Is Representative Greg Walden Oregon's Very Own Master of Disaster?

In his Sunday piece, Oregonian columnist Steve Duin calls out our state’s sole GOP congressman, Greg Walden, for his predatory and unproductive push to make timber industry hay out of the devastating Eagle Creek fire that ripped through the Columbia River Gorge last month.  While the fires were still smouldering, it turns out, Walden was busy putting forward legislation that would expedite salvage logging operations, smother environmental reviews, and severely limit public input following natural disasters not just in the Gorge, but in any National Scenic Area. 

It is one thing for Representative Walden to ill serve the citizens of his own district; they deserve better, but they are also the ones who have chosen to elect him, repeatedly.  But Oregonians have already seen him play an outsize role in attempts to dismantle Obamacare — a cynical unwinding that would not only disproportionately hit Walden's own district, but severely affect the health care and finances of the state at large, not to mention cause wholly preventable suffering to millions of Americans nationwide.  And now, following a man-made fire that has turned to ash some of the Portland area’s most beautiful forests, he is backing a plan that puts timber industry greed ahead of both the entire states’s interest, not to mention scientific good sense.  

Some have urged hope in the aftermath of the Eagle Creek fire, arguing that the forest will inevitably fully recover — if not necessarily in our lifetimes.  But when politicians like Greg Walden hurry to take advantage of disaster, and prioritize rewarding their donors over letting the land regenerate for future generations, it’s easy to see how exploitative politics, greed, and climate change might combine to result in a permanently diminished state of nature in Oregon.  Now is the time to summon the political will to make such a dystopian possibility unthinkable.  We can’t risk losing forever what we’ve already lost for the foreseeable future.  Concerned citizens and politicians need to speak out against Walden's gambit, including Democratic politicians who Duin rightly calls out for ducking the issue for fear of crossing the timber industry.

And progressives need to serve notice to Walden that these legislative efforts that would diminish us all have now legitimized a statewide effort to replace him with a better advocate for our state in the next election.  

Will Alabama Senate Candidate Moore End up Being Less for the GOP?

The Republican primary in Alabama to choose a senatorial candidate for the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions has startled many in the GOP establishment.  In part this is because President Trump himself supported and in fact campaigned for the losing candidate, Luther Strange (who currently holds the seat via gubernatorial appointment).  The significance of the outcome is also bound up with the fact that Moore is a long-time extremist and all-around weirdo whose possible election to the Senate portends a further move rightward for the Republican Party.  As the New York Times details, many Republicans see Moore’s victory as a clear signal that the GOP base has turned against its current leadership, though the conclusion of Republican strategists that “the conservative base now loathes its leaders in Washington the same way it detested President Barack Obama” seems like a unresolvable question, akin to that old theological debate about how many profound hatreds can dance on the head of a pin.

Due to his political extremism, many Republicans wonder if Moore might lose against the Democratic candidate in bright-red Alabama.  As summarized at Talking Points Memo, “Moore is a hardline religious conservative who was twice kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to obey the rule of law and disregarding higher court rulings, first for erecting then refusing to remove a monument of the ten commandments a decade ago then for rejecting the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage.  He’s said homosexual conduct should be illegal, suggested the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks happened because America has turned away from God, and claimed that parts of the American Midwest were living under Muslim Sharia law.”  Moore had also argued that Democratic representative Keith Ellison should not be seated in the U.S. Congress due to the fact that he’s Muslim. 

Yikes.

It’s not much of a stretch, though, to conclude along with TPM that Moore won not despite his extremism, but because of it.  His positions are no mystery to Alabama voters, and we also have to weigh in the fact that they had plenty of cover to vote for Moore’s opponent via President Trump’s backing of Luther Strange.  Steve Kornacki at NBC argues that not only is a GOP base voter insurrection underway, but that it’s part of a larger pattern that has played out for the past ten years, in which extremely conservative candidates ride to primary victory on a wave of voter disgust with the GOP establishment.  This movement has encompassed the rise of the Tea Party movement and failed senatorial candidates like Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell and Todd “legitimate rape” Akin.  Kornacki not surprisingly includes Donald Trump in this anti-establishment movement, and makes the point that Trump “cracked the code” of the Tea Party — that it was not about “policy or ideology,” but about cultural rebellion.  As confirmation, he points to Trump’s lack of legislative accomplishments in contrast with his endless enthusiastic culture-war battles meant to rouse and pacify his core voters.

In this context, Roy Moore’s victory seems more like a vindication or continuation of Trump’s strategy than a repudiation of the president.  Like Trump, Moore practices a politics that foregrounds cultural resentments and the notion of a haggard people besieged by godless others.  Moore, after all, has made his reputation by provoking culture war-type fights.  Kornacki is right on in playing up the continuities between Trump and Moore — and indeed, Donald Trump immediately began signaling his support for Moore following his victory, even going so far as to delete previous pro-Strange tweets.  He also observes that though Strange was Trump’s pick on the basis of mutual loyalty, it was Moore who could more strongly make the case that he’d be the the one more likely to fight against the GOP establishment and give Trump political room to be himself.

Moore’s election is one of several looming insurgencies that challenge Republican incumbents, which many believe may raise opportunities for Democratic candidates.  In fact, a recent piece in Politico details how Democrats are closely watching races in which Republicans are poised to field and perhaps select extremist candidates.  But as one Democratic party strategist observes of how the ground has shifted in the last seven years, “Unfortunately, the goal posts have moved on what’s considered sane and reasonable now.”  Indeed — and Donald Trump is Exhibit A. 

Over at New Republic, Jeet Heer goes all in with dunking nascent Democratic optimism in cold water, pointing to the last eight years of politics as evidence that excited predictions of Republican collapse are always proved premature.  He writes:

What’s striking is that this so-called war between the establishment and the populists always ends in the same way: with the establishment absorbing elements of the populist agenda to win elections. Seen in this light, these so-called insurgencies or civil wars never really hurt the Republican Party. Rather, they give it more energy by riling up the base. The gamble that [Steve] Bannon is making is that religious extremism will create a more powerful GOP.  Alas, there’s no reason to think Bannon is wrong.

I’d agree that Heer has got recent history on his side — however tenuous and fraught the GOP’s balancing act seems, the party does keep ending up ahead.  But he importantly notes that it’s not just the base’s energy and the establishment’s ability to keep channeling that energy (while of course also being changed by it) that’s helped the Republicans move to control all three branches of government.  As Heer puts it, even with the burden of candidates who appall the middle, “a Moore-style GOP can remain an electoral force in the same way that the current GOP does: with a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Senate and Electoral College’s overrepresentation of small, rural, overwhelmingly white states—their bias toward conservative voters, in other words.”  These additional factors are in fact necessary for the Republicans to continue achieving electoral success.  Unfortunately for them, these are all practices against which Democrats have a fighting chance, in that they are uniformly anti-democratic arrangements that thwart the will of the majority, and that in the case of gerrymandering and voter suppression are based on immoral and racist foundations.

