President's Tolerance of Corruption in Cabinet Members Tests Bond with Base

Highlighting Republican corruption has emerged as a leading strategy for Democrats looking to take back Congress in 2018 and the presidency in 2020.  EPA head Scott Pruitt’s unethical behavior is a particularly juicy example: the man is a preening peacock who has demanded unprecedented security, flown first class repeatedly on the taxpayer dime, and got a sweetheart deal on a condo co-owned by an energy lobbyist’s wife (and then resisted moving out, despite his landlords’ entreaties).  This is to say nothing of the fact that he’s not doing his job of working to protect the environment, but instead is cozying up to the businesses that would prefer to treat our common air and water like their own personal ashtray.  

Americans tend not to like feeling ripped off by their government, and President Trump is playing with fire in tolerating this level of corruption.  But of course, his primary motivation to be president is likely to make a buck, so the idea of him tolerating or not tolerating corruption is probably not the most accurate way to frame the situation.  I’d argue that a lot of Trump voters welcomed his self-serving approach to the presidency, assuming that as supporters they’d benefit, at least indirectly, from his particular brand of cronyism when applied to federal policy and largesse.  Something of this mindset seemed to be reflected in comments by White House spokesperson Sara Sanders, who suggested in an interview that Pruitt’s corruption might be balanced out by his work in enacting Donald Trump’s agenda.  Corruption, in other words, is all right so long as a larger good is also being served.

In this respect, Pruitt’s behavior can be seen as something of a stress test for the corruption Trump’s supporters are willing to accept.  Do they really believe that it’s all right for an official to rip off taxpayers, so long as he’s also doing the president’s bidding and, by extension, fighting for those very voters?  In other words, will this direct affront to themselves as taxpayers be excused by the sense that the corruption is for the greater good of actually benefitting them by helping the president deliver on, say, more jobs in the coal industry?

The president’s willingness, at least so far, to defend the EPA chief supports the theory that Trump understands the bargain he’s made with his supporters — in this perverse reasoning, his willingness to tolerate corruption by his cabinet members is also a sign of his willingness to tolerate corruption in support of his base.  Clearly, though, events are pushing their credulity to the limit.  

Sadly for the president, the sense that such behavior is outrageous is far easier to understand for the majority of Americans who don’t support him, and who will be even less inclined to vote for either him or the GOP going forward based on such abuse of taxpayer dollars and trust.  It would be so easy for Trump to make examples of at least the most outlandish corruption, as a way of faking concern to appeal to more persuadable voters, but luckily for the survival of the republic, this is one area where he seems unable to act deviously.

I've only talked about self-aggrandizing behavior here; but of course the other side of the coin is the failure of Scott Pruitt and other cabinet members to serve the public interest.  With Pruitt, you see this in his efforts to undo a broad swathe of environmental regulations, from automobile emissions standards to the presence of lead in paint.  But as both The New York Times and Politico detail this weekend, Pruitt's eagerness to serve corporate interests at the expense of public health has been matched by his incompetence in actually doing this work.  Malign intent matched by ineptness: the Trump administration in a nutshell.  But these bozos have another three years to push through their foul agenda, though, more than enough time to correct their initial mistakes and do lasting damage.

With “Caravan” Tweets, the President Asks Americans to Trade In Their Patriotism for Cowardice

Donald Trump’s repeated tweets that the United States is about to be invaded by a “caravan” of Latin American immigrants is so transparently an incitement to fear and hatred, so obvious an example of the way he creates crises out of nothing, that it raises anew the issue of how this sad and sordid fool is able to drive the national dialogue with such relative ease.  This episode is the reductio ad absurdum of his methodology: we are to believe that people dislodged by poverty and political repression are actually determined enemies of America, so threatening and powerful that no less than deployment of the U.S. military will suffice to stop them from visiting terror on the Homeland (a word that, in the age of Trump, feels increasingly impossible to separate from its authoritarian associations).

Despite the president’s attempts to redefine the character of our nation, the United States traditionally takes in refugees forced to flee their countries due to violence, natural disaster, and other dire circumstances not because we’re weak and can’t protect ourselves from crossing the border, but because we’re a powerful country that subscribes to international conventions on how to treat the powerless.  Donald Trump would have us act like cowards, when we have the power and resources, not to mention moral obligation, to act humanely.  

The presence of Honduran refugees among the caravan that Donald Trump claims is about to invade the U.S. highlights the moral bankruptcy of his vision for America.  The United States has long backed abusive and anti-democratic forces in Honduras; most recently, the U.S. helped legitimize the dubious re-election late last year of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who cemented his hold on power by violence against peaceful protestors.  For the president to double-down on this initial betrayal of democracy by treating its victims — those very people the United States should have stuck up for in the first place — as enemies of America shows such contempt for our ideals that every American should feel ill at heart.

Donald Trump claims to be putting America first, but when his government pursues policies that actually generate refugees and ask us to ignore our own obligation to defend democracy, he’s in fact asking us all to put America last.

If the president and the Republican Party wanted to stop illegal immigration, wanted to stop illegal immigrants from taking American jobs as they claim, they could simply pass a law that required all employers to verify the citizenship or legal immigration status of job applicants.  But they will not do this because too many employers want to continue hiring illegal immigrants because they’re cheap labor; and many of these are GOP voters and financial contributors.  So instead, we have this continuing vile and racist onslaught against Latin American immigrants, which the president has escalated to be equivalent to an actual assault against our country.  

Trump no doubt feels this a great fight to pick because it energizes his base and puts Democrats in the position of balancing a defense of human rights against the perception advocated by the president that to treat immigrants humanely means to hurt the security of Americans.  But in branding a small group of refugees as an existential threat to America, Donald Trump has staked out a position so absurd that it presents an opportunity to define his policies as the unhelpful, un-American bullshit that they are.  Democrats and other opponents of Trump should highlight the moral cowardice of his position, the way it compromises us all while gaining us nothing in return.  As the ultimate example of his tendency to create crises out of thin air for political advantage, it’s also yet another example of his fundamental unfitness for office.  We need to make it clear, however we can, that Donald Trump hasn’t just picked a fight with refugees; he’s picked a fight with America.

Renewed Attacks on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Demonstrate Vulnerability of the President's Fake Populism

Predictably, Mick Mulvaney, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is recommending that Congress overhaul the agency so that it can no longer perform its function of protecting consumers from the predation of banks and other financial actors.  I’ve argued before that opposition to CFPB is a symbol of the Republicans’ fundamental alignment with major financial interests against the needs of average Americans, and that Democrats would be wise to highlight GOP attacks on the bureau as incontrovertible evidence of where the Republican Party stands.  It’s telling that Mulvaney’s criticisms go at the very strengths that make the bureau a strong advocate for citizens: its independence from political interference, and its effectiveness at exposing and punishing bad behavior by financial actors.  In other words, the CFPB is a problem for the GOP because it’s been doing its intended job.

