To Break Through Conservative Propaganda, Progressive Pushback Needs to Ground Itself in Long-Established American Traditions

News that the American Civil Liberties Union plans to spend millions to back ballot initiatives and various political issues in the 2018 election cycle is yet more concrete evidence that the progressive backlash provoked by Donald Trump’s election is very real.  The ACLU is in a position to spend $25 million for this purpose because, whereas it raised $5.5 million in the year before Trump’s election, it has raised as astounding $93 million in the year since.  Alongside this massive increase in fundraising has come a quadrupling of its membership, to 1.75 million.  This combination of increased members and financial resources is deeply heartening for those of us looking for evidence of a real changes in the political landscape, as is the ACLU’s ambition to become a left-wing analogue of the National Rifle Association in terms of its ability to affect policy.  The growth of the ACLU is also a reminder of the importance of building out an infrastructure and fighting the good fight even in less receptive times; now that the political environment is in rapid flux, the ACLU is not only positioned to act, but is a recognizable organization through which people are able to band together and flex their political muscle.

I’ve been a member of the ACLU for many years; in fact, as far as I can remember, it’s the first political organization I joined (in an early example of how political backlash can work, nothing could have made me more excited to sign up than the patrician George H.W. Bush's famous accusation that Michael Dukakis was a "card-carrying member" of the organization).  Its emphasis on civil rights and particularly free speech, even when these positions might receive scant support from either side of the spectrum, spoke to my youthful sense of righteousness and a foundational belief in free speech that has only grown stronger over time.  And so it’s not surprising that the ACLU’s current success feels especially gratifying to me.

But though what I’ve written so far might sound like a testimonial in support of joining the ACLU (and I will neither encourage nor discourage any of you from reading it this way), I want to sound a note of caution about the left’s increased ability to throw large amounts of money and advertising behind points of view that are not simply progressive, but also exist in a world in which the right wing has spent much time and energy attempting to define their meaning for the public.  It’s not enough to advocate for certain issues; we also need to proceed in ways that incorporate philosophical arguments for why these positions fit into a broader American morality and patriotism.  Not to do so would be to tacitly embrace a naive, overly optimistic, and potentially self-sabotaging read of the perilous and propagandistic state at which American politics has arrived.

Take protection of immigrants’ rights.  For millions of Americans, defense of immigrants and refugees is an expression of our shared humanity, a clear case of a politically weak or even powerless group requiring assistance on the most basic moral grounds.  But this is clearly not the way that many Americans view the matter.  Donald Trump and a great deal of the Republican Party have identified newcomers to this country as an existential threat, explicitly on the grounds that they take American jobs and act as vectors for terrorism, and somewhat less explicitly on the grounds that they threaten the culture and whiteness of our country.  Because this framework has such a powerful hold in the public discourse, any pushback from the left needs to be aware of it and answer its wrongful assumptions, lest progressives inadvertently provide more ammunition to positions they oppose.

For example, it makes sense to ground advocacy for documented immigrants to our country in America’s centuries-long status as a nation of immigrants, where newcomers are welcomed as the citizens of tomorrow, just like nearly all of our own ancestors once were.  It’s also crucial that we argue for the net economic benefits of immigrants, and demonstrate the basic economic fact that rather than taking away jobs, immigrants help to grow the economy by creating new jobs, paying taxes, and helping drive demand as consumers.  These arguments have the benefit of being neither liberal nor conservative positions, but reiterations of basic facts.

More fraught are (mostly conservative white) racialized fears about demographic and cultural change.  Frankly, such fears can’t be addressed directly.  A person who believes the United States should be majority white forever is in the throes of a racism that we still have no easy cures for, and the response to which should ever and always be unremitting opposition and contempt.  But such fears can be countered and undermined by reminding everyone of the very American story of immigrants contributing to American greatness.  Just because people express bigoted views worthy of contempt doesn’t mean the right answer is to ignore them; if there are ways to neutralize nativist appeals, then we need to explore those avenues.  And as I’ve repeatedly argued on this site, we have to acknowledge the very real economic malaise that many people face: that these Americans have chosen to blame the wrong targets for their predicament doesn’t mean they don’t deserve an economy that helps them as well.

I’ve also been thinking about the backlash against liberal initiatives in light of the effort underway in Florida to re-enfranchise to citizens who have permanently lost their voting rights due to felony convictions.  An incredible 1.6 million otherwise-eligible Floridians are currently unable to vote, including a staggering 20% of the state’s African-American population.  An ongoing petition would put an initiative on the ballot in 2018 to restore voting rights to those who have served their time and completed their parole requirements.  All efforts to strip people’s right to vote should be viewed with a deeply skeptical eye, and Florida’s status as one of only three states with a lifetime ban on the franchise puts it in scandalously poor company. 

Yet I can’t help thinking of the likely Republican counter-attack against this initiative.  They will contend that the Democratic Party is the party of criminality and minorities.  It would not be surprising if they also used the success of this initiative to attempt to discredit future outcomes in Florida elections — not because any law has been violated, but simply because casting doubt on our electoral process is increasingly part of what the GOP views as an acceptable path to power.  There is nothing any of us can do to stop Republican politicians from adopting anti-democratic stances — but we can at least anticipate and counter them.  In this case, I would hope that the Florida ballot initiative is supported by a broader discussion of the basic immorality of removing a person’s right to vote, the implicit racism of a policy that disproportionately affects minorities, and the undeniable fact that the Republican Party has all but abandoned its ability to win over a majority of Americans and so has grown reliant on undemocratic means to suppress the vote.

Tying specific issues back to their roots in American tradition, morality, and democracy; and framing them in a way that cuts through the right-wing framework rather than simply adding easy fodder to backwards conservative arguments: I can't say I know how we do this effectively, but my gut is telling me we need to figure out how.

Have Progressives Let Themselves Become Identified With the Shortcomings of the U.S. Economy?

Since the 2016 election, New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall has analyzed the constituency of both our major parties in deeply insightful ways, and has become one of my go-to’s for trying to understand the origins and scope of our American political crisis.  His writing on the GOP has been superb, but his thoughts on the Democratic Party in particular have delved into territory that progressives ignore at their peril.  I’m hoping to revisit some of his arguments in full soon, but for the time being I want to talk a little about a column from early December.  

Titled “Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears,” Edsall's piece engages with the thoughts of a pair of sociologists who argue that liberals and liberalism more broadly have played an important role in energizing the powerful right-wing movement of which Trump is the current apotheosis.  As with many of his columns, Edsall brings in points of view with which I don’t necessarily agree, but which are deeply thought-provoking.  

First, Karen Stenner argues that a liberal democracy such as that generally supported by the left can end up creating conditions that undermine it, by advocating values that threaten and provoke resistance from those with a far different mindset.  She also asserts that these same values essentially involve a sort of unilateral disarmament on the part of the left — for instance, by insisting on the absolute value of free speech, it allows into the public sphere hateful or racist speech inimical to liberal values of tolerance.  In a similar vein, but to my reckoning more grounded in the actuality of American politics and economics, Eric Schnurer tells Edsall that a combination of economic, demographic, and cultural changes make typical Trump voters feel that they are being left behind by the country, while at the same time these very changes are embraced as progress by their typical “blue state” counterparts.  Finally, Edsall checks in with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who throws into the mix the idea that liberals have unhelpfully backed down from making a stronger public case that liberal government works — that we’re better off with environmental laws that give us clean air, that the welfare states lifts people out of poverty, that globalization has had some benefits for Americans.  Synching up somewhat with Stenner’s framework, Pinker argues that there will always be a clash between “enlightenment values” and “innate tribalism,” but that modernity will ultimately prevail.

For me at least, the dialogue that Edsall facilitates here is heady, exciting stuff.  It hits various sweet spots — inquiring into the nature of Trump voters’ grievances, exploring unexamined assumptions of Democratic and progressive voters, and suggesting that the way forward requires mass empathy for those millions of our fellow Americans who have embraced, to varying degrees, an un-American authoritarian in the White House.  Backlash is an enormous part of Donald Trump’s rise to power — backlash against a black man in the White House, backlash against the cultural changes that are disorienting and weakening people’s sense of status in the world, and backlash against an economic system that seems not to serve most people any longer.

Yet all these backlashes are not created equal.  The racism-infused reaction to the demographic and political rise of minorities is a sorry judgment on the state of much of white America’s claims to basic decency, and the conflict it embodies is not one from which liberals can retreat a single iota and still consider themselves liberal.  Likewise, the backlash created by cultural developments such as gay marriage and the continuing empowerment of women in the workplace and society requires unyielding push-back.  But the final leg of this destabilizing triad — our deindustrializing, globalizing, inequality-revving economy — is in my judgment the lynchpin and accelerant of these other two great clashes.  This recent piece from Edsall, as with several over the past year, is so exciting to me because, in a nutshell, it suggests a dangerous complicity by otherwise liberal-minded people in an economic dynamic that is deeply damaging to people who, generally speaking, come from less urban areas, and who generally have a lower educational background.  This dynamic is summarized well by Schnurer:

I don’t think there’s much argument that the modern economy is killing off small towns, US-based manufacturing, the interior of the US generally, etc. There is, or could be, an argument as to whether that’s just the necessary functioning of larger economic forces, or whether there are political choices that have produced, or at least aided and abetted, those outcomes. In any event, while most of us in Blue World see these changes as beneficent, they have had devastating effects on the economies of “red” communities.

