More Thoughts on the Comey Firing

It's extremely difficult for The Hot Screen to believe that President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and the subsequent parade of contradictory explanations — including some proferred by his staff and later contradicted by Trump himself — have not opened up a world of permanent hurt for the president.  As noted in our last post, Donald Trump himself said in an interview with NBC News that the investigation of Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion between that country and his own campaign, was on his mind when he fired Comey.

Whether or not this admission meets the legal definition of obstruction of justice, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that Trump has put his personal agenda ahead of the nation’s interest in determining the extent of interference by a foreign power in the 2016 presidential election.  From other remarks made in the interview, Trump doesn’t seem able to separate the idea of an investigation into Russian interference from the inquiry into possible collusion between his campaign and the Russians.  The two are obviously linked; but he seems to see both as a threat to him, when in fact only one of those lines of inquiry really is; even if it were somehow determined that it was only through Russian interference that he was elected president, it’s all but impossible to see how this could lead to the results of the election somehow being set aside — there’s just no mechanism for that.  Of course, it would weaken the country’s sense of his legitimacy, and this may be Trump's larger fear — but when weighed against the integrity of our electoral process and our democracy itself, this personal cost must be counted as mere peanuts, and his inability to see this as disqualifying for a chief executive.

But the actual firing of Comey has now expanded to invoke a far larger constellation of related words and events, as reporting on this decision and the relationship between Trump and Comey continues to turn up new information.  There is the dinner the two had, at which Trump reportedly asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to Trump, and at which Trump claims Comey asked Trump to keep him on the job.  There are Trump’s repeated statements that Comey assured him that the president himself is not under investigation — if false, this is another pernicious lie by Trump, and if true, it raises the damaging issue of inappropriate inquiries by Trump.

And of course, as a sort of piece de resistance, cherry-on-top-of-the-whole-shit-sandwich, there is Trump’s amazing tweet that “James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”  We all know at this point that the Trump administration is, among other things, a grotesquely dirty snowball of accumulating outrages and violations of our political norms — but a more or less overt threat against a former FBI director really takes the cake!  Part of the wonder is how Trump’s threat so badly backfires on himself, in simultaneously invoking shades of Richard Nixon and all but calling Comey’s bluff by suggesting Comey has more to lose than he does — considering that Trump has already done his worst against Comey, firing him in humiliating fashion, the threat seems particularly reckless and somewhat power-mad.

One major deciding factor in how things play out in the coming days and weeks, and how quickly, will be whether substantial numbers of Republican representatives and senators begin to speak out against the president.  The evidence so far is not encouraging.  And with the Comey firing, continued Republican support of the president means that the party as a whole is further committing itself to a lawless, anti-democratic presidency in a way that is without precedent in our history.  Some are pointing to how Republicans who turned on Nixon during the Watergate crisis were crucial to forcing him out of office, but there are major differences between the dynamics then and now.  The Republicans were in the minority in both houses at the time; the Democrats were in fact in the midst of a decades-long dominance of the House of Representatives.  The pendulum has swung the other way in our time, and the Republicans now hold the Senate and House.

Whereas jettisoning Nixon could be seen as a way to ensure the Republicans were not permanently tainted by his corruption, the Republicans now find themselves at a precarious pinnacle of power, one they are loathe to abandon now that they’ve achieved it.  Republican politicians are aware that though they hold the reins, they are, and are increasingly likely to remain, a minority party in terms of raw voter numbers.  Hilary Clinton, after all, won the election by millions more votes than Donald Trump, and in recent elections Democratic senators and representatives have received more votes than the Republicans, even if this has not always resulted in control of the legislature.  In short, as this guy and others have argued, the Republicans have major incentives, based on issues of democratic legitimacy that echo Trump’s own, to continue to defend Trump.  And the longer they do, and the more deeply implicated they become, the more of a perverse incentive they’ll have to keep supporting him, as a way to keep at bay a backlash and the inevitable weakening of Republican power should Trump be forced out of office.

Everything we have seen about Trump points to one thing: his outrages will only get worse.  This hellish elevator of a presidency has only one direction - down - and one speed - faster and faster.  And so we end with this quote from Laurence Tribe, who is interviewed this week at Slate about Trump's offenses against our country and constitution: “[D]eceiving the American public on matters directly pertinent to the institutions and processes of government, taking advantage of one’s high federal office to give one’s lies both cover and credibility, is certainly a grave abuse of executive power — and is indeed the essence of the unenumerated offenses the Framers clearly contemplated by the open-ended phrase, “high crimes and misdemeanors."  Even if lying to and/or misleading the public — as opposed to deceiving official bodies under oath — is not and could not be made a civil offense, that by no means implies that such a pattern of deliberate deceit is irrelevant to the ultimate inquiry of whether one has forfeited the public trust that alone entitles one to retain a position of power in the United States government.”

Discuss.

The President Gropes His Way Toward Free Fall

The truth of the point made in this post at Talking Points Memo has been hovering out there for all to see these past few days, colored in by much circumstantial evidence, and now President Trump has admitted as much in an interview today: he fired Comey because Trump doesn't like the Russia inquiry.  This doesn't mean there weren't other motivations behind the termination — Trump seems particularly aggrieved by Comey's suggestions that the FBI director's maneuvers around Hilary Clinton's emails might have affected the election in Trump's favor (thus removing some of the glory of Trump's glorious victory) — and it also doesn't prove that Trump himself has something to hide.  But for purposes of establishing a public record of his lawlessness, it's enough that he's interfering with such a crucial investigation — an investigation that, at its heart, has to do with the possible subversion of our democracy by the Russian government.  To interfere in such an investigation, to preemptively decide single-handedly that there's nothing to see here, even if the minimal explanation is that Trump is tired of his agenda being sidetracked by Russia talk, is deranged and contemptible behavior when the person doing the interfering is the president of the United States.

Is Trump Going Full Nixon On Us, So Soon?

Shit just got realer.

President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey is a shocking and fast-moving story; it’s less than a day old at this point.  So, first, a general observation, in the name of orienting ourselves, and providing a dose of context (if not necessarily reassuring context): it’s almost uncanny how the Trump administration is proceeding along the lines of incompetence and authoritarian threat that his opponents during the election warned about.  Who would have thought that Trump would fire the FBI director months into office, on grounds that are obviously a lie, positioning himself to appoint an ally into this extremely powerful law enforcement role?  As shocking as it is, it’s also not surprising for many people, given what we observed about the man during the endless 2016 campaign.

The most salient fact is that Comey was in charge of an investigation into whether Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to support Trump’s election as president of the United States; in firing Comey, Trump has directly interfered with this investigation.  The Trump administration, not surprisingly, does not want us to see the bigger context, and instead is focusing on a specific, narrow storyline about Comey’s firing.  A big part of the pushback is to defer to the memos Trump’s termination letter to Comey cited in support of the firing: these memos, written by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, essentially make the case for why Comey should not be the FBI Director.  But as is being furiously unpacked here and elsewhere, the reasons they provide don’t make sense.

