

“I trust the president,” Senator Graham told CNN. “I like the president. I trust him in terms of trying to do things that are big and matter. Here’s what I’ve got. I’ve got a relationship with the president at a time when I think he needs allies.”

Republicans steadfastly refuse to re-authorize the Voting Rights Act, while putting a white supremacist in charge of the Justice Department. Meanwhile, at the state level the GOP perfected the ancient art of gerrymandering allowing most House Republicans to pick their voters instead of the other way around and in the process making voting much more difficult for millions of Americans.

Needing an issue to enflame the nativist base of the party they now own an immoral, barbaric, un-American policy that separates kids from parents seeking asylum in the land built by immigrants.

Fearing – and likely knowing – that Trump is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg they trash the American justice system and consider the Republican special counsel investigating Russian interference in our politics as some dark “deep state” conspirator.

To repeat for emphasis Robert Mueller is a registered Republican, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran and a man of sterling personal qualities and professional ethics. The president of the United States repeatedly labels his work “a witch hunt” and guys like Graham and Risch smile and pray not to get a primary challenge.

Reaping the Whirlwind…

Republicans officeholders have been working on handing the country over to Donald Trump for a generation. They have valued power over principle, polarization over policy. They have been lying to their base for so long that, not surprisingly, people started believing the craziness. Now Trump owns them. They are afraid of losing an election or slipping out of power and they have fully acquiesced to his lies, his personal and moral dishonesty, his dangerous and deranged foreign policy, his racism and, most troubling, his ever more obvious authoritarian ambitions.

Last week Trump told Fox & Friends, the nut job echo chamber that feeds his gargantuan ego, that his new North Korean friend is “the head of a country — and I mean he’s the strong head. He speaks and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.” Later Trump said it was just a “joke,” but that same “joke” has been used in the past to discount the kind of language that authoritarians regularly use.

The nut job echo chamber…

The journalist Andrew Sullivan says Trump is “openly living in his own disturbed world” where whatever he says is true and whatever contradicts his truth is “fake news.” And the Republican Party, witness the comment from the party chairwoman, has accepted this new reality.

“Anyone that does not embrace the Donald Trump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake,” says Ronna McDaniel. By the way, Ms. McDaniel for a long time used her maiden name – Romney – until Trump said he didn’t like it – she’s Mitt Romney’s niece – so she quit and now has a name approved by the Great Leader.

“The party of free trade has gone protectionist,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere in Politico. “The party of spreading freedom and never negotiating with dictators is now full of praise for chumming it up with Kim Jong-un. The party of fighting deficits has blown a trillion dollar hole in the budget. Family values and moralizing have been replaced by porn stars and Twitter tantrums. Trump goes to war with the G-7, and the sum of the Republican reaction is a statement from John McCain and a few comments on Sunday TV from Maine Sen. Susan Collins.”

Democracy Dies With Lies…

Democracy Dies in Darkness is the new motto of the Washington Post, a newspaper that daily tries to sort out the various strains of wretched weirdness that is the Republican Party, but the newspaper motto gets at only part of our problem. Democracy actually dies when lies dominate the daily political discussion, when ethics get ignored and when principle has no place.

There is an authoritarian playbook

I’m reading a new book on an old story, how the Weimar Republic in Germany collapsed amid the lies and nationalism and racial hatred that ushered in the darkest period in modern history.

Historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes that a crazed Austrian postcard painter figured out the essential truth of the authoritarian long before we got Donald Trump.

“To sink into the minds of average people,” Hett writes, “a message [or a lie] had to be simple. It had to be emotional – hatred worked well – not intellectual. And it had to be endlessly repeated.”

No Collusion

Crooked Hillary

Witch Hunt 

Fake News 

There is an authoritarian playbook, well worn and often remarkably successful. The would be authoritarian lies about everything to the point that enough people no longer care about the truth. A free press is put to the torch. Convenient enemies – immigrants, Muslims, any opponent of the leader – are daily attacked. The rule of law is subverted. Financial and ethical norms are ignored.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote recently: “Every time Trump extends his ludicrous, ridiculous, and insulting reality show for another season, and every time the Republican Party echoes every delusion within it, there’s a big temptation to give in, give up, or look away. A numbness soon takes over. So many of my friends are turning off and tuning out, their decency reflexes exhausted with the pace of the indecency.”

This is where we are, fellow Americans.

Captured by an unhinged, lying, racist president enabled by a minority of the country thrashing about in a fever swamp of nationalism and rage, while elected members of a political party fearful of their leader, goes along to get along. What’s a little lying compared to a Supreme Court packed for a generation? Personal corruption – no big deal we got the tax cut. A deeply flawed psychopath in the White House, sure but he’s our psychopath

It’s the lies, my friends, it’s the lies. The postcard painter knew the path to power. Lie bigly. Lie always. Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie to demonize the other side. Lie to discredit the press. Lie to protect your privilege. Lie often enough, loudly enough and pretty soon no one knows what to believe and the authoritarian has his day. It has happened before. It is happening again.

More on The Death of Democracy next time.

American Presidents, Books, Trump

Democracy Dies In Broad Daylight . . .

Posted on by mjohnson

“I love Jeff Bezos for what he’s done for the Washington Post, but their headline on top of the paper, the motto, ‘democracy dies in darkness’ — no, democracy dies in broad daylight. Again and again, it’s the lesson in history. You retain the appearance of democracy without having it. I think that’s where this country is right now.”

Journalist/historian Tom Ricks

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The journalist and biographer Jon Meacham has a new book – The Soul of America – that makes the case that as bad as things now seem for American democracy that things have actually been much worse at points in our checkered past.

 “Let’s learn the lessons of the past,” Meacham says. “Resist tribalism, deploy reason and remember that fair play for others is the best way to ensure fair play for you. If we can do that, then we’ll rise above the corrosive tweets, the presidential bullying and the narcissism of our reality-TV president,” he says. “It feels dark and insuperable, but it’s felt that way before.”

Agreed. We did have a Civil War. That was pretty awful. Before that war human bondage as a political issue ripped the country apart and even when slavery ended after the slaughter of more than 700,000 Americans it took another hundred years to legislatively guarantee voting rights for citizens of color. (Of course, the Supreme Court threw out the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act a while back, but keep the faith we’re still working the problem, sort of.)

The McCarthy Era was bad news. A demagogue paralyzed the United State Senate, gained a legion of followers and destroyed countless lives. Joe McCarthy eventually drank himself to death eliminating the need for his ultimate repudiation at the ballot box and the Senate did censure him, but not before he poisoned American politics for generations.

Vietnam. Bloody battles over Civil Rights. The Klan. Assassinations. An ever-expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment. (Where do you sign up to be part of that “well-regulated militia,” by the way?) Endless war in places we don’t understand and couldn’t impact if we did.

American strife and division, particularly the poisonous variety, as Jon Meacham says, “are in some ways the rule in American life rather than the exception.”

Fair enough, but, but … we have never before had a Donald J. Trump.

Richard Nixon . . .

Richard Nixon was mean, vindictive and despite his statement to the contrary a crook, it least in the political sense. Harding surrounded himself with a loathsome collection of grifters and political hacks. Bill Clinton did have sex with that woman and history has not been kind to a clueless James Buchanan or a bumbling Franklin Pierce. Yet, none have done what Trump, the ignorant, arrogant, self-obsessed, serial lying, three-times married, hush money porno star paying faux billionaire has done.

The Trump coup d’etat . . . 

As Rebecca Solnit wrote recently – read her stuff in Harper’s and elsewhere – Trump has effectively staged a coup: “It happened on November 8, 2016, when an unqualified candidate won a minority victory in a corrupted election thanks in part to foreign intervention … The evidence that the candidate and his goons were aided by and enthusiastically collaborating with a foreign power was pretty clear before that election, and at this point, they are so entangled there isn’t really a reason to regard the born-again alt-right Republican Party and the Putin Regime as separate entities.”

Consider just a few bits of news from the past few days.

The president of the United States has done publicly what Nixon only did in the privacy of the Oval Office, namely attempt to discredit a legitimate investigation into his own conduct. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have temporarily defused the crisis  by referring the matter to the department’s Inspector General. Still make no mistake this is a very, very, very big departure from previous presidential behavior. Trump’s coup has now made such unprecedented action – certainly unprecedented post-Nixon – standard operating procedure in the White House.

As Jonathan Bernstein wrote in Bloomberg: “Once upon a time, President Richard Nixon turned the Department of Justice into his personal flunkies in various different conspiracies to break the law. Before it was over, his first two attorneys general wound up in legal trouble. A third attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the further demands of the president.” We may still be in the early days of Trump’s attempts to manipulate and rig his own Justice Department and rip to shreds the notion of “the rule of law,” but it is increasingly clear we are in very deep and unchartered waters.