[. . .]

The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to. I don’t think this is good — in fact, I think it’s a very dangerous situation — but I think we need to understand it in order to responsibly address it.

I keep arguing that economic malaise has been key to creating conditions for cultural and racial resentment to boil over into a movement that presents an existential challenge to our democracy, but I want to be clear that the way people experience threats to their well being is not so neatly divided into the categories I’ve been discussing.  The disturbance that millions of people are living through is felt so powerfully in part because it feels like it threatens them across a broad spectrum of their lives.  If you’re a factory worker who’s lost a job, this undermines more than just your economic livelihood — for instance, it threatens more abstract but deeply important things like the culture you thought you were part of, and the way you view illegal immigrants who Fox News keeps telling you are the reason you lost your job.

While Edsall’s article raises the broad question of whether liberalism has in part created the forces that now threaten our political system, the question of whether liberalism has endorsed, tacitly or not, an economic regime that largely benefits them while doing great harm to great swathes of the population seems to me the most critical piece of our political puzzle.  This is not only because I think economic unease is the great accelerant to cultural and racial resentment, but because it’s the one enormous part of our lives that we can actually exert real collective control over.  So it becomes more than a little disturbing when you stop to consider whether too many progressives have either embraced, or failed to gauge the true harm of, a modern capitalism that has eviscerated entire regions of the country.

If you accept, at least for argument’s sake, that many Trump voters associate progressives and progressivism with a destructive free market capitalism, then the combination of cultural revanchism and economic protectionism that the president espouses begins to feel more understandable as a position that Trump supporters might see as a direct rejection of liberalism.  If liberals have indeed placed themselves, implicitly or explicitly, on the side of an economic system that in serious ways contradicts or undermines values they hold dear, then this could help to explain some of the muddled state we have gotten ourselves into.  The question of whether the economic benefits that have accrued to many Democrats over the past decades — particularly those at the higher end of the income scale — is slowing the party as a whole from acknowledging and addressing the real structural problems in our economy seems like a question worth pursuing.  Better to bring the party's contradictions into the light of day than to let them fester unexamined. 

Claims of Donald Trump's Mental Deterioration Excuse GOP-Endorsed Authoritarianism

In the day or two since excerpts from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House were published online, I’ve been seeing a much increased discussion of Donald Trump’s mental health (or lack thereof) in response to some of its reporting.  And just yesterday, CNN had a story out that a group of mostly Democratic congresspeople received a briefing from a Yale psychiatrist about the president’s psychological fitness.  But whether or not Trump is in psychological decline, the choice of his opponents to focus on his mental competence strikes me as a potentially dangerous cop-out for addressing the real dangers of the Trump era.  Such an emphasis threatens to reduce our political crisis to the mental shortcomings of a single man, when in fact we face a multi-faceted democratic emergency.

While Trump-specific behaviors such as the president’s erratic public statements about North Korea can persuasively be argued to originate in the president’s damaged psyche, the larger harm he’s causing, from attacks on the free press to a tax bill that threatens to send economic inequality into hyperdrive, are more properly described as far right-wing policies.  Trump is not primarily an enormous threat to American democracy and prosperity because he might be mentally ill, but because his words and actions propagate an authoritarian agenda.  My personal take is that his authoritarianism is less because Donald Trump has a well thought-out political belief system, and more because his tendencies toward self-aggrandizement and the need to protect himself from the truth of Russian collusion push him in such an anti-democratic direction.  Such inclinations are also clearly being shaped and encouraged by members of his staff.

But more than this, the president’s personal tendencies are finding common cause with an authoritarian mindset that has clearly been growing for some time both in the Republican base and in the Republican Party at large.  Exhibit A is the fact that Trump has managed through his first year to retain a solid core of support from a significant minority of the population, and that Republican representatives and senators have nearly unanimously closed ranks around his presidency.  

The dangers of overemphasizing Donald Trump's mental issues are greatest in the context of the Russia investigations, which at this stage have determined collusion between the president's 2016 campaign and the Russian government.  It is quite possible that as more facts about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia enter the public consciousness, and a narrative of this collusion begins to take hold, the GOP’s protection of the president will begin to waiver.  At that point, one path to saving their own skins would be to play the mental health card.  By asserting that the president is mentally ill as a way of removing him from office, perhaps through invocation of the 25th Amendment, such a course would give them an opportunity to sleaze out of their own complicity with his corrupt behavior and endorsement of retrograde policies.

Again, I feel like I can’t say this often or emphatically enough: Trump is not the biggest problem our political system faces — the Republican Party is.  I employ the term “political malpractice” a little too often even by my own reckoning, but at the risk of overuse, I’m going to deploy it one more time here: it would be political malpractice for the Democratic Party not to do everything it can to highlight to the public that the most egregious behavior and policies of Donald Trump are inseparable from the agenda of the contemporary GOP.  This is a party that has gerrymandered and voter-suppressed its way into not only a House majority, but into control of statehouses across the country.  Twisting the structure of democracy to perpetuate rule by a party with minority support across the nation is on a continuum with the more overt authoritarianism displayed by the president and indeed endorsed by the party at large.

For me, the nightmare scenario is for Republican politicians to be the ones to “save” the country from Donald Trump on the basis of his real or alleged mental incompetence, rather than for him to be felled on the grounds of political malfeasance and moral unfitness — grounds that would implicate and sully the GOP at large, and very deservedly so.  The distance between these two possible outcomes is vast: either Donald Trump is scapegoated as a unique outlier, or he's branded as the failed avatar of a GOP in which authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism vie for pride of place as the most pressing reason for ending this party’s role as a major player in American politics.

In Which The Hot Screen Tries to Sound Optimistic About 2018 and Beyond (While Avoiding Abject Pollyanna-ism)

Since the disastrous 2016 election, one of the fundamental debates on the Democratic-progressive side has been over whether the future path to victory will involve winning over Trump voters, or energizing its own base in sufficient numbers to win.  One of The Hot Screen’s guiding beliefs is that a progressive movement that appeals to far more than a narrow majority of the American population is within reach, as long as we’re bold enough to articulate and fight for a real vision of economic and social justice.  While we’ve been persuaded that white supremacism and racial resentment play a larger role in the Trumpist and far-right political movement than we believed (or wanted to believe), we remain convinced that a key aspect of draining the power and influence of these resentments is to ensure that the economy serves all Americans, not just the wealthiest; that economic insecurity is an accelerant to racial scapegoating, and economic security a suppressant.

That said, how we approach the debate over appealing to Trump voters versus energizing Democratic voters is crucial to building this new majority movement.  The results of the Virginia election earlier this month point towards the power of an energized, more traditional Democratic electorate; likewise, the sustained feminist backlash against Harvey Weinstein and other male predators suggests political repercussions for the Republican party come 2018 and 2020, though it’s clear that both parties may be roiled in ways we can’t predict.  In other words, recent events are providing evidence that, as one might expect, an energized Democratic base is showing great electoral strength. 

But The Hot Screen has been intrigued as well by several recent pieces of reporting that suggest ways in which progressives can, if not defuse the Trump base completely, then begin to peel away crucial votes from what is a large minority of the U.S. voting population.  First, Ezra Klein of Vox makes the case that, although our current political situation has drawn comparisons with eras as dramatic as the pre-Civil War era and early Nazi Germany, we might be better served looking to the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency.  As Klein describes, the Democrats generally looked at the 2004 election as a crossroads for the country, and George W.’s defeat of John Kerry led to familiar soul-searching about whether the Democrats had lost touch with the American people.  Yet by 2006, in the face of President Bush’s increasingly undeniable incompetence in matters of both war and peace (the never-ending Iraq War, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina), Democrats re-took Congress, and in 2008, of course, the presidency.  Klein doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of which electoral coalitions rose and fell to make this possible, but his basic points seem a solid orienting principle — the failures of the governing party do eventually translate into electoral losses, and shifts in the balance of power can happen faster than we think.

Klein’s fellow Voxer, Matthew Yglesias, has written what feels to me like a companion piece to Klein’s essay, in which he explores the mechanics of how Democrats might begin to peel away people who voted for Trump in the last election.  Focusing on to the victory of a ballot initiative that expands Medicaid in the state of Maine — a state that Hillary Clinton won only narrowly — he sees evidence that it’s possible to win over small but electorally significant chunks of the Trump coalition.  Yglesias points to the vulnerability inherent in Trump’s 2016 electoral appeal, which combined rancid white nationalism with vows to protect Americans’ entitlement programs like Social Security.  As has become glaringly obvious by now, Trump has doubled down on culture war, while going all in with the economic agenda of the 1%, through his support for Obamacare repeal, the GOP’s truly noxious leave-no-millionaire-behind tax plan, or his own budget’s call for severe cuts to Social Security.  As Yglesias puts it:

No matter what Democrats say or do, small towns that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 are almost certain to support him again in 2020 and to support GOP candidates in 2018.  But pulling 5 or 10 percent of them away would deal a devastating blow to the GOP’s overall electoral fortunes.