The incoherence starts with the fact that the stated reasons contradict Trump’s own prior praise for Comey.  The memo from Rosenstein criticizes Comey’s disparagement of Clinton when announcing that no charges would be brought against her in the email investigation, as well as Comey’s announcement of re-opening the Clinton investigation days before the election.  As we can all recall, both of these actions by Comey were wildly celebrated and amplified by Trump, who used them to further his argument that Hilary Clinton was a criminal who should be locked up.  The idea that these are now firing offenses for a Donald Trump concerned with the FBI’s image and objectivity requires us all to forget recent history.

Then there’s Trump’s actual letter to Comey, which contains a remarkable non sequitur that may turn out to be something of a smoking gun.  Apropos of nothing, Trump writes, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau” [emphasis added].  This feels very much like Trump trying to lodge into the public record what Comey allegedly told him, as a way of asserting his innocence regarding such investigations, as well as trying to provide cover against suspicions that personal animus led Trump to fire Comey — after all, Trump is grateful to Comey!

But the lack of context is eye-catching, and decisively so when the investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign is the number one suspect for why Trump fired Comey.  Trump’s line becomes more significant still when basic logic says that the ongoing investigation might still implicate Donald Trump, even if he is not currently under investigation.  This adds to the overall circumstantial sense that Trump is attempting to freeze the Russia investigation while he still can, before anything leads back to him.  Finally, the logic of its inclusion falters under the fact that Trump is essentially firing Comey for his incompetence: if Comey can’t be trusted to lead the FBI, how can Trump trust his comments about the president not being under investigation?

There have been reports that Donald Trump decided on firing Comey a week ago, at which point he set his team at finding a rationale to fire him.  This is another way of saying that Trump has a reason to fire Comey that he does not want to share publicly.  The Russia investigation is the most probable one: but even if it’s not, the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t want to disclose his real motivation for firing Comey, and is covering it with a lie, is very disturbing.  At any rate, this story from Politico provides more circumstantial evidence that Trump’s concerns about the Russia investigation were the prime motivator. 

Trump is acting like a cornered animal; he has something to hide, and he’s not afraid to aggrandize his own power in order to protect himself.  As we are reminded here, Trump sees the government as an extension of himself — he even sent his long-time personal bodyguard to hand-deliver Comey’s termination letter, a touch that is both creepy and telling of how Trump conceived of this firing in deeply personal terms.  The Republican Party has so far acted as his co-conspirator, and it is naive to think that they will suddenly back down, when that means opening up the president to even greater scrutiny, with impeachment or resignation as possible outcomes.  But if Trump thinks he can get away with this transparently self-serving firing, what’s to stop him from setting his sights even higher, such as appointing a dedicated ally in the traditionally non-partisan role of FBI director?

And breaking just now — a story from the New York Times that only days ago, Comey asked for an expansion of the Russia investigation.  Who did he ask, you wonder?  Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG who just helped fire him.  

If You Want to Make a Political Satire Omelette, You’re Going to Have to Break a Few Cock Holster Jokes

In perusing the headlines of this past week, The Hot Screen has descried an unholy trinity of news stories that remind us of the importance of and ever-present battle for free speech rights.  Getting the most play is Stephen Colbert’s joke on “The Late Show” that Donald Trump’s mouth is Vladimir Putin’s “cock holster” — a line that’s received fire from both Trump supporters and those who say the line was homophobic.  The Federal Communications Commission has received complaints, and is looking into whether the material was “indecent” or “profane”; if it finds this was the case, CBS may be hit with fines.

As is all but inevitable when television is involved, vital context has been lost here, especially pernicious in a situation like this when context is everythingGo ahead and listen to Colbert's entire monologue, and then consider whether it’s at all possible or even rational to attempt to separate criticism of this single line from the rest of the bit.  The first part intertwines Colbert’s mockery of Donald Trump with excerpts from recent interview of the president; Trump manufactures the rope with which Colbert proceeds to hang him.  The president sounds like an idiot and a liar based on his own words, with Colbert hilariously savaging the ignorance and lies.  Colbert shows the clip of the end of one of the interviews, in which Trump dismisses CBS's "Face the Nation" journalist John Dickerson when the president doesn’t want to answer a question about Trump’s accusations that President Obama had him wiretapped.  We have seen such Trumpian behavior before, but The Hot Screen still found it somewhat shocking; like a squid squirting ink to escape danger, Trump emits a cloud of bluster, then scuttles behind his presidential desk like that same squid hiding behind a coral reef.  The president then proceeds to shuffle through and read the papers on his desk, like a bad impersonation of a busy businessman, in an obvious continuation of that same bluster.

But then Colbert reveals that even this was not the worst moment that journalist Dickerson had to endure, running a clip in which Trump sneers that he calls Dickerson’s show “Deface the Nation.”  Dickerson may be held back by his personal dignity and journalistic ethos from responding, but Colbert, says Colbert, is not.  He then unleashes a paint-blisterer of a tirade against Donald Trump, as if what came before had only been a warm-up, though we also realize that the mockery up to now has also been driven by his outrage over the treatment of Dickerson.  And it is this context of a self-consciously delivered verbal beatdown of the president that the “cock holster” line is delivered.

The unwitting meta-joke/deadly serious point that surrounds the FCC investigation of whether Colbert’s words were “indecent” or “profane” is that Colbert resorted to such language in his effort to communicate the idea that Donald Trump’s actions are indisputably both indecent and profane, that this dunce’s presidency is an obscenity.  Colbert used foul language because that’s what he judged necessary to communicate the reality of a foul politics.  It’s a testament to his wit that this was the only point he crossed an obvious linguistic line; but it’s also clear that he knew the importance of hitting Trump hard with shocking and graphic language.  It’s not the job of comedians not to go too far; in fact, going too far is an occupational hazard and occasional necessity.  But it IS their job to try to tell the truth of things while making us laugh.  

In a neat bookend to the Colbert kerfluffle, a protestor at Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing in January has been convicted of. . . laughing at Jeff Sessions.  Desiree Fairooz guffawed after Senator Richard Shelby praised Sessions’ “extensive record of treating all Americans equally under the law”; now Fairooz has been convicted of unlawful conduct for disturbing the proceedings, though she contends she only emitted a “reflexive noise.”  Whether or not this charge was technically correct, the idea of convicting someone for laughing at a politician is, well, laughable.  This is a judgment that only a totalitarian would love.

And finally, the story completing the sad anti-free speech absurdity of the last week: The Republic of Ireland is investigating whether comedian and actor Stephen Fry blasphemed when he responded to an interview question in 2015 about what he’d say to God if he had the chance.  Fry faces possible charges under a law passed in 2009, although it sounds like such charges are unlikely.

His answer included the following lines: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery? It's not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"  Far be it from us to judge Ireland’s particular mix of religion and free speech, but clearly Fry raised the most basic of theological questions — why is there evil in the world? — for which punishment seems nonsensical.

Along with the cases of Colbert and Fairooz, we are seeing attempts to limit speech allegedly to protect the sanctity of some public good — television broadcasting in the case of Colbert, a Congressional proceeding in the case of Fairooz, the beliefs of the Catholic Church in the case of Fry — when in fact the larger purpose is to limit challenges to the prerogatives of the powerful to propagate a world view of their choice.  This trio of heavy-handed anti-free speech incidents may be only incidentally linked, but they remind us that claims of indecent, inappropriate, or blasphemous language often serve to obscure a reality that the powerful would rather keep unexamined.