And then there is Trump’s attempt to pressure the Post Office to retaliate against Amazon and its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos, of course, also owns the Washington Post, one of the news organizations attempting to keep alive the flame of presidential accountability.

“[Postmaster General Megan] Brennan [a career official who worked her way up from letter carrier to boss] has so far resisted Trump’s demand, explaining in multiple conversations occurring this year and last that these arrangements are bound by contracts and must be reviewed by a regulatory commission,” the Post reported recently. “She has told the president that the Amazon relationship is beneficial for the Postal Service and gave him a set of slides that showed the variety of companies, in addition to Amazon, that also partner for deliveries.”

Other presidents have certainly attempted to intimidate various businesses for various reasons, but Trump’s action is in a new category. His behavior is the conduct of a man who relentlessly seeks to punish his perceived political enemies and he’s proving he will pull whatever handy levers he stumbles on to inflict the punishment. This is not politics or ideology, but rather rank authoritarianism on an American scale.

It’s the corruption – stupid . . . 

Or consider this lede on a recent New York Times (non-fake) story: “HONG KONG — The Trump Organization’s partner in a lavish Indonesian development project boasting a six-star hotel and golf course with President Trump’s name has brought on a new ally: a Chinese state-owned company.

“The Indonesian partner, the MNC Group, said Tuesday that it had struck a deal with an arm of Metallurgical Corporation of China, a state-owned construction company, to build a theme park next door to the planned Trump properties.”

The Times concluded, “The timing is awkward.” We should hope to shout it is awkward.

After promising a trade war with China and after the Indonesian hotel deal, Trump suddenly abandoned sanctions against Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE, an organization American intelligence officials says is in the middle of Chinese efforts to evade Iranian and North Korean sanctions. Additionally the director of the FBI told the Senate Intelligence Agency as recently as February that he was “deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks.” Top intelligence officials have bluntly told Americans not to use ZTE phones and devices because they constitute an espionage threat.

Perhaps there is a rational explanation for all this, but it would seem the best that could be said for a president making money off a foreign business deal financed by a Chinese company while engaged in trade negotiations with China is, well, “awkward.”

There are new and credible allegations of additional pro-Trump election meddling. The latest involves deep-pocketed Persian Gulf operatives in a second campaign season Trump Tower meeting involving the president’s son Don, Jr. and various foreign agents, one of whom apparently has lied to Congress about his involvement in the campaign. It is worth remembering that it is against the law for foreign citizens, agents, and companies to in any way involve themselves in a U.S. election or to spend money to support or defeat a candidate. Democracy dies in plain sight.

And there is always more with this crowd.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s family real estate business has apparently entertained offers for a troubled New York building – 666 Fifth Avenue – from an investment group backed by money from Qatar. The Kushner deal, and of course he’s a top White House advisor, somehow is also caught up in an ongoing diplomatic Middle Eastern brouhaha that Vanity Fair described this way:

Jared Kushner – son-in-law, White House aide, real estate investor, problem

“Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.”

I know it’s complicated keeping the conflicts of interest and the world-class grifting all straight, but this is way beyond “awkward” and into the territory of bribery and shakedown. I’ll put it the way special counsel Robert Mueller likely would: Did Kushner pressure Qatar for money for his New York building in exchange for backing off on the blockade?

Or as Slate succinctly put it: “Bribery, corruption, and real estate have always gone hand in hand. If I give you a suitcase containing $500,000 in cash, that’s extremely suspicious. But if I buy a property from you for $1.6 million, it’s almost impossible to determine that the ‘real’ value was only $1.1 million and that therefore $500,000 of the payment was somehow nefarious.”

That we are even considering this kind of thing in relation to the president and his “staff” is an astounding moment in American history.

Whenever there is a choice . . . 

Back in 2008 the writer Thomas Frank produced a splendid little book entitled The Wrecking Crew. His basic assertion was that the modern conservative-liberal political debate can now best be explained by the fact that liberals actually continue to believe in government as a force for good and a route to improvement in the human condition, while conservatives are essentially cynics about government. Conservatives not only don’t want much government they want to privatize what little they tolerate. In the process they elevate “bullies and gangsters and CEOs over other humans” – sound familiar – while telling us to get smart and stop expecting anything good from Washington.

“Whenever there is a choice to be made,” Frank wrote back in those pre-Donald Trump days, “between markets and free people – between money and the common good – the conservatives chose money.”

The modern Republican Party, now completely the party of Trump, is daily proving the essential truth of Thomas Frank’s little book.

“I worry that we no longer live in a democracy,” the journalist and historian Tom Ricks said recently. “We live in what the ancient Greeks called an oligarchy — government of the rich, for the rich, by the rich. Money now is much more important in America than people’s votes.”

Scandals 100th the size those that swirl daily around the White House would have in years past set off a mad race to investigate and hold accountable the wrong-doers. What we have instead is an incredibly tepid response from Republican politicians afraid that raising legitimate questions about the president’s conduct will induce blowback from residents of the Fox News fueled fever swamp that is the Republican “base.”

Republican candidates for an open Congressional seat in Idaho all dodged a debate question about whether there was anything Trump has done that caused them heartburn. The joker who won the primary and likely will go to Congress said he hadn’t been following the special counsel investigation deeming it a “distraction.” Democracy dies in broad daylight.

Conservative never-Trumper Max Boot ended a recent column by saying, “Republicans approve of, or pretend not to notice, his flagrant misconduct, while Democrats are inured to it. The sheer number of outrages makes it hard to give each one the attention it deserves. But we must never – ever! – accept the unacceptable.”

Yet, so much damage has been done amid so little pushback from the conservatives who certainly know Trump is a disaster, but cannot bring themselves to speak of the destruction he has created. And the damage is huge and will be long lasting.

The whole world is watching . . .

“The West as we once knew it no longer exists,” the German magazine Der Spiegel said recently in an remarkable editorial. “Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership. President Trump has adopted a tone that ignores 70 years of trust. He wants punitive tariffs and demands obedience. It is no longer a question as to whether Germany and Europe will take part in foreign military interventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is now about whether trans-Atlantic cooperation on economic, foreign and security policy even exists anymore. The answer: No. It is impossible to overstate what Trump has dismantled in the last 16 months.”

With due respect to Jon Meacham and the “we’ve had it worse” argument, the Republican Party embrace of Trump is not like anything we have ever seen. The embrace of his incompetence and corruption when coupled with a near complete political unwillingness to restrain his attacks on institutions, the law, old alliances and fundamental decency is absolutely frightening.

We retain the appearance of democracy without having it. You have to wonder if we can ever get it back.

Books, Trump

The End of the Beginning …

Posted on by mjohnson

      We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.

Adam Davidson writing in The New Yorker.

—————-

There are now four types of people in the United States.

One type, slightly over 50 percent of white adults according to an ABC News poll, support the president of the United States. Older white folks are the Trump base. But it is still an astounding number and speaks at some level to the fundamental racial divide in the country since it is more and more clear that Donald Trump’s core appeal has always been racial, the oldest, most toxic play in American politics. Yet, it is also clear as Trump has said that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and well, you know do anything and not endanger support from “his base.” The true believers are one type.

A second type of American, perhaps best exemplified by current House Speaker Paul Ryan, enables the president while ignoring him in order to accomplish a handful of highly partisan or personal goals – a giant tax cut for corporate America and the wealthiest among us, a much more conservative judiciary for a generation or victory in a Republican primary where fidelity to Trump is the only issue. The morality of this group is on display if not their patriotism. They see. They might even cringe. But they persist. He is an idiot after all, but a useful one.

A third type of American, a handful of elected Republicans among them, seem to believe that Trump’s ethical and legal misdeeds, his trashing of long-established norms of political behavior, his insult filled rants, and his delusional foreign and economic policy will eventually fade away. We must just let all this run its course. It will all work out they say. Common sense and the American Republic will soon enough return, these optimists hold. One hopes they are right, while suspecting they are not.

And the fourth type is, well, folks like me. People who believe Trump represents an existential threat to our politics and our culture. Indeed his daily shredding of truth and decency, his attacks on a free press, the courts and the rule of law are destroying, as Financial Times columnist Edward Luce has written, the very idea of classic western liberalism.

“Western liberal democracy is not yet dead,” Luce writes in his brilliant and frightening book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, “but it is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe. It is facing its gravest challenge since the Second World War. This time, however, we have conjured up the enemy from within. At home and abroad, America’s best liberal traditions are under assault from its own president. We have put arsonists in charge of the fire brigade.”