And while Ralph Northan’s Virginia victory powered mostly by white college graduates was impressive, to make significant midterm inroads, Democrats will need to win in places where the white population tilts more working class.  The Maine referendum seems to point the way to do it: remind people that Democrats like the same safety net programs they do, and that Trump has broken his promises to protect them.

To return for a moment to the debate we started with: it’s one thing to speculate that it’s possible to peel away Trump voters with populist appeals, it’s another thing to find evidence that this is possible and that Donald Trump’s betrayals of his voters will inflict electoral damage on both him and the GOP at large in future elections.

Former 2012 Obama presidential campaign manager Jim Messina offers another take on winning over Trump voters.  In a piece titled “Trump’s Tweets Are Hurting Him with the Voters He Needs Most,” Messina relates insights he’s gained from running focus groups involving Obama voters who either turned to Trump or at least did not vote for Hillary Clinton.  In April, a group of such voters from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania indicated that though they were aware of Donald Trump’s racism and misogyny, they believed the president was working on improving the economy — results that have actually been reflected in national polls that show Trump’s handling of the economy receiving approval on the order of 25% higher than his overall job rating.  At the same time, the focus group voiced concern about Trump’s constant Twitter battles, and how they worried he was not focused on helping the economy.

This much is suggestive of a way to woo this particular subset of Trump voters — but it gets even better.  Messina’s firm went on to try out four different criticisms of Trump’s handling of the economy.  The one that linked his tweeting with lack of success in bringing jobs back to the U.S. decreased the former Obama voters’ approval of Trump’s handling of the economy by 21 points.  Just as potently, linking Trump’s huge tax cuts for the rich and program cuts for the middle class dropped his approval on the economy by 24 points with this group.  Messina also notes another intriguing fact: when they approached those voters again six weeks later, those who’d received the message linking Trump’s tweeting to his lack of progress on the economy had a much worse view of Trump than the other respondents.

Messina concludes that Democrats should “relentlessly” link Trump’s universe of Twitter comments to his economic failures.  It is hard to find fault with this common-sense assessment; in fact, it gratifyingly accords with The Hot Screen’s rule (not always followed) to never attack Trump without including an economic criticism.  In a way, Messina’s focus on Trump’s tweets is a kind of ju-jitsu method of using Trump’s domination of the media against him.  That Trump tweets about non-economic matters is not proof that he’s not working on the economy — but the obvious energy he puts into the world of Twitter, coupled with people’s own lived experience of a lackluster economy, turn his tweets into a persuasive symbol and crucial piece of evidence that he’s not looking out for average Americans.  Highlighting his tweets as a phenomena in themselves, rather than engaging with their substance, is also a clean way to sidestep the distracting function the tweets seem pretty obviously meant to serve.

The grounds for optimism in the articles I’ve highlighted share a rational approach to politics: people are persuadable by facts; every reaction sparks a counter-reaction; all Americans share a common commitment to democracy.  But because our political crisis is ultimately about so much more than simply citizens’ rational appraisal of their circumstances, I want to end with an article by Michael Kruse that revisits Trump voters in Johnstown, PA with whom the author spoke during the 2016 campaign.  The point it drives home is that there is a certain segment of the population that seems no longer persuadable to vote for someone other than Trump; that certain voters have moved from making their support of Trump contingent on his betterment of their lives to offering him their approval no matter what happens.  As Kruse memorably puts it:

Johnstown voters do not intend to hold the president accountable for the nonnegotiable pledges he made to them.  It’s not that the people who made Trump president have generously moved the goalposts for him.  It’s that they have eliminated the goalposts altogether [. . .]  His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments.  For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting.

Convinced that Trump is working hard to protect the little guy, the supporters interviewed here appear mired in a toxic combination of hopelessness, resentment, racism, and economic insecurity grounded in the real-world conditions of their city and region.  Mills and mines that were the backbone of the economy have closed over the last few decades, with no new engine of prosperity to take their place.  The population of Johnstown has declined precipitously, and drug overdoses are at an epidemic level.  It is impossible not to feel pity and a kindred hopelessness reading about their lives, even as their open expressions of racism invite contempt.  It is a tragic situation that also begs this basic question: what sort of people are we, that we would allow such economic and social devastation in this country we hold in common?

Now, in ways that few believed possible, we are paying the price for our neglect and our consent to the economic dislocations of the last few decades.  Embittered losers of our inequality-generating system, such as the interviewees of Johnstown, give Trump and the GOP the unwavering support they need, not only to continue the evisceration of the American economy but to pull the country into an authoritarianism that has become the right-wing’s solution to containing the social instability of rampant inequality.  Either we figure out how to bring real hope to such people’s lives, or we make sure that we never again lose a presidential election to fellow citizens whose only source of satisfaction seems to be to bring the whole American house burning down, so that we are all left in the same scorched place.  This is the nightmare we need to face up to, and it is one that needs to be fought not only with the practical tools of electioneering, but with a poise of compassion for our fellow citizens and a willingness to open our eyes to an economic system that is clearly manufacturing the conditions for an American fascism, just as much as it’s pumping unfathomable wealth into the pockets of our social betters, our corporate overlords, and their associated 1% ilk.

Paul Ryan to Women of America: Lay Back and Think of George Washington

One of the most painfully annoying things a politician can do is to explain to the public, in matter-of-fact terms, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, some idea that he thinks is unimpeachably great, but which in fact is so larded with noxious assumptions and implications that you feel the need to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming.  GOP Representative Paul Ryan is a master of this particular rhetorical art, and managed to outdo himself last week while discussing the number of American workers in relation to impending retirees.  He asserted that this disparity is creating a problem for the economy — I assume for funding programs like social security and keeping up economic growth — and said that the obvious solution is for Americans to start having more babies.

It’s hardly in dispute that one major way our economy continues to grow is through population increase, lending Ryan’s statement a grain of truth that makes it hard to dismiss outright, and that adds to its overall fatuous quality.  But by zeroing in on the U.S. birth rate, Ryan tellingly ignores the fact that U.S. population growth has been supplemented by immigration for many years.  Yet he acts as if we have a population growth crisis, which would only be true if we were to become a nation that no longer allows in moderate numbers of documented immigrants.  The only reason this might be the case, of course, is because our government is currently headed by a nativist, anti-immigrant commander-in-chief who aims to make such restrictive policies the law of the land.

As this piece rightly points out, there’s a clear line between Ryan’s ideas and the thinking of right-wing GOP Representative Steve King, who said in a CNN interview earlier in 2017 that, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to teach your children your values. In doing so, you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, and you can strengthen your way of life.”  Paul Ryan’s statement about the necessity of Americans getting busy making the l’il workers of tomorrow implicitly assumes this racist and nativist perspective, in which “real” native-born Americans are more valuable than those who happen to be born elsewhere.   

Ryan’s statement also runs up against his own dismal record on policies that actually help people raise children, and for those children to get an education that might allow them to fulfill their glorious destinies as Productive Workers.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that the soon-to-be-passed GOP tax bill would exclude millions of children from its Child Tax Credit increase, and Common Dreams notes that in 2009, Ryan voted against a bill that would allow federal employees to use up to four weeks of vacation time for parental leave — far less generous that the leave offered to families in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and many other countries.”

As has also been noted elsewhere, simply birthing out more future workers is hardly the only solution to budget issues created by relatively fewer people in the work force vis-a-vis the retired population.  As a glaringly obvious Exhibit A, it’s possible to amend the tax code to raise more money from the wealthy — an option that Ryan is philosophically and perhaps even cognitively unable to consider.  In the context of the “soak the rich — with firehose streams of free money!” GOP tax bill, the suggestion that we’re just plumb out of funds for government becomes laughable on its face, and the idea that the best solution to raise money is for average people to have more babies comes to seem bizarrely roundabout.

If nothing else, Ryan’s suggestion that it’s the patriotic duty of American women to pump out kids vividly illustrates the connections between an economics tilted to benefit the rich, a racist social vision, and a politics of misogyny.  If America is to remain as white as possible, but still retain a growing economy, then the importance of women’s reproductive function becomes increasingly prominent versus the million other things women are capable of.  And almost needless to say, the notion that our private choices to marry and reproduce should be informed by a sense of patriotic duty upends the relationship between citizen and state in a way more befitting an authoritarian regime than a democracy dedicated to personal freedom.  Ryan's is a bankrupt vision, morally and economically, and his ability to make it superficially sound like it's no big thing is yet one more reason to hope his Speakership gets drowned in a big blue wave in 2018.

Beating Back Authoritarian Challenge Will Take More Than Politics As Usual

Over at Slate, Jamelle Bouie elaborates on a point that I touched on briefly in Scenes From a Panicking White House, where I speculated that perceptions of Trump’s power may be overstated by his opposition.  Bouie suggests that a journalistic over-emphasis on Donald Trump’s hard core of supporters has created a blindness to the larger fact of his historical unpopularity.  He notes how absymal the president’s approval numbers are compared to previous presidents, and the concrete ways in which this is affecting his ability to get things done:

It matters that Trump is historically unpopular.  It robs him of potential allies in the Democratic Party.  Even “red state” Democrats like Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota or Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia must think hard about working with the president.  Likewise, it puts him on uneven ground with “blue state” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.  It weakens his overall agenda.  Public skepticism about Trump has transferred to his tax plans, putting Republicans in a hole as they move to transform the tax code.

