Democrats Need to Go Big and Be the Party of American Democracy That the Country Needs

One of the rules The Hot Screen has tried to follow is to never offer a critique of Donald Trump and the Republican Party that doesn’t include at least some idea about a more constructive approach to the issue in question.  One constant danger of this deranged president is that opposition to him can easily crowd out positive visions of what our country should be like in place of his white nationalist and self-serving con job of a presidency.  Trump didn’t come out of nowhere, and a general insistence that we reject him in favor of some preexisting normalcy confuses the symptom for the illness.

Likewise, demonstrating the continuity between Trump’s deranged white nationalist, plutocratic politics and the modern GOP is incredibly important — we cannot let the GOP disown this monster that it created, and that it embraces — but begs the question of what better party Americans should support.  I’m obviously a strong backer of the Democrats, but as for many people, it’s a support ever contingent on an idealized, aspirational vision of the party as much as on its present state.  The Democrats’ failure to fight sufficiently hard for an economy that serves all Americans, and against the past decades’ worth of Republican voter suppression, are two prime failures of the party that have got us to this point where it is not at all absurd to worry about quasi-fascist rule of the United States by a perverted president and lapdog GOP.  The Democrats have failed to take corporate power seriously enough; they have failed to take economic inequality seriously enough; they have failed to take the immiseration of broad swathes of the American electorate seriously enough; and they have failed to anticipate and deflect the obvious backlash to the dramatic social and demographic changes re-shaping this country.

At some level, this critique might seem harsh.  After all, how many of even our country’s most pessimistic critics would have guessed that our country would have a racist plutocrat as president who gleefully incites violence against women, minorities, and the free press with no meaningful pushback from either his own party or the opposition?  Who would more or less openly embrace a white supremacist vision of America?  Sure, the potential might have been there, but who really argued that this was a real possibility?  If this is such a black swan event, why beat up on the Democrats?

For starters, harsh criticism would be valid even if things weren’t nearly as dire as they are.  Even if the imbalances of American society hadn’t led to one of our two major political parties becoming unmoored from American democracy, the mass suffering and unfulfilled human potential in our society is simply unforgivable, as is the unchecked destruction of our planet that is literally robbing all future generations of Americans, not to mention the rest of humanity, of the basic premise of a healthy planet conducive to happy lives.  And particularly after the 2008 financial meltdown, the failure of greater numbers of Democratic politicians to challenge the self-sabotaging status quo of our economic arrangements has meant that inequality has continued to rise, so that our country is increasingly a nation of haves and have-nots, with a desperately insecure and shrinking middle class in between.

Harsh criticism is also merited because of how the Democrats have handled the challenge of Donald Trump.  This is not to discount the decisions on strategy and tactics that led to their takeover of the House last week, as well as the massive number of state-level seats they won.  But as I wrote in my last piece, the Democrats’ victory in the realm of “normal” politics immediately came face to face with Donald Trump and the GOP’s authoritarian tendencies.  As just one example: The president and Republican politicians are falsely claiming fraud in the few elections (Arizona, Georgia, and Florida) in which ballots are still being counted in close votes.  This is shocking and unprecedented behavior that fits the blueprint of a failed state, not the United States of America.  The Democrats still have not got a handle on how to oppose an openly undemocratic president and party willing to suppress votes, deny the legitimacy of elections, and essentially brand the opposition as illegitimate.

In a paradoxical way, the question of legitimacy is in fact at the core of our current political conflict.  The GOP’s position is increasingly that any electoral wins by the Democratic Party are inherently illegitimate, the result of nefarious maneuvers like voter fraud.  Yet, in rejecting not only the principle of free and fair elections, but in embracing a white supremacist ideology as the core of the Republican Party, we could argue that it’s the GOP that is in danger of losing its legitimacy as a mainstream political organization.  Indeed, we could go a step further and say that it is the issue of how to respond to a party that has brought questions of legitimacy and the prospect of one-party rule to the fore that is confounding the Democrats.  This is not normal democratic politics, even if the GOP has been tending in an authoritarian direction for years.

The Republican Party might not be pursuing such an undemocratic direction if it thought it could win majority support in this country.  After all, the normal response of a struggling party in a democracy would be to figure out how to win more votes by changing its platform in order to attract more support.  The GOP, as the party of white nationalism and rule by plutocracy, is simply unable or unwilling to do so.  Hence, to maintain power, it must increasingly fight against democratic norms, and engage in all manner of vote suppression and court packing.  As keen observers have noted, they are seeking a way to perpetuate minority rule, not only through creative anti-democratic measures but also aided by the particularities of our political institutions, such as a court system they can stuff with far-right judges and a Senate that over-represents rural, and as things currently shake out, Republican-leaning parts of the country.