Luce’s 2017 book chillingly describes the retreat of western liberalism in places like Poland and Hungary and he correctly places Trump and America in this context. Trump has shown us at least one thing, which in my lifetime has not been as crystal clear as it now is: our system of checks and balances, the conventions of acceptable political and ethical behavior are really very, very fragile. It has actually been quite easy for a would-be autocrat to drive us to the edge of chaos and political breakdown. All it has taken is a reality show personality, a capacity to lie with abandon, an appeal to racial divide and a Twitter account.

And now after months of constant disruption and the kind of behavior that would have doomed any previous president we have arrived at the point of reckoning of sorts. The president of the United States is increasingly cornered, frightened, more erratic and unfocused than normal. He is at war with his own Justice Department and the FBI. Michael Cohen, his long-time personal lawyer – a wise guy character right out of Goodfellas or A Bronx Tale– is almost certainly going to be indicted, likely for a host of misdeeds directly and indirectly bearing on Trump.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen

Trump’s legal team has shrunk to Cohen and an in-house White House lawyer whose signature accomplishment has been to restore the handlebar mustache to prominence. On the other hand Special Counsel Robert Mueller, working quietly with the passion of a straight arrow Boy Scout and backed by an A-Team of criminal prosecutors, accumulates documents, interviews, tapes and who knows what related to elections, Russians, assorted shady con men, bank loans and porn star payoffs.

When it all becomes public the Trump story – at its core the story of a profoundly flawed, deeply troubled man who has no business visiting the Oval Office let alone working there – will make Nixon’s Watergate or Harding’s Teapot Dome look like a small time embezzlement job at a church bake sale.

We are about to see with the Trump fiasco, as Churchill said after the long twilight of the first three years of World War II and after a victory at El Alamein, “not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The end of the beginning. And Trump knows it is coming. His Twitter account screams acknowledgement. He may be able to compartmentalize his dishonesty and selectively forget what is inconvenient to remember, but he knows his decade’s long haphazardly constructed house of cards – what an appropriate analogy – is going to crumble.

Soon-to-be former Speaker Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan, at age 49, heading for Janesville, Wisconsin to spend more time with his family, knows it is coming. Mitch McConnell will try to create a few more federal judges in the interval remaining, but he knows it is coming. The scores of Republicans declining to seek re-election to Congress know it is coming. The Fox News nitwits, even they (we hope) know its coming.

Vladimir Putin, yes even he knows it is coming, Yet, unlike the rest of us Putin is a winner no matter what becomes of Trump because his whole game has been to show how abjectly corrupt American democracy can become. The mess Trump has made – his own corruption and dishonesty, the lying, the Scott Pruitt’s, The Mooches, the Newt Gingrich’s and Rudy Giuliani’s, the degrading of decency, the wholesale cashiering of a once-proud political party – none of that will be automatically fixed when Trump is gone. It will take years to correct this mess, if it is even possible.

Putin’s aim was to destroy American leadership around the world, fray the NATO alliance and pit the U.S. against China. He wanted to walk back what until just a few years ago seemed to be the relentless history of democratic expansion around the world. Now, as Ed Luce points out, there are 25 fewer democracies in the world today than there were just 18 years ago.

Putin’s dream has worked better than any KGB plotter could possibly have envisioned. Meanwhile, the thug from St. Petersburg emerges as a new Middle East power broker, the new most interesting man in the world, the man who will keep pointing out that America is broken and corrupt and leaderless.

Checking signals

The only question left is whether Trump burns down what is left of the structure of American law and norms or whether enough righteousness remains in the hollow souls of the president’s GOP enablers to stop him short of political Armageddon.

The Lawfare blog’s Benjamin Wittes wrote recently that we have known for months the ultimate blow up was looming, but it “has ripened slowly and, while in plain view, in a fashion that has permitted people to avert their gaze. Those who wanted to deny that the confrontation was coming at all could convince themselves that perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation would peter out; perhaps it would reveal only misconduct by expendable hangers-on in the president’s entourage; perhaps it would reveal only politically embarrassing conduct rather than conduct that required elements within the executive branch to lock horns over whether the special counsel would be meaningfully permitted to accuse the president.”

The raid on Michael Cohen’s law office, home and hotel room ended all ability to avert our gaze. This is what a Constitutional crisis looks like. If we survive it historians will be studying this moment for years, books will be written and everyone will claim to have seen it coming even though it is often difficult to see things happening in plain sight.

The end of the beginning of the Trump unraveling comes – as Putin and his Kremlin pals must be celebrating – while eight of the top ten jobs at the U.S. State Department sit vacant and while the CIA’s top leader is leaving for State and both he and his announced replacement, an architect of torture policy, face bruising confirmation fights. The unraveling comes while American troops flail away without strategy or leadership in Syria and Afghanistan and while the White House chief of staff has lost all ability to manage the daily drama in the West Wing.

None of this is sustainable. Oh, the 50 percent of white Americans who would cheer Trump if he did something criminal on Fifth Avenue will stay with him to the bitter, bitter end. They are a political lost cause. The GOP base. These white folks will rage on against the dying of the darkness, while their hero fumes on social media. They have made up their minds. They embrace the chaos. Porn stars, Russian meddling, the deepest ethical swamp in modern memory – piffle. He isn’t Hillary. He isn’t Obama. Good enough.

But the rest of us, the Paul Ryan’s, the hopeful Republicans and the worried Democrats, the midnight worriers, must hope the end comes quickly and with minimal collateral damage. But does anyone really think Donald J. Trump will suddenly find reason and common sense and go quietly or reasonably as the circle closes around him? Of course not.

The Boston Globe’s Michael A. Cohen, not to be confused with the Trump Tower wise guy, wrote last week: “we have a president who will do anything to save his own skin. He cares not one whit about the law, ethics, norms, or the good of the country. As has always been the case, Trump’s only concern is Trump.”

Trump will go down. The events of the last week make that all the more certain. How much farther down Trump takes our country is what keeps some of us awake at night. Trump is an existential threat to the long American experiment. And that is no hyperbole and it is certainly no joke.

Human Rights, Nebraska, Trump

Moral Clarity…

Posted on by mjohnson

      “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

Donald J. Trump, meeting with members of Congress about immigration

—————-

I grew up in western Nebraska and South Dakota. My mother and dad, and folks on both sides of our family, lived in this part of Middle America for generations. Some still do. These places – the sandhill country of Nebraska, the Black Hills of South Dakota – are part of my personal story. It is impossible, I think, not to be formed by the landscapes, the rhythms, the attitudes of “our” places. I grew up white in white America. It was who I was.

The most diverse place I’ve ever lived.

It wasn’t until we moved to Rock Springs, Wyoming – I was entering the seventh grade – that I really had personal exposure to people different than my family and me. It’s not an overstatement to say that place changed my life.

Rock Springs, a tough, blue collar railroad and coal town, remains the most ethnically diverse place I have ever lived. I got acquainted with and played basketball in the high desert of southwestern Wyoming with a couple of African-American teammates, the best players on the team. One kid had a Japanese-American background, another Hispanic, and others could trace their ancestry to southern Europe. Our neighbors played bocce, a game as foreign to me as polo, but as common in Italy as baseball is here. My mother and dad were invited to a Greek wedding in Rock Springs. That was an eye opener for those Cornhuskers.

And she may not have known it, but I had a serious crush on a girl named Johanna. She was Jewish, I think, and as I recall her ancestors emigrated from Poland. She was also the smartest kid in my class – quiet, studious, serious. I wonder to this day if she has had a good life.

Those years in Rock Springs have stuck with me for lots of reasons, but mostly for what the daily exposure to kids and cultures different than me – a kid of modest middle class white privilege – did to change my view of my country and myself. After a few years in Wyoming we moved back to South Dakota, sixty miles as the crow flies from the Pine Ridge reservation, the land “given,” as white folks like to say, to the Oglala Lakota band of Sioux.

The sand hill country of western Nebraska

I had no immediate epiphany about race and class as I started high school, but something happened, gradually, after that move back to the prairie. The routine white culture stereotyping of Native Americans – they can’t handle their booze, they’re lazy, they’re happy in their poverty – started to sound odd and wrong to me. I had played ball with and against some of these guys. They were anything but lazy.

Billy Mills, a native of the Pine Ridge, won a Gold Medal in the 10,000 meters in the 1964 Olympics. It was the first time – the first time – a U.S. athlete ever won that medal. That’s not lazy.

Would not a Sioux culture that produced a Crazy Horse, a Sitting Bull, or a brilliant historian like a Vine Deloria, Jr. be worthy of celebration? Why did so much of the dominant white culture demean the native culture? Why did folks who had never had a conversation with a Native America make up stories? What did they fear? Why did they say those things?