Republicans' nonsense attacks on the agency transparently favor the powerful over ordinary consumers, and in this create an enormous vulnerability for the GOP and a huge opportunity for the Democratic Party.  More specifically, Mulvaney’s role in attempting to gut the bureau helps expose the contradictions and deceit at the heart of Donald Trump’s brand of right-wing populism.  What sort of politics that purportedly puts the little guy first would go after an agency specifically dedicated to protecting the ordinary consumer?  The president will clearly say anything to try to sway working- and middle-class voters, which makes it even more important to highlight where his actions contradict his words.

The battle over the fate of the CFPB also shows how there’s no half-assed way to fight Trumpism, because it’s rooted in exploiting the tensions and contradictions of American politics, on both sides of the aisle, even while it's riven by its own contradictions to the point of incoherence.  First, the contradictions of Trumpism: Mulvaney’s attacks on the CFPB, presumably in line with the president’s wishes, demonstrate the hollowness at the heart of Trump’s populism; his criticisms partake of a mainstream, pre-Trumpian Republican attitude that the CFPB is the spawn of Satan (aka Elizabeth Warren), and should be combatted with a holy fervor because its very existence is premised on the idea that big business neither automatically acts with the public good at heart, nor automatically produces outcomes that benefit the public when pursuing the bottom line.  Trump's embrace of this perspective undercuts his populism — for all his bluster of fighting for workers, he’s not even pretending to want to shield workers from predatory lending practices.

Looking beyond the CFPB, the president’s economic populism actually shields American business from any responsibility for the parlous state of the American worker — instead, it’s all the fault of other countries taking our jobs, or immigrants stealing our jobs here at home.  In offering such a vigorous explanation for what ails America, but which in practice fails to address the roots of our inequality and the economic challenges of so many, Donald Trump forces the opposition to articulate a clear alternative vision rooted in reality, lest the president’s blustering (and misleading) vision be taken as the best (and perhaps only) way forward.

So on the CFPB front, effectively attacking the president’s agreement with Republican orthodoxy means advocating a perspective that views big business as self-serving and willing to exploit the public in the absence of strong regulation.  This is clearly not the easiest thing in the world for Democrats, many of whom receive contributions from the financial sector and who fear that such a position might mean they get tarred as anti-growth or anti-business.  In other words — and at the risk of sounding tautological — the Democrats can’t fully exploit Donald Trump’s vulnerability on this issue unless they’re ready to be the party that sees the financial sector and other large economic actors as existing at odds with the needs of ordinary Americans.  Muddying this point only works to the president’s benefit — it ends up helping him justify aggrandizing the power of big business at the expense of ordinary Americans (which will have the real world effect of making most of us less well off).

I would love to see Democrats make a concerted effort to expose the contradictions of Trump’s faux populism by pushing for legislation that would bring tangible benefits to Americans.  A higher minimum wage; expansion of the CFPB; real infrastructure spending and not just bullshit tax credits for corporations; laws that make unionizing easier.  This last item feels extremely promising to me, at least at a gut level: has the president ever been asked about whether he supports unions, or why he’s not doing anything to support them?  The Democrats will win back union voters by exposing these contradictions, and by doubling down on their role as the party of labor.  Trump won the election in part by promising to fight for ordinary Americans in a way that too many believed the Democrats have failed to do; one way to refute and defeat him is to show what fighting for working Americans really looks like.

Hey, Joe, Where You Going With That Really Dumb Idea in Your Hand?

However heartfelt and relatable, Joe Biden’s declaration that he would have whupped Donald Trump’s teenage ass in high school is like listening to someone elevator-pitch the worst Back to the Future spin-off ever.  It’s also very much like listening to someone make a clear case that he should not be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020.  And now that Biden has said that he regrets making the remarks, even as he tried to explain that they were taken out of context — he was talking about a time-traveling Joe and Don, not a present-day senior division wrestling match — he’s just provided more evidence that whatever his many virtues, Biden is not the person Democrats should look to as their 2020 presidential candidate.

The number one rule for taking on Trump is to never, ever lower yourself to his level — Trump is simply the king of the muddy pigpen, and there’s nothing to be gained by engaging at his schoolyard level.  This includes never partaking of the ways that he has gradually insinuated the threat of violence into mainstream political discourse, from encouraging supporters to threaten reporters covering his rallies, to his refusal to call out neo-Nazis in the Charlottesville clashes last year.  For Joe Biden to have gone there — first in 2016, and again more recently — was an idea lacking this basic common sense.  I suspect his Fight Club remarks, rather than being a gaffe, were quite consciously made to establish him as a tough guy who can take on Trump.  To me and I suspect many others though, the talk of fighting it out in the name of defending women’s honor more strongly suggests that it’s long past time we had a woman as president.  Our times demand a different type of toughness than fists and bluster.

For a more comprehensive argument against Biden 2020, check out this piece by Jamelle Bouie.

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Story Opens Window on Role of Propaganda in American Politics

For anyone looking to get up to speed on what the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook story is all about, you couldn’t do better than this piece by Zenep Tufekci, who’s written other incisive pieces about the power of big tech in our society, including this excellent article about YouTube.  She provides a concise run-down of what happened and why it matters to the public and to our country, describing a business model in which Facebook’s customers are not its social users, but the “advertisers, political actors and others” to which Facebook sells our attention and personal information.  Making a persuasive case that there was no meaningful consent by users to the release of their information, Tufekci describes what happened with Cambridge Analytica's exploitation of user information as something of an inevitable by-product of Facebook’s business model.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that any American who goes online and isn’t aware of basic concepts about how Facebook and other big tech companies make their money off the exploitation of user data is akin to a babe in the woods, unaware of the privacy being given up and the fundamentally predatory attitude of these corporations.  And with the many reports of how online social networks were used by Russians and others to influence the 2016 election, the consequences of our mass blindness and exploitation begin to seem darker by the day.

This is a complicated and troubling situation that invites the classic “no easy solutions” response.  On the tech fix side, Tufekci says that the Facebook business model is inherently flawed and will be abused, and that its lack of accountability needs to be reigned in.  Amen to that — and the start to such accountability is getting the word out about how exploitation of its own users is at the heart of its business.  But beyond this, we’re at an inflection point in how we think about conducting politics in this country.  Ads and other techniques based on micro-targeting of voters put provoking an emotional response over dialogue and understanding; they seem to be most effective at raising fear, not building hope.  Their tendency is to manipulate and push people to extremes, funneling down information flows rather than broadening its reach or facilitating critical thought.

For these reasons, they are the latest, most technologically sophisticated expressions of a propaganda model of politics, which has long haunted our democracy, particularly in the age of mass media.  Voters are viewed as targets to be activated, not citizens to be persuaded, or, crucially, listened to.  This model has existed for so long now that we all see it as part of the normal state of things.  But with cutting-edge technologies putting manipulation at the center of its technique, its coexistence with democratic discourse is revealed to be more inappropriate than we might have thought.  And its dangers are even more pronounced given the political-economic state of our union, which I would argue is badly in need of fresh, egalitarian, democratizing ideas that are less about reinforcing people’s existing views, and more about asking people to think anew and creatively about our common challenges. 