It’s also important not to misinterpret the cultural resentments that provide so much of the political fuel for Republican politicians.  A progressive politics can’t and shouldn’t match ideas like anti-immigrant hatred or homophobia, but it can put forward policies that address the economic insecurity that make people so receptive to illiberal, tribal appeals in the first place.  The GOP is already behind in numbers — the party can only suffer so many voters being peeled away before what seems like impregnability will turn to catastrophic vulnerability.  And if Democrats can come back enough, they can pass laws to eliminate the anti-democratic tools Republicans have used to secure their majorities in too many states.  There are worse platforms to run on than defense of democracy.

Which brings us back to Roy Moore and the race in Alabama.  He's a politician so extreme, so contemptuous of the rule of law, that the Democrats would be fools not to make support for him a litmus test for other Republicans, and to fully back former state Attorney General Doug Jones against him.  This is not because they will necessarily win, but in order to draw a bright line between what is acceptable and what is not.  And it turns out that in addition to his disdain for the Constitution, separation of church and state, and human equality, Moore’s biggest backer is an outright modern-day secessionist who apparently mourns the South’s loss in the Civil War.  With such an association, Moore pushes the definition of right-wing past the breaking point — if you accept money from someone who literally doesn’t even believe in the existence of the United States, we are well beyond conservative politics and into some new-fangled hodgepodge of farce and disqualifying anti-Americanism.  It is inconceivable to me that with this sort of neo-Confederate, un-American baggage, a well-funded, intelligent Democratic campaign could not give Moore a run for his money.  At the very least, it's an opportunity for Democrats to highlight the absurdity of a GOP that flaunts its patriotism while acting in a way that's anything but patriotic.

Are NFL Players Really the Ones Who Need to Show a Little Respect?

One silver lining in the imbroglio over NFL players daring to kneel during the national anthem is how deeply the whole affair has galvanized my understanding of white privilege and white supremacy in America — a selfish perspective, sure, but in my defense I will call upon my own white privilege one last (OK, maybe) time.  The way that so many have used the alleged infraction of the players against the honor of the flag to ignore the issues the players are seeking to highlight has hit me like a ton of bricks.  And once Donald Trump stepped in, you’d have to be willfully ignorant or complicit with his intentions to claim that racial animus has nothing to do with what’s going on.  The story has continued through much of this last week, with the president talking about how the owners must be afraid of their players.  Yes — he is talking about how the 99% white owners must be afraid of their 75% African-American players.  Tired racist trope, anyone?

My understanding and ire have grown together, particularly cemented by encountering a white Facebook riot in which commenters piled on about the players’ lack of civility, privileged status, and of course contempt for the flag, anthem, and all veterans of all wars ever.  The clincher was when one writer praised some players for protesting the “right” way — just not during the national anthem! — as if they had finally learned their lesson.  The lack of shame in presuming to tell African-Americans exactly how they should protest was my a-ha! moment — they just needed to learn some respect, you see, that was their whole problem.

An assumption of malevolent intent on the part of the players is obviously batshit racist on its face.  But I will note that the use of this assumption to essentially refuse to consider the players’ stated reasons for protest — police abuse against African-Americans and by extension racism more generally — elevates a supposedly color-blind patriotism into a weapon of white supremacy.  The harder they hold to the idea that patriotism and veneration of the flag and anthem are the starting points for any further discussion of ANY issues whatsoever, the more they drive home the fact that by their own terms they are placing an abstract nationalism and unity over compassion towards living Americans — living Americans who it is no coincidence happen to be African-American.  And by making the national anthem and flag all about veterans and those who have perished in war, they not coincidentally construct a clear hierarchy in which dead soldiers are more important than dead black folk any day of the week.  Try to say with a straight face that this is not part of the shtick around this amazing new taboo against protesting during the national anthem.

I will be honest: this take-a-knee-or-not moment has left me profoundly disturbed at how the most naked racism is being propounded not just by the president, but by so many white Americans for whom their own racist reasoning should be obvious to them.  Of course, part of what’s so illuminating about this moment is that many of these people don’t actually believe they’re being racist; they think they’re simply being right, without realizing that the reasons they think they’re right (love of country comes before love of living Americans (who happen to be black)) are actually pretty racist.

Placing abstract patriotism over the lives of African Americans is a conscious choice, whether anyone wants to admit or not.  Opponents of the players’ actions are behaving as if, while the national anthem was being played, the players were alternately defecating onto the Constitution (not a copy, mind you — the original document); peeing on a Bible; masturbating to a photo of their beloved 14-year-old daughter; and taking a flamethrower to the American flag.  But let’s always remember — they’re merely kneeling, which San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid has pointed out was deliberately chosen as a respectful gesture . 

* * *

In my addled and mildly despairing state, two recent pieces at Talking Points Memo have given me a bit of comfort by providing important context for our little football war.  Neither article addresses this fight directly, but they’ve both got me thinking about why exactly we’re at this racial moment and about how there may be some glimmers of positive change.

The first, titled “What Is White Supremacy,” jumps into a discussion sparked in recent days by Jonathan Chait’s article at the New York Magazine site about the definition of “white supremacy.”  TPM’s Josh Marshall makes the case that our current political state owes much to the fact of declining majority and lurking non-majority status for whites, along with the concomitant rise of minority populations in our country.  In 1970, 89.5% of Americans were white, with 10% African-American (with Hispanics being counted as either black or white and composing another 4.5% of the population).  In 2010, according to Marshall’s figures, whites were down to 72.4% of the population, with Hispanics constituting 16% of the population.

Marshall brings up these figures in making the case that what it means to be a white supremacist or to support white supremacism may be changing along with our demographics.  He approvingly quotes Chait interlocutor Adam Serwer’s definition of a white supremacist as “someone who believes white people are entitled to political and cultural hegemony.”  Marshall’s argument is pretty careful and nuanced, and should be read in full, but it works towards the point that as more whites become fearful that their primacy in the American heirarchy is being actively threatened, and wish to preserve this primacy, effective distinctions between “outright” white supremacists like David Duke and “sort of” white supremacists like Donald Trump become less marked; as Marshall concludes the piece, “Maybe it is that the changes in the country have made the functional difference between the two much less relevant.”  

His observation seems right on, yet his final observation feels like it pulls back from exploring or stating a broader implication — that as the demographic ground shifts in our country, and they feel more overtly threatened by a loss of status, more white Americans are essentially consciously embracing not just the idea of white supremacism (as in, hey, I’m realizing what I’ve got because I'm white, and I don’t want to lose it), but also becoming more willing to embrace the mentality and tools of what we’ve more traditionally considered white supremacism — active denigration of minorities as a political goal, certainly at a rhetorical level but running the spectrum towards voter suppression, through racist policing and other forms of state violence.  Looking at the dichotomy of David Duke and Donald Trump another way, we could speculate that Donald Trump is very much a reflection, if also an accelerant, of a rising white supremacism in which consciousness of wanting to stay on top segues very quickly into embracing racist leaders and strategies for doing just that.