Historian Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux

Coming from people I knew and liked these often-hateful comments, a variation of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” made me understand, really for the first time, that such attitudes are learned behavior. No one is born a bigot. Racism is not genetic. Attitudes about race and class, like table manners, are learned behavior. My native land seemed awash in ignorant stereotypes that made those not like us, less than us.

I found it difficult and awkward to confront someone who said something not just wrong, but hateful. The easy thing to do is to cringe, be quiet and move on. But in the long run that sort of attitude – staying quiet, not speaking, letting it slide, may be even more damaging than the harmful, hateful words of a bigot.

I admit I’ve not always spoken up and too many times I’ve looked at my shoes wondering what to do or say. I knew what I felt. Few of us want to create a scene or risk a relationship by actually exercising the courage of our convictions. Now, I’m too old, seen too much and believe too much in the idea of America to bite my tongue. By not confronting the kind of hate we have seen from the top of American politics for the last two years we encourage it. We condone by not condemning.

The old, enduring Republic we have – and I hope will continue to have – has been confronting over the last few days yet another moment that cries out for moral clarity. I applaud those who have spoken out against obvious racism and I wish many more had voiced objection, spoken moral truth to power. Those who where there and have said nothing are as guilty as I have been when I sat quietly while some joker popped off in a bar, in the office or at a family gathering. Bigots love a moral vacuum. Exposure, condemnation and rejection are the disinfectant racists cannot tolerate. You don’t defeat evil by pretending not to hear it or see it.

The New York Times has produced a useful summary of those who have spoken up at this moment of moral testing. Sadly, the list of those saying nothing is a great deal longer than the list of those who have.

There is no excusing the timid, ignorant, small and bigoted man who happens to occupy the office Lincoln once held. He is a product of his environment. For crying out loud his father marched in a Klan rally. His inherited wealth reeks of his white privilege, even as he fails to acknowledge his own immigrant story or that two of his three wives came here by choice. His entire campaign for the highest office in the land was built on a foundation of division and discord. He is so fundamentally lacking in self-awareness – or so overwhelmingly invested in continually appealing to the very worst among his followers – that he will never be different. We can bemoan that, but we need not accept it or act as if it does not matter. It does matter. Racism thrives in denial.

We can all say, loud and often – not in my country, not given all our history, not in this land we appropriated from those who really are the original Americans. No, it is not going to happen in this country built on the backs of slaves. Not in my country where immigrants – my ancestors and surely yours – did the crappy jobs, believed in the dream and saved and scrimped so that we might go to school, live in a decent house and afford health insurance.

Philip Kennicott, writing in the Washington Post, asks the right question about this moment of moral clarity. “What I want to know is how the men in the room with him reacted,” Kennicott wrote this week. “This is the dinner table test: When you are sitting and socializing with a bigot, what do you do when he reveals his bigotry? I’ve seen it happen, once, when I was a young man, and I learned an invaluable lesson. An older guest at a formal dinner said something blatantly anti-Semitic. I was shocked and laughed nervously. Another friend stared at his plate silently. Another excused himself and fled to the bathroom. And then there was the professor, an accomplished and erudite man, who paused for a moment, then slammed his fist on the table and said, ‘I will never listen to that kind of language, so either you will leave, or I will leave.’ The offender looked around the table, found no allies and left the gathering. I don’t know if he felt any shame upon expulsion.”

We know the man who brought us to our moment of clarity knows no shame. But what about those who were there and heard him, observed his body language, wondered if what they had just heard could possibly be in the heart and on the lips of the president of the United States?

There are issues that transcend politics, that speak to bigger, more important truths. The current occupant of the White House again forces us to confront a fundamental question of human existence: who are we and what do we want to be?

If we speak up now we are answering that question.

If we stay silent we answer as well.

 

Politics, Trump

The Open Secret…

Posted on by mjohnson

     The President of the United States is a deranged liar who surrounds himself with sycophants. He is also functionally illiterate and intellectually unsound. He is manifestly unfit for the job. Who knew? Everybody did.

 Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

—————

I am not inclined to read the new Michael Wolff blockbuster that purports to detail how utterly unfit for the presidency is Donald J. Trump. Why read the book? We’ve all been watching the play for nearly two years.

The fact that Wolff’s “revelations” have been widely described as an “open secret” among Washington reporters and members of Congress tells us a good deal about how perilously screwed up our politics have become. Virtually everyone knows the president of the United States is a dangerously unbalanced narcissist, hard pressed to control his instincts whether he is eating a second Big Mac or tweeting his daily insult.

Is anyone really surprised? No, of course not. Because we see it all with our own eyes every time we turn on the television. Trump has an attention span to match his tiny hands. He doesn’t read anything – ever. He can hardly string together a coherent thought. His grasp of the details of the most difficult job in the world are way, way beyond him. His grasp of history begins with his birth and ends with The Apprentice. And the president’s court enablers are a shameless collection of hacks, bootlickers and family members and, as is increasingly obvious, there is a lot of corruption in this crowd.

No one save Trump and his sleaziest current operative Stephen Miller – well, OK Sarah Sanders too, but she hardly counts since she has been appropriately cast as the Trumpian Court’s chief prevaricator – is really denying the essentials of the Wolff book. Quibble over the details, if you will, and bemoan Wolff’s own self-importance and his sloppy copy editing, what he writes still has the overwhelming stench of truth. We’ve all seen it for months. Who you gonna believe? Donald Trump or your lyin’ eyes?

Stephen Miller. Enough said.

The essential truth is this: Trump is not up to the job. He’s not even remotely intelligent in the way leaders must be. He lacks a shred of empathy and Trumpian self-awareness is as rare as a degree from his phony university. The man is a world-class con man who by virtue of a political fluke became president of the United States. To say that Trump is out of his depth is to say that Lincoln was a “political genius.” Neither label does either man justice.

The fact that our political process cannot provide the information and action to correct this disgusting and dangerous show is the real story here. Good for Michael Wolff, I guess, for making a bundle while pointing out the obvious.

Still, this mess – yes, it is a bigly one – does beg a few ongoing questions. I know it is difficult to sort out what really matters from the daily barrage of nonsense, so here goes.

There are increasingly serious questions concerning Trump’s cognitive decline and the fact that we have no realistic way to deal with that issue. A medical doctor, James Hamblin, recently wrote a piece every member of Congress – and the public – should read. Hamblin carefully avoided passing medical judgment on Trump’s mental state, but he did note several issues that raise serious questions.

For example, consider Trump’s practice of repeating and repeating and repeating the same point, while rarely articulating substantive – or coherent – thoughts:

Unfit at any speed.

“If Trump’s limited and hyperbolic speech were simply a calculated political move—he repeated the phrase ‘no collusion’ 16 times in the Times interview, which some pundits deemed an advertising technique—then we would also expect an occasional glimpse behind the curtain. In addition to repeating simplistic phrases to inundate the collective subconscious with narratives like “no collusion,” Trump would give at least a few interviews in which he strung together complex sentences, for example to make a case for why Americans should rest assured that there was no collusion.

Or there is this from James Fallows writing recently in The Atlantic: “We have something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: the more limited someone is in reality, the more talented the person imagines himself to be. Or, as David Dunning and Justin Kruger put it in the title of their original scientific-journal article, “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.”

Trump World has festered into a steamy swamp of tawdry, ludicrous craziness that keeps most of us – and the political press – on edge, all the time. It’s hard to see the forest for the crazy trees. The white nationalist joker Steve Bannon is the latest case in point.

Elevated first by Trump who made Bannon his chief campaign strategist, then brought into the White House where every D.C. reporter vied to be the one to see the chicken scratches on his “strategic” white board – remember this disheveled clown actually sat for a while on the National Security Council – then dismissed by Trump only to re-emerge as the political genius behind Roy Moore’s campaign in Alabama.

Trump and Bannon. Happier days: For them if not for the rest of us.

Having directly contributed to the loss of a safe Republican Senate seat by embracing a credibly accused child molester, Bannon returned to his click bait, conspiracy theory peddling “news” site to troll Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and preach the old populist gospel of white nationalism, protectionism and retreat on the world stage. Finally, Bannon gets, temporarily one assumes, his comeuppance thanks to Michael Wolff’s word processor.

But wait! Bannon has now, as the Washington phrase describes such things, “walked back” his criticism of Donald Trump, Jr. and kind of apologized. He did not, however, say he was misquoted by Wolff, but instead that he was really trashing a guy under indictment (Paul Manafort) as opposed to the president’s son who will soon be under indictment. For the record, Bannon did not “walk back” his portrayal of Trump he just changed his story in hopes of changing the story.