Let Your Senators Know A Torturer Doesn't Deserve to Head the CIA

One big meme of the last couple weeks is that Donald Trump is finally feeling comfortable as president and is ready to start doing things his way, at long last!  Notably, he seems to be doing so in a way that hearkens back to his reality TV past: by firing people.  Rex Tillerson, whose manly name likely got him hired as secretary of state yet was not talisman enough to save him from ignominious dismissal, has been the biggest head to roll.  There are rumors that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster will go soon as well.

But just as life and death exist in an intricate balance, firings are cosmically joined to hirings.  Tillerson may be gone, but his position is not, and so Donald Trump has nominated CIA director Mike Pompeo as the new secretary of state.  In Pompeo’s place at the CIA, the president has named Gina Haspel, currently a deputy at the agency.  But while Trump may be feeling Tillerson-level manly with all this secretary-appointing and position-swapping, this has presented an even greater test of the Democrats’ cajones: because no rational political calculation would allow either of these nominees to get through the Senate without a vicious fight.

Many in the media may talk about the president engaging in a second year re-set, but where Mike Pompeo is concerned, the crucial context for evaluating this nomination is the mounting evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.  As noted in this Politico piece, there are plenty of questions Democrats can ask about Donald Trump's communications with Pompeo around the Russia investigation.  The last thing we need as secretary of state is someone who shares Donald Trump’s willingness to kowtow and otherwise practice bizarre subservience to Vladimir Putin.

The nomination of Gina Haspel requires, if anything, an even greater dose of evaluative woop-assery.  Haspel was deeply involved with the torture of detainees during the Bush administration; she ran a torture site in Thailand, and enabled the elimination of video evidence of waterboarding.  As a former Department of the Navy lawyer argues here, these are disqualifying activities, no matter how great Haspel’s managerial skills might be.

The fact that Haspel still has a job at the CIA, let alone could be nominated to head the agency without being laughed out of town, speaks volumes about our country’s failure to reckon with and punish the Bush-era torture regime.  One of that administration’s most self-defeating acts was to piss away America’s moral high ground versus al-Qaeda and its ilk; substituting sadism for proven interrogation techniques, torturing prisoners was less about extracting information and far more about revenge, at the price of violating the very values we claimed to be defending.  That most Americans chose to ignore or suppress their knowledge of these heinous acts done in our collective name does nothing to change the fact that they happened, and that they blurred the line between the bad acts of al-Qaeda and the bad acts of Americans in a way that only helped the extremist cause.  Torture turned out to be the choice of the incompetent and the morally bereft, as the same leaders who OK’d such practices also undertook an occupation of Afghanistan that lasts to the present day and an invasion of Iraq that is a contender for the single most catastrophic and counterproductive foreign policy action in U.S. history.

It feels inevitable that our newest worst president would be unable to avoid the temptation of appointing a torture supporter to head the CIA.  Donald Trump has voiced support for torture in the past, and you can be sure that his choice of Haspel signals that torture is once again to be accepted as U.S. policy.  Last week, I noted the challenge of keeping up with the rush of news out of this administration, and how to prioritize responses.  Well, this one is a no-brainer.  Appointment of a torturer to head the CIA is a story to pay attention to, and is a story that concerned citizens can do something about.  Call your senators, and let them know that you oppose Haspel as CIA director, and Pompeo as Secretary of State.  Torture is immoral, unconstitutional, counter-productive, and evil; it’s a renunciation of civilized values that, when implemented in our name, degrades us all, and brings our country down to the moral level of the terrorists themselves.

We've Allowed Our Kids to be Terrorized for Too Long, and Now It's Time to Make Things Right

Something really basic to the student-led gun control movement finally hit me as I watched the coverage yesterday — these kids are truly scared for their lives.  Up to that point I’d mostly marveled at their civic engagement and energy; it took their weekend occupation of the national stage to drive home the scale of their fear.  And it also struck me how the U.S. has done an amazing job over the last 70 years of making its citizens, particularly its young citizens, fear for their lives.  I see a parallel between the specter of nuclear war that led to preposterous “duck and cover” drills and existential dread in millions of students during the Cold War, and the anxiety that haunts students today, when the innocent act of entering a classroom could be akin to signing their own death warrant.

Our political system having failed the young, the young have chosen to re-define the political system as including space for those purportedly not yet old enough to participate.  In turn, adult commentators have expressed gratitude to these kids for showing us what hope looks like, for bringing energy that might break the logjam of gun control in this country.  But however inspiring this youth movement is, it’s also an indictment of our politics, and a challenge to adults to step up to our collective failure to protect our kids and to right this failure.

To hear the NRA attacks on the protesting students is to be reminded that too many well-meaning Americans have let themselves get psyched out by a deranged and paranoid right-wing organization.  Apparently, the students marching and giving speeches in favor of changing laws are actually violent radicals who are also stooges for dangerous socialist forces.  Say what?  Such are the out-of-touch ramblings of a morally compromised organization that itself places violence at the center of its political agenda and that backs extremist right-wing politicians.  These offensive comments are sure to alienate far more people than they activate to support the NRA, and suggest that the NRA is more vulnerable than most had supposed.

For decades now, the NRA and its political supporters have fostered a culture of death in the United States, based on an extremist reading of the Second Amendment.  This culture has insisted that Americans are always and ever at the peril of being killed, and that the only way to protect ourselves is to own guns so that we can shoot those trying to kill us.  In doing so, they’ve ensured not only that guns of all kinds are plentiful in our country, but that any restrictions are always seen as making us less safe.  The resulting permissiveness has helped create a culture of mass shootings, and ensured that guns feature in far more common incidents like domestic violence.  They’ve also created a situation where easy access to guns means that around half of all gun deaths are suicides.

Now students are calling bullshit on this situation, and we all need to back them up.  They’ve gotten the ball rolling, but it’s up to adults to carry this fight, to right the wrong that we’ve allowed to fester and kill far too many of us. 

What Does It Really Mean to Take the Trump Challenge Seriously?

Whether or not the Trump administration was ever competent enough to consciously implement a shock and awe strategy against the U.S. government and the American people, as Steve Bannon dreamed, a sense of being overwhelmed in ever-fresh and perilous ways has been our lot ever since a certain special someone took the oath of office back in January of 2017.  The volume and depth of offenses against our common morality, democracy, and safety have made us feel like we’re constantly scrambling on at least two fundamental levels: simply keeping up with the news, and trying to find a stable place of perspective to put it all together and understand its larger meaning.

These universal challenges come together every time I think about what I want to write about.  How to prioritize?, is the fundamental question.  Probably like a lot of writers, I let my personal interests guide me, both because a) why write otherwise? and b) it resolves the prioritization conundrum (to get anywhere, you have to start somewhere, as some ancient folk saying undoubtedly says).  But this isn’t a cure for the sense of being overwhelmed; it’s just how I cope.