2017 is shaping up to be a hell of a year for our sense of humor.

Forget About Trump’s First Hundred Days: It’s Time to Mess With Texas (Politics)!

For an antidote to premature sighs of relief that we’ve weathered the worst of Trump and the larger populist wave hitting the Western world, you couldn’t do much better than catching up on Andrew O’Hehir’s recent political columns over at Salon.com.  This week’s piece points up the way in which the Marine Le Pen versus Emmanuel Macron run-off may well only prolong, not resolve, whatever reckoning French politics is heading towards, and how mainstream commentators repeatedly seize on evidence that any apparent ruptures in Western politics are going to be healed, lickety-split.   

Among other things, O’Hehir argues that establishment politicians and media have a tendency to believe the political-economic system is fundamentally sound and self-correcting, and work to promote this idea in a hundred ways large and small; an underlying assumption is that it is also fair, insofar as the current arrangements should continue without major changes.  The underlying point he makes, not so explicitly, is that ordinary citizens must inevitably struggle against a myopic world of purported expertise that in some ways is inherently incapable of admitting the significance of very real changes and conflicts in our world.  For O’Hehir, these issues of perception are front and center today as the world enters what he considers to be an age of revolution around political and economic systems, with an outcome still very much to be determined.

As we pass the 100-day point of the Trump presidency, I’ve got two contradictory feelings that correlate intriguingly with O’Hehir’s observations.  On the one hand, I’m gratified that resistance to Trump has been so strong, and that our constitutional system has slowed down initiatives like the Muslim ban: hey man, our system works!  No dictatorships or religious tests in this country, buddy!  On the other hand, as Trump embraces a more straightforward plutocratic, self-dealing agenda, sets course toward voter suppression and a hands-off approach to police violence, proposes tax “reform” that will drive income inequality to new, unfathomable extremes, and dismantles a bare-bones federal effort to fight global warming, there are signs that the political system and media coverage are beginning to relax into familiar territory; it is as if the message is, “Yes, Trump is crazy, but the system has constrained him; and now we are back in the charted world, of tax plans, health care, and the like.”

But even if accepting for the moment that the particular danger represented by the personal derangements of Trump has passed (which I don’t), the world of “regular” politics and economics is where the real emergency ultimately lies: our failures as a polity and a society are what gave rise to this wrecking ball of a presidency in the first place.  Trump, after all, was elected on a promise to break or reform a system that many people, particularly the working class, correctly see as no longer working for them.  So if Donald Trump now pursues policies that will worsen those problems, one possible outcome is that he’s laying the groundwork for worse Trumps to come.

The most dangerous tendency of the Democrats right now is to believe that all they have to do is let Trump and the Republicans keep shooting themselves in the foot, and to sit back without a full agenda of opposition.  By keeping themselves above the fray, their larger message is that the overall economic and political arrangements are acceptable, and all they have to do is swoop in at some point and tinker at the edges.  In a way, Donald Trump is a godsend for cautious Democratic politicians; they can oppose Trump without having to deal with the real problems that helped him come to power.

While many Democrats continue to believe that Trump and the Republicans’ self-destructive tendencies will sweep them back to power, the good news is that the bigger story is the ongoing battle in the Democratic Party over the issues that I’ve been talking about: whether the party will be driven by grassroots concerns, or continue to be an entity of the status quo.  And on this note, I want to flag this article by Andrew Cockburn, entitled “Texas Is the Future,” that reports on some news that most people are probably not aware of: that while much of progressive America cried and/or drank itself to sleep last November 8th, Democratic voters in Houston and other parts of Texas were cheering victories in various local races.

For those of us who believe that the answer to our political and economic problems is always more democracy — democracy defined as civic engagement, education, economic opportunity, and fighting for values like dignity, fairness, and fair wages — what progressives have been accomplishing in Texas comes like a welcome glass of cold sarsaparilla on a hot summer day.  In the face of Democratic electoral annihilation since the 1990’s, progressive organizers in Texas, including members of the Texas Organizing Project, have gone back to the basics.  They’ve identified crucial issues that harm or hold back working class voters and voters of color, and have mobilized voters around solutions to those issues.  They combined research into voting patterns with focus groups on basic political questions, such as why potential Democratic voters don't show up to the polls (the most-common answer: nothing seemed to change when they do, so why bother?)

These activists saw the need to deliver concrete results, and for community engagement to be ongoing, not just at election time.  And by acting directly on issues that affect the poor, like the punitive fines that can turn minor driving offenses into major financial burdens, not to mention jail time, they’re also pushing back on trends that have been turning us into a nation of have’s and have-not’s. In short, what they did was dogged, common-sense, and essential; they re-expanded the definition of democratic politics from elections to actually making changes and expanding the idea of democratic participation.  In the context of a Democratic Party that has too often passively relied on the notion of changing demographics to push it into the political majority, these state organizers’ efforts come across as mind-blowing.

To give you a sense of what they've been up to, there’s this:

“Ever since the era of [former governor] Ann Richards, Democrats had been focusing their efforts (without success) on winning back white swing voters outside the big cities. But [TOP organizer Crystal] Zermeno realized that there was no reason ‘to beat our heads against the wall for that group of people anymore, not when we’ve got a million-voter gap and as many as four million non-voting people of color in the big cities, who are likely Democrats.’ By relentlessly appealing to that shadow electorate, and gradually turning them into habitual voters, TOP could whittle down and eliminate the Republican advantage in elections for statewide offices such as governor and lieutenant governor, not to mention the state’s thirty-eight votes in the presidential Electoral College. In other words, since the existing Texas electorate was never going to generate a satisfactory result, TOP was going to have to grow a new one.”

Here’s another way of thinking about what the TOP organizers did: they stopped playing by the old rules, expanded the electorate, and ended up changing the game.  To give you a sense of how revolutionary this organizing work has been: in November, the Democrats dominated the election in Harris County, in which Houston is located, including electing a sheriff and district attorney.  And here's an amazing statistic: Hillary Clinton got in excess of 160,000 more votes than Donald Trump in the county, even though Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there by only a few thousand votes in the last election.  

There's been a lot of excitement about the Democrats competing in the handful of special elections that have been happening; but clearly immense changes have been occurring below the radar of national elections that need to be replicated and expanded if progressives are going to push the country in a better direction.

All States Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others?

For being our country’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sure is awfully loosey-goosey with his words!  Last week, he referred to the state of Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific” — technically accurate, sure, but politically reprehensible, as the description was part of an effort to discredit the ruling of a federal judge based in Hawaii against the Trump administration’s latest Muslim travel ban.  (Sessions' full phrasing referred to a "judge sitting on an island in the Pacific," which is great because it conjures up the image of a robed jurist sprawled in the sand on a Spring Break bender, rum daiquiri in one hand and un-American ruling in the other — do judges ever even work!?)

Because absolutely nothing in the man’s record might suggest racist motivations — save for that time in the 1980's when the Senate rejected him as a federal judge based on evidence that he was racist — it’s clear Sessions was only tweaking the geographical remoteness and Johnny-come-lately entry of Hawaii into our blessed union, and that his choice of words had nothing to do with the fact that Hawaii’s population contains the smallest proportion of whites of any U.S. state.  Obviously, he would have directed similar innuendo at distant, frozen, Russia-kissing, second-to-last-state-to-join-the-union Alaska.