The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg said it perfectly. “Bannon is a common character in Washington: a megalomaniac who made the mistake of believing his own bullshit.” Anyone in politics for any length of time encounters characters like Bannon – full of themselves, full of BS, and totally devoid of accomplishment, other than, of course, self-aggrandizement. In a curious way, Trump and Bannon deserve each other: two classless, clueless “smartest guys in the room” who wouldn’t last fifteen minutes in a responsible corporate board room or in a serious political office.

And, yes, the D.C. press corps, which should be able to spot this kind of charlatan as far away as “K” Street, has been utterly complicit in Bannon’s rise and now fall and soon his resurrection. It is so completely telling that Bannon offered Trump his faux mea culpa about the Wolff book though the daily newsletter of Axios’ Mike Allen rather than using his own “news” organization. Allen is Washington’s prime example of an access journalist who values nothing more than being the transmission belt for the kind of B.S. Bannon and the White House dish daily. And like Trump, Bannon craves the attention of the establishment that he works so hard to dismiss as evil.

Prediction: And you heard it here first, Bannon will successfully patch things up with Trump. He has to.  And Mike Allen will be the first to report it. In order to survive Bannon needs to breathe the same oxygen Trump inhales. Any little slice of this absurdity is all the proof you need that the White House is, as Tennessee Senator Bob Corker said before he subsequently lost his nerve, “an adult day care center.”

Get someone to look at you like Paul Ryan looks at him.

So, nothing – nothing – you have read or heard or shook your head about over the last several days represents any shocking new surprise. There are no revelations here really. We’ve seen this level of incompetency, bizarreness, craziness and danger for months and months. And it will get worse.

There are only two questions left to ask: how badly will this end and why does anyone with an ounce of integrity or a thimble full of honor work in this carnival funhouse?

The answer to the second question can only be that power or proximity to power, status or the perception of status, and money or the prospect of making more money are powerful motivators. It may be a circus, but it least the clown suit fits.

But how to explain a Rex Tillerson, a H.R. McMaster, a John Kelly? Serious people, apparently, who one must conclude are just hanging on to keep this runaway train more or less on the tracks. Explaining Congress is easier: Unprincipled, unbridled opportunism is an old, old American political trait.

Still, imagine telling your grandkids: the highlight of our professional life was working in/with the Trump Administration! The grandkids will return the Christmas presents.

The answer to the first question is more difficult – how will this end? Instability breeds instability. Madness begets madness. The immediate future is more instability beset with more madness.

As Masha Gessen says in a New Yorker column, “A year in, the Trump Presidency remains unimaginable. To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the Commander-in-Chief would use Twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a ‘very stable genius,’ verges on the impossible.”

But, it has become possible. This entire tragic circus exists no matter how defiantly Congressional Republicans avert their eyes or White House aides or Cabinet secretaries abet the emperor with long ties, but no clothes. We are headed for the inevitable Constitutional crisis over Russia – yes, there will be collusion uncovered and money laundering and likely a good deal more – or, perhaps even sooner, we will be forced to confront Trump’s unfitness in some other way. It will happen.

My wish for the New Year: As long as we are going to have a Constitutional crisis let’s get it over with.

 

 

Income Inequality, Politics, Trump

The Careless People…

Posted on by mjohnson

        “They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

—————

The convergence of two monumental political events – a Democratic victory in a weird Senate election in Alabama, of all places, and the emergence of the remarkably cynical and damaging GOP tax bill – bring into stark focus the degenerate state of the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

In the Alabama election, the leader of the Republican Party made it clear that he was all in for a reliably accused child molester, while slandering the eventual Democratic winner for being “bad on crime.”  The guy who won the Alabama Senate seat, Doug Jones, is a former prosecutor who convicted the Ku Klux Klan murderers of five little girls in the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Doug Jones is bad on crime like Donald Trump is good on the facts.

While Trump touted the creepy Roy Moore – the New York Daily News called him “teen-loving Moore” – holding a rally, tweeting and recording robo calls, the rest of the Republican Party, with very few exceptions, sat on its duff, unable to rouse even mild indignation at such moral degeneracy.

As conservative commentator Charlie Sykes put it: “At every stage of the run-up to this special election, Republicans could have resisted, pushed back, or drawn lines, but their failure to do so led them inexorably to this moment: the defeat of an unreconstructed bigot and ignorant crank who had the full-throated backing of the president they have embraced and empowered.”

The Gilded Age revisited

To assert that the modern GOP – and the man-child heading it – lacks an intellectual, moral or ethical foundation is a little like observing that the décor at Mar a Lago is a bit overdone. The reality of where the new GOP and its supreme leader have taken the country – and increasingly the world – has become difficult to fathom, and that is a major part of our problem. There is so much turmoil, so much wrong, so much corruption and degradation – where to start?

As the country we once knew slips ever closer to authoritarian kleptocracy – and worse – the enablers of this increasingly dystopian nightmare pass tax cuts to enrich themselves and their donors and refuse to bestir themselves to offer even the most tepid condemnation of behavior that just months ago would have produced universal rejection.

We are caught in what the military and diplomatic historian Tom Ricks recently called the tragedy of a Trumpian America, where lying has become governance, where reckless ignorance masquerades as policy and where demagogues are unconstrained and therefore empowered. For the first time, Ricks says, and I agree, we fear for our country, a country were things are bad and all too likely to get much worse.

Ricks wrote recently in Foreign Policy, “People stuck inside tragedies often make the mistake of thinking they are nearing the end when they are only in Act I. And that is where I think we stand, still at the beginning of this long ride. All around us, the selfish and malevolent are thriving, flatterers are rising, and good people feel simply powerless.”

Let’s Cut Taxes for the Wealthy…

The GOP controlled Congress will pass a tax bill this week that violates almost everything the president said about taxes during the last campaign. His supporters, enablers and political functionaries are lapping it up. Lies have become policy.

Senator Orrin Hatch and Rep. Kevin Brady celebrate. Of course they do…

The tax legislation is not directed at the middle class, as Trump said it would be, but at corporations and the wealthiest among us. After saying the tax legislation won’t benefit him we now know it certainly will, likely to the tune of millions of dollars due to a last minute slight of hand that helps real estate investors. The president’s children benefit, too, of course. Fiddling with the estate tax made sure of that. This is the kind of self-dealing enrichment that we once might have condemned in a third-world country presided over by a tin horn dictator. Rather than preventing this type of corruption, the GOP is writing it into law. And our tin horn dictator, feared by timid Republican souls who don’t dare risk the wrath of his Twitter habit, daily corrupts a government he knows little about and cares about even less.

But, hey, the tax cutters are getting what they dream about. Cutting taxes is, after all, what Republicans do and damn the consequences.

For years we’ve heard Republican politicians – guys like Idaho Senator Mike Crapo, a very conservative, Harvard educated lawyer – take to the stump to howl about exploding annual deficits and warn against the dire consequences of a ballooning national debt. Back in 2011, Crapo said, “The single greatest issue facing the nation is the ever increasing federal deficit. Congress, and particularly the Senate, needs to engage fully on a course of bold and productive actions to end the debt crisis in America that is stifling the economy and stalling the fragile recovery.”

That was then. Now Crapo, who once endorsed the work of the Simpson-Bowles Commission to comprehensively fix tax and revenue problems, is embracing a tax bill that will do precisely what he has spent the last decade warning against. Various estimates say the GOP legislation will add a cool trillion or maybe two trillion to the debt. No remotely sane economist says, as Republican lawmakers do, that the tax cuts will pay for themselves.

Meanwhile, the debt ticker runs on Crapo’s website, while he regularly accumulates a political war chest courtesy of the people he really works for – high rollers in the financial services industry who handsomely reward his service on the Senate Finance and Budget Committees.

The conservative National Review generally praised the GOP tax handiwork, while ignoring the obvious self-deal in the legislation, but even the heirs of Bill Buckley had trouble with the debt issue. “Most Republicans say that the tax cut will generate so much extra growth that it will increase revenues,” the NR said in an editorial. “No economic model of the tax cut, not even any of the models produced by conservative economists, backs this claim. It is convenient, though, in letting Republicans offer tax cuts to various constituencies without having to impose any restraint on spending.”

Crapo, in perhaps the most secure Senate seat this side of Alabama, is surely going to get away with this breathtaking display of intellectual gymnastics now that deficits don’t matter again. Or perhaps we should just mark this type of intellectual rot as the perfect example of the school of “I can say and do whatever I want since alternative facts are all that matter in Trump’s America.” And, of course, “the base” – the folks who voted for Roy Moore – will believe the Fox News spin and all will be good.