I mentioned that I find some comfort in this piece in the context of the NFL protest issue.  “Comfort” may seem perverse, but I think it does help me to understand why so many white folks are coming across as both virulently racist and newly emboldened.  A rising consciousness in the face of impending loss of majority status, and the possible loss of status that could bring, certainly seem like spurs to renewed racism in our country.  And channeling this fear and animus at African-Americans, who after all are not growing as a percentage of the population, just puts the cherry of stupid on top of this racist layer cake.  In a time of fear, people fall back on familiar patterns, and also prey on the weak — why not attack a non-growing minority group with a weak economic position, when these very facts mean that you are likelier to get away with it all?  Enter Donald Trump and the bet he has made that our country is no better than him.

The other TPM piece that caught my attention notes that Richmond, Virginia is planning a monument that will honor Nat Turner along with nine other anti-slavery figures, which Marshall finds striking given the controversy which Turner's actions have traditionally provoked.  Marshall discusses the paucity of anti-slavery monuments in the United States, and suggests that more attention to slave revolts may help open up our understanding of slavery in helpful ways.  The concluding paragraph gets at some of the possible sea change we may be seeing:

[S]lave revolts are inherently violent and uncompromisingly brutal. That is hard for this country, which still honors a legal continuity with a long history of slavery, to grapple with. Because coming to the terms with the brutality of slave revolts brings the brutality and violence of slavery itself to the fore in a way America has seldom publicly faced. It’s like a tight and uncompromising algebraic equation. Honoring Turner means that his actions were laudatory and merit public memorialization. But his actions involved killing families and small children in their beds. If such actions, which are normally among the worst we can imagine, merit praise and public honor, the system they were meant to fight and destroy must have been barbaric and unconscionably violent beyond imagining. Very few of us would contest this description of slavery. But bringing Turner into the discussion of public commemoration will air these issues in a new (I think very positive) and jarring way.

For all the people inspired by the president or unwilling to examine their own illiberal assumptions about their fellow Americans, there are many more who are pushing back against this tide of darkness in a million different ways.  When people try to push racist beliefs into the public sphere, they should be made to shoulder all the hideous history and implications of what they're saying.

Why Is the Trump Administration Taking the Heat Off Right-Wing Extremists?

After the white riot in Charlottesville, and the president’s continued problematic response to the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched, no one can claim that our current day political dangers don't include a re-energized far-right that draws inspiration and solace from the current occupant of the White House.  This piece in the New Republic offers solid evidence for why, at a minimum, these extremists see objective evidence that they have little to fear from this presidency.  Presumably under the cover of trimming the budget, the Trump administration has terminated funding for the Countering Violent Extremism program, which “emphasizes community engagement over aggressive law enforcement,” and includes support for programs that target both Muslim radicalism and right-wing extremism.  The administration has also canned grants that specifically target far-right extremism.

Does anyone else find this chilling?  Why is the first instinct of Trump’s law enforcement team to take the heat off right-wing extremists?  And of course, in the fight against Islamic extremists, it signals a fuller embrace of a militarized and counter-productive approach that sees all Muslims, including American citizens, as potential enemies, and refuses to recognize the primacy of non-military solutions to a fight that too many people who should know better would prefer to treat as a never-ending war.  

Both pragmatically and politically, these problematic cuts to the Countering Violent Extremism program are obvious points of attack for Democrats and other opponents of Trump.  Community-level programs to defuse right-wing extremism should be massively escalated, not put on the chopping block, even as law enforcement should be addressing any criminal activity with overwhelming resources.  Once the president made clear his bizarre reluctance to criticize neo-Nazis and white supremacists, any and all legislative evidence of his ambivalence needs to be highlighted.  This also provides a powerful opportunity to press for increased funding for those community-engagement programs that fight Islamic extremism.  The message is simple: let’s de-energize extremism of all stripes through cost-effective, morally defensible approaches, not throw away some of the most powerful tools we have to combat violent ideologies.

We should make Donald Trump justify his coddling of right-wing extremists and incompetence at combatting Islamic extremism at every opportunity.

It's Time for Trump to Stand Down About Standing Up for the National Anthem

The idea that Americans should be forced to honor the national anthem in precisely the way that the president defines and for the reasons that he defines is the laughable opposite of actual patriotism.  The national anthem and the flag are symbols of the full range of American values and ideals; among the most important of these are the rights to political expression and the idea that we need to continually work to perfect our union.  When a citizen believes that our country is not living up to these ideals, then the single most important thing they can do is to share their discontent with others and persuade others to join them, in a way that conveys the power of their feelings and the reasons for their dissent.  This clearly includes the use of symbolic actions; one powerful such action is refusing to stand for the national anthem.

Peaceful protest is always welcome in our country; when a politician calls for retribution against peaceful protest, this is a powerful warning sign that this politician holds beliefs hostile to democracy.  Enforced political conformity and unreflective worship of patriotic symbols are practices of totalitarian societies, not a healthy democracy.  Donald Trump would have you believe that he’s attacking NFL football players for their lack of patriotism; but what he’s actually attacking them for is their actual patriotism.

As is so often the case with Donald Trump, the tendencies towards authoritarianism are tied up with presidential-level racism.  He brought up the issue of black athletes kneeling for the national anthem at a nearly all-white rally for a Republican candidate for the Senate, and his calls for these athletes to be fired is in the context of an NFL in which 75% of the players are African-American and all but one of the team owners are white.  His tweets suggesting that the football players need to just shut up and play the game because they’re paid a lot of money easily evoke old chestnuts that African-Americans are lazy, and also that they should avoid getting uppity.  And as if determined to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his anger at the players has everything to do with their race, within a day the president was picking fights with still more African-American athletes, not on the national anthem issue, but by disinviting the Golden State Warriors from visiting the White House.

If there are any doubts left as to his alignment with white supremacists, you need only compare Donald Trump’s enthusiastic denunciation of these African-American athletes with his grudging and hedged criticism of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and other avowed enemies of American democracy after the violence in Charlottesville.  As many a countervailing tweet has pointed out in the past 48 hours, the white nationalist marchers were “fine people” in the eyes of the president, while any NFL player who kneels at the wrong time is a “son of a bitch.”  Now that we know that “son of a bitch” is within the president’s wheelhouse of publicly appropriate phrases, the fact that he kept it in reserve when denouncing neo-Nazis pretty much tells you everything you need to know about his moral unfitness for office.

In attacking some of the country’s most popular African-American athletes, Donald Trump is showing us that his racism and war on equal rights are total and all-consuming.  Under cover of defending American values, the president is trying to marshall racist resentment against patriotic Americans who seek to raise awareness and effective change around abusive policing and other expressions of systemic racism in American society.  This is what it looks like when the president is a white supremacist.  His racist provocations will only continue to escalate, and will only be stopped by a countering movement in American politics and society.

Progressives Need to Pick a Fight Over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Earlier in the year, we noted a looming fight over the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as Republicans saw an opportunity to dismantle this important government agency.  But as the New York Times recently reported, even as the financial sector’s hatred of the bureau remains unabated, and right-wing legislators harp on its alleged tyrannical powers, GOP moderates seem to have held back a full-scale assault on the bureau thus far.  Its staying power stems from the fact that it is actually performing as intended, protecting the interests of ordinary Americans by pushing back against predatory financial industry practices.  Since its creation, the CFPB has restrained abusive debt collection, improved mortgage lending, and actually investigated hundreds of thousands of consumer complaints — investigations that have resulted in financial benefits on the order of $12 billion for 29 million people. 