On the plus side, though, this means it’s open season on technically accurate but "accidentally" tendentious descriptions of Sessions’ home state of Alabama — which from now on we’ll be referring to (metaphorically, of course) as "a formerly-secessionist island of slavery in the ocean of the Confederate States of America."

And now this weekend Sessions is telling us, without evidence, that “mostly Mexicans” are receiving billions in excess tax credits from the U.S. government.  He made this intriguing assertion as part of a possible absurd new argument from the Trump administration that Mexico really IS going to be paying for the border wall.  See, we’re going to fund it by taking away tax credits going to “mostly Mexicans” — and because Mexicans are clearly from Mexico (not like that confusing situation where Americans are from Hawaii — still wrapping our heads around that one, sorry!), Mexico is actually gonna pay for the wall, via the transitive property of Mexican-ness!

In the interest of resuming contact with reality: the Wall Street Journal had an article last week describing how zero percent of U.S. senators and representatives from districts and states that would see construction of a border wall actually support it.  When even those who are supposed to benefit the most from the wall don’t want it, you know you’ve got problems.

Dieu Have Mercy! — Counting Down to the French Presidential Election

This may come as a surprise to some — but while we here at The Hot Screen try to pull no punches when writing about the American political scene, letting loose with fire, brimstone, and assorted burning bon mots as we see fit, we try to practice a little more humility in opining on what’s happening in other countries.  The U.S. is where we live and breathe; every other nation is observed at a distance, and it seems better to exercise humility when armed only with imperfect knowledge.

Nevertheless.

The potential ascension of National Front leader Marine Le Pen to the presidency of France fills us with a nausea that a dozen Camus-brand dramamine capsules couldn’t keep at bay.  The National Front’s vision for France strikes us as atavistic, racist, anti-Muslim, demagogic, and just plain ugly.  Le Pen has worked vigorously to clean up the sordid image of this party founded by her father, and that has long horrified the great majority of the French.  Now, in the midst of decades-long economic malaise and fear of terrorist attacks, the party has surged to its highest popularity ever.

The anti-Muslim rhetoric of the National Front is particularly appalling.  France has a different model of nationality, citizenship, and the role of religion than the United States — but we don’t know how one can look objectively at the challenges France faces and not conclude that the Muslim community is being scapegoated for a whole raft of problems for which that community can’t rationally be responsible for.  No real vision of human rights can countenance blaming an entire populace for the crimes of a very, very few.  But, of course, scapegoating is deeply seductive; it frees everyone else from responsibility, and creates a sense of inclusion for those doing the scapegoating.

When Europeans demonize a religious minority, we all need to exercise the deepest skepticism as to motivation and impact on that minority.  The idea that France is somehow existentially threatened by a small fraction of its populace says far more about French insecurity than a mysterious outsized power of the minority, and should raise all sorts of alarm bells. 

It seems to us that the four major presidential candidates reflect not just France’s, but the western world’s, inability to come to grips with the economic and social challenges of our time.  Whether from the right or left side of the spectrum, there is a struggle over how to make the economy work for all; there are various flavors of deals or confrontation with the devil of global capitalism, as well as degrees of embracing or rejecting a vilification of perceived outsiders as a way to remedy or distract from these economic problems.

For us, Jean-Luc Melénchon is the most intriguing of the major candidates, as he seems most committed to addressing the French malaise from a leftward direction: he advocates massive government spending and potentially withdrawal from the European Union if it doesn’t amend its laws to allow things like greater budget deficits for its members.  He also seems aware of the environmental barriers to our current economic arrangements, and has spoken of a 100% renewable energy-fueled economy.  This piece in The Nation and this one in the New Republic have provided a good introduction to the man and his politics.

We anxiously await Sunday’s vote with a comfort croissant in one hand and a reassuring wedge of brie in the other.

New Republic Writer ID’s, Eviscerates Emerging Trump Normalcy Meme

Brian Beutler at the New Republic notes signs of a sea change in recent coverage of Donald Trump: a growing consensus that Trump is trimming the sails of his rightward tendencies, and moving to some sort of centrist politics.  As Beutler effectively outlines, though, Trump’s retreat or rebuff on radical policies like the ban on Muslim immigrants or his previous statement that NATO is obsolete, need to be measured against the problematic centrism that he’s now said to occupy. 

Beutler writes “It is strange, for instance, to describe the combined law enforcement policy of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, economic policy of adviser Gary Cohn, and foreign policy of Trump’s Twitter feed and the military generals in his good graces as ‘centrism.’  Trump has instead taken the three-pronged fusionism of standard movement conservatism—pro-corporate economic policy, religious right-wing social policy, and hawkish foreign policy—and stripped away any pretense of concern for racial equality and inclusiveness. Describing that kind of platform as “centrist” is both inaccurate and a gift to reactionary forces in society.”  

It isn’t surprising that mainstream commentators would want to believe that the crisis has abated and that our institutions have tamed Donald Trump; after all, this would suggest that there’s nothing fundamentally flawed about our politics and economy.  But the election of Donald Trump is a wake-up call to all of us that our country is at a profound crossroads.  We face an environmental crisis of literally civilization-threatening intensity; levels of economic despair and inequality that have helped bring to power a would-be authoritarian leader in the person of our current president; ongoing and escalating U.S. military action that is far too close in appearance to a war on Islam to ever be successful; and unaddressed structural racism that has millions of African-American citizens fearful that a routine traffic stop might turn into a death sentence.  And yet, we’ve elected to power a president, and a Congress, that will not address these issues in any meaningful way, because they don’t actually think they’re problems, and who are, in fact, committed to perpetuating them.

Apart from the fact that the president has no real plans or intentions to address the most fundamental challenges we face, his moral and mental incompetence mean that we confront a whole separate set of dangers no matter what particular policies he is or isn’t working to implement.  There’s an ongoing investigation into the Russian role in the last election and possible collusion between that nation’s intelligence apparatus and the Trump campaign.  Donald Trump and his family apparently intend to use the presidency as a path to personal enrichment, legal or customary conflict of interest rules be damned.  The president appears to be embracing reckless belligerence in place of "mainstream" foreign policy that is itself already thoroughly militarized.

And the president has already demonstrated a propensity to abuse the power of his office in frightening ways.  Among other offenses, he slandered President Obama with talk of impeachable wiretapping, then instructed intelligence agencies to find evidence to fit his baseless accusations.  He has also used his bully pulpit to literally bully individual citizens, a grotesque and frightening mutation of this twitter-loving chief executive.  This is to say nothing of the collection of incompetents, fools, and ideologues who have unfortunately been granted the privilege of serving as members of his cabinet, and who are already showing plenty of evidence of serving private avarice, not the public good.

Let’s not be lulled into thinking that the worst is somehow behind us.  We can’t let ourselves lose four years not addressing head-on the existential issues of our time.  And we can’t stop working to constrain, block, and ultimately eject from office this joke of a president that the GOP has seen fit to inflict on a country that deserves, and needs, so much better.

Will the Dems Pick Up a Seat in Georgia Today?