GOP tax bill writers ignored the experts, ignored corporate CEO’s who said they would give their new tax breaks to investors rather than workers, and they ignored basic facts. Their legislation doesn’t simplify the tax code, doesn’t address vast income inequality, won’t jump-start the economy and won’t improve wages for middle class workers, but it will please the GOP donor class. Give Republicans credit: once they are bought they stay bought.

Congress or the Russian Duma? 

If the policy specifics of the tax legislation don’t give you pause then consider the process used to pass the legislation. In the not to distant past the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee would have produced separate proposals developed during long hours of hearings and committee mark up. The two houses of Congress would then act. There would be ample time for amendments and real debate and the differing versions of legislation would be hashed out in conference.

This process would have seen expert witnesses brought in to discuss issues like whether giving a tax cut to corporations currently sitting on trillions of dollars in cash would really do anything for the economy or for workers. Reducing income inequality, now at the worst level since the Great Depression, might have been discussed and policies incorporated into the legislation to provide a boon to middle class spending, which would really boost the economy. Factual information about how few Americans are impacted by reducing the estate tax might have been brought to light. Perhaps even one Republican would have expressed discomfort in passing legislation that would directly benefit the president and his family. Perhaps even one Republican would have said it would be appropriate to see a certain someone’s tax returns before voting.

None of that happened.

There were no hearings. The slippery Orrin Hatch slipped in sleazy provisions benefiting individual members of Congress and the president of the United States at the absolutely last minute. The conference committee met, but there was no debate or voting on a true conference report. That was all settled out of sight of public or press scrutiny. This isn’t legislating; it is how the Russian Duma makes “laws.”

It requires a willful suspension of common sense to undertake massive cut taxes, while unemployment is low and the economy is in pretty decent shape and while we continue to pile up enormous debt. Only a crackpot economic theory would support such idiocy. Welcome to Trumpian America.

In at least one important respect the Trump presidency has succeeded. The congenital liar has degraded common sense, common decency and common purpose. What a set of accomplishments. His is the tool kit of the authoritarians and his handy enablers are helping him not only enrich himself in the most flagrant manner, but to denigrate the whole public square. It would be shameful if it were not so frightening.

Trump didn’t start us down this path of fact free public policy, but his rants against “fake news” and the steady erosion of public ethics that have been the by-products of his consistently abnormal behavior have now succeeded in polluting an entire political class. It only took a year. That is why we are only in Act I of this tragedy. Or as Tom Ricks writes, “things can get far worse than we ever suspected, and end horribly.”

Fasten your seat belts: The worst is yet to come.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote about them in a novel in the 1920s. The careless people. They are now fully in charge and this is no fiction.

2016 Election, Russia, Trump

Up to Its Neck in Russians…

Posted on by mjohnson

       “Not everything done by Lenin was carefully conceived. In particular, he had little foresight about what he was doing when he set up the centralized one-party state. One of the great malignancies of the twentieth century was created more by off-the-cuff measures than by grandiose planning…Lenin eliminated concern for ethics. Lenin justified dictatorship and terror. Lenin applauded the political vanguard and the need for firm leadership. Lenin convinced his party that his Marxism was pure and that it embodied the only correct policies.”

                     Historian Robert Service, author of Lenin – A Biography

—————

One hundred years ago this month the world changed. Not for the better.

Lenin: The Revolutionary

In many ways the “revolution” that toppled the Russian Czar and ultimately led to the formation of what we used to call the Soviet Union was an unthinkable event in both Russia and in the rest of the world. Across the political spectrum, American politicians, with a few exceptions, recoiled at the thought of a Lenin, a Stalin or a Trotsky establishing the first communist state and not incidentally a bridgehead from which to export revolutionary political thought and action. The coming to power of the Bolsheviks was, in many ways, just as unthinkable in Mother Russia.

As Anne Applebaum, an insightful historian of all things Russian, pointed out in a recent Washington Post essay: “At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, most of the men who would become known to the world as the Bolsheviks had very little to show for their lives. They had been in and out of prison, constantly under police surveillance, rarely employed. Vladimir Lenin spent most of the decade preceding the revolution drifting between Krakow, Zurich and London. Joseph Stalin spent those years in the Caucasus, running protection rackets and robbing banks. Leon Trotsky had escaped from Siberian exile was to be found in Viennese coffee shops; when the revolution broke out, he was showing off his glittering brilliance at socialist meeting halls in New York.”

A few months later these losers of distinction were in power exercising a ruthless stranglehold on the population and eliminating every visage of what had been for a few months a fledgling democracy. Oh, and of course, they brutally eliminated their opponents.

At the heart of the “revolution” of one hundred years ago – Applebaum says it was more correctly a coup d’état – was, for sure, violence, but also audacious and persistent lying.

Leon Trotsky

“All through the spring and summer of 1917,” Applebaum writes, “Trotsky and Lenin repeatedly made promises that would never be kept. ‘Peace, Land, and Bread’?” The Bolshevik leaders lied about their own past and they lied about the scandalous deal Lenin struck with the Kaiser’s Germany that allowed him to return from exile to be in Petrograd when his moment came.

Putin and the Politics of Lying…

It was the birth moment of decades of lies, misdirection and tragedy that finally seemed to end with the dramatic break up of the Soviet Union in 1991. But, that conclusion may well have proven to be premature – or fatally incorrect – given the state of the Russian experience since Mikhail Gorbachev gave the world fleeting hope that the old Soviet empire might indeed enjoy a new birth of freedom. Vladimir Putin took care of that hope.

Putin, the one-time KGB operative, now the new Czar

The former KGB goon now stands astride a government as corrupt and venal as most anything Lenin could have dreamed up. Putin has also succeeded where so many of Lenin’s successors failed. He has gotten the United States and much of the West to question its own democratic exceptionalism, while helping advance a new narrative based on old Soviet tactics of constant misrepresentation, doing away with opponents, press manipulation and – that word again – steady, unremitting lying.

As a special counsel and several Congressional committees probe the level of Russian influence in the last election and quite potentially the active collaboration with Russian actors by a host of individuals in Donald J. Trump’s political orbit, we should remember some recent and not-so-recent history.

How far we have come, or better yet how far we have fallen.

During decades of Communist rule in the old Soviet Union, skepticism or outright hostility to the leaders in the Kremlin became an article of political faith for American political leaders. Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan were always wary and occasionally warlike in denouncing the dangers emanating from a non-democratic state ruled by greedy men consumed by their own lies. Stalin pioneered the Russian practice of simply erasing his opponents from history. Putin, his modern day successor, now controls a vast international propaganda network – it operates openly and brashly in the United States – that embeds the modern Kremlin line in your daily social media feed.

In the not too distant past most Americans who argued for some type of accommodation with the Soviet Union – think of Henry Wallace, a one-time vice president who saw his political career crumble under allegations of being “soft on the Reds” – were relegated to the political margins, their reputations tainted.

Skepticism of Russia Was Once Just Good Politics…

Entire political careers – Nixon, Joe McCarthy, Reagan, even JFK – were built around the belief that Soviet Russia presented an existential threat to the west and, in particular, to the United States. Few elections were lost from 1920 to 1990 by candidates who adroitly played this Russia card. The last real Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, was mocked for his prescient observation that Putin’s Russia continued to present the gravest kind of threat to American interests.

Young Congressman Richard M. Nixon hunts for Communists in the U.S. government

My how things have changed. With Trump in the White House his Republican Party appears to work every way from Sunday to cozy up to Putin, the new Russian Czar. On this level alone Putin’s classic disinformation campaign directed at western democracy has succeeded beyond Lenin’s wildest dreams.

As conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin observed recently, the Trump Administration is up to its neck in Russians. “We have never seen such a multiplicity of connections,” Rubin wrote, “to a hostile foreign power and lack of transparency in a presidential campaign or administration — nor have we ever had a campaign in which Russians interfered in such a widespread and deliberate manner.”

Up to Its Neck in Russians…

Consider just some of the news of the last several days:

A Trump campaign foreign policy advisor pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign and the details of his contacts continue to seep out.

Campaign manager Paul Manafort and his chief deputy were indicted for a variety of alleged illegal sins, including laundering Russian (or Ukrainian) money through a Russian-connected bank in Cyprus.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was found to have his own Russian connections – with members of Putin’s own family no less – thanks to the leak of a trove of offshore banking and corporate documents. It was reported earlier in the year that Ross had helped engineer deals with Russian oligarchs while the vice chairman of that interesting little Cypriot bank.