These past few weeks, I’ve been feeling acutely overwhelmed, as the number of unsettling stories and their dark implications for our country have seemed to escalate.  Dig into it, and any single outrage contains multitudes of perfidy and stupidity; try to take a step back to find some perspective, and you reel with the thought that our mechanisms for addressing such levels of craziness are at best exceedingly slow-working, and at worst, broken.  Scandals that would wreck any ordinary presidency explode like fireworks, not firebombs.  Their sheer number seems to work in the president’s favor, with the stories seeming to cancel each other out or to fade away given the implications of even larger offenses.  Why fret about the travel spending of cabinet officials when the president might be a Russian patsy, right?  And the sheer outrageousness also seems to provide cover to this administration.  The spy novel amazingness of a president blackmailed or otherwise indebted to a hostile foreign power is only the grandest of our threads.  What about the news that Jared Kushner may have encouraged U.S. backing of a war against Qatar as revenge for that country refusing to provide financial backing to the Kushner family?  The deeds are so vile that even opponents of the Trump regime are taken aback.  THIS is our reality now?

Grappling with all this, I keep coming back to a counter-intuitive point that doesn’t even totally make sense to me.  As much as many millions of Americans are paying attention, and are angry and motivated to fight for change, I keep thinking that we are having difficulty comprehending the depth of the depravity and the scale of the response that’s required.  Yes, the amount of energy we see going into Democratic and progressive efforts to re-take the House and Senate in 2018 seems to be hitting historical levels; in the face of an anti-democratic president, millions of Americans are doubling down on our institutions and the electoral process.  This is very good news.

But playing by the rules and norms of our democracy isn’t how Donald Trump got elected.  He got elected by — at a minimum — accepting the assistance of a hostile foreign power; by mainstreaming racist and white nationalist sentiments; by denying his sexual predation against numerous women; by blaming immigrants for every problem under the sun.  Beyond this, he benefitted from a media that amplified nonsense attacks about Hillary Clinton’s email use and an FBI head who broke protocol by announcing a re-opened investigation against Clinton days before the election.  Trump broke the rules, but so did other major players in our national power structure.

For all the energized opposition, it too often feels like the initiative remains with Donald Trump.  We all wait for the next blow to fall: Will he fire Robert Mueller?  Will he start a trade war?  Which African-American woman will he insult next?  I know there are real structural reasons for his ability to maintain this initiative — he is, after all, the president — but there must be ways to blunt this advantage.  Taking Trump and what he represents seriously means figuring out a way to take back control of our national conversation.  Maybe what I’m getting at is this: to fully grasp how dangerous and destructive this administration is, we also need to more fully articulate and fight for what we actually want than ever before. 

White Like Trump, Revisited

Last week, in “White Like Trump?  Plenty of Americans Are Saying No Thanks,” I argued that many white Americans are being spurred to re-evaluate what it means to be white in the face of Donald Trump’s unabashed appeals to racism.  But at the time, and haunting me even more over the last several days, is the plain fact that I really don’t know if this assertion is true.  I know it’s true for me that I’ve been thinking about how Trump has troubled my relationship not only to great swathes of other white people in new and profound ways, but with my own whiteness.  Yet I’m instantly aware of the layers of potential bullshit in making a claim like this.  For example, it’s not like I’m risking anything by exploring this sense of rift or alienation: no matter how I pretend to enlightenment, I’m still a white person who enjoys the status and privileges that this random accident of birth brings to me every day of my life.  It costs me absolutely nothing to acknowledge this privilege.

But allow me to double-down and make the case that there are strong reasons that my feelings of repugnance and alienation should be shared by other white Americans, and that this could be something new and potentially transformative for our society and politics.  First, at a profound level, by making explicitly racist, white nationalist appeals central to his presidency, Donald Trump is presenting white Americans with a choice that no president in any of our lifetimes has.  By asserting again and again that his base is the only constituency he cares about, and that he intends to unite this base by explicitly racist policies and propaganda (including lesser but telling offenses, such as asserting in his Pennsylvania speech yesterday that 52% of women voted for him in 2016, when in fact it was 52% of white women who voted for him), the president would have us return to a time when full citizenship was synonymous only with white skin.

But this is not 1900, or 1950, 1975, or even 2000.  Reality, in the form of political and social change, has slowly ground away the capacity of a political movement to sustain an explicitly racist appeal.  White people have friends of other races; they work with people of other races; they marry people of other races.  Trump’s appeal may work with some white people, but our reality puts a cap on how many it can work with; it’s a hard sell to ask someone to turn against their friends, or co-workers, or relatives, on the basis of the color of their skin.

Of course, a shocking percentage of the white population did vote for Trump, and does continue to support him, which is a decent counter to my arguments for the power of our multicultural reality to blunt his white nationalist demogoguery.  And Trump’s racist appeals are inextricably linked to white fears of economic backsliding and loss of social status, both of which fears continue to be amplified by our increasingly unequal and potentially unstable economy, and so can be counted on to supercharge Trump’s race-based strategy so long as he remains president.

* * *

Over at Slate this week, Jamelle Bouie comes at the question of Trump’s white nationalist appeal from another angle — the backlash it’s potentially provoking among non-white Americans.  But first, his overview of the resurgent role of race in American is bracing and not to be missed.  Drawing on the work of Nils Gilman, Bouie notes that from the 1970's through the Obama era, a national consensus existed in which overt racism was not to be tolerated, but in which structural racism was allowed to continue.  Barack Obama “stood as the embodiment and apotheosis of racial liberalism, promising racial transcendence and an end to the tribal conflicts of the past.”  But now we’re seeing the end of this era, with the rise of both white nationalism and a growing civil rights movement that views institutional racism as unacceptable.  Bouie sums up our current situation thus:

Politically, the new equilibrium of American racial politics is still taking shape.  Yes, Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office, and Democratic politicians are increasingly willing to condemn “institutional racism” and call for the removal of civic symbols tied to white supremacy.  But the institutional Republican Party has still not fully embraced the president’s demagoguery (even as it remains complicit in giving it a platform), while the Democratic Party has only taken small steps toward a message and platform of racial egalitarianism.  Here, the parties are lagging somewhat behind the public.

I’d say that the GOP, with its party-wide emphasis on voter suppression and gerrymandering, has gone further in with the president’s racism, or is at least well on course to do so, than Bouie indicates — but his assessment that we're in a situation of political flux rather than some new end state is incredibly important for understanding our political situation and figuring out how to fight for progressive, egalitarian goals.  We’re in a place where actively and loudly discussing the forces in play, in defining the terms of debate, can make a huge difference in where we end up going.