Bouie contends that his declining poll numbers show that Trump’s scandals and mistakes have in fact hurt his political standing — that he’s not untouchable, as some pundits would have us believe.  And it’s not just that Trump is hindered, Bouie goes on to say; his weakness puts him on the verge of being a failed president.

As much as I agree with Bouie’s spot-on criticism of the media’s coverage of Donald Trump — there has surely been an underemphasis of the fact that only just over a third of the nation supports him, and this in turn has led to overstatements of his political clout — and as much as I like how this backs up my speculation that there is great possible harm in overestimating Donald Trump’s political power, Bouie’s conclusion that Trump is close to a failed presidency is a point I find myself both wholeheartedly agreeing and disagreeing with.  How can this be?!

My schizoid stance brings us back to one of the fundamental questions that has kept popping up since Donald Trump’s election: do the regular rules of electoral politics still apply, or are we in altogether new territory?  Let’s stay with Donald Trump’s exceedingly low approval ratings for the moment.  I take Bouie as making the case that the old rules apply, for example, insofar as he sees the president’s position in past discussions over the GOP tax plan to be weakened by his basic unpopularity.  I would agree that on something like the tax bill, this is the case.

But another fundamental question to ask is not whether Donald Trump is succeeding or failing under our normal measures of success in a democracy, but to what degree he is engaging in behavior that undermines our democracy — behavior that indicates he may be playing by a different set of rules entirely.  Because alongside traditional measures like approval polls and whether the president is actually able to get legislation he supports passed by Congress, there is a whole other dimension of the GOP’s near-lockstep march in running interference around Trump’s scandals, from the Russia investigation to his incompetence in handling the Puerto Rico disaster.  Our entire politics is haunted by an alternate storyline, unfolding on a daily basis, in which an authoritarian White House resorts to increasingly desperate and anti-democratic measures to assert its power.  We could even make the somewhat obvious observation that his incentive to take such measures increases as Donald Trump’s poll numbers decrease and as his scandals mount.  The greater his political weakness as measured in traditional terms, the greater the incentive to fight cultural wars, demonizing NFL players and immigrants; to call for the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton; to call on his supporters to simply, ominously “DO SOMETHING,” as he tweeted last month.  In this way, you can see how the authoritarian possibilities of the Trump White House exist in a parasitic relationship to more democratic measures of success.  

There is also the unpleasant fact that because of gerrymandering and more polarized party identification on the right, the GOP majority in Congress is dangerously insulated from broader public disapproval of Donald Trump.  With so many districts more or less impervious to a Democratic challenger, GOP congresspeople most fear attacks from their right flank, not from the left; and what better way to shore up that right flank than to support Donald Trump through thick and thin? 

Apart from Trump’s own authoritarian tendencies and the GOP’s built-in incentives to support Trump to the hilt, the other great challenge to our traditional understanding of politics right now is the degree to which Trump supporters are living in a different informational reality than the rest of Americans.  This piece by David Roberts at Vox is an excellent take on how the powerful right-wing media echo chamber has brought us to a point at which Americans are living in two different worlds of facts and explanations for what transpires in our shared world.  Roberts uses the real-world example of the Mueller investigation and Mueller’s possible finding of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to make his case.

The phenomenon of the influential right-wing media has been explored thoroughly and often over the last two decades as it evolved into the foul-headed hydra that poisons our discourse today, but Roberts makes the case that we’ve reached a turning point of deep “epistemic breach.”  This is a philosophy term concerning fundamental disagreement over “who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.”  Roberts’ assertion that the conservative movement is the primary cause of this breach as a general issue in our society is debatable, but it’s hard to argue that right-wingers and their media aren’t the primary cause of this in the political sphere.

“Epistemic breach” is some high-faluting terminology, but an alternate conservative universe of lies has been developing for a long time; with Donald Trump, a man who lies effortlessly and endlessly, this universe now feels like it’s enormous, self-sustaining, and in danger of suffocating us all, or at least breaking the country into irreconcilable systems of facts and understanding.  Roberts’ example involving Republicans rejecting Mueller’s possible future finding of collusion between Trump and Russia feels creepily accurate, as it’s only been borne out in the time since he wrote the article, with the right-wing embarking on a concerted effort to discredit Mueller even before the conclusion of his investigation.  

Roberts’ peroration is dismal:

The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.

If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.

[If] the very preconditions of science and journalism as commonly understood have been eroded, then all that’s left is a raw contest of power.

Millions of us are aware of the evil of this fake news/alternative facts, right-wing discourse; if we’re going to return our country to a sounder course, we’re going to have to figure out a collective antidote to this corrosive assault on fact-based truth.  

A Few More Takes on the Recent Alabama (Political) Shakes

As a pick-me-up for any readers bummed out by our recent cautionary post on the Alabama election results, I recommend this sharp-eyed analysis from New Republic’s Jeet Heer about what Doug Jones’ victory may portend for U.S. politics.  After commenting on President Trump's notable failure to persuade voters to support his preferred candidate in Alabama, Heer makes a few further observations that seem both correct and grounds for optimism:

Trump is turning out to be a true disaster for the Republican Party, because his hardcore supporters are numerous enough to win primaries (as they did for both Moore and Trump), but can only be mobilized by a divisive politics that’s alienating a chunk of traditional Republicans while also animating the Democratic opposition.  This can only to lead political disaster for the Trump led GOP.

In the wake of Moore’s defeat, Republicans will be more divided than ever.  Moore supporters like Steve Bannon, the Breitbart CEO and former Trump strategist, had prepared for such a result—and whom to blame for it.

The Republican Party is facing a nightmare 2018 scenario where Bannon-backed populist candidates disrupt the primaries, creating wounds that will make it difficult for the GOP to unify and win general elections.

There’s a final ominous fact about the Alabama election.  Moore lost in large part because of the accusations of sexual assault against him. This is an indication of a sea change in American culture, one that bodes ill for a president who notoriously boasted that his celebrity allowed him to grope women with impunity.  Seeing Tuesday night’s election results, Trump has every reason to worry that the social forces that took down Moore have the president in their crosshairs.

Let’s take these point by point.  First, the idea that Trump’s very success with a hardcore base is also working against him has been a central theory of Trump Studies since he began running for the presidency.  The 2016 election was a body blow to this notion, seeing as Trump ended up alienating a whole lot fewer Republican voters than many thought he would; in the end, partisan loyalty ruled the day.  The Alabama election results, like those in Virginia last month, suggest that now that they’ve experienced the full horrific reality of an empowered Trump, sufficient numbers of Republicans are starting to lose their enthusiasm for the GOP to help the Democrats make substantial gains.  And as demonstrated in both Virginia and Alabama, Trump’s presidency has galvanized Democratic voters, much more than his candidacy did in 2016; again, the lived experience of a Trump presidency seems to have made a world of difference.

On to the second point: Heer’s suggestion that Moore’s defeat will divide the Republican Party even more presupposes that it’s divided to begin with, which may be underestimating the degree to which the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon white nationalist vision has overcome the GOP as a whole.  Many obviously still resist this authoritarian, racist vision — Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker come to mind — but many more, both politicians and rank and file, have embraced it.  Moore’s defeat gives these slightly less conservative politicians ammunition for making a case that the party has gone too far to the right, but it seems to me that most Republican voters are still on board with the red meat vision of Trumpism.  My guess is that the “Bannon-backed populist candidates” won’t divide the party so much as largely win their races, reflecting the horrid new consensus position of the Republican Party.  In facing their Democratic challengers, though, we will have the best test to date of whether this shift to the right will end up losing them more votes than they gain.

Finally, it does seem certain that a “sea change in American culture” is upon us, with a reckoning regarding sexual harassment and assault against women finally at hand.  My gut tells me that “tidal wave” may be a more apt nautical description than "sea change" for the righteous storm, both cultural and political, that daily roils and strengthens around us, and that will likely upend political expectations in 2018 and beyond.  Jonathan Chait has written a short piece on how Trump’s self-avowed history as a sexual predator may yet come back to destroy his presidency, after he himself lit the fuse that runs through the exposure of Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent cascade of sexual misconduct stories involving public figures.  Whether or not such fitting poetic justice is visited upon the president, it bears remembering that we are only at this critical moment because in response to misogynists like Trump, thousands of women have gone public with painful stories — an inspiring democratic response to the sexual infractions of the powerful. 

What Hath Doug Wrought?

As with the Virginia elections last month, Doug Moore’s victory over accused pedophile and Constitution-shredder Roy Moore demonstrates that some basic laws of politics remain alive and well in what often seems like a post-Newtonian Trumpian universe to which we’ve all been delivered.  Energized base voters will help you win elections; competent and inspiring candidates help a lot, too; and a huge public backlash to the majority party’s politicians and policies is a big plus.  