I understand why the Democrats ran on health care as their primary issue in the midterms, with the understanding that there was no need to overplay the reality that this election was as much about Donald Trump.  This approach worked, for now — but as I said, the immediate aftermath showed us that the president has the power to undermine our democracy faster than we have elections.  I would also say this: it is fundamentally dispiriting and enraging for the president to engage in racist, autocratic behavior and not be forcefully challenged on it by the opposition.  I am thinking, first, of his recent attacks on the press, which it is not up to reporters but to the Democrats to rebut and discredit.  Donald Trump would love nothing more than to demonize the media, and the media stepping into that fight helps him paint it as biased toward him.  I think it is impossible for the press to do otherwise, both at a human and a self-preservation level, but it is a no-brainer that the Democrats should interpose themselves without fail; there is no democracy, and no hope for the Democratic Party, without a free press.

I am also thinking of Trump’s overt racism and embrace of white nationalism, which is a moral abomination nearly beyond the power of words to describe.  Slate’s Jamelle Bouie recently wrote about the Democrats’ need to push back on this racism, noting that it proved itself useful in stemming GOP midterm losses and could serve to defeat Democrats’ quest for the White House in 2020.  White nationalism is a toxin in the body politic, poisoning the United States’ vision of diversity with an ideology utterly discredited by slavery, the Civil War, the state-sponsored terrorism of Jim Crow, and a basic incompatibility with human dignity and common sense.  Democrats didn’t win the House majority because their views on racial equality are obscured; they won in part because they’re seen as the party of sane racial views.  A president who expresses racist notions is unfit for office; and a Republican Party that places suppression of the African-American vote as key to its hold on power is a white supremacist party, even if it’s too cowardly to accept that logical conclusion.

This goes to a larger point I’ve been considering: there is no question but that the path to defending our democracy, and for the Democrats to gain back power, is for the party to unambiguously assume the role of defender of the rule of law and the constitutional order.  The Republicans fear a fair fight based on democratic principles, because they know they’ve lost the support of the majority and can never win it back.  The Democrats have both a pragmatic but also idealistic interest in assuming this role: they will never wield power if Republicans corrupt American government to their autocratic goals, and they will not be a party fit for anyone’s support if they don’t fight for the rule of law.

On the economic front, Democrats can no longer avoid making the hard choices that have kept the party too closely aligned with conservative economic thinking for too long.  They can either be the party of business, or of the people: they can’t be both.  It should be self-evident that it’s citizens, not corporations, who should be served by their elected representatives.  One suggestion: it’s long past time for all Democratic candidate to stop taking donations from corporations and corporate PACs; let the GOP complete its identification with big business, and see how well that goes for them in this era of inequality and grotesque corporate influence.  People are smart enough to know what it means when one party refuses corporate dollars and the other gobbles them up; they know who’s more likely to fight for them and who’s more likely to sell them out.  There are dozens of other ideas out there that would reform capitalism and give working Americans more control over their destiny; the best of these should become part of the Democrats’ vision.

In the dangerous years ahead, Democrats have the righteous but harder burden of our two major political parties.  Even as the GOP shows its willingness to tear the country apart and perpetuate minority rule, the Democrats must bring the nation together — not through papering over our conflicts, but by addressing them head on.  They must advocate for more democracy, but also more economic security for working and middle-class Americans.  And they must practice a politics of inclusion and forgiveness, and practice graciousness in victory.  We cannot expect every virulent racist to become a lover of diversity, but the Democrats can work to mitigate the social and economic fears that have led so many Americans to consider abandoning American democracy for a grotesque, white supremacist autocracy.  If Democrats cannot save the soul of every racist, then they can at least stop them from the sin of destroying our democracy. And if they don’t bother to thank the Democrats, their children still may.

Midterm Elections Offer Snapshot of Two Irreconcilable Political Realities

The results of the 2018 midterm elections made clear both the promise and the horror of our political moment.  The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the largest gain for the party since the post-Watergate election of 1974.  They also won seven additional governorships and hundreds of state legislative seats, doing much to roll back the catastrophic losses of the Obama years.  It is impossible to read this outcome as anything but a repudiation of Donald Trump — yet it also arguably constitutes a clear majority of Americans’ rejection of Republican policies on such vital issues as immigration and health care.  It’s a result that rejects any argument that the American public had somehow shifted hard right in the wake of the Obama presidency.