Relating this back to what I’ve been trying to work through about white people becoming more aware of the need to pick a side: whether or not white people actively feel revulsion towards Trump’s racism, a progressive politics should encourage people to understand the choice Trump is giving them, and argue with all the logic and passion at its disposal to urge white Americans to reject this noxious and evil path.

But Bouie goes on to talk about another enormous factor in halting and reversing the tide of white nationalism: the racial awareness and equality-mindedness of the millennial generation, particularly among its millions of minority members.  Check out these statistics:

Millennials, now the most diverse generation of adults in American history, are at the vanguard of a shift toward greater color-consciousness in American politics.  Fifty-two percent point to discrimination as the main barrier to black progress, a 14-point jump from 2016, when just 38 percent agreed with the statement, according to the Pew Research Center.  Similarly, 68 percent of millennials (and 62 percent of Gen Xers) say that the country needs to “continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.”  Millennials show the highest support for immigrants and immigration, and are most likely to oppose a border wall with Mexico.  In a separate Pew poll, 60 percent of white millennials said they supported the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bouie cites other figures to back up a case that millennials are more aware than previous generations of discrimination and inequality in American society (likely, one suspects, because more members of this generation have been subject to or otherwise aware in their own lives of such realities).  He concludes that while white nationalism may be on the rise, the attitudes and political power of millennials are an enormous counterforce that stands in opposition to it.

As I’m sure Bouie would agree, the rising power of this diverse cohort is one of the changes in America that politicians like Donald Trump are drawing on to stoke white fears of diminished economic power and social standing.  Not surprisingly, but still depressingly, white millennials hold more regressive opinions on race than their minority counterparts: "59 percent believe blacks should overcome prejudice and 'work their way up' without any 'special favors,' and 48 percent believe discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as that against nonwhites."  The good news is that white millennials are still more progressive than previous generations.  The bad news is in figures like those 48% of millennials who believe that they are somehow subject to discrimination, let alone discrimination equal to that against nonwhites.

The tendency of whites to increasingly see themselves as a besieged and belittled group needs to be viewed not only through the lense of other groups achieving greater equality and relative economic power, but crucially as the victory of politicians who use racial animus as a smokescreen behind which the upper reaches of our society take more and more of the collective economic pie.  Put bluntly, whites wouldn’t be nearly so receptive to the argument that they’re losing their relative position in society if, for the past 40 years, most people hadn't seen their wages and wealth stagnate.  Trumpism is both the logical endpoint and most glaring example of this dynamic: a millionaire president who claims to advocate for his white base while passing laws and regulations (a regressive tax bill, roll-backs of safety rules that protect blue-collar workers, steel and aluminum tariffs that will hurt more working Americans than they help) that benefit the rich at the expense of other Americans.  And as I’ve pointed out before, this approach is self-reinforcing: as Trump and GOP policies continue to squeeze working Americans, white Americans will continue to be vulnerable to explanations that involve the scurrilous behavior of blacks and Latino immigrants as the actual reason for their economic malaise.

And so I end where I began, wondering what combination of logic, moral suasion, and reminders of our lived, shared experience as Americans will suffice to break the hold of racist appeals that dehumanize non-whites, degrade whites, and defile our American experiment. . .

In Supporting Republican Banking Bill, Democratic Senators Are Helping the GOP More Than Themselves

The decision by 17 Democratic senators to vote with the GOP majority to undermine the Dodd-Frank regulations passed in response to the 2008 financial crisis is a harsh reminder that too many Democratic politicians still exhibit loyalty to their big bank donors whose bad behavior laid waste to our economy a decade ago.  At a minimum, as Brian Beutler argues this week, there’s something deeply telling about the fact that the Democrats demanded absolutely nothing in the way of more progressive concessions as the price for their votes, suggesting this is more about currying favor with the financial sector than casting votes in line with the wishes of an increasingly progressive Democratic base.  

Assessing the desire of many of these senators to appear bipartisan through this vote — particularly those from red states — Jamelle Bouie sees a parallel with the efforts of some Democratic senators in 2009 to water down the economic stimulus package in order to appear more centrist and fiscally-disciplined.  As he notes, the outcome then was a bill that wasn’t big enough to quickly pull the U.S. out of recession; beyond that, only one of the senators who pushed for the changes was re-elected in the two subsequent election cycles.

Whatever the legitimate fixes that the Dodd-Frank legislation requires, this current bill clearly moves the overall emphasis from protecting consumers and the economy at large in favor of making it easier for banks to make money.  That so many Democrats feel comfortable supporting such a step backwards shows that the progressive shift of Democratic voters hasn’t filtered up to the top of the party yet.  Beyond this, it’s also a disheartening reminder that even with the GOP as a whole increasingly compromised by its embrace of Trump and its embrace of his multi-layered corruption, many Democratic politicians aren’t afraid to share what are essentially 1% policy positions with their GOP colleagues.  Moreover, in supporting policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many, these Democrats are making it harder to tie these unjust laws to the other forms of corruption overflowing from the White House and being given cover by a Republican-controlled legislature that refuses to engage in its oversight duties.  That is, they’re helping undermine an opportunity to paint the GOP as a party interested only in protecting its donors and its own.  In the face of other anti-consumer moves by the Republicans — such as the gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — this also muddies the idea that the Democrats can be relied on to protect average Americans from the predations of big finance and big business more generally.

This dispiriting behavior by so many Democrats highlights another worrying possible dynamic as the GOP tends rightward and towards ever more plutocratic territory — rather than seeing this as an opening to make an argument for progressive policies, many Democrats see this as reason to appear “bipartisan” or moderate, when in fact those positions have drifted further and further to the right as the space between the Democrats and the modern-day, radicalized Republican Party has widened.  In a larger sense, it’s the difference between Democrats who think that things were basically going OK up to 2016, that Hillary Clinton only lost by a hair’s breadth, and that no major Democratic shifts are needed, and the perspective that the rise of Donald Trump and a reactionary GOP constitutes a wake-up call for our democracy, and for a Democratic Party dedicated to equality under the law, electoral fairness (i.e. an end to gerrymandering and voter suppression), and broad economic reforms that benefit the working majority.

White Like Trump? Plenty of Americans Are Saying "No Thanks"

In his recent essay “We All Live on Campus Now,” Andrew Sullivan argues that a “cultural Marxism” gestated on college campuses has erupted into the mainstream: a perspective in which “the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation,” in which the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping away, and whether the idea of “individual merit [. . .] is increasingly suspect.”  This sort of critique of academia is pretty long-standing, but the change Sullivan identifies is the way this campus framework for viewing the world is gaining wider acceptance outside universities.  I don’t intend to be dismissive when I say I don’t have the expertise or interest to engage fully with the scope of his claims — but I do wonder about Sullivan’s claim that Donald Trump’s embrace of white identity politics has helped create an “equal and opposite reaction” from other groups.  Although he doesn’t really explore what this reaction consists of — I can only assume the increase in the idea that people of a certain race or gender are tending to primarily identify themselves by that group identification — I would suggest that the real world response to Trump that I’ve experienced and observed demonstrate that fears of this sort of balkanization of the American people are overblown and pessimistic.