That’s a lot of money, and that’s a hell of a lot of registered voters.

The Hot Screen has previously argued that Democrats need to place a vigorous defense of the CFPB at the forefront of their efforts to retake Congress and the presidency (in this case, the best offense is actually a good defense).  A decade out from the 2008 crash, the financial industry retains its predatory, anti-democratic instincts, seeing the American people as a collection of marks to rip off, rather than a citizenry seeking to build a meaningful economy for themselves and their families.  Amazingly, the financial industry continues to try painting itself as a victim of government overreach, despite massive government bailouts and continued bad behavior that is never adequately sanctioned (hello, crooked Wells Fargo!).

The CFPB is the sharp end of the spear pushing back against the otherwise accountable power of a huge, and hugely important, sector of the American economy.  It’s also a vivid demonstration of the more general proposition that government needs to, and can, serve the basic interests of the public; clearly this is a reason why the GOP hates it so much, and why progressives need to make the CFPB a household name.  The economy as a whole, and our prosperity as individuals, are not well served when we are all being constantly ripped off by big corporations and don’t have enough money to invest in the actual economy.  It is like we are constantly being taxed, with the money going into the pockets of private interests dedicated to giving nothing back to society.

It’s amusing to see Republicans use the elements that make the CFPB such an effective advocate for consumers — its insulation and independence from political pressures — to paint it as an out-of-control government agency.  Irrepressible Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling calls the CFPB “the single most unaccountable and powerful agency in the history of our republic”; apparently, in its short existence, the bureau has managed to surpass even the J. Edgar Hoover-era FBI in its abusive power!

What Keeps Happening: The Dumb Responses to Hillary Clinton’s What Happened

The Hot Screen is no great fan of Hillary Clinton — but the various yelps and whines of outrage over her temerity for writing a book about the 2016 campaign are godawfully absurd, if also fully expected and potent reminders of the irrational Hillary-hatred that suffused so much of the coverage of the presidential race.  For us, most telling are the glaringly-visible double-standards when criticisms of Clinton are stacked next to the daily depredations of the man she beat by almost 3 million votes — as if Hillary’s election missteps can at this point be reasonably compared to the actual policies this clown of a president has actually implemented.  It is a classic case of comparing apples and orange hair.

As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, one question recurs in the land of punditry: “Will [Clinton] accept total and unconditional responsibility for our current calamity?”  We would add that some variation of this question has also played out in the progressive electorate at large, among which we would guess that nearly every voter has at one time or another had at least a flash of resentment toward Clinton for letting us down.  But as incisive observers had already noted before What Happened was published, any explanation that puts an inordinate amount of blame on Clinton inevitably ends up downplaying and even discrediting the complementary explanations for what factors came together in 2016 to result in the election of Donald Trump.  All national elections are complicated; but this last one was clearly a humdinger on the complexity scale, and it seems quite a stretch to say that Hillary’s inadequacy was the overriding reason she lost.

There is also a twisted illogic to the blame-Hillary game, in that the very people who are so concerned that she personally doomed her campaign are almost invariably people who actually WANTED HER TO WIN over Donald Trump, and who are disappointed that she did not.  It’s worth noting that a case can be made that too much blaming Hillary, along with Clinton’s own decision to keep clear of the public eye, very well may have already been counterproductive to pressing forward a progressive agenda since Donald Trump’s election.  There seems to have been a collective decision, born out of some combination of shock, horror, and masochism, for the left to downplay the fact that Hillary Clinton won the election by nearly 3 million votes.  With so many Americans feeling victimized by the election of Donald Trump, the last thing many people wanted to do was consider Hillary Clinton to be an even bigger victim than themselves.

As the Hot Screen has written before, the extremism of our political moment requires us to sometimes defer to a cold, ruthless approach to our politics and our political assumptions.  When the losing candidate of the most significant election of our lifetimes writes a memoir about what she thinks is important about the election, we all need to pay attention, regardless of our personal feelings about this candidate and our assumptions and conclusions to date of what transpired.  There will be lessons to learn from what she’s written, even if it takes an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff — an effort necessary when reading the writing of ANY politician, damned or sainted alike.

Is the Trump Administration Hiding Its War on Workers Behind "Entrepreneurship" Smoke and Mirrors? Or Just the New York Times?

This New York Times piece, titled “Trump Shifts Labor Policy Focus From Worker to Entrepreneur,” puts a soft spin on an unsurprising but appalling development — moves by the Trump administration to screw over American workers.  It’s also a reminder that despite the president’s protestations, there’s tons of mainstream, prestige journalism that pulls its punches from clear-cut, outright takes on the starkest betrayals of Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

After detailing an executive branch reversal of the Obama administration’s position in a Supreme Court case on whether “employers can force workers to forfeit their rights to bring class-action lawsuits,” the article goes on to note Trump’s proposed 40% cut for an agency that researches workplace hazards and gutting of a program to educate workers on avoiding injury.  The obvious angle is betrayal of the president's supposed working class base; but the article instead highlights how this approach actually demonstrates Donald Trump’s long-time support of “entrepreneurship,” a term never defined in the article but which seems to refer to people who create jobs and hire people.  

Suggesting that Donald Trump is actually acting in a pro-entrepreneur fashion seems a highly charitable reading of his government’s anti-worker actions, which after all are equally reflective of long-term right-wing efforts to smash labor protections wherever possible.  The article seems to stake its case on the pro-entrepreneurship policies of this administration by citing its changed positions on various technical but important labor rules about joint employers, who gets termed a independent contractor versus an employee, and who qualifies for time and a half pay.

But whether the administration, its supporters, or the author choose to call these policies supportive of entrepreneurship, you could also easily counter that “entrepreneurship” is just a fig leaf for the timeless effort of business owners to pay and compensate their workers as little as possible.  When the article quotes labor-hating, failed nominee for labor secretary Andrew “What a Puzd!” Puzder about the tendency of overtime pay to staunch the job-creating ambitions of hourly workers (apparently by seducing them into settling for being mere workers fairly compensated for their work), the stench of bullshit becomes overpowering.  

The article amusingly quotes David Weil, who was involved with the issue of classifying workers as independent contractors versus employees during the Obama administration, and who notes how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs expressed an attitude of “Why are you bothering me with this employee stuff when I’m actually giving people a chance to be entrepreneurs?”  The idea of valorized entrepreneurs arguing that people working for them are actually entrepreneurs, too, and should be happy about it, is an absurd but also quite radical shift in what an employer’s responsibilities to its workers should be.  It conjures a vision of a world in which, through the magic of semantics, there are no longer owners and workers, but just entrepreneurs floating in a sea of equality, as if all the tendencies toward exploitation in the absence of regulation have been whisked away by good will.  But it doesn’t take a cynic to see that anyone — you can call them entrepreneurs, but you can more clarifyingly also call them bosses or owners — who needs other people to help them with their work will always have serious incentives to compensate those people as little as possible — isn’t that the basis of capitalism? — and that such incentives include simultaneous efforts to deny the basic fact that these people are indeed working for them.