This article at Politico has a nice rundown of some of the history, evolving demographics, and economic issues in Georgia’s sixth congressional district, where a special election today holds the real possibility of a Democrat either being elected in place of Republican Representative Tom Price, who has joined the Trump administration, or forcing a runoff against a Republican candidate.  Democrat Jon Ossoff is benefitting from being in one of the few ongoing races right now that allow Democratic rank and file to show their displeasure with the president; Ossoff has received more than $8 million in contributions from upwards of 200,000 donors, most of them from out of state.  As the article points out, that amount of money approaches what is spent on senate runs in Georgia, and has allowed Ossoff to plaster the district with unprecedented levels of advertising (at least for a Democrat).

The Hot Screen is particularly struck by the ethnic diversity of the district — 30% of the residents are non-white, and 21% of the populace wasn’t born in the U.S.  For those who are used to thinking of races in the South as often orienting along a black-white continuum, these are eye-opening figures.  And such numbers don’t bode well for a G.O.P. that has decided that its central electoral strategy is to make itself the party of white Americans.  At the same time, a deep delve into the particularities of this district should be a reminder that every district is unique, and that a one-size-fits-all approach to politics is inadequate.  As the Democrats have had hammered home to them in the last several election cycles, demographics is not destiny; people aren’t just going to vote for them because the other party has signaled its disdain for the color of their skin or their country of origin.

This Georgia contest comes after last week’s special election in Kansas, where the Democratic candidate ran close to his opponent despite the fact that Donald Trump had won the district by almost 30 points.  What happens in Georgia Tuesday will be another important piece of the story of how electorally significant the backlash against Trump is, and whether it can help put otherwise Republican-safe seats in play come 2018.

Is Donald Trump Our Country's Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?

ghostbusters choose the form of the destructor stay puft marshmallow trump

The Hot Screen admits to mixed feelings of validation and fear at having joked last week about Trump liking to blow shit up, after the cruise missile strike against Syria but BEFORE the dropping of the largest conventional bomb in the history of civilization on an ISIS complex in Afghanistan.  Trump has demurred as to whether he ordered the bomb into action, but it’s obvious that either a direct order or assent to an idea presented to him led to this ostentatious display of old-school firepower.  Peter Bergen has an article at the CNN website titled "Why 'the Mother of All Bombs' and Why Now?", which seeks logical explanations, such as a need to address the deteriorating war against the Taliban in Afghanistan; but we feel the answer lies as much in the irrational, ignorant, and violent impulses of the commander in chief as much as any conscious strategy.  We've said it before as an ironic question and we’ll double down now by just saying it straight: Trump obviously likes to blow shit up, whether it’s our democracy or ISIS fighters.  This is not a man with a subtle grasp of power: bigger is surely always better in his mind.

It’s never reassuring to hear a weapon described as “the largest non-nuclear ordinance” in the U.S. armory, with its suggestion of brushing up against the lower end of the spectrum of nuclear terror.  We even find its MOAB (for Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb) acronym mildly freaky, with its unnecessary biblical connotations and association with barren Utah landscapes.  And isn’t it all a little too Saddam-Hussein-in-Uncle-Sam-drag to be calling this the “mother of all bombs”?

But as unsettling as all the telling verbiage that surrounds talk of the bomb are the actual circumstances of its use.  Sixteen years after the initial U.S. invasion to root out al-Qaeda and depose the Taliban, the U.S. is still in Afghanistan fighting against. . . al-Qaeda and the Taliban, PLUS, of course, ISIS.  Likely among other things, the MOAB drop was meant to signal toughness and resolve in the fight — but the pure symbolism of the act is only accentuated by the ghastly tonnage of the explosion.  One bomb, after all, is not going to win the fight, in part because it’s not at all clear that the U.S. military, elected officials, and foreign policy professionals really understand WHY we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, or what victory might look like.

Afghanistan is a country that has been at war in one form or another for going on 40 years straight; its territory and populace have been pummeled and eviscerated by countless bombs.  This makes us think of this single MOAB drop being as much a sign of pointless and redundant violence as anything else, a signal that Trump and his military advisors still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there’s a military solution to the endless Afghan fight.

In fact, on three fronts this past week, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that Donald Trump is getting pretty jacked up about superficially simple military solutions to complicated foreign policy issues.  From Tomahawks aimed at Syria, to big momma MOAB, and then over to North Korea, against whose further nuclear testing the U.S. has indicated it may respond militarily.  Of the three conflicts, North Korea is by far the scariest.  As discussed previously, there are many ways that things can get very, very bloody extremely quickly in North Korea.  It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in foreign affairs to grasp that two militaristic mentalities with irreconcilable needs (the U.S. asserting that North Korea cannot have nuclear weapons, North Korea feeling the threat from the U.S. as its ultimate reason for wanting them) aren’t necessarily going to end up at a peaceful resolution.

And so thrust into our faces in increasing doses every day is the greatest danger that a Trump administration has always presented to our country: that this embarrassment of a president might get us into a war.  We never imagined that the possibility would be upon us so quickly; it seems a symptom of Trump’s overall incompetence, that having failed so quickly on the domestic front he is turning to distractions abroad, where a president can act with far less constraint than in domestic politics.  

To be fair, we did sort of see this coming, what with all the generals Trump has named to security posts, and his own basic belligerence, ignorance, and lust for power.  Recall that Defense Secretary Mattis needed once-every-half-century approval from the Senate to fill that post so soon after being on active duty — a small but troubling augury of the impending hyper-militarization of American foreign policy under this president.  And there is a good case to be made that it is not simply Trump’s personality, but his lack of his own vision for foreign policy coupled with an assertive Pentagon and a lack of typical civilian controls, that is helping drive military over diplomatic solutions.  And the context of the American war on terror can't be overstated: tragically, this country has grown accustomed over the past 15 years to a permanent state of war, so that increased militarization under Trump might seem like a matter of degrees rather than a full departure from what came before.  

What worries us at this nerve-wracking moment is that a sense of ironic distance, denial, and fatalism seems to have overcome the body politic.  Even as people express their fear, we don’t have a sense that they REALLY think Trump will get us into a war.  Certainly you are not seeing the mass demonstrations that might have been expected warning Trump off his belligerence in Syria and North Korea.  In fact, polls have shown that a majority of Americans supported the missile strikes against Syria, and it is a depressing but real possibility that support in that one arena is emboldening Trump to consider force in the much more dangerous conflict with North Korea.

Is a basic non sequitur preventing us from fully grasping the danger we collectively face — that it feels incomprehensible that someone as absurd as this president could be the end of us all, or at least the end of an often nasty but relatively robust international order?  And yet, with his early embrace of destabilizing global violence, it sometimes feels as if we've unwittingly chosen the form of our destruction: Donald Trump, our country's very own Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

This Is How Trump Gets Re-Elected

It may be that in ordering the U.S. military to attack a Syrian air base, Donald Trump made the right decision for the specific reasons his administration is giving: to punish President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons this week against his own people, and to deter Assad from using them again.  But the thing is, we can’t possibly know yet if this was the right decision; all we have is this single, violent move.  We will only know if it was successful if Assad never uses chemical weapons again, if Donald Trump pursues the many diplomatic moves necessary to support this policy, and if it doesn’t end up contributing to the overall dynamics of violence, disarray, and increasing chaos in Syria that the United States is presumed to oppose.  This a lot of ifs beyond a single feel-good moment of kicking a little Assad ass.