First, when a president deliberately targets particular groups — Hispanics, African-Americans, women — for special contempt and blame for our nation’s ills, it’s inevitable that people who belong to those groups would grow even more aware of belonging to those groups.  A reaction along these lines isn’t perverse or necessarily damaging to our democracy, but common sense.  Indeed, we could argue that recognizing your common interests with others is a key building block in democratic politics.

This gets at one of the things about critiques of “identity politics” that staggers me.  There is a sense from writers like Sullivan and others that African-Americans, or gays, or Filipino Americans, or any other group that has sought to advocate for issues as a group, does so out of a fundamental sense of perversity, out of a wish to tear down a sort of melting pot harmony which is our country’s natural state.  But it seems obvious that people organize along lines of ethnicity, national origin, or what have you specifically because they have been discriminated against or otherwise not fully included as equal citizens and members of our society, not because they’ve decided to abandon their identities in a Borg-like collective. 

I understand Sullivan’s concern about the individual subsuming him- or herself to a particular group identity.  In theory, this sounds horrifying, the opposite of every person being a free and equal actor in our society.  But in actuality, is there a single American who truly puts a particular group identity over their sense of being their own person?  I don’t buy it.  Individualism is so strongly woven into our culture that it’s like the air we breathe.  We literally can’t even see it.

The most telling evidence that the term “identity politics” obscures (and slurs) more than it illuminates is calling women’s efforts to gain full equality in our society a form of identity politics.  A movement that would advance the rights of literally more than half the U.S. population might more accurately be called “politics.”  That women have interests not inherently shared by men — calls for equal pay, full health care that includes female-specific medical concerns — only makes those interests “special” or “factional” if we take men’s interests to be the normal, baseline interests that a citizen is to subscribe to. 

I can’t help delving a bit into the identity politics question because it’s been purported to be the source of a split in the Democratic Party, against those who would rather talk about economic or other supposedly neutral issues everyone can rally around.  It seems to me, though, that no particular group has one issue that concerns them, and that many of the issues that do concern them share broad commonalities, like a wish for economic fairness and to be treated fairly under the law.  You are simply not going to stop people from caring about what their situation in life — based on race, economic status, gender, or sexual identity — forces them to care about.

And it’s here again that the slams against “identity politics” seem to be all about a strawman argument.  Critics act as if people are randomly or perversely choosing to identify with a particular group, when the truth is that a great deal of that impulse is the result of our society and political system having long denigrated those people, hammering into their heads that their identity is indeed deeply entwined with being a poor African-American woman or a Mexican immigrant.

Rather than the Trump Administration accelerating trends towards a harmful balkanization of our society, there are in fact signs that many Americans are not being split apart, but brought together in healthy ways.  The Trump administration may indeed be a stress test of sorts for American social cohesion, but I’d hazard most Americans are passing the test fairly well.  When Donald Trump says Mexican immigrants are rapists, or casts aspersions on African-American football players who take a knee to protest police violence, members of these particular communities may feel a tightening of internal bonds — but these attacks also are causing many, many Americans to feel sympathy and, yes, identity with the groups under attack.  For other vulnerable groups, the attacks arouse sympathy, because they know what it is to be targeted by the most powerful man in the land.  And for those who don’t necessarily feel threatened or that they might be targeted, there’s still an impulse to sympathy, and to stand with the vulnerable. 

I also think that a particular dynamic is playing out in how white people are reacting to Donald Trump’s threats against minorities.  Donald Trump may be the de facto leader of a white identity movement in America, a dangerous mindset that would have us believe that whites as whites are being oppressed in this country — a racist and refutable notion if there ever was one.  When he identifies minorities as threats to American stability and prosperity, these threats are in fact an important way of rallying white people to his racist cause.  What’s been less noted, though, is the way this explicit appeal to white identity has the potential to expose to scrutiny and repudiation the white supremacist thinking that underlies it (and that in fact constitutes its true identity), specifically by alienating and indeed repulsing many millions of other white Americans.

For all that he’s managed to con so many Americans and appeal to the darkest impulses of the citizenry, Donald Trump has reminded millions of others of the evil and immorality of racism and misogyny.  He’s one of the worst spokesmen for backwards beliefs that you could have wished for, a person in whom stupidity and prejudice can be observed in full, noxious synergy.  For many white Americans specifically, to look upon Donald Trump is to look upon a model of how you would never in a million years want to be, and to entertain or embrace the idea that you have more in common with minorities in America than with other white Americans.  And crucially, for millions of white women, Donald Trump undermines his appeals to white solidarity every time he lets his misogynist freak flag fly, implicitly telling them that the white supremacist movement is also a male supremacist movement; if you are not a white male, then you are not a full American citizen.  Conversely, this rampant misogyny subverts Trump’s possible appeal to white males who aren’t down with the president’s gross and gropy hatred of women.  There’s a dynamic playing out that refutes Andrew’s Sullivan’s fear that being aware of your “identity” is an inherently bad thing.  If Donald Trump is making millions of Americans more aware of their whiteness, and reminding or causing them to realize that they don’t want to be white like him, then this is progress for America.

Rising Stock Market and One-Time Bonuses Are the Embodiment of Inequality

You may have noticed that we here at The Hot Screen like to talk about economics a lot.  This might lead you to think that we actually like economics, but the truth, as they say, is a bit more complicated than that.  We certainly like economics more than we used to, though this realization feels a bit shameful, like confessing to a guilty pleasure that reveals your true character to be a lot duller than you’d like everyone to think.  But our attraction to learning more about economics, apart from the at-this-point undeniable fact that we find it sort of interesting, has also been driven by a gradual awareness that something boring and basic and in plain view for all to see is actually a lot more central to our lives, our society, and our politics than most of us fully grasp.  This has been my experience, anyway.  It’s got a decoder-ring appeal.

Then along came Trump, with his combination of faux populism bound up with authoritarianism, as if to provide us all with an object lesson about being economically ignorant at our collective political peril — because perhaps the most terrifying thing about his presidency is his desire to push for policies that will make most of us poorer, and not incidentally create even more people resentful and angry enough to fall for his racist, misogynist snake-oil cures for our ills.

So two recent articles in The New York Times have grabbed our attention, in that they’re both about issues central to our well-being and relate directly to gibberish the president frequently spouts — a real two-fer, in The Hot Screen’s book!  First, Eduardor Porter’s “Big Profits Drove a Stock Boom. Did the Economy Pay a Price?” hits on a topic near and dear to the president’s heart — the idea that the rising stock market provides infallible proof that all is right with the universe.  Well, it may surprise you to learn that this proof may not be infallible after all!  Porter highlights how the large corporate profits that are helping drive stock prices are accompanied by lower rates of investment by companies.  This lack of investment contradicts mainstream economic theories, which would indicate a ripe environment for such investment given where interest rates (and thus borrowing costs) have been for a good long while.