The comically inept Carter Page, another Trump campaign operative, appears destined to become the G. Gordon Liddy of the current Russian caper. (Liddy, for the post-Watergate generation, helped plan and carry out the break in of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in 1972. He was a conspiracy theorist and more than a bit odd. Liddy served nearly a year in prison for his Watergate role before becoming a rightwing radio talk show host.) Page’s recent testimony to a House committee marks this nutty Trump campaign character as either a fool or as a deeply implicated collaborator with the Russians, or perhaps both.

Facebook, Twitter and Google have recently testified about the extent – as far they know or are willing to admit – of Russian propaganda contaminating their technology platforms. It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that Russian agents accomplished a massive disinformation campaign designed to influence the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, while generally creating havoc in the American body politic.

Alt-right “news” sites such as the conspiracy fueled website Infowars actively helped peddle Putin’s propaganda. Since 2014 Infowars has republished more than 1,000 articles pulled directly from RT, the Kremlin funded “news” platform that operates openly in the U.S. Infowars, you may recall, peddled completely phony stories about refugee crimes in southern Idaho and stoked the “Pizzagate” garbage that gained substantial traction during the last presidential campaign.

The conservative Drudge Report website, the second most visited Internet site in the United States, has also repeatedly linked to stories that originated within the Russian propaganda universe. One headline posted at Drudge on November 7, 2016 – Election Day – simply said “Obama Encourages Illegals to Vote.” The story was total B.S. and totally manufactured by Putin’s RT.com lie factory.

Meanwhile the president of the United States continues to side with Vladimir Putin against the unanimous conclusion of the nation’s intelligence services on whether Russia meddled in his election.

“He says that very strongly,” Trump said in describing his conversations with Putin during a summit meeting in Vietnam, “he really seems to be insulted by it, and he says he didn’t do it. He is very, very strong in the fact that he didn’t do it. You have President Putin very strongly, vehemently, says he has nothing to do with that. Now, you are not going to get into an argument, you are going to start talking about Syria and the Ukraine.”

U.S. President Donald Trump, right, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin talk during the family photo session at the APEC Summit in Danang, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

For good measure Trump described the former directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, men who have testified under oath about Russian interference, as “political hacks.” As The Atlantic’s David Frum notes, “These are not the actions of an innocent man, however vain, stubborn, or uniformed.”

Back to Anne Applebaum, the Russian scholar. “Remember: At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, most of the men who later became known to the world as the Bolsheviks were conspirators and fantasists on the margins of society,” she wrote recently. “By the end of the year, they ran Russia. Fringe figures and eccentric movements cannot be counted out. If a system becomes weak enough and the opposition divided enough, if the ruling order is corrupt enough and people are angry enough, extremists can suddenly step into the center, where no one expects them. And after that it can take decades to undo the damage. We have been shocked too many times. Our imaginations need to expand to include the possibilities of such monsters and monstrosities. We were not adequately prepared.”

Who You Gonna Believe…

And, of course, we wait with trepidation to discover if the president of the United States, a man woefully ignorant of history and consumed by ego was himself an active Russian collaborator, an ignorant dupe, a greedy businessman or, as seems increasingly likely, all of the above.

As Chico Marx – no relation to Karl, but Groucho’s brother – once said, “who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes.”

Putin has already won a great victory in the West by using disinformation to fuel deep doubts about American institutions and the fundamentals of a democracy, particularly a free press. His victory has advanced the interests a perverted and dangerous 21st Century version of the kind of tyrannical state that Lenin set out to create a century ago, a place were truth and reason are turned upside down.

The questions for us a year into the Trump presidency is whether Putin will continue to get away with sabotaging American democracy or whether American institutions, including what remains of the political party Trump has hijacked, can end the corruption and begin to roll back the damage already done.

Guns, Politics

American Carnage…

Posted on by mjohnson

   “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” 

Donald J. Trump Inaugural Speech, 2017

———-

     “We trust what we know in our hearts to be right,” he said. “We trust our freedom. In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want.” 

Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association.

—————

The American politicians who enjoy support from the National Rifle Association (NRA) are not bad people – well, at least most are not bad people – but they are scared. Scared of the gun lobby, scared of their constituents, scared to confront the reality that the types of guns that would not be out of place on an Afghan battlefield have no place in a Las Vegas high rise hotel.

Fear – unbridled, unreasoning fear of unreasonable political forces – is a very, very powerful thing. The NRA has made fear a lucrative business and arguably the most powerful lobby in the country.

The aftermath of the carnage

Yet I suspect in the wake of the latest horrific mass murder, in which the gunman used a modified automatic weapon, there is also something else at play with those politicians who have sold their souls to the NRA. They are embarrassed; embarrassed by the immorality of their nation – alone in the world by the way – that tolerates frequent mass murder and catastrophic injury by guns.

As the Washington Post noted in a gruesome story about the gun shot injuries suffered by the victims of the Las Vegas massacre: “Gun deaths are this nation’s third-leading cause of injury-related fatalities, with the most recent data showing that firearms accounted for more than 36,200 deaths in 2015. Over a nine-year period, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 971,000 people were hurt or killed by firearms in the United States — with a just-released study finding that such injuries cost nearly $25 billion in hospital emergency and inpatient care from 2006 to 2014.”

Imagine being a member of Congress whose only response to the deaths of 59 fellow Americans and the horrible injuries to hundreds more is to say, as South Dakota Senator John Thune said: “I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”

President Trump addresses members of the National Rifle Association during the 2016 campaign REUTERS/John Sommers II – RTSF85S

No other aspect of American political life, no other amendment to the Constitution is as off-limits to debate, reflection or reform as the gun amendment – The Second Amendment. The NRA and its wholly owned minions in Congress and the White House – the NRA spent $30,000,000 to elect Donald Trump and $27 million to support GOP senators who vote with the organization – remind me of the pre-Civil War defenders of American slavery. For years prior to the unraveling of the nation due to the Civil War a “gag rule” prohibiting talk about slavery was in effect in the House of Representatives. The rule, instituted in 1835 decreed that “all petitions, memorials, or resolutions regarding slavery should automatically be tabled and that no further action be taken upon them.”

The NRA’s gun restriction “gag rule,” enforced through a massive political war chest and an ability at a moment’s notice to mobilize a grassroots army of gun right fanatics, now prohibits all but the most cursory discussion of the national disease of gun violence.

As Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce noted this week: “We hear serious arguments about all the other parts of the Bill of Rights: that the First Amendment has limits on what T-shirts high-school students (“Bong Hits 4 Jesus!”) can wear; that the Fourth Amendment has limits that allow wiretaps without warrants; that the Fifth Amendment has limits that allow drug-testing without cause; that the Sixth Amendment has limits that allows the states to poison convicts to death. But only with the Second Amendment do we hear the argument that the only tolerable limit on its exercise is that there are no limits. Only with the Second Amendment do we hear that the price of freedom is the occasional Stephen Paddock, locked away in his own madness on the 32nd floor of a luxury hotel and casino, deciding coolly whose brains he will blow out next a few blocks away in the 273rd such unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment rights this year.”

The NRA has largely succeed through propaganda, political intimidation and encouragement of social division – the organization regularly promotes conspiracy theories about the inevitable need for a gun toting population to rise up against an authoritarian government – to regularize the murder of little children in classrooms, movie fans at a cineplex, church goers in a sanctuary, people at a nightclub and music fans at an outdoor concert.

Guns, guns, guns…

In the aftermath of the worst mass murder in modern American history the NRA appears ready to entertain a tiny, tiny tweak of gun laws by endorsing a move to regulate so called “bump stocks” of the type that turned the Las Vegas shooter’s guns into fully automatic weapons. This would constitute the most modest step away from the NRA’s absolutist doctrine, but perhaps it is an indicator that the gun lobby can read the polls as well as the rest of us.

Most Congressional Republicans have willingly embraced the Faustian bargain that demands unflinching support for an incompetent, dangerous president. In the glaring light of the post-Las Vegas massacre it remains all too clear that the NRA, through fear and intimidation, has succeed in creating another awful bargain for the GOP.

As my friend Bob Mann wrote recently in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “The NRA has persuaded its members and many politicians that nothing can be done about mass killings. Forget the other tragedies and calamities we have addressed. Stopping gun violence, it seems, is an impossible feat for a great nation that eradicated polio and put men on the moon.

“As someone observed on Twitter the other day after a gunman in Las Vegas murdered 59 people and wounded another 527: ‘American can-do vanishes when the @NRA check arrives.'”

In the beating heart of every politician, well almost every politician, is something most of us live with every day – a conscience. In the privacy of their conscience – in their hearts – it must be a daily embarrassment for these people to repeatedly make excuses for the inexcusable.

Books, Politics, Trump

Amusing Ourselves to Death…

Posted on by mjohnson

     “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

————

I have rarely – as in never before – thought of the televised Emmy award show and at the very same moment also reflected on Aldous Huxley’s 85-year old novel Brave New World.