In the glorification of the entrepreneur, we see a devaluation of being a “mere worker”; but this sleight of hand rests on the false idea of a heroic, creative few who supply the real drive to the economy, with automaton-like laborers supplying rote and unthinking grunt work to make it all move.  It’s a self-serving notion at odds with the real world, and an insult to the near-infinite contributions made by people who, for a thousand different reasons, don’t have the means or inclination to found a company. 

China Invests in Greece While European Union Prescribes Bad Economics

The New York Times has a fascinating article out about how China has begun to invest heavily in Greece, even as the European Union has imposed strict austerity on that beleaguered country.  As the article notes, “While Europe was busy squeezing Greece, the Chinese swooped in with bucket-loads of investments that have begun to pay off, not only economically but also by apparently giving China a political foothold in Greece, and by extension, in Europe.”  China’s investments include modernizing the port of Piraeus as part of an enormous initiative to create networks for trade with Europe across the Asian continent, which for anyone with even a faint memory of reading about Greek history is an amazing twist for a city that featured in the Peloponnesian War, and speaks to larger global shifts of power and influence in our own time. 

It is amazing to The Hot Screen that as the European Union has imposed what appears to be counter-productive and punitive austerity on Greece, China has essentially moved in and showed the enduring utility of Keynesian economics, creating jobs for Greeks through its investments.  And China’s economic influence is inevitably political, demonstrated most vividly when Greece, along with Hungary (where China is also planning to spend billions), vetoed an annual E.U. effort to condemn China’s human rights record.  The article quotes a Dutch European Parliament member as saying, “The Greek government needs to choose where its alliances lie and realize the E.U. is not only a market, but first and foremost a community of values”; but it seems that the E.U. itself got mixed up on this point when it chose to treat Greece as a market and not a community of fellow human beings needing rescue from economic malaise.  That Greece is now at least sympathetic to an undemocratic competitor to the E.U. is a lesson you’d hope other European politicians would learn the right lesson from, at least if they care about democratic values as much as they claim to.

Early Signs That Macron Doesn't Know How to Fix What Ails France

It looks like France’s experiment with centrist Emmanuel Macron is turning into more politics as usual.  As Sarah Jones at New Republic recounts, his economic proposals would seem to be indistinguishable from what a conservative Republican in the U.S. might propose — tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich, and a weakening of unions.  Jones points to the parallels in the Democratic Party today, where a resurgent Bernie-left movement is working against common wisdom that the center’s where it’s at, even as the center has failed to address spiraling inequality in our country.  Thank god Macron beat Marine LePen, but France’s failure to restore prosperity will only spark new energy for her proto-fascist movement.  Here’s hoping both our countries get it together and start building an economy that works for ordinary people, not the already well-to-do or hyper-rich.

Is Trump a Perfect Storm of Asshole and Empty Vessel?

One of the more bizarre elements of our ongoing national crisis is that we are beset by a president whose ultimate goals seem to be neither political nor ideological, at least not in any traditional sense, but instead fall under a more idiosyncratic desire to assert his own power.  It is of course true that Donald Trump has found himself sympathetic to the furthest-right fringes of the political spectrum, and has also appealed to less extreme conservatives through a combination of economic nationalism and race-based appeals; but these seem more like means to an end, as opposed to someone like, say, Steve Bannon or Jeff Sessions, who seem to have well-though-out (if alternately despicable and discredited) ideas about race, politics, and the economy.  The Hot Screen notes this as prelude to saying how remarkable it is that our greatest Constitutional challenge arguably since the Civil War is coming not through a president with a specific political agenda and ideology, but from one whose main goal is personal aggrandizement — both emotional and monetary — from the presidency.

At any rate: two recent pieces provide insightful assays at what motivates Donald Trump to do like he does.  At long-time THS fave The Baffler, David Roth has penned a haughty and scathing essay, half-lackadaisacal and half-knife-so-sharp-you-don’t-know-you’ve-been-cut-until-your-head-falls-off.  In "The President of Blank Sucking Nullity," Roth diagnoses the president as having a fairly common affliction, though one that’s been badly magnified by his ascent to power: Donald Trump, he asserts, is an asshole, with many consequences that transcend any particular political ideology flowing from this basic fact:

The most significant thing to know about Donald Trump’s politics or process, his beliefs or his calculations, is that he is an asshole; the only salient factor in any decision he makes is that he absolutely does not care about the interests of the parties involved except as they reflect upon him.  Start with this, and you already know a lot [. . .]  The rest of the world is an abstraction to him, a market to exploit; there is no other person in it who is real to him. They’re all supplicants or subjects, fans or haters, but their humanity is transparently not part of the equation.

Roth doesn’t simply leave matters at this basic assholic quality of self-absorption that characterizes Trump and his fellow bottom-dwellers, but identifies the specific ways the president's condition manifests itself: 

It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More.  The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude.

Roth goes on to demonstrate (conclusively or not, we will leave to the reader; hint: the right answer is “conclusively”) that Trump’s asshole status makes quick work of various vexing questions, such as whether Donald Trump is a racist or a neo-Confederate:

There is no room for other people in the world that Trump has made for himself, and this is fundamental to the anxiety of watching him impose his claustrophobic and airless interior world on our own.  Is Trump a racist?  Yes, because that’s a default setting for stupid people; also, he transparently has no regard for other people at all.  Does Trump care about the cheap-looking statue of Stonewall Jackson that some forgotten Dixiecrat placed in a shithole park somewhere he will never visit?  Not really, but he so resents the fact that other people expect him to care that he develops a passionate contrary opinion out of spite.  Does he even know about . . . Let me stop you there.  The answer is no.

You may or may not agree with Roth’s singular diagnosis, but you have to admit that his is a determined engagement with the question of why our politics has so much come to revolve around the psyche of a single, clearly troubled person.  THS believes that part of the mesmerism of Trump is a simultaneous dissonance/congruity between his singular, self-obsessed personality and the larger socio-political forces he’s tapped into; that is, there is something remarkable in the fact that a man so self-obsessed can be seen by so many to embody THEIR particular aspirations and grievances.  Of course it has to add up, because there he is in the White House, and here we are as a stunned and harshly beset nation.  Roth’s analysis gets at the truth of the matter, which is that on one side of the equation we are facing a general situation of the emperor having no clothes: the man ultimately is not the savior of the working class or even white America, but a huckster out to aggrandize numero uno.  Helping anyone else is purely incidental.

(Lo and behold — it seems that at least one Republican is on board with Roth's diagnosis, though it seems he's reached the conclusion independently of Roth's essay.  Speaking of President Trump, Congressman Duncan Hunter is said to have told colleagues recently, "He’s just like he is on TV.  He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole."  Alrighty then.)

At New Republic, Jeet Heer has a piece out — titled “Cultural Warlord Trump Goes on the Offensive” — that looks at why Trump has adopted so many of the culturally conservative/malignant positions that arguably seemed not to interest him during the 2016 campaign.  (Of course, the idea that he’d back off cultural fights never made much sense — you can’t back off a fight without tacitly supporting the currently winning side.)  Heer suggests a theory that’s been offered by others in various permutations, writing:

[Trump backer billionaire] Peter Thiel (and those who shared his illusion) misjudged Trump because they thought the fact that he wasn’t personally invested in culture-war issues would mean that he would put them on the back-burner.  What they ignored is that Trump has a fundamentally tribalistic approach to politics.  He sees himself as the head of a tribe, whose main goal is to reward his supporters and punish his enemies.