But I'm a little nervous that too many people, critically including politicians and other influential members of the Democratic party, may draw the wrong conclusions from this seeming continuity with our pre-Trump world.  Progressives need to make damned sure that we're running on and implementing policies that include an accurate assessment and remediation of the rotten root causes of Trump’s ascent to power — an ascent which by this point stands revealed as an authoritarian movement that threatens American life as we know it.  Trump and the increasingly right-wing Republican Party thrive off the dislocations of an increasingly inegalitarian and self-cannibalizing economy, channeling people’s economic insecurity toward fears of minorities and others perceived as different or un-American.  On top of this, the increasing racial diversity of American society is provoking a white backlash that is intersecting in toxic ways with economic anxiety.   

It’s extremely noteworthy that the GOP itself has placed a response to these tectonic forces at the center of its modern agenda.  But rather than seeking to cure or ameliorate economic malaise or social tension, Republicans have chosen to double-down on the forces driving economic inequality, whether through aggrandizement of the financial sector, support of monopolistic corporations, passage of an unfair tax bill, or enactment of voter suppression efforts.  All the while, as a distraction on the cultural front, they lie to their base about the benefits of their economic policies and encourage a demonization of minorities, whether blacks, Hispanics, or Muslims.  

Even under President Obama, economic business as usual was failing most of us.  Inequality continued to widen; employment may have finally increased to normal levels years after the Great Recession, but wages barely crawled upward; and the cost of basics like higher education, health care, and homeownership continued to outpace inflation.  There are millions of people whose economic prospects remain stunted due to the lingering effects of the recession.

I offer this quick sketch as context for why I think we should think critically about the outcome in Alabama.  It is not enough to win an election; it is critically important to then work to deliver actual benefits to voters that address the issues I identified above, and to attack the legal roadblocks that the GOP has attempted to sow in the American political landscape like so many anti-democratic pillboxes.  Analyzing the Alabama election results, THS fave Jamie Bouie shows exactly how this sort of holistic diagnosis and prescription should be done.  He writes that while Jones alone can't be expected to reverse racial inequality in the state, his vote may help save the Children’s Health Insurance Program or protect Medicare and Medicaid benefits, which Bouie describes as “keeping a rotten status quo from decaying further.” 

But beyond this, Bouie zeroes in on a structural issue that the vote in Alabama should highlight — the degree to which Doug Jones won only because African-Americans were able to vote in force despite suppression efforts, and how fighting voter suppression should be at the center of progressive politics.  Bouie describes various reports of voter suppression observed on election day, from police officers attempting to serve warrants at polling stations to enormous lines in African-American precincts — a character-building test of one’s patience and ability to miss work mysteriously denied to whiter parts of the state.  In fact, voter ID laws have been carefully tailored in the state to target African-Americans while maintaining the ridiculous pretense of being race neutral:

A 2011 law mandated strict photo identification to vote in the state, and actions taken in 2015 closed voter ID offices throughout the rural counties of the Black Belt, where many black Alabamians reside. The state later lowered some of those hurdles, but the impact remains. Proponents of those policies argue any suppression is an unintended consequence—that no one wanted to keep black voters from the polls—but in Alabama, the evidence is stacked against them. One advocate of the original voter ID law claimed, on record, that it would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure,” and two of the law’s sponsors were caught on tape attacking black Alabamians in explicitly racist terms.

And this is exactly the point where the fears I highlighted at the beginning come back to haunt me.  As Bouie notes, if Democrats are going to start turning statehouses and Congressional delegations bluer, voting reform and protection will need to be front and center of their agenda.  But doing so is going to require not only a popular understanding of how pernicious the problem has become, but fighting the temptation to point at states like Alabama and rationalize away taking on such a hard fight by saying, Hey, we still won even with the voter restrictions!  Voting reform will also mean that the Democrats will have to swear off partisan gerrymandering in their own favor, a position which will surely seem like political suicide to more conventional pols.  But it’s far more important to institutionalize a level playing field than seek short-term advantage which the GOP will only exploit and push beyond all previous norms when they have the power to do so.

Given our desperate political straits, it’s critical that we learn the right lessons from this election.  But I don’t want to miss the forest for the trees, either.  Jones' victory is a huge deal in basic political terms — it’s effectively a repudiation of gutter-dwelling politicians like Moore and his endorser-in-chief, Donald Trump.  The reduction of Republican control of the Senate to a single vote is going to haunt the GOP through 2018.  And though I started on a note of caution, it IS highly encouraging that basic rules of democratic politics are intact: energy and enthusiasm still matter.  So does momentum, and Democrats now have even more of it going into the 2018 elections.  Substantively, too, although there’s a risk of learning the wrong lessons, Alabama provides a great chance to learn the right lessons, about how important the right to vote is, and how much people are ready for change from our current retrograde course. 

Senator Chuck Grassley Advocates for Estate Tax in Trying to Knock It

"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”  In one sense, this utterance from GOP Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is a trifle, something a man of a certain older generation might say.  But while it casually asserts an obvious fairness in cutting the taxes of those who have money to invest, a look beneath the surface shows that fairness to those who work hard for a living is not what either the estate tax debate or the language of his original comment are about.  Indeed, his phrasing colorfully and concisely captures so much of the backwards and classist thinking behind Republican efforts to lower the taxes on the wealthiest among us.

The laudable wish to pass something on to one’s posterity and the incentive this can provide for a person to work diligently is not in dispute.  What IS in dispute is how much of this money should be taxed.  Many in the GOP say none or only a little should be — a sure recipe for instituting a system of inherited wealth and even aristocracy at odds with American democracy, as massive sums of money would be passed from hard-working parents to their trust-fund progeny, and in the next generation from the idle rich to yet even more work-ethic-deprived offspring, in a debilitating spiral truly awful to behold (as our prime exhibit, I refer you to look no further (if you can stand it) than the Trump kids).

An estate tax can and should be relatively high for the basic reason that its earner is no longer around to use his or her wealth, and those who would inherit it have not actually worked to earn it.  A society also needs to balance the right to pass something on to one’s relations against the larger social goal of limiting the tax burden on the living.  This point is not raised by defenders of the inheritance tax nearly enough; taxes need to be paid by someone, and if rich, dead people aren’t paying them, then it’s likelier that poor, living people will be on the hook — and how exactly is that fair?  Reducing or eliminating the estate tax directly rewards not those who have earned money, but their heirs; it is a tax that by definition will never benefit the actual earner. 

If poor people spend all their money, it is because they do not have much of it, and do so in order to purchase the basic necessities of life.  Grassley’s comment opens a window into how, say, a conservative politician might convince himself that rich families deserve to make their families rich in perpetuity.  In invoking the tired image of poor people who don’t invest because they spend their money on foolish things, the senator elides the common sense fact that the main reason poor people don’t invest in things like the stock market is simply because they are poor.  In point of fact, it is kids who inherit scads of money without having to work for it who are relatively more inclined to spend their money “on booze or women or movies,” — to which we can also add a few exciting possibilities, such as “yachts or baccarat in Monaco or a membership at Mar-a-Lago.”

Beyond Collusion Confusion

The Hot Screen has found itself in a conundrum when grappling with the overall story of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 election.  At this stage, a full year later, there are so many threads to follow that it often feels overwhelming to keep up, much less synthesize what we’ve heard and read into anything worth sharing with our readers.  In this way, the Russia story is a (very big) microcosm of the American experience since Trump’s election: seldom, if ever, in most of our lifetimes has there been so much critical and disturbing news that constantly threatens our ability to absorb and assess it.

But some recent articles are shining a light on the particular reasons why the overload feels so very dramatic.  First, Talking Points Memo has posted what for me has been the single most useful article I’ve read regarding the Russia investigation in recent weeks.  Focused on disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, it makes the critical point that major parts of the story don’t really make sense until we realize that we’ve all been trying to understand not simply the facts of a static plot hatched by Team Trump, but a plot that began to twist and turn still more as the plotters reacted to the fact that they were being investigated by both the federal government (i.e., the FBI and intelligence agencies) and the press.  As Marshall puts it, 

[T]he logic of events only really comes into focus when we realize that there was a sort of race taking place between the Trump team’s effort to arrange a rapid rapprochement with Russia in the first weeks of January and February and a mix of the intelligence community, the national security apparatus and the press piecing together what had happened during the 2016 election. Imagine it as a starting pistol firing off on the morning of November 9th, with both teams racing to get more of their critical work done by the end of January.

As Marshall proceeds to detail, this “race” helps explain, among other things, Flynn’s otherwise strangely reckless behavior, particularly in relation to his pre-inauguration contacts with the Russian ambassador.

But this observation about the complicated interaction between the collusion plot and effort to uncover it also helps lay bare another way to understand the underlying arc of what we’ve been learning.  First, it helps to think that there are three distinct but interrelated phases to the collusion effort.  One is the pre-election period in which Russia rendered assistance to the Trump campaign; the second is the post-election period, including prior to Trump’s inauguration, in which the Trump team tried to make good on its half of the Faustian bargain it had made, including through diplomatic concessions beneficial to Russia; and the third comprises the efforts by the Trump administration to hide the existence of these first two parts from view, both at the time they happened and continuing into the present.