Of course, we don’t even know if the reason the president has given for launching the attack is actually the real reason.  This is because Donald Trump has proven himself to be a man who thrives on lies, who lives as unquestioningly within a circuit of lies as an innocent pig wallowing in its own personal hog heaven of mud and muck.  He and his appointees have spent the first months of his administration systematically degrading our ability to actually believe a single word that comes out of their mouths: from obsessive quibbles over inauguration crowd counts, to the lie that President Obama wiretapped him, to whether or not Donald Trump supported holding a vote on health care (news flash: he did), lies have been as much the coin of the Trumpian realm as in any tinpot dictatorship out of a Marx Brothers-meet-Charlie Chaplin fever dream.  Can we really trust that the stated reasons for the attack are the real ones?

Then there’s the broader context of this attack: first off, the 24-hour-a-day disaster that is the Trump administration.  It’s fresh off failures on its anti-Muslim travel ban and Obamacare repeal, and is mired in the Russian election interference investigation.  This administration is such a bundle of damaged goods that any seemingly decisive action it takes in foreign policy has to be looked at with extreme skepticism, as a possible effort to change the conversation.  

Other factors amplify the need for such skepticism.  Former Clinton-era state department official James Rubin points out that only days before the attack, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley signaled that Assad’s removal from power was not a priority for the United States.  This was followed by Secretary of State Tillerson and spokesperson Sean Spicer seconding her view.  The U.S. had also turned its back on Syrian refugees through Trump’s travel ban, suggesting American indifference to the plight of ordinary Syrians.  As Rubin puts it, “The unsurprising consequence of this shift was a newfound confidence within the Assad regime that it need not worry about paying a heavy price if its forces committed new acts of barbarity aimed at demoralizing the nation’s remaining rebels.”

The Trump administration is pressing a narrative of Trump’s decisiveness and toughness, but this episode equally raises a storyline of catastrophic missteps by Trump followed by a hasty, ill-thought-out response to Syria’s chemical attack.  So why are so many people praising the missile attacks when Trump’s incompetence in the first place may well have cleared the way for this chemical attack?  It is natural and justified to feel hate against Assad, and to want revenge for what he’s done to his own people: but the satisfaction that supporters of the strike are feeling is being dangerously decontextualized from story of the mistakes Trump may have made.  Joan Walsh of The Nation has an excellent article on the Syria attack, and among other things she notes that “any liberal who praises these missile strike has to account for what comes next.” She points out that Trump’s lack of care about diplomacy is well known, which I will interpret as another way of saying that it’s a little bit crazy to praise a single action by Trump when we know full well that he’s likely not capable of the follow-up actions to make this missile strike meaningful in terms of stopping Assad’s use of chemical weapons.  

This attack should also be viewed with serious skepticism in light of the Russian factor: not just the Russian interference in our election and possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and this effort — and Trump’s need to distract us from this — but also the fact that the Russians are active in Syria in support of Assad.  A danger that has been theoretical up to now has become uncomfortably possible: that Trump might act dangerously aggressively toward the Russians as a way to mitigate the perception that he was only elected through Vladmir Putin’s assistance.  Putting aside the question of what the hell either nation is doing in Syria in the first place, the idea that Russia and the U.S. both have combat forces in the same country, sometimes in support of opposing factions, rightly strikes the dispassionate observer as batshit crazy.  The U.S. warned Russia that the attack was coming, I assume to minimize the possibility of Russian casualties; but the fact that there could have been Russian casualties suggests a recklessness to Trump’s action that has not been adequately considered either by politicians or in the news coverage.

The Donald Trump who launched these attacks is the same Donald Trump whose temperament, moral turpitude, inexperience, and authoritarianism make him unfit for the presidency.  The one question to be answered is this: do you trust Donald Trump to take the complicated, delicate, and difficult steps needed to prevent future gas attacks, let alone bring the Syrian civil war to a close?  If the answer is no, then it makes no sense to support this one-off attack.  This is the same sort of context-free approval that has already gotten us into so many problems around the world to begin with.  A related point: President Obama chose not to respond militarily when Assad launched a previous gas attack against his own people.  Are opponents of Trump who nonetheless support Trump’s action here really so sure that Trump made the right decision, and Obama did not?  

It seems probable that Donald Trump will draw all the wrong lessons from these missile strikes.  Some of the same dark traits that make him unfit for the presidency — a lust for vengeance, an ignorant belligerence, a limitless craving for approval — will drive him to use military force again, and again, based on the positive response he got with his Syria attack.  This is just the beginning.  Anyone who opposes this insane presidency is likely to regret cheering on the missile strike these last few days.

In the way that these strikes have at least temporarily reset the conversation around Trump, and led to support from otherwise skeptical quarters, we can see the rough shape of a strategy whereby Trump eventually wins re-election to become a two-term president.  A cynical take on what happened in Syria is that he created a problem that he then purported to solve, using the broad discretion accorded the president as commander-in-chief.  Many commentators had previously noted the risk of Trump using military conflict to distract the public or rally it behind him.  This missile strike shows how easily this can be done, at least in terms of the president’s ability to order military action with little or no Congressional restraint.

It’s not like we haven’t been here before.  Exhibit A is the presidency of George W. Bush; after all, how else did Bush get re-elected but by turning his catastrophic failure to defend the U.S. against the attacks of 9/11 into a reason to vote for him, in the form of the ill-conceived war on terror and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?

The Illogical Illegal Immigration Debate

The Hot Screen has long refused to take seriously Republican bloviation about the evils of illegal immigration for one main reason: the lack of proposals to deter businesses from hiring illegal immigrants in the first place.  As this New York Times editorial points out, the last big immigration bill (in 1986!) existed in a world in which this topic could at least be addressed, if insufficiently.  Thirty years on, nativists like Donald Trump have embraced this blindness, so that we are left with a supposed crisis both perfect and perfectly illogical.  The right tells us that millions of illegal immigrants continue to pour into our country, like an unstoppable brown wave, to take our jobs (despite the fact that illegal immigration has dramatically fallen off in the past few years) — but with so much single-minded emphasis on how American jobs are being “taken,” the obvious question is always skipped over — who, exactly, is giving them all these jobs?  Well, American businesses, that’s who!

So instead of building a Great Berlin Border Wall at the cost of billions to keep these people out, why don’t we just pass some laws to make it impossible to get hired without proper documentation?  The grotesque, grandstanding spectacle of stopping ‘em at the border must always take center stage, in order to obscure the logic of taking away the employment magnet, and making the border wall redundant.  Suppressing this basic, common-sense idea enables demonization of immigrants by picturing them as an immoral horde who shoulder all the blame.

At least in the ‘80s, cracking down on employers who hired illegal immigrants was seen as an important aspect of the overall immigration issue.  Today, though, you can measure the corruption and inanity of the anti-immigrant push by the way the burden of the problem has been pushed entirely onto the immigrants themselves.  This silence, as they say, speaks volumes, and I would venture that the role of businesses in exploiting illegal immigration is the key to understanding the overall issue.  So many American industries employ illegal immigrants, from agriculture and construction to meatpacking and restaurants, that they can be said to be the number one reason we have illegal immigration to begin with: without jobs to be had, far fewer people would come here illegally.  After all, Republicans admit as much when they falsely claim that immigrants are stealing American jobs — these people are coming here to work, not mooch.