In January 2016, Will Saletan wrote in Slate that “the Republican Party is a failed state, and Donald Trump is its warlord.”  That metaphor deserves an update.  Trump is now presiding over America as if it were a failed state, and he is its avenging cultural warlord.  Trump is styling himself as the chieftain of the Straight White Christian Party who will defend his people against all enemies, be they Muslim terrorists or trans soldiers.  

We might say that Heer’s argument is the complement of Roth’s: Trump, in his assholic emptiness, has become the vessel and defender of a broader white grievance, through some confluence of psychological propensity and alignment with the aggrievements of others — a sort of dizzyingly narcissistic selflessness.  Armchair psychologizing aside, Heer’s characterization of Trump as “chieftain of the Straight White Christian Party who will defend his people against all enemies, be they Muslim terrorists or trans soldiers” resonates with us, and seems to contain not so much a grain of truth as a whole frickin’ nugget’s worth.  

Opposition Grapples with the Implications of the Arpaio Pardon

Political writers continue to weigh in on the ramifications of Donald Trump’s pardon of sadistic Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Pursuing a theme he’s revisited over the past months, Brian Beutler highlights the Republican Party’s position vis-a-vis the pardon.  Pointing to the discouraging silence on the part of nearly all elected Republican officials, he reminds us that the pardon power is a presidential prerogative impossible to counter by ordinary legislative means; it really can’t be constrained by passing a law.  Their only available remedy is impeachment, an option on which the GOP is deafeningly silent.  But Beutler points out that the Republicans who control Congress do have secondary remedies, such as investigating the pardon and passing laws that signal to law enforcement that racism won’t be tolerated — approaches that the GOP currently seems content to leave unexamined.

Beutler also identifies some of the destructive messages contained in this pardon: it encourages abuse by other law enforcement members, encourages white supremacists, and constitutes a test of Trump’s pardon power as a future way to defeat Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.  Paul Krugman goes a step further in Monday’s column, identifying Arpaio as an exemplar of an American fascism, and the pardon as Trump’s endorsement of it; referencing Arpaio’s own description of his tent prison as a “concentration camp,” Krugman writes:

There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style. 

Krugman’s characterization is helpful in part because it also helps explain how we got to this perilous moment; the authoritarian behavior and systematic racism that Trump threatens have been exercised by other Republican politicians for decades now, and broadly excused by the GOP.  Sheriff Arpaio, after all, had been re-elected over the course of twenty years, and indeed was only defeated at the ballot box in November 2016.  And we see various flavors of this behavior across the country, from police killings of unarmed African Americans to the way law enforcement has been turned into a revenue-raising function of the state in towns like Ferguson, where African-Americans have been targeted for “crimes” that, say, a white middle-class person would never be subjected to.

In light of which — Jamelle Bouie connects the dots between the Arpaio pardon and the president’s decision to resume the full-on 1033 program of supplying military surplus to police departments around the country.  He writes, “This too represents an attack on accountability, and together with the Arpaio pardon, they show a key priority for this administration: impunity for those with state authority and attendant disregard for the people that authority is wielded on, often cruelly.”  Bouie also sees in both actions a fetishization of law and order by the president “at the expense of actual rule of law.”  (This opposition of law and order versus rule of law seems to be a bit of a meme lately, and it seems a promisingly concise way to communicate what’s wrong with Trump’s approach on many fronts).

Finally, in a piece on the president’s demented Arizona rally at which he teased the possibility of an Arpaio pardon, Joan Walsh links Trump’s pardon talk to Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House, describing the impending pardon, and Trump’s speech more generally, as an attempt to demonstrate to his followers that Bannon’s departure has left him no less virulent a supporter of white nationalism.

Although it's ultimately up to the Republicans whether or not to attempt to constrain the president's abuse of the pardon power, nothing is stopping the Democrats and other opponents of Trump to create an atmosphere that makes such efforts more likely.  It's vital to get the word out on what a vile and undeserving recipient of the pardon Joe Arpaio is, how this pardon connects to broader systemic racism that abuses immigrants and literally kills Americans, and sets a dangerous precedent for further abuse by a president beset by myriad crises of his own making.

Pardon of Joe Arpaio Is a Very Bad Sign of Where We're Heading

President Trump’s Friday pardon of the recently convicted former sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ is the latest bright red neon warning sign that this president is determined to push our system of government to the breaking point in pursuit of his own narrow political interests.  Some are arguing that this pardon itself constitutes an impeachable act; but setting that debate aside, there are layers of perniciousness to this action.  As Bloomberg View columnist and Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wrote a couple days before the pardon was issued, Arpaio’s offense wasn’t simply breaking a law, but flouting the Constitution itself.  Coming so soon after Donald Trump’s endorsement of racists and the neo-Confederate movement in connection with the white riot in Charlottesville, it’s clearly meant as a doubling-down on his supporters’ accurate perception of him as the white supremacist-in-chief.  And in the context of Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Donald Trump, it needs to be read as a signal to anyone caught up in potential crimes that the president is not afraid to use the power of the pardon in controversial, indeed, outrageous ways.

As Feldman summarizes, in 2011 a federal judge enjoined Arpaio to cease “saturation patrols,” which involved rounding up people because they appeared to be Latino, as this was found to constitute unconstitutional profiling and warrantless stops.  However, Arpaio continued to run these sweeps, which in 2016 led the same judge to find the sheriff in civil contempt of court.  This ruling led to a second proceeding to determine if Arpaio was in criminal contempt of court; another judge found this to be the case, and Arpaio was convicted in July of this year essentially for “willful defiance of a federal judge’s lawful order to enforce the Constitution.”  I think it’s worth quoting Feldman at length here, because he sets out very clearly the implications of Trump’s pardon of such a crime:

The only way the legal system can operate is if law enforcement officials do what the courts tell them.  Judges don’t carry guns or enforce their own orders. That’s the job of law enforcement. 

In the end, the only legally binding check on law enforcement is the authority of the judiciary to say what the law is — and be listened to by the cops on the streets.

When a sheriff ignores the courts, he becomes a law unto himself. The courts’ only available recourse is to sanction the sheriff.  If the president blocks the courts from making the sheriff follow the law, then the president is breaking the basic structure of the legal order.

From this analysis it follows directly that pardoning Arpaio would be a wrongful act under the Constitution.  There would be no immediate constitutional crisis because, legally speaking, Trump has the power to issue the pardon.

But the pardon would trigger a different sort of crisis: a crisis in enforcement of the rule of law.

Apart from the grave issue of undermining the rule of law, let’s not forget the context of this pardon: it comes as Americans continue to grapple with the implications of the events in Charlottesville and the clear indications that Donald Trump sympathizes with the vile forces that rallied there.  The line from Charlottesville to the Arpaio pardon is clear because of the nature of the offenses for which Arpaio is notorious, and which led to his conviction.  For going on two decades, Arpaio has pursued racist and inhumane policing against the Latino community in Maricopa County.  His offenses range from the aforementioned racial profiling, to a sadistic, overheated tent city for detainees, to the abuse of his office to pursue political vendettas, to the deaths of those in custody.  His barbaric approach has been a stain on the American conscience for many years, and he has been not just a symbol but enforcer of institutionalized racism.  It was a good day for American justice when Arizona voters voted him out last year.