This taxonomy seems glaringly obvious now.  Again, we have to ask: Why has even such a basic framework felt so elusive?  Two particular reasons occur to us.  The first is a point elaborated in a second recent TPM article, which details the ways in which multiple members of the Trump administration have lied publicly about their knowledge of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador.  The larger point this suggests is that the White House, amplified by the right-wing media, has knowingly constructed a false narrative to cover their tracks — essentially, the implementation of the third “cover-up” phase I noted above.  I’ll return to this point sooner or later, but for now I want to at least state it more acutely: the White House appears to have engaged in what can rightly be termed a massive conspiracy to cover up the equally massive conspiracy involving the Trump team's relationship to Russia during the election and beyond.

The second major reason I think it’s been so difficult to understand the elements of the narrative is that the basic existence of collusion has felt elusive, even for those of us who closely follow this story.  This is deeply related to the word "collusion" itself, which as various people have noted is not necessarily a term of law but more of a general concept.  But as Brian Beutler notes over at Crooked Media, for their own separate reasons both the media and Trump defenders have stressed the legal definition as paramount in judging whether anything malign occurred between Russia and Trump’s team.  Beutler goes on to makes the case that despite such hedging in the media and outright denials by Trump partisans, collusion is at this point, by any reasonable understanding of the word, an established fact:

We know that Russian spies approached the Trump campaign offering assistance in the election multiple times. At least twice, Russians dangled the lure of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including stolen emails, and both times, Trump campaign officials (George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump, Jr.) expressed interest. Trump, Jr. was particularly enthusiastic about the idea of cooperating with the Russians, and shortly after he welcomed Russian spies to Trump tower for a meeting about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, he coordinated messaging with Wikileaks, which operated last summer and fall as a cutout for Russian hackers.

After repeatedly communicating to Russia (in public and in private) that they welcomed interference in the election, Trump and his aides cast public doubt on whether the saboteurs were Russians at all. When Trump went on to win the election after benefiting from this interference, members of his inner circle, through Michael Flynn, secretly connived with Russia to subvert the countermeasures the American government had undertaken as penalties for Russia’s interference.

[...]

“Whether or not these actions amounted to a crime,” writes former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa, “it was a coordinated, covert effort directly against the interests of the United States. It threw off what was likely a lot of planning and analyses and contingencies that various agencies had prepared. I think when we focus exclusively on the criminality aspect, we (continue to) miss how these efforts essentially aided and abetted a hostile foreign state who attacked our country. That is the big picture.”

If the story were to end where we are right now, with no further confessions or indictments or revelations, it would still amount to the biggest scandal in American political history.

[...] At this point, to say collusion allegations remain unproven is materially misleading.  Collusion has been conclusively proven; we are in the process of learning how extensive it was, and whether, in the course of it, American conspirators committed federal crimes.

Beutler’s piece is one of the clearest statements I’ve read about where we are vis-a-vis the existence of collusion; but even his effort feels like it founders somewhat under the burden of using this term, even as he digs into the use and abuse of the word, and to spell out what he himself means by collusion.  The Hot Screen wonders if it might be more helpful, more clarifying for the public discussion, if we moved closer to the language of the FBI agent Beutler quotes — that the efforts of the Trump administration “aided and abetted a hostile foreign state who attacked our country.”  Whether or not any laws were broken, such activity is, for purposes of American politics, utterly damning for those who carried it out; using "collusion" as some sort of shorthand seems to obscure the actual activity engaged in.

As Beutler writes, journalists and Trump partisans both have their reasons for insisting on a more legalistic definition of collusion.  But conversely — and here we arrive at another major reason for the fog of obscurity around the term — Trump’s opponents find benefits in keeping alive the term’s ambiguity.  While the president's defenders spin “collusion” into meaning whether or not a specific law was broken, his adversaries benefit from the non-legalistic reading of the term, because it suggests malfeasance even if no law was broken.  That is, keeping the term “collusion” relatively vague allows them to keep damaging suspicions about Trump in public view without getting tied down to questions of whether specific laws were broken.

But this raises yet another question: now that we’re at a point where we can say with sureness that Trump’s campaign and then administration conspired with the Russians to subvert the U.S. elections, and subsequently acted to cover up their behavior, why aren’t more Trump opponents speaking up about this fact?  That is, why are they still either embracing the perspective that we don’t know yet if any laws were broken, or refusing to assert directly that Trump’s team participated in an attack against our country?

I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of possible and reasonable explanations for holding their fire.  Maybe they have faith that Robert Mueller will find evidence of law-breaking, and fear making partisan attacks when Mueller might have proof that could persuade even some Trump supporters of Trump’s bad behavior?  Maybe they look at their minority status in Congress and see that they lack the power to do anything?  Or perhaps they don’t think asserting the existence of treasonous behavior will be effective unless we have direct evidence of President Trump’s involvement (in fact, this distinction between the activities of Trump versus the rest of his team is yet another reason for the fog around the term “collusion” — if the president himself didn’t collude, was it so bad?)

But our guess is that the central reason that more Trump opponents aren't making the case that his team essentially committed treason is that all of us, individually and collectively, lack a framework for fully comprehending the scale of the bad acts before us.  There are few, if any, worse political offenses in a democracy than conspiring with another country to subvert your own country’s election process, and then acting in ways that benefit that meddling country.  But trying to write about it, these words seem disproportionate, grandiose and insufficient all at once.  It feels like writing about the plot of a spy novel.  We try to comprehend what has happened, and despite our best efforts still find ourselves wandering in the interminable mists of collusion.

This failure, or more charitably, this difficulty of full comprehension, exists for so many of us because full comprehension can only occur when you also feel it fully; and to feel it fully means to enter into a state of rage and helplessness.  Because it is not at all clear what to do, even while it is equally clear that this situation cannot stand.  A president whose campaign conspired with a foreign power to win him the presidency is an illegitimate president, regardless of whether laws were broken or whether or not he would have won anyway.  If a country does not recognize and repudiate treason, then it isn’t really a country.  

But it’s also clear that the response to such an attack on our democracy requires a doubling-down on democracy in response: on collective, non-violent action to restore ourselves to an accountable, legitimate government.  With immediate impeachment impossible, given that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the overriding goal would be to force the resignation of President Trump and those who participated in both the collusion and the cover-up.

It may feel like a secondary issue, but our ability to comprehend and build the necessary collective action to address this challenge is deeply hobbled by the left’s discomfort with a discourse of patriotism.  This may be because of how thoroughly the right has co-opted and transformed competing conceptions of patriotism into an increasingly nationalistic, militaristic, grandiose ideology more akin to the propagandistic mindset of authoritarianism.  In opposition to this, it may be that those of us who believe in a democratic, tolerant, and law-abiding United States need to find our way to a public solidarity based on our shared hopes and aspirations, mutual respect, and understanding that collectively we are much more powerful than the sum of our parts.

Diplomats Beset by Eerie Brain Drain in Havana

The Hot Screen confesses to being fascinated by a Cold War-style mystery that’s taking place in Cuba.  As Politico summarizes, a couple dozen American officials and a handful of Canadians “reported hearing high-pitched sounds and exhibited symptoms reflective of a concussion, including dizziness, nausea and memory issues.”  These incidents began shortly after Election Day 2016, and continued until August of this year.  Part of the strangeness is that no one knows quite what happened to the victims.  The number one possibility for a while was the use of some sort of electronic device, such as an acoustic or microwave device, against the diplomats.  Under this explanation, it seemed the incidents could have been the result of a surveillance operation gone wrong or even intentional malicious attacks on the officials.

There are also eerie and disconcerting details, including the experience of some diplomats of hearing a sound in one part of a room, only for it to disappear a mere few feet away.  And new reports indicate that the U.S. government is beginning to back off the sonic attack hypothesis.  As it turns out, medical examinations have uncovered changes to white matter in some of the victims’ brains — changes that experts believe wouldn’t be caused by sonic means.  Another article I read suggested that chemical exposure might be the culprit; I assume that under that scenario, the noises the diplomats have reported hearing could be a type of aural hallucination caused by the effects of such exposure. . .

Assuming these are attacks, the question of motive and perpetrator remains obscure.  There are theories that a rogue faction of Cuban intelligence may be behind the incidents, perhaps as a way of derailing improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations; the U.S. is also looking at whether Russians are involved.  The mix of unknown means and indeterminate intent, along with the apparent lack of progress in getting to the bottom of it after so many months, is truly odd.

Republican Tax Bill Doubles Down on Class War Against Average Americans

When we see that the Republican tax legislation showers corporations and the rich with bundles of cash, while plundering the wealth of the middle and working classes to pay for this largesse, and on top of that drives up the deficit on the order of $1.5 trillion dollars, what we are witnessing is not tax reform but class warfare by means of federal law.  And with provisions that particularly raise taxes on citizens of states that have voted Democratic in the last several presidential elections, we see again that this is not tax reform, but use of the tax power as a weapon to punish political opponents (conversely, provisions like a removal of a ban of political activities by tax-free churches rewards far-right evangelicals, allies of the GOP).