The benefits to business are also the central reason why it has taken this long for illegal immigration to move from bogeyman of the right to an issue they actually have the governing power to do something about: too many traditional centers of Republican influence have seen the benefits of illegal labor.  But now Donald Trump has ginned up illegal immigration into an existential crisis for the country, and a reckoning is at hand between the xenophobic and low-cost labor wings of the party. (For a particularly bracing shot of schadenfreude, be sure to check out this article about Trump-supporting California farmers worried about losing their cheap labor — how could they have known, right?)

But the pass we have arrived at on immigration must be seen as a bipartisan failure, and evidence of the Democrats’ share of hypocrisy and misjudgment on this issue, and indeed a source of their peril as well.  Democrats are responsive to some of the same business pressures as the Republicans, and have hardly advocated for an employer crackdown — all the more telling when this is the most obvious and effective line of defense against the inanity of building a border wall.  In going slack on this crucial piece of the puzzle, Democrats have indirectly enabled the supercharging of a narrative that places blame for illegal immigration solely on the illegal immigrants and the porousness of the long southern border.  In turn, this has placed Democrats in the politically fraught position of advocating for citizenship paths for long-time illegal immigrants, and adopting the morally necessary position of protecting the human rights of illegal immigrants, which inevitably make them vulnerable to charges of being more sympathetic to illegal immigrants than American workers. 

The lack of employer sanctions in all the Trumpian talk of cracking down on illegals suggests a dark and exploitative future for illegal immigrants in our country: since employers will still be able to hire illegal immigrants with little fear of sanction, while the immigrants are ever more fearful of deportation, their employers will have even less incentive to pay them fairly or provide decent working conditions.  It is a recipe for increased exploitation.

Finally, this is as good a place as any to call out a grating piece of racist dogwhistling that’s gotten under my skin lately: the way that the right is able to use the neutral phrase “illegal immigrants” when everyone knows that we’re talking specifically about Latino immigrants (particularly when the context is building a wall on the southern border).  That is, we’re not talking about illegal immigration in general, but illegal immigration by certain national and ethnic cohorts (which, admittedly, is by far the greatest source of illegal immigration).  The decontextualized term “illegal immigration” provides polite language for the fact that this effort is specifically directed at the world of Latino immigrants, and of course also serves to ignore their actual human (and humanizing) realities of nationality, race, creed, religion, and the myriad other things that would make them not simply job-grabbing invaders but people driven to escape their countries for a thousand reasons.

Leashing Up the Dogs of War in North Korea

It’s one thing to be convinced, based on the endless evidence presented during the painfully long 2016 primaries and campaign, of Donald Trump’s fundamental unfitness for the presidency.  It’s another, more chilling thing to daily contemplate the specific areas of mortal danger over which he now has responsibility.  Exhibit A among these dangers may well be North Korea’s nuclear aspirations.  North Korea is surely a puzzler for many Americans: the country combines cartoonish anachronism with atomic danger, as if some distillation of the Cold War had made it to our early 21st century — which is actually true, as far as it goes.

But origins aside, the central reality is that North Korea is a country whose leadership has become convinced that the only way it can defend the regime is to possess nuclear weapons that will deter the United States from attacking it, while the United States is committed to ending North Korea’s nuclear program.  And as this disturbing New York Times piece lays out, this inevitably means that the United States and North Korea are locked in an extremely dangerous conflict.  Now that the United State is putting pre-emptive action “on the table,” it’s become even more dangerous.  Here’s the key quote for understanding how unstable the dynamic is: 

“North Korea knows it would probably lose any war. Should one occur, its plans call for a full-scale, last-ditch retaliation to stop the Americans in their tracks.  

This strategy, borne of desperation, creates a risk that has long chastened American war planners: that North Korea would perceive even a limited strike as the start of a war and respond with its full arsenal.”

Here’s my question: Can Donald Trump be trusted to understand the specific danger here — that the fundamental ambiguity of what North Koreans might “perceive” as a “limited strike” means that the United States might, by miscalculation, set off a chain of events that could leave millions, most probably in Asia, dead?  On the one hand, we have a paranoid, nuclear armed power willing to contemplate horrific death tolls to defend itself; on the other, we have a president whose hallmarks include casual belligerence, basic incuriosity, and no grasp of the facts in too many areas to count.  This is a situation where what seems like a small misstep could foreseeably escalate into apocalyptic horror.  

When I say that opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency must be rooted in ensuring his political destruction and removal from office as soon as possible, it is situations like North Korea that are uppermost in my mind.  The risks are too great, and there is too high a possibility that once an immediate crisis is upon us, it would be too late to turn things around.  This means that in fact a national crisis is already upon us, whether we like it or not, and one of the tasks at hand is to persuade the unconvinced that the time for full-scale opposition to Trump is now.  One crucial challenge is to demystify and broadcast issues like the North Korea conundrum, and at a minimum to make sure that the public spotlight is on them, so that Donald Trump cannot so easily tweet us into nuclear war.

A Good Day Not to Be Donald Trump

The scuttling of the American Health Care Act on Friday was good news for anyone who believes health care should be a basic right for every American.  With the non-stroke of a pen, 24 million Americans could breathe a little easier about not losing their coverage in the foreseeable future.  And by revealing the limits of President Trump’s power and influence, including over his own party, it was good news for his opponents; this bill’s withdrawal was another puncture to the cartoonish aura of invulnerability that is one of the most worrisome things about him.  Repeal of Obamacare was a central campaign pledge, and Trump isn’t going to be able to fake news his way out of all the headlines of failure.

This is also a valuable lesson about the complexity of politics and social change in our country.  I’m going to speculate that opposition to Obamacare became such a proxy for opposing Obama himself, for both Republican politicians and voters alike, that too few noticed the shifting of the ground beneath their feet: enough conservative voters benefitted from Obamacare, whether they realized it or not, or at least embraced the basic assumption that citizens should have health care, that when it came time to actually repeal it, sufficient will was simply not there on the part of their representatives.  In a larger sense, then, it should provide some comfort to progressives fearful of a major assault on the remaining elements of the New Deal and other liberal legislation.  As this piece by Brian Beutler indicates, none other than Senator Mitch McConnell has pointed out that the Republicans will need much bigger majorities, like the Democrats have held in the past, if they are to be able to roll back all the programs they want to.  This speaks to a basic fact: in the United States, there is not only a bulwark of consensus for long-standing social insurance programs like Social Security, but an appetite for new ones like health care.

I would like to think that people are also beginning to see through the insistence of conservatives like Paul Ryan that the greatest good in the world is to cut taxes on the rich, in the name of economic efficiency; from their perspective, private citizens, particularly the wealthiest among us, will always more effectively invest their money than the government ever will.  But the issue of health care highlights the irrelevance of this argument to many issues: what could be a better an investment than the health of our fellow citizens?  And even a cold-hearted, economics-only analysis would say that healthier workers are more productive workers.  But of course, the ideology of such folks is more ruthless and sadistic than the mechanistic one I just mentioned: to them, it's obviously better to have sick workers scared for their basic needs and more willing to accept shitty jobs with bare bones benefits, than people secure that their society, acting through the mechanism of their government, has got their backs.