So it is no coincidence that Arpaio is Trump’s first pardon, or that it comes as the latest act in the program of presidential-level racism that metastasized into undeniable public knowledge after Charlottesville.  The Arizona Republic spells out what this pardon means for the country at large:

[Trump’s] pardon of Joe Arpaio elevated the disgraced former Maricopa County sheriff to monument status among the immigration hardliners and nationalists in Trump’s base. This erases any doubt about whether Trump meant to empower them after the violence in Charlottesville [. . .] Donald Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great [. . .] By pardoning Arpaio, Trump made it clear that institutional racism is not just OK with him. It is a goal.

As he has been doing emphatically since Charlottesville, and indeed since he launched his presidential campaign, Donald Trump is showing that he intends not to be the president of all Americans, but only of a subset for whom no constitutional outrage is too great, so long as it means that non-whites are scapegoated for the country's ills.

The pardon also needs to be seen in the context of Donald Trump’s broader malfeasance, from the anti-Muslim travel ban to his attempts to set up a voter commission intended to deny the vote to millions of Americans.  Particularly, it needs to be seen in the context of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with which by multiple accounts the president is obsessed.  A pardon this early in his administration of a prominent ally sends a clear signal to those in the crosshairs of the investigation; as Democratic strategist Paul Begala told the New York Times, “The Arpaio pardon was awful in and of itself, but I also think it was a signal to the targets of the Mueller investigation that ‘I got your back.’”

At a minimum, the pardon demonstrates Trump’s willingness to use the pardon power for strictly partisan purpose.  Bear in mind that this pardon did not follow the usual procedures followed by previous presidents; here is how the New York Times describes the normal process:

The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which ordinarily makes pardon recommendations, has an elaborate and lengthy process for considering pardon applications.  It generally requires a five-year waiting period, the office’s application instructions say, “to afford the petitioner a reasonable period of time in which to demonstrate an ability to lead a responsible, productive and law-abiding life."

The department, moreover, usually recommends pardons only after an expression of remorse.

“A presidential pardon is ordinarily a sign of forgiveness,” the instructions say.  “A pardon is not a sign of vindication and does not connote or establish innocence.  For that reason, when considering the merits of a pardon petition, pardon officials take into account the petitioner’s acceptance of responsibility, remorse and atonement for the offense.”

Mr. Arpaio, who has been anything but contrite, did not submit a formal application. Indeed, he had not yet been sentenced.

There are now also reports that in the months prior to this pardon, Donald Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House counsel Don McGahn II about whether the feds could drop the case against Arpaio.  If not an outright attempt to obstruct justice, this is an interest in interference in the legal process that you never want a president to explore, and is more evidence of the president's disregard for our court system, and by extension the rule of law.

It might seem alarmist to extrapolate from a single pardon, but it is not hard to see that a president who chooses to use this Constitutional power repeatedly to protect himself and his supporters from bad acts would in effect end the rule of law in our country, a point that Bloomberg’s Feldman makes.  And again, it is not simply this pardon, but its conjunction with so many other bad acts and behaviors of this president, that make us not simply fear executive excess, but show us that such presidential excess is already in full swing.

It's Time for White America to Think Harder About True Patriotism, Not to Mention Basic Decency

Two of my favorite political columnists, Andrew O’Hehir and Jamelle Bouie, have pieces out that cut to the heart of the discussions people need to be having in the aftermath of Charlottesville and the president's sordid response to the white riots there.  O'Hehir confronts head-on the hideous valorization of the Confederate cause that, to our great sorrow, we have all been reminded still haunts and sabotages our country through the present day.  He recounts the clarity of Ulysses S. Grant’s vision of the Civil War and its aftermath, noting that Grant “saw the slaveholding aristocracy that drove the South into secession as an indefensible criminal regime, rooted in treason and an immoral economy where human beings were 'bought and sold like cattle.'"  O’Hehir goes on to outline the stupefying situation we now face, in which the Confederacy has come to be seen by millions as a glorious era, with all the massive social damage such a false sense of history entails.  He writes:

As if by dark magic, a disgraceful episode that very nearly doomed the entire American project to failure — and was driven by the greed and cruelty of a tiny elite caste — is now widely understood as a profound and mystical expression of the American spirit.  Or, more bluntly, as a sacred covenant of whiteness.

By refusing to face the true legacy of slavery and its aftermath, and embracing an entire universe of “alternative facts” about the Civil War, the Confederacy and race relations, a large portion of white America has in effect enslaved itself to a false sense of history and a false racial consciousness.  We can see the resulting confusion and dysfunction all around us: In the “diseases of despair” and self-defeating politics of the now-infamous white working class. In the appalling street theater of Charlottesville, a new low in our nation’s 21st-century decline.

While Trump blathers on about how Confederate statues are "beautiful" and part of a history we should cherish, it’s becoming clearer than ever that a president as divisive and hateful as Donald Trump could only be elected if U.S. citizens, particularly white Americans, have either learned a false history or have too little grasp of our true one.

It’s also becoming increasingly obvious that white folks are reaching a reckoning time as to whether they continue down this road, with all the newly-escalating racial hatred on their side that it has unleashed, or whether they open their eyes to the full story of our country.  Such is the argument that Jamelle Bouie makes in a column this week entitled “White Americans Have to Make a Choice.”  Contemplating the writing of historian Lerone Bennett Jr. and writer James Baldwin, Bouie revisits the idea that the U.S. doesn’t have a race problem so much as it has a white person problem, and writes of the “myth of innocence” that so many white Americans embrace, and which was fully exploited by Donald Trump in his ascent to the presidency.

Addressing the larger issues that intersect around the fight over Confederate monuments, Bouie gets to the central question for white Americans, and for the survival of this country more generally: 

Indeed, if Confederate statues represent the effort to erase history, then this push to remove them is a request to recover and reckon with it. It’s a demand that those white Americans abandon the comforting fictions of unity and progress and confront the past and present in all of its ugliness. And it’s a call for white Americans to broaden their moral imaginations and consider the impact these monuments make on their fellow citizens, to understand what it means to reify the symbols of a slaveholder’s rebellion. To answer any of this is to answer that question of the era: Who is America for?

Bouie describes the fight to redefine our memory of the Civil War and its white supremacist aftermath as an uphill battle, but after Charlottesville, it seems that there’s no choice but to keep fighting it.  In his closing, he makes a great point that addresses the argument that those troubled by monuments to the Confederacy are simply agitators upset with a settled history: 

It presumes that these monuments were never controversial and that the narratives they represent were never contested. They were. They always have been. And the reason we have this fight is because for more than a century, too many white Americans were content with narratives built on exclusion and erasure. The question now is whether they’re still content, whether they still believe this is a white country, or whether they’re ready to share this country, and its story, with others.