Sean Spicer, yes that Sean Spicer, provided the connecting tissue between the glitz, phony seriousness and absurdity of the Emmy’s and the stunning relevance of a book written when Herbert Hoover was in the White House.

Spicer, the truth challenged former White House press secretary who shamed himself with six month’s worth of daily prevarications from behind the White House podium before finally resigning when The Donald brought The Mooch into the White House, was the talk of this year’s Emmy show.

How far, how very far, we have fallen.

Spicer, as everyone on the planet no doubt has seen by now, made a surprise appearance at the top of the award show pushing his podium on stage. It was all part of an elaborate inside joke, the kind that both Washington, D.C. insiders and celebrity A-listers find so irresistible. (Politics is show business for ugly people, as they say.)

Spicy at the Emmy Awards

Spicy was, it was pointed out, poking fun at himself from behind the same kind of moveable podium that Melissa McCarthy and Saturday Night Live used to make him, a political hack in service to a political disaster, into a national celebrity. By delivering a slight variation on his lie about the size of Trump’s inaugural day crowd and applying it to the Emmy broadcast, Spicer was apparently hoping that poking fun at his lying would remove the stink of his White House tenure. It was as if he were hoping that joking about being a lying joker would be as good as a confession before Saturday Mass.

Melissa McCarthy does Spicer

As Mark Leibovich wrote in the Times, Spicer “for all his professional sins, achieved something far more pertinent to the current environment: In the space of barely half a year, he became the most famous White House press secretary in history, hands down. After a while, the celebrity itself becomes the thing. Spicer’s embattled narrative became its own subplot in the greater Trump reality show. How long could he last? How much could he take? How low would he go? People tuned in to watch his briefings in record numbers.”

Yet, now a small time political operator who made White House “alternative facts” the new normal has a visiting fellow gig at Harvard and a seat next to Jimmy Kimmel on late night television. And he’s a “star” posing for photos with complete strangers and lining up speaking engagements like someone who might have something important to say. He doesn’t.

Spicer is alive and well on national TV and on the lecture circuit even if he is not yet quite settled into a well padded sinecure on cable TV. None of this is because he has done anything significant or great and not because he’s a thoughtful fellow (who just happened to lie and bluff his way to the top of the Trump heap), but simply because he’s now considered amusing.

Spicy is our living proof that Neil Postman’s seminal 1985 book – Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business – has become the handbook for our times.

Postman, who died in 2003, was a professor at New York University and perhaps our most authoritative analyst of the intersection where modern communication collides with culture and politics. Our great national reality show has prompted a wide revisiting of Postman’s prescient work, to read Amusing Ourselves to Death in the Age of Trump is to come face-to-face with the perilous nature of our times.

Neil Postman

Postman’s great subject thirty years ago was television and its role in shaping and diminishing American life. His 1985 dissection and critique of the vast wasteland of the blinking tube amazingly applies perhaps even more to our present Facebook/Internet-centric age. Television remains a huge force in modern lives, but the new sinister force that daily wads up truth and sends it to the trash lurks not in the corner of our living rooms, but on our laptops, smart phones and tablets. Spicer and his former boss remind us daily – hell, minute by minute – that distraction, diversion and decidedly fake news are always just a click away.

”When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” Postman wrote in the 1980s, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” This is where we are, my friends, starring down the national vaudeville act that threatens everything from the rule of law to the law of common sense.

Neil Postman didn’t really predict that America in the second decade of the 21st Century would place a faux billionaire whose real claim to fame was hosting a reality television show in the most important job in the world, but he would not have been surprised. He predicted the enthusiastic embrace of ignorance that inserted Donald Trump into a role that he is demonstrably unfit to manage let alone master.

Postman, predicting our appetite for stupid over substance, would not have been surprised that Trump actually declined to fire Sean Spicer earlier this year because the guy “gets great ratings.” Postman would not have been shocked that the president of the United States began his Tuesday by delivering a juvenile and disjointed rant before the United Nations – praised by his “base,” of course – then ended Tuesday with a tweet bemoaning the poor ratings for the aforementioned Emmy awards show.

My pal Roger Plothow, a newspaper publisher who is actually trying to do something about our appalling lack of media literacy – he visits schools and talks about real news to anyone who will listen – is as worried as I am about the sewer we are swimming in.

“The fundamental inability of people to differentiate fact from fiction has always been a critical problem,” Plothow wrote recently. “The percentage of any population with highly developed critical thinking skills has probably always been low. When technology allows the spread of ‘alternative facts,’ and altered or invented ‘photographs,’ and it makes possible the viral proliferation of sources that intentionally spread fiction, the stakes are magnified beyond even Postman’s imagining. It creates a circumstance in which a man can be so convinced that a presidential candidate is operating a child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria that he appears at the restaurant armed and ready to act. Amusements are so readily available that families sitting at a restaurant table may be more engaged with their smart phones than with each other. Taken separately, these are troubling. In aggregate, Postman would consider these circumstances a grave danger to our very survival.”

Trump’s great triumph was not his improbable and unprecedented winning of the White House (while losing the popular vote) it is rather the success he has had in destroying objective truth among a significant number of Americans. And, of course, the president has succeeded in replacing facts and most all political norms with chants of “lock her up” and “Make America Great Again.” He can call for terminating the internationally supported Iranian nuclear agreement without ever really grappling with the substance of the deal or what might replace it. He lobs Twitter barbs at North Korea’s “rocket man” with no apparent attention to the real world dangers that bombastic miscalculation might have on literally millions of people.

Sean Spicer, a small man with a small brain always so obviously on display is just one of a thousand exhibits in Trump Museum of Mendacity. The president of the United States lies about everything and trivializes all things. The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale has been keeping track and records 588 lies (and counting) of varying seriousness since January. Meanwhile the Trump “base” and Republicans in Congress, most of whom really do know better, just keep smiling, amusing themselves en-route to the mid-terms.

Trump Tweets a short, fake video where he appears to drive a golf ball into Hillary Clinton’s back. He brags that the economy has never been stronger. He boasts that he has had the most productive start of any president, ever – period. The Russian election interference is “fake news” and, oh yes, his opponent last year is the “crooked” one.

It is all a show, a roiling, distracting, disgusting show of trivia and piffle, a show that Neil Postman, God rest his soul, forecast a generation ago. These smiling idiots, Postman warned, will destroy the very nature of democratic culture, which brings me back to Huxley.

Postman’s book is in some ways an analysis of the two great 20th Century dystopian novels that dealt with our communication culture – George Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932. Postman correctly concluded that while Orwell’s book was supremely interesting Huxley’s was spot on correct.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one,” Postman wrote. “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

Andrew Postman, the professor’s son, wrote recently in The Guardian about the  renewed interest in his father’s thinking about our willingness to replace relevant reality with phony amusement. “While fake news has been with us as long as there have been agendas, and from both sides of the political aisle, we’re now witnessing – thanks to Breitbart News, Infowars and perpetuation of myths like the one questioning Barack Obama’s origins – a sort of distillation, a fine-tuning,” Andrew Postman wrote.

Postman continues: “’An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,’” my father wrote. ‘Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?

“I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did not. He saw his job as identifying a serious, under-addressed problem, then asking a set of important questions about the problem. He knew it would be hard to find an easy answer to the damages wrought by ‘technopoly.’ It was a systemic problem, one baked as much into our individual psyches as into our culture.”

There is no easy solution to a political culture rotting in real time. Obviously, as my publisher friend Roger Plothow has shown, we must begin to foster a more media literate citizenry. This starts early with education and must include a genuine recommitment to education in the humanities, particularly courses in basic civics and American history. We all need to burst out of our bubbles and be willing to confront information – and facts – that we find uncomfortable and at odds with our own well-baked views. And we must engage, all of us, in citizenship. Put the country first. Think and behave with inclusion in mind rather than tribalism. In other words, act like a citizen who deserves a place in a society that was created around the ideal that all are created equal.

And here is another idea. Read. Read Huxley and Orwell and Postman and read Timothy Snyder’s marvelous and chilling little book On Tyranny, a call to arms for our age where the unimportant has trumped the vital.

Snyder, a Yale historian who specializes in European history, reminds us in his tiny and profound book that 20th Century history holds great lessons for our time. “Believe in truth,” Snyder writes. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then it is all spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

Failure of the world’s most important and enduring experiment in democracy is not a laughing matter, yet we confront the very real possibility that we are permitting the essential fact-based, serious work of citizenship to be perverted simply because we don’t care enough to keep from being amused to death.

Sean Spicer doesn’t matter. He really doesn’t. What he represents matters a very great deal.