He zeroes in on one particular theory as to why this disjunction may be occurring — the fact that many major corporations no longer have true competition.  This means that they don’t need to worry so much about investing — why bother improving products when no one’s nipping at your heels to take away market share? — and that they can squeeze both customers and workers as they wish.  (The economics profession, dedicated to obscuring as much as possible in order to maintain its claim as a high-falutin’ field that the hoi-polloi need them to interpret, confusingly refers to these high returns gained through uncompetitive practices as “rents,” rather than a more accurate and helpful term like “margin of rip-off” or “magical profit in defiance of poorly conceived economic theories.”)  Donald Trump can point to the rising stock market as a growing source of wealth for those actually invested in the stock market; but the same factors that make the stock market a great investment mean that the people with lower incomes who could benefit the most don’t have money to invest in the first place, for the very reasons that the stock market is doing so well in the first place.  

The article concludes with the observation that this trend looks likely to continue, although “This is not the kind of economy proposed by classical economic theory.”  Apart from being yet another example of the sort of wizened fatalism that we’ve grown to expect from mainstream news sources (nothing will ever change, even though we’ve just told you about why it really should!), we’re also left with the question of why something as intrinsically obvious as big corporations preferring monopolistic powers over actual competition is somehow in defiance of “classical economic theory.”

The quick answer is that, just as economics has been left out of politics for a whole bunch of bad reasons, politics has in turn been left out of economics.  Big companies end up re-writing the rules of the game, up to and including exerting influence over the government in the form of lobbying dollars and other forms of power, to help preserve and protect the lack of competition that pads their profits.  I feel comfortable making this observation because the topic that Porter touches on — the role of monopolies in the U.S. economy — has been the focus of a growing movement in U.S. economics, perhaps most notably by economists like Barry Lynn and his Open Markets Institute.  Lynn and others have been writing about these ideas, and influencing progressive politicians in what can be seen as a sort of rational, fact-based effort to right the misdirection of the U.S. economy, against the hate-mongering and cronyism that the right would offer instead.  We're hoping to talk more about his ideas soon.

Bookending Porter’s piece on the stock market, “Where Did Your Pay Raise Go? It May Have Become a Bonus” by Patricia Cohen lays out evidence that over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly turned to bonuses rather than pay raises to reward their workers.  The major downside here is that the bonuses have not nearly compensated for the lack of wage increases; in effect, they’ve given businesses the flexibility to reward and retain workers while also allowing them to gradually stop increasing workers’ wages as much as our frenemy, traditional economics, would expect as the labor market tightens.  This trend had already started before the Great Recession, but the economic downturn only reinforced it, as companies learned that they would be more likely to survive by cutting costs in anticipation of an inevitable future slowdown.  In other words, expectations of the next bust in our boom-bust economy seem to have finally hammered home the message to employers that they really can’t afford to pay workers more.  

You can’t read about this and not be struck by the ignorance and opportunism of Donald Trump’s praise for all the businesses giving out one-time bonuses attributable to the Republican tax cut plan.  Forget about the lack of presidential pressure for companies to give their workers permanent raises — crediting businesses for bonuses that excuse them from permanent wage gains is to actively participate in a cycle that’s increasing inequality and ripping off employees.  And when businesses curry favor with this administration by referencing the tax bill as justification for handing out bonuses, you see more than an inkling of how politicians and the ownership class mutually support each other at the expense of the people actually doing America’s work.  

Democrats Go AWOL On Rational Dialogue About Pentagon Budget

At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart points to the recent budget bill to remind us that the Democratic Party as a whole appears to have given up on any critique or meaningful challenge to the ever-bloating Pentagon budget — and by extension, the ever-increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy.  Beinart refutes President Trump’s claims that the defense budget atrophied under President Obama, and reminds us that despite the Pentagon’s failure to audit its own spending — in contravention of laws passed to this effect — experts agree that there are literally tens of billions of dollars that the Pentagon could save by rationalizing various functions.  Other reports have suggested that many more billions of dollars are simply wasted every year — which hasn’t stopped military leaders from claiming that any failure to give the Pentagon as much money as it wants constitutes a threat to national security. 

I can understand why the Democratic leadership would not want to pick a fight with the president and Republicans over the defense budget.  What politician wants to seem weak on defense, which is just another way of looking weak in general?  Conversely, what better way to appear “strong” by larding the Pentagon budget with more dollars than anyone can count?  But by tacitly embracing Trump’s lies that the U.S. military is in a beleaguered state and that the armed forces are the nonpareil symbol of American greatness, the Democrats have ended up bolstering Donald Trump’s claims that he’s the president who’s going to make America great again.

The military budget is no secondary issue.  By dominating discretionary spending, increased dollars to the armed forces squeeze out funds for civilian use — you know, things like actually investing in our country.  Beyond this, treating the defense budget, and by extension, the U.S. military as something sacred and beyond criticism bolsters the tendencies towards militarism and war as a first resort that have done as much as anything to degrade our democracy and our actual security in the world.  From an imperial presidency whose dangers so many are now waking up to, to U.S. wars that have helped destabilize the Middle East, the escalating primacy of violence as how America makes its way in the world has left a dangerous legacy that a true movement for democratic renewal will need to confront and reverse.  There is a deep, subterranean link between Trump and the rise of authoritarian politics on the one hand, and the U.S.’s intervention across vast swathes of the planet on the other — due both to the destabilization this has led to, and due to the links between the impulse to violence and the willingness to embrace authoritarian solutions to public problems.

Part of the irony and agony of this moment is that much of the American public is clearly exhausted by the wars of the last couple decades.  People know in their gut that the people doing the fighting and dying have primarily been from the lower rungs of our society.  They know billions of dollars have been spent for no good reason.  They know that in the case of Iraq, we literally invaded the wrong goddamned country.  Trump understood this public mood better than Hillary Clinton, and so he criticized the Iraq invasion, even though he’d previously supported it.  

But Trump also knows that many Americans are irrationally scared of the world’s perceived dangers, and seems to share their belief that simply throwing money at the military, even as he’d promised not to get us into new wars, would not be perceived as any sort of contradiction.  (Indeed, in light of the lack of actual strategy by either party, the shoveling of money into the military is the whole point.  It is not rational in any way — if anything, it’s more akin to magical thinking, as if we were casting a spell to ward off unspecified demons).  Of course, Trump soon enough revealed himself to be a president actually more likely to get us into war than his average predecessor — not simply on account of his own personal maladies and ignorance, but because he surrounded himself with supposed experts who’ve apparently managed to convince him that a war with North Korea might constitute a rational and defensible act, despite the potential loss of millions of lives and the likely irreversible destruction of U.S. leadership in the world.