I'll end by offering a parallel question: White Americans need to be asking themselves whether it's preferable to share this country with non-whites, or whether it's somehow more comfortable to share it with the freak-show bigots who showed up in Charlottesville, and who will continue to thrive so long as we've got a commander in chief who acts as their apologist, and as long as enough people look the other way.  If these people don't fill you with horror and loathing, don't ignite your contempt for all we're learning about the deranged history too many have told themselves about race in America, then it's time to take a closer look at your basic value system.

Keeping Trump Pinned to His Support for White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis

The terrible events in Charlottesville last weekend have heightened public awareness of the growing boldness of white nationalists and neo-Nazis alongside the election of Donald Trump.  But the flashpoint of the Robert E. Lee memorial in that city has also thrust the question of Confederate monuments more into public view as well.  Already, the city of Baltimore has removed its Confederate statues from public view, and other cities are beginning to debate the appropriateness of their continued display.

One of the most important pieces of information to emerge more broadly into public view over the last week is that most of these statues were not put up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to commemorate the Southern war dead.  Rather, most were erected decades after the war, as an affirmation of the establishment of post-bellum white supremacy and the South’s delayed victory on this key front.  Their construction is also related to the way that the North, as a method for reconciling the splintered U.S.,  allowed the South to construct a narrative that the Confederate fight was not to preserve slavery, but was instead a patriotic battle for liberty.  As Josh Marshall discusses at Talking Points Memo, “[w]hat is little discussed today is that the North and the South made a tacit bargain in the years after the Civil War to valorize Southern generals as a way to salve the sting of Southern defeat and provide a cultural and political basis for uniting the country with more than military force.”  As Marshall also notes, this approach was coupled with the North’s move to leave African-Americans in the south to the mercy of their former overlords, leading to decades more of Jim Crow and African-American disenfranchisement.

So the history behind these statues is shot through with racist intent, and the recent right-wing protestors at Charlottesville show us that at least white supremacists know this.  So now that these statues have become a flashpoint for rejection of a far-right resurgence, and their real meaning becomes more broadly understood, what’s the best strategy to take?  Should removal of the statues become a full-court press by progressives?

This seems to me a slightly more fraught question than I had initially believed, because I think most people on the left would agree that there is a larger issue that needs to be addressed, which is defeating Trump and the forces of white supremacism that have energized his presidency.  So, adopting language inspired by the militant backdrop here, the question becomes, how best to use the battle of the statues to advance the war against these retrograde forces?  The right-wing march on Charlottesville, and Donald Trump’s response, have vividly demonstrated the synergy between the president and these illiberal, un-American groups; it is crucial that this synergy be keep in full public view as much as possible.  At this point, there seems to be momentum, including from conservative politicians, to remove them from some Southern cities.  But as much as I personally despise the presence of these statues and instinctively would like nothing more than to knock them all down overnight, I think we need to consider how such a project can be carried out so as to maximize the political damage to Trump, his Republican Party enablers, and white supremacists.

When Steve Bannon says it would be a good idea for his brand of politics if people keep knocking down statues, I don’t think it’s letting Bannon play head games with the left to stop to consider why he might say this.  I think an important part of the answer can be gleaned from Bannon’s phone call to American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner shortly before his departure from the White House, when he said, “The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”  I think the grain of truth in his words is that reinforcing a narrative in which the left seems to ONLY care about race and identity is indeed not a great idea for Democrats and other progressives; it can be leveraged to alienate white voters, and to make the case that the Democrats are a party that no longer cares about economic justice.

I realize the question of identity politics is a fraught and complicated topic, and that I make such a quick digression into it at my peril.  But here’s why I bring it up: I think the moral power of the fight to remove Confederate statues is maximized when progressives and others make it clear that these are emblems not simply of subjugation of African-Americans, but have become a modern-day inspiration to forces that hate nearly ALL Americans - white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates, for whom the only acceptable American is Christian, southern, probably male, and of course white.  Don't make it an issue of black Americans versus white Americans; make it an issue of normal, decent Americans versus treasonous, racist, anti-Americans.  Keeping up the fight is also a huge win by continuing to put Trump’s defense of these hate groups in the public eye as the struggle to remove them continues; because at this point, the clear and immediate danger, more than whatever inspiration the monuments give far-right forces, is the fact that they have a president who showers them with approval from the highest office in the land, laying the groundwork for greater white supremacist violence. 

Bannon’s line of thinking is that the statues are yet another issue that can be used to drive a wedge between Americans along racial lines, while the president continues to talk about “economic nationalism.”  What Bannon seems not to grasp, though, is that the rally in Charlottesville, and the discussion it has opened up about the president’s defense of white supremacists, has made it increasingly difficult for Trump himself to talk about anything else.  Indeed, it makes it easier than ever to see that “economic nationalism” is a euphemism for a politics of benefitting white Americans, including by means of un-American voter suppression efforts, against perceived advantage-taking by privileged minorities; otherwise, why would Bannon be positing some sort of obvious opposition between economic nationalism and the interests of non-whites?  Bannon seems not to understand the significance of the fact that it’s Trump who started this fight, when he gave a nudge and a wink to racist elements during the campaign and after his election.  Trump is the one who stood behind the podium at Trump Tower and talked about the “fine people” at a neo-Nazi rally.  The statues have become a gateway into a heightened discussion of the fact that our president has thrown his weight behind the most hateful and violent fringes of our society.  Removing the statues from their pedestals is a powerful new way to talk about removing Trump from office.

An effective strategy around the statues is also one that doesn’t simply call for tearing down, but for building up - in this case, constructing new statues in the place of the old that celebrate our SHARED American history.  A good place to start are abolitionists and African-American soldiers who served in the Civil War - there are many heroes to be found in both groups, including people who should be better-known than currently.  One name I have seen mentioned is Robert Smalls, whose amazing story encompasses stealing a Confederate ship and being elected to the House of Representatives.  More broadly memorialized, these people would be an inspiration that decent Americans could celebrate together.

And speaking of driving a wedge - there is one area where Democrats and progressives can force Trump’s Republican enablers to choose sides with little risk and maximal moral righteousness.  Ten U.S. Army bases are named for Confederate generals, and now a group of House Democrats has proposed a bill under which the defense secretary would have to rename military bases named after anyone “who took up arms against the United States during the American Civil War or any individual or entity that supported such efforts.”  It is shocking that U.S. military facilities would be named after generals who fought against the United States.  Once again, the roots of this phenomenon go back to a time when it was seen as important to placate the South.  According to Politico, “A number of the bases got those names in the early and mid-20th century, at a time when military leaders needed to fill the ranks and relied heavily on Southern states. Some were named in the lead-up to World War I and others on the cusp of American entry into World War II. Many of the names were put forward by the states, and the Army, in desperate need of manpower, agreed.”

I cannot believe that this is an issue on which the cause of retaining these names will find many defenders.  It is logically nonsensical for a military base to be named after someone who fought against that same military: as nonsensical as, say, naming a base after German general Erwin Rommel.  And if this legislation were to be passed, it would set a powerful precedent that would help to re-define the conversation about Confederate monuments, and those like the president who mistakenly view them as beautiful elements of both our public parks and history.