Republicans tell a tale of how Americans businesses are crippled by high taxes, even while it seems impossible to find an economist who says that businesses actually end up paying those high taxes, what with the loopholes and deductions already available under current law.  And claims that high taxes make the U.S. less competitive are belied by the fact that the American economy’s boom times in the 1950’s and 1960’s were a time of much higher corporate taxes, and by the complementary evidence that current business leaders would rather plow their tax windfalls into stock buybacks than invest in future products or, heaven forfend, pay higher wages to their workers.  

With the elimination of deductions for property and state income taxes, the GOP is exporting its anti-tax, anti-government mania to states that disagree with the notion that hollowing out education, social services, and health care should be the goal of governance.  The party of small government is making sure that big government crushes the ability of states to respond to the common wishes of their voters.  Apparently, we should all just shut up and be Alabama now.

We need to reckon with the fact that after literally decades of Republican lies about how cutting taxes to the rich will trickle down to the rest of the economy, the Democrats and the progressive movement have failed to discredit this notion in the public eye — for how else were the Republicans able to put forward this falsehood once again without being laughed out of the room?  What may be most fantastical about this legislative process is that the Democrats are not forcefully making the logical counterargument — that in an economy as driven by consumer spending as ours, the most direct way to stimulate the economy and help corporations succeed is to provide tax relief to the lower- and middle-income people most likely to spend money.  Absent in the legislation as well is any notion that the people who should get the most tax relief are those who would benefit the most from it — people towards the lower end of the wage scale who would spend it on necessities, not the wealthy who will now simply have more money to buy luxury goods.  To put it in terms even a Republican can understand — the stock market will do better when all Americans have money to spend.

Or is it possible Republicans don’t believe in capitalism anymore, at least the capitalism that most Americans understand it to be?  In the outright plunder of this tax bill, its robbing of our common future to reward the upper class in the present, in its tacit acceptance that corporations have no obligation to invest in America or pay their workers more, this legislation is of a piece with the monopolistic capitalism that’s taken hold while most people have been working hard just to make ends meet and support their families.  Republicans would rather not draw attention to this pernicious development; but the Democrats have failed to make a larger case about the changing nature of American capitalism that would provide context for why this tax bill is such a very bad idea.

This leads us to perhaps the most frightening aspect of the bill.  After decades of ever-increasing inequality in our country, this bill is like pouring gasoline on an already-raging fire.  The rich, already so very wealthy, will get richer.  Everyone else will get poorer.  For me, most sinister are the provisions that directly assault people’s ability to move up in the world, such as ending tax deductions for student loans and grad student tuition waivers.  Perhaps most unbelievably, the legislation even eliminates a small deduction for teachers who buy school supplies out of their own pockets — to the GOP, teachers are first and foremost members of hated unions to be punished, not educators of our children to be thanked for their invaluable public service.

Some are arguing that this tax bill will radicalize the majority of the country against the GOP, but I think that depends entirely on whether the political opposition is willing and able to make a forceful case for the many over the wealthy.  Without such an effort, the likelier possibility is that this bill will administer destabilizing blows to the economy and the social order that will only increase the GOP’s hold on power.  After all, the party, and Trump in particular, have absolutely thrived off economic inequality and people’s resulting fears around diminished economic and social standing.  The racial animus that Trump stoked and profited from might have a life of its own, but it’s also deeply entwined with economic insecurity.  As the promises of this bill fail to come to fruition, Republicans will have an incentive to double down on the overt racism and faux populism that Donald Trump has engineered.  They will bet that people’s resentment and rage at their ever-diminishing prospects can always be channeled away from the proper targets — the increasingly powerful upper class, corporations that no longer view themselves as part of a social contract with America, and, last but not least, the GOP itself, which has done so much to clear the way for such a hideous economic state of affairs.

Democrats need to put repeal and replacement of this monstrous tax legislation at the center of their platform for taking back Congress in 2018.  On economic, political, and moral grounds, this is a no-brainer.  Left in place, this bill will cripple the possibility of actual tax reform and relief for Americans, and the deficits it entails will forestall funding programs that benefit ordinary Americans, from increased college tuition assistance to universal healthcare.  The Democrats would also do well to put this legislation in its proper historical context; not just in relation to the increasing inequality of the past 40 years, but the acceleration of this trend in the aftermath of the Great Recession, from which the upper reaches of American society have recovered far more quickly than the majority.  Less than ten years after the peak of the downturn, it seems inconceivable that policies that benefit the 1% to the detriment of ordinary working Americans wouldn't get laughed off the public stage — it's a measure of how deep our ongoing economic and political malaise runs that such a retrograde plan is about to become law.

The rich need to start paying their fair share; the working and middle classes should be rewarded for their hard work so that they can support their families and help their children achieve a better future.  Corporations need to invest in America if they want tax relief, including higher wages for their employees.  Progressives are discussing dozens of ideas to implement such a vision; they make a hell of a lot more sense than raising taxes on average Americans.  Let’s make the Republicans regret the day they ever dreamed up this gift for the 1%.

There Is Absolutely No Public Support for Giving Away Our Internet to Giant Telecommunications Companies

As is so often the case with right-wing assaults on consumer protections, the repeal of net neutrality is being described as a solution to a problem that government has created; as Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai puts it, “Under my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the internet.”  But the truth is that without government regulation, massive telecommunications companies will be able to gouge consumers, stiff-arm competitors, and stifle free speech in pursuit of their own oligopolistic profits.  The “government intervention” bemoaned by an AT&T vice president is actually the government’s insistence on equal access — that is, the government’s prevention of malign corporate intervention that would squeeze consumers and upstart competitors, and subordinate the free flow of ideas and information to the profit-seeking of communications giants.

Here’s how I think of the primary issue at play: right now, the internet is like a giant bazaar in which, as big as it is, every company and internet site gets a front-row location.  If I want to read an obscure political blog, my access to that site can’t be given a slower connection than if I were trying to visit, say, CNN.  Without the net neutrality rules, that obscure political blog could be given a back row seat.  Of course, providers could ask both CNN and that blog to pony up money to make sure people are still routed to their sites at the old speeds — but guess which of the two news sites will be able to afford it, and which will become handicapped by its lack of financial resources?  In this, repeal of net neutrality is a grotesque assertion of the privileges of giant corporations over individuals and small businesses.

The pending loss of net neutrality is one of the biggest crises our country is currently facing, and that’s saying a lot (check out this article at The Nation for some righteous fire and brimstone on this point).  We can safely say that there is absolutely no broad public support for this change.  It's all about fucking over the consumer; but whether by accident or design, it’s also a frontal assault on the free exchange of information, aka the lifeblood of our democracy.  It’s telling that along with this change, the FCC has just announced a plan to get rid of the limitation on a single corporation controlling TV broadcasts that reach more than 39% of American homes — a rule that will be used by ultra-conservative Sinclair Broadcasting to beam its propaganda into millions more American households.  Dominated by Trump backers, the FCC has abandoned any pretense of serving the American people.

The overarching reality is that the internet is a public good.  In fact, the existing net neutrality rules involve the FCC’s determination that broadband internet is an essential public utility, which is indeed how millions upon millions of Americans experience their daily internet access.  Our tax dollars built the internet; it's highway robbery when big companies want to take it from us, and then charge us even more to use what's rightfully ours.  It’s time to hit the phones and let your representatives know we’re not going to stand for this giveaway to powerful telecommunications companies.

With Insane One Percenter Tax Plan, GOP Tilts at Electoral Oblivion

The more I read about the Republican tax legislation, the more outlandish and outrageous it becomes.  Its tilt in favor of the rich is its greatest sin, remarkable in its brazenness.  Those who could benefit the most from a tax cut — people earning less than $25,000 — would receive the paltry sum of $50 with the proposed plan.  Meanwhile, the benefits to the richest among us are extraordinary.  

Apart from needlessly increasing inequality in the United States, we need to bear in mind that the plan will also likely mean cuts down the road into programs that benefit ordinary Americans, as the GOP will use the deficits created by the tax plan to justify such reductions.  At a basic level, Republicans are making a choice to return tax money to the wealthiest among us, rather than using that money for the public good.  Call me cynical, but I don’t think that those wealthy people are going to turn around and spend their money on things like student lunches, health insurance for children, or much-needed infrastructure projects.     

But the foulness of this bill only grows the more you dig into it.  Perhaps most extraordinary is the way the plan seems designed to raise taxes on blue state populations to the benefit of Republican-leaning states.  The single largest factor here is the elimination of deductions for state and local taxes, which disproportionately benefit Democratic-leaning states; as noted in an op-ed by political scientist tag-team Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “all of the states that have above-average use of the state and local taxes deduction voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”  Lest you think we are talking small amounts here, these changes would result in increased taxes of $1.3 trillion over 10 years for taxpayers in those states.  Hacker and Pierson note that the other major tax break slated for downsizing is the home interest deduction, which would also have a disproportionate effect on Clinton-voting states.

At a basic level, hitting the state and local tax deductions punishes taxpayers of states that spend more on government.  That is, if the voters of a state choose to tax themselves more heavily in order to provide better education, superior health care, or a cleaner environment, the Republican tax bill effectively hurts them for using government to promote the public good.  Another way of putting this: the Republican tax bill penalizes states that dare to use democratic governance to build their common future.