These Democratic gains came in the face of deeply anti-democratic gerrymandering and voter suppression in GOP-dominated states, and against a flood tide of conservative billionaire dollars vectored into hundreds of races.  The organization and enthusiasm of Democrats made this victory possible, helping the party overcome deep structural disadvantages.

Some of the disappointments of Tuesday are also not so disappointing as they may have felt in the information overload of election night.  In Texas, Beto O’Rourke ended up within 3 points of unseating Ted Cruz in a state that has become synonymous with Republicanism, providing a template for future campaigns and exposing a reality that Americans are more receptive to more progressive governance that the common wisdom would have us believe.  The as-yet unresolved races in Georgia and Florida also signal tectonic shifts in American politics, with Stacy Abrams and Andrew Gillum at worst making incredibly strong gubernatorial runs in states not exactly conducive to Democratic success.

But these mixed disappointments open up the door to the darker side of what the midterms tell us.  In the Senate, Republicans have retained control, and will have increased their majority by at least one vote when the final votes from Arizona and Florida are counted.  The Democrats’ loss of seats in North Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana reflects a growing conservatism in red states that some say means that Democrats will never be able to elect senators from those states, and point to a perpetual GOP dominance of the Senate.

Widespread voter suppression (whether through voter ID laws or voter roll purges) and gerrymandering were also part of the worrisome backdrop of this election, undoubtedly costing Democrats additional house seats in otherwise competitive states like North Carolina (where Democratic House candidates collectively won 48% of the votes cast but only captured three out of 13 seats) and Wisconsin.  The Democrats may have won, but such anti-voter measures mean that the extent of public support for the Democratic Party is to some degree obscured by the results — an argument already being taken up by conservatives and mainstream pundits alike seeking to downplay the extent of the party’s success on Tuesday.

But the darkest note of all is that, after two years of the Trump presidency, the electoral pummeling suffered by Republicans was not even more dire; that there was not wholesale rejection of this awful man.  This upsetting fact could not have been made any starker than by the president’s ongoing reaction to the election results.  Obviously deeply upset by the election results (despite his protestations that the Republicans had in fact achieved a great victory), Donald Trump wasted no time in escalating his attacks on the free press.  Not satisfied with belittling and insulting reporters at large at his first post-election press conference, he singled out female African-American reporters for particular scorn, engaging in behavior that is clearly racist.  The fun didn’t stop there, though: Offended by his persistent questioning, the Trump administration revoked CNN report Jim Acosta’s White House press credentials, based on a lie that he had struck a female White House aide.  To support this claim, the White House endorsed a doctored video: a frighteningly totalitarian twisting of facts.  I will keep saying it because it is true, and it is a central fact of our time: attacking reporters for doing their job, with the purpose of creating public distrust of a free press, is authoritarian behavior, the stuff of Russian dictators and Hungarian neo-fascists.  For a U.S. president to engage in this behavior is a national disgrace, and a crisis for all decent Americans.

But were these acts against the media merely meant as a distraction from the Democratic wins, or were they what they seemed — an escalation of this presidency’s war on a free press?  As so often is the case with this presidency, they were both.  But within another 24 hours, even these obscenities were overshadowed by additional dangerous pronouncements from the White House.  First, we learned that Donald Trump had fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and installed in his place an unqualified lickspittle whose purpose is obvious: to allow the president to disrupt and derail the investigation of Russian collusion being run by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.  

This was hardly the end of it, though: it took only another day or two for the president to begin to attack, without any basis in fact, the legitimacy of some of the close races that appeared to be breaking against the GOP as more votes were counted, including in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona.  Against the reality that it can take longer than a day to count all the votes in an election, and that many late-counted votes tend to come from urban districts that favor Democrats, the president has invented Democratic conspiracies out of thin air.  It is no excuse to say that we have gotten used to this fear-mongering: it is unacceptable, and indeed impeachable, for a president to groundlessly attack the legitimacy of U.S. elections in the pursuit of his own hold on power.  

The distance between America’s two competing and irreconcilable realities could not have been starker: within days of millions of Americans exercising their collective duty to run this country, the president was once again taking actions that assert he