Democrats have won a reprieve with the failure of Obamacare repeal; but they should also take what has just happened to the Republicans as a cautionary tale.  For too long, the G.O.P. opposed Obamacare with little thought as to what should replace it — obviously many oppose government-supported health care as a matter of belief, but some don’t, and should have been ready to put forward a reasonable replacement.  It is not too early for Democrats to talk loudly and boldly about a renewed push for broadened health coverage, and real fixes to the Affordable Care Act’s weak points.  The Republicans have created a public perception of incompetence; while the strategy of keeping out of the way of this trainwreck of a bill has worked out so far for the Democrats, it’s not a viable long-term plan, not for the good of the party or the good of the country.

Trump’s election win amid promises to actually protect the social insurance benefits of his voters means that there is more room for maneuver than many Democrats realize: given rising public perceptions of Trump’s incompetence, the failure of Obamacare repeal being Exhibit A, there is an increasing opportunity to take back the mantle of protecting the common man that Trump has attempted to appropriate.  Progressives need to continue to push the Democratic Party back to its roots, toward economic security for all.  Voters will listen and respond to straight talk and common sense, particularly as Trump's message becomes increasingly garbled.  

Finally, while I'm not as pessimistic as this guy that Trump supporters may take the defeat of Obamacare repeal as yet more evidence that the president should press on in an authoritarian direction, I do think that the largest threat that Trump presents may have just gotten bigger: that faced with failure in the realm of conventional politics, he has an increased incentive to assert his powers in areas where presidential power is less constrained — namely in matters of war and national security.  Andrew Sullivan is beating this warning drum again this week, and is right to do so; it is worth noting as well the ominous escalation of American involvement in Syria, about which The Hot Screen will soon have more to say.

The Populist Paradox: Getting Beyond the Hate

The election of Donald Trump has its dark trans-Atlantic parallel in the rise of right-wing movements across Europe; we are facing a disturbing international phenomenon, and figuring out its roots as well as its national variations will be key to stopping and reversing this trend towards authoritarian, racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic politics.  To this point, the New York Times has a complementary pair of stories this week about the growing electoral prospects of the far right in both France and Germany via the growth of the National Front and Alternative for Germany.  Both offer good on-the-ground reporting as well as larger insights about what is and might be going on.

Populisms of both the right-wing and left-wing varieties are on the rise around the Western world: in the United States, not just Trump but Bernie Sanders succeeded beyond the wildest mainstream imaginings this past election cycle.  And in Europe, left-wing movements have prominently arisen in Spain and Greece.  Whether on the right or left, these trends have generally been observed to be a response to economic inequality and stagnation, a sense of powerlessness among voting populations, and a feeling that an economic elite has gained too much power.

In some ways, an optimist might look at a party like Marine Le Pen’s National Front, and see that this is a movement with real differences from what we’re used to thinking of as conservatism in the United States.  There’s much more talk of economic equality, more consideration of things like protecting benefits that seem to partake more of socialism than any free market ideology.

But as is described in studies and books (such as in John Judis’ recent The Populist Explosion), right-wing populism often identifies an “other” beyond monied interests as part of the problem, such as immigrants who are taking away jobs, to explain the economic difficulties their country faces.  And indeed, the right-wing populist situation in both Germany and France involves the increased mainstreaming of a chilling and hateful scapegoating of vulnerable minorities; the photo of National Front members with a poster showing France subdued under the shadow of minarets is particularly nauseating and emblematic of the nastiness involved.  (The notion that France is under some sort of imminent threat of occupation by marauding Muslims becomes even more fraught when you stop to consider the various French interventions in the Muslim world over the past several years, including in Mali, Libya, Iraq, and Syria.)

A right-wing populism that claims to oppose inequality, economic stagnation, and the power of elites, but that riles up its voters by scapegoating immigrants and religious minorities as being equally responsible for their discontent, carries the threat of establishing a nasty, illiberal status quo that ends up solving no real economic problems, and enabling greater persecution of vulnerable populations as politicians double down on this one “threat” they can more easily exert some control over — as opposed to, say, truly challenging entrenched undemocratic power.

The central complication is that, just as in the U.S., the populist right nonetheless has identified, and promises a response to, a definite economic malaise, where parties in the center and the left are perceived to have failed.  On the one hand, there is a fundamentally democratic element in saying that ordinary citizens should have more control over their economic destiny; after all, drawing a line between where democracy ends and economics begins has in some ways been the central conundrum of our age, and is at the root of many of our greatest problems.  But as we see in the United States, this democratic notion has been dangerously tied an authoritarian solution, in which Donald Trump would act on behalf of the people to make things right, even if it means asserting maximal powers and subverting other institutions of government, such as the courts.  (In contrast, witness Bernie Sanders’ many assertions about ordinary people needing to get involved with politics, and his followers' moves to take over the Democratic Party from the bottom up.  For Donald Trump, there is only politics from the top down.)

Both articles in the Times raise a central irony — the way that the right in France and Germany has subverted something that makes those countries admirable — taking in millions of refugees and other immigrants from outside the E.U. — by using this humanitarianism to drive fears of a racial and religious invasion by outsiders.  (And of course, it’s not just humanitarianism that has led France and Germany to welcome immigrants — these newcomers have also created many benefits for the economy, as they have also done in the United States.)  The idea that a relatively small group of immigrants could somehow cripple and undermine German and French society also raises the question of how little faith the Germans and the French have in their own cultures and societies: to an outsider, it seems far more likely that the dominant culture would absorb the newcomers, rather than the other way around.  And if there are issues with immigrants not integrating into their new societies, surely there are productive remedies for dealing with this; it’s obvious that demonizing newcomers is the opposite of welcoming them.

And yet, this fundamental insecurity about the strength of their societies exists.  On the one hand, all this scapegoating of dark-skinned immigrants who take people’s jobs seems like displaced aggression against the intra-European immigration that has been enabled under the European Union, in which citizens of one EU member can cross borders without fuss and work in another country.  The fears of cultural assault associated with these non-European immigrants likewise seems to be tied to fears of losing national identity on account of the European Union.

There is also the intriguing possibility raised that Germany is particularly, and ironically, susceptible to nationalistic, xenophobic appeals because of its post-WWII policy to downplay nationalism; one interviewee suggests that this lack of identity has left people feeling an “inner emptiness.”  Germany is one of the most extreme examples possible regarding issues of nationalism and identity, and the fact that even conscious attempts to move beyond nationalism are facing such challenges calls for close consideration.

But here I will use the extreme to pivot to what is, at least for me, one of the most important questions to answer in this time of political peril: How can a truly democratic politics energize people without resorting to nationalistic appeals that seem to so easily slide into xenophobia, racism, and religious discrimination?  Another way of putting this: How does the left compete with a right-wing vision that’s so very comfortable with demonizing not just immigrants, but even other citizens, to rile up its supporters?  Because what we are seeing in Europe right now appalls and frightens me — I have trouble comprehending that a continent that experienced the Holocaust would, within living memory of that horror, see the rise of politicians who thrive on religious hatred and demagoguery, deploying not just anti-Muslim slander, but anti-Semitism as well.  It can’t just be about stopping these movements; it has to be about how we create a politics, and a society, that makes these movements unthinkable and taboo.