The dangers of using the tax system to punish entire states and reward others are not only political, though those are frightening enough; after all, the use of state power to harm opponents is the stuff of authoritarian governments, not democracies.  In the words of one prominent conservative from the Heritage Foundation, “The big blue states either cut their taxes and costs, or the stampede of high-income residents from these states accelerates.  The big losers here are the public employee unions — the mortal enemies of Republicans. This all works out nicely.”

And beyond this naked power play, there are real economic costs that we’ll all be paying, blue and red states alike; according to Hacker and Pierson,

Red America may hold the key to Republicans’ control of government, but blue America holds many of the keys to our nation’s economic future. Indeed, among the blue-state pay-fors, the most troubling may be those that will bleed institutions of higher education, particularly in the House bill. In their zeal to extract revenues from blue states, Republicans are threatening our nation’s ability to excel in a global knowledge economy.

These concerns become still more palpable due to the inclusion of various provisions in the tax plan that seem to specifically target the ability of working and middle class people to advance both educationally and economically.  The Center for American Progress shows that the House plan cuts education benefits by $65 billion over 10 years.  Among the specifics, student loan interest could no longer be deducted, and tuition reductions for grad students would be treated as taxable income.  Until now, there’s been a federal Lifetime Learning Credit that provides $2,000 annually for things like grad school and job training; but apparently the proper role of government no longer involves helping people get an education, so this is going away as well.  

The final tell that this tax legislation has everything to do with favoring the 1% is the fact that, after literally years of fighting Barack Obama over allegedly out of control government spending, and insisting that the national debt was the greatest of threats to our country, this proposed legislation will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.  That’s money on which interest will need to be paid, and the bill’s skew toward the rich means that it will be the middle and working classes that disproportionately foot the bill for giving the Richie Riches of the country still more money to buy new Jaguars, jewels, and vacation homes in gated communities safe from the rank and file of average Americans.  As a New York Times editorial puts it, “Republican leaders aren’t just trying to transfer money from current middle-class and poor Americans to corporations and the very wealthy.  They are also trying to transfer money from future middle-class and poor Americans to corporations and the very wealthy.”

This bill has “political suicide” written all over it: its deep unpopularity in public opinion polls suggests that most Americans aren’t falling for the con, and it’s difficult to believe that many who see their taxes go up next year won’t be a hard sell to vote GOP going forward.  But it’s no surprise that Republicans are trying to implement the type of cuts they’d only been able to dream of through the Obama years.  Having lived with the fantasy for so long, they seem disinclined to face up the possibility of electoral backlash, instead soothing themselves with thoughts that the public is too inattentive to notice how they’re about to be screwed.  That’s a hell of a gamble.  This bill may well pass; but whether it does or not, this tax nightmare will be a weight around the neck of every Republican senator and representative come 2018.

War on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Will Gain Republicans a Pyrrhic Victory at Best

On Friday, the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray, resigned in advance of the end of his 5-year term.  His departure was long expected, and the White House had indicated for some time it intended to appoint Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and Budget, as acting director until President Trump appoints, and the Senate confirms, a new permanent director.  According to its stated plan, upon Cordray’s resignation, the White House went ahead and appointed Mulvaney as planned.

But as the Intercept’s Dave Dayen began pointing out last week, and as burst into full public view in the past 48 hours, the president’s action has run up against the language of the legislation creating the CFPB.  As part of an effort to shield the CFPB from political pressures, the CFPB director is to be succeeded by its deputy director, pending Senate approval of the president’s pick to head the bureau.  Until a couple days ago, the CFPB only had an acting deputy, so this rule may have been moot; but the day before his departure, director Cordray appointed Leandra English to the deputy role.  Hence, under the law that created it, English is now the director of the bureau in the wake of Cordray’s departure.

The White House, though, is taking the position that another law, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, overrules the language of the CFPB legislation.  So now there are essentially two heads of the CFPB, and it appears this may require a court decision to be resolved.  But however things shake out, the Trump administration clearly opposes the work of the CFPB; we need look no further from the president’s tweets from yesterday, in which he stated that the CFPB had been a “total disaster” and had “devastated” financial institutions.  Likewise, Mulvaney himself has previously called the bureau a “sick, sad joke.”  Such attacks by those nominally charged with running the agency are potent reminders that the insulation from political pressures intentionally included in the design of the CFPB was well-considered and essential to its operation.

Beyond this, the imbroglio over its leadership succession serves to highlight one essential fact: the CFPB has earned the ire not only of the White House, but of many Congressional Republicans and much of the financial industry at large, for the simple reason that it’s doing its intended job: protecting consumers from the predation of financial institutions.  Here’s how a recent piece at The Intercept describes its accomplishments:

In fact, the CFPB has emerged as that rare beast — a fast-moving agency that actually chalks up wins for average Americans. By the end of 2016, shortly before Trump took office, the 5 1/2 -year-old bureau’s enforcement actions against everyone from the country’s biggest banks to small-time debt collectors had already returned $11.9 billion to 29 million consumers. The CFPB had created a public database of consumer complaints against banks and other lenders, and had issued new rules governing everything from mortgages to student loans to the prepaid cards that millions of “unbanked” Americans carry in their wallets. A year ago, the bureau finalized new rules giving prepaid customers some of the same protections enjoyed by those who use credit cards. 

So it comes as no surprise that the CFPB has been targeted by the financial sector and the politicians it buys off for degradation and elimination.  The Intercept piece describes a near-literal army of lobbyists and lawyers who attempt to gum up the agency’s ability to work by filing endless lawsuits and information requests that eat up the time of its employees.  In fact, as you read this account, it begins to feel amazing that the CFPB has actually accomplished anything at all in the face of united and deep-pocketed resistance from the sectors it’s supposed to help regulate.  You also get a sense of how deep-rooted the rot in the financial industry remains, nearly ten years after this sector of the economy nearly caused a new Great Depression and required a bailout via massive amounts of taxpayer money.  From fake customer accounts created by Wells Fargo to rip off consumers, to obscure rules meant to cause credit card holders to miss payments and get dinged with penalties, to payday lenders that insist on every American’s right to the financial freedom to pay exorbitant interest and get caught in a downward spiral of unsustainable interest payments, a truly huge chunk of the financial sector sees screwing consumers as the key to its own financial success.  

It’s a measure of our debased and badly askew political economy that the CFPB seems like a nearly miraculous government institution — a bureau that not only has the mission to protect consumer rights, but the enforcement power to back it up, and that moreover actually does its intended job.  In a larger sense, it’s a shining example of government by the people working for the people.  This is why the bureau has attracted such outsized enmity beyond just the financial sector: it’s a daily rebuttal to the right-wing lie that government is always a hindrance, never a good, and a rejoinder to the fiction that an unregulated market will provide consumers with the best choices.  These are the reasons why the battle for proper succession to head up the CFPB, and advocacy for the bureau more generally, is so important. 

To hear its opponents talk, you’d think that the CFPB houses a cabal of Marxists plotting to destroy the U.S. economy.  The criticisms are overwrought and generally laughable on their face, and boil down to a rage at not being able to gouge consumers whenever and wherever desired.  As a specific example, Donald Trump’s tweet that the CFPB has “devastated” financial institutions is notable for its lack of actual facts to back up the accusation.  And this hysterical opposition is actually another sound strategic reason for engaging wholeheartedly in the defense of the CFPB: these ridiculous and unfounded criticisms end up highlighting the malfeasance of the financial industry and the need for the CFPB in the first place, leading the public to increased awareness of the benefits of the agency.  Even the financial industry has appeared to mind the dangers of a direct assault on the CFPB until now — hence the attacks on the margins via lawsuits and other attempts to slow the CFPB down.

But now that the White House has chosen to put the agency in the crosshairs, attempting to place an outright enemy of the bureau as its head, the assault has become full frontal.  Unfortunately for its opponents, the CFPB continues to enjoy overwhelming public support — including among Republicans.  By highlighting his opposition to an agency with a clear and public-minded mission with broad support, the president in particular highlights the falseness of his faux populism and lack of interest in protecting ordinary citizens.  To insistently remind the American people of the concrete and publicly beneficial accomplishments of the previous administration seems like folly, the strategy of someone who thinks that lying will get you everywhere.  But the facts about the CFPB are easily accessible and digestible to the public at large.  The president’s incipient war on the bureau should stick in the craw of any citizen who fears and loathes the outsize power and malignant tactics of big banks and big finance more generally.

The flip side is that Democratic defense of the CFPB is as close to a sure thing as you can get in politics.  The bureau is popular, and its mission is well-understood by many Americans.  Attacks by the GOP and defense by the Democrats demonstrate that the latter can be counted on to look out for average Americans, while Republicans paint themselves as the tools of big business.  In fact, the Democrats should be advocating for expanding the resources of the bureau, as a way of exploiting Republican vulnerabilities in its broader alignment with a predatory financial sector.  The GOP will keep gunning for the CFPB as long as it exists; it’s political good sense to make them pay the steep price they deserve.  Like their current attacks on net neutrality and their hideous tax plan, Republicans  have declared open season on average Americans, all in defense of the richest and most powerful people in the land.