But this only renews the urgency of the question — when we are faced with the possibility of wars that would come at unsupportable costs, and when we see the chaos that our recent wars have unleashed, why are we still acting as if the military is the one thing that can reliably keep us safe?  We need look no further than the true existential crisis of our times, climate change, to see the folly of this monomania.  It’s a challenge with no military solution (even though the Pentagon is already looking ahead to the political chaos that will surely result, and seeing still more roles for itself).  The Democrats seem to be committing the same mistakes they made on gun control, embracing a tired fatalism at the exact moment it’s time to question all the rotten assumptions about where we are.

Can We Really Address Gun Mayhem Without Understanding America's Broader Addiction to Fear and Violence?

One of the obvious obstacles to gun control over the last several years, despite a series of mass shootings that could potentially have catalyzed this movement, is the argument that no law, or even handful of laws, will have much overall effect on gun violence.  As I noted last week, many people are beginning to challenge the fatalistic assumptions built into this thinking — since when is doing even a little not better than doing nothing, and wouldn’t even some movement open the way for larger reforms and begin to change the culture around the role of guns in our society?

The necessity of changing our collective cultural perceptions around guns seems undeniable, and new legislation can both embody those perceptions and drive further change.  For instance, laws that require a high degree of responsibility in gun owners not only have the potential to cut down on their use in criminal activities, but would also be a way to encourage people to reflect on and change how they think about guns, such as in the importance accorded to gun ownership.  Restrictions on magazine capacity and a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons could reduce mass shootings, while also reflecting a larger cultural change about the appropriateness of civilians owning weapons of war.

But as awful and important to prevent as they are — both in terms of lives lost and a more generalized terrorization of our populace incompatible with the most basic definition of a free and open society — mass shootings represent a tiny fraction of gun deaths in our country.  As Eric Levitz writes at New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, over-emphasis on mass shootings as the primary gun control issue could well have effects contrary not only to progressive values, but arguably to values dear to any member of a democratic society, regardless of party affiliation.

And a focus on mass shootings only in schools presents a distorted view not only of the problem — if by problem we mean mass death by gun violence — but of what are considered to be legitimate solutions to gun violence of any kind.  Levitz quotes a mother of a teen killed in the Parkland shooting, who essentially puts forward an argument for turning schools into fortresses.  It’s revealing to think about this “school fortress” idea a little more.  After all, making a school into a de facto prison is rational if your sole concern is to stop a mass shooter from ever killing another child.  I would even say that arming teachers is on its surface a rational response to the desire to kill shooters before they can kill our kids.  But apart from the depressing way they assume that there’s either no will or no legal way to prevent potential killers from acquiring weapons of war, such ideas share a common belief that security flows primarily out of a restriction of personal freedom and the literal barrel of a gun.  That such ideas are receiving at least broad public consideration shows the degree to which our country’s notion of security has been broadly poisoned by these basic misconceptions.

After all, it’s not just in our current gun debate that we find ourselves enmeshed in bad assumptions about how violence and restriction of civil rights is necessary to our security.  At New Republic, Jacob Bacharach makes the case that cultural tendencies in this direction are embodied in government policies, which in turn feed certain cultural assumptions about the role of violence and state power in America:

The political and economic choice to allocate so many of our society’s resources to endless, expanding war-making, to armed cops and barbaric prisons, has a deranging influence on our cultural life. Among other things, it makes warfare—a gun culture—quotidian and banal; it makes weapons of war perfectly ordinary tools; it makes TV cops taking body shots at suspects who are, obviously, always guilty, normal; it makes the idea of turning teachers and principals (and custodians! and guidance counselors!) into armed agents of the state, there to protect children against equally armed citizens, a topic for political debate rather than a notion as insane as fake moon landings and a flat Earth. And this, in turn, makes the billions and trillions we spend on warfare, at home and abroad, likewise seem like something other than the craziness that it manifestly is.

To consider the preponderance of gun violence in American society in isolation from the broader questions of how we allocate our collective resources—of how we determine social value—is inherently self-limiting [. . .]  But in the absence of a larger leftist agenda to move guns and war from their central position in our government and political economy, I find it hard to imagine that there can be really fundamental change, and I fear we will continue this slow drift toward more armed guards, more locked doors, more checkpoints, and more professions—educators now, then what: nurses? doctors? transit workers?—simply deputized as armed agents of a violent state whose citizens in turn enact in ever greater numbers the gun-happy antics in which they marinate every moment of their waking lives.

Bacharach is taking an important swing at an issue that’s difficult for many of us to articulate, a  larger cultural and political context that makes straight talk about gun violence feel so essential, but also so often cut off from a larger cultural discussion.  Here's my swing at posing some ancillary question: Why have so many Americans divided the world into perpetrators and the innocent?  Why do so many of us feel powerless and under assault?  And why do so many tacitly accept that violence is the only way to feel secure? 

Headache in Havana

ProPublica recently published an article that seems to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the strange incidents in Cuba that have stressed American relations with that country and resulted in the removal of much of the U.S. diplomatic presence there.  We've previously professed our fascination with the mystery of what seemed to be sonic attacks on American diplomats in Havana.  Since then, the mystery only seems to have deepened, in that further investigations have still not settled on either a cause or a perpetrator.  This despite the fact that the U.S. government has made sophisticated and extensive efforts to get to the bottom of the affair, which at this point has set back Cuban-American relations, emboldened hardliners, and resulted in injuries to almost two dozen Americans. 

The single strangest element is the fact that no one can authoritatively say what actually happened.  Some 22 Americans and 8 Canadians have been diagnosed with symptoms reminiscent of concussions, including headaches, nausea, and hearing loss.  These injuries occurred over several months in various places; victims often reported hearing a high-pitched sounds or noises akin to the chirping of cicadas.  Yet no one can definitively say there's a relation between those reports and what actually caused their injuries.

The incidents have brought the FBI and CIA into conflict: the FBI has ruled out the possibility that the Americans were deliberately targeted, while the CIA sees significance in the fact that the first four Americans affected were agency officers.  And the U.S. foreign service has experienced disgruntlement in its ranks, with criticism leveled at the embassy leadership for not fully appraising diplomats of the extent and severity of the incidents early on.

The occurrences began right after the election of Donald Trump, which would seem to suggest a political motivation to influence the new administration.  And with the Cubans vociferously denying involvement, there’s been suspicion that this was a Russian operation — yet investigations have apparently not found any evidence of suspicious Russian activity or personnel in the vicinity of the incidents (for what it's worth, the fact that the Russians had just successfully meddled in the 2016 presidential election would seem to me to increase the likelihood of their involvement). And on the other end of the spectrum, there has apparently been speculation that some of the incidents may have a psychosomatic angle, although such an interpretation seems not to have been pressed out of concern for angering and insulting State Department staff.

The fact that U.S.-Cuban relations have been seriously harmed by these occurrences means that behind the strangeness lies real menace: that they will be used as an excuse to further downgrade relations with Cuba, and that an actor or actors as yet unknown have managed to subvert American foreign affairs via physical harm to American diplomats.  It’s long past time to solve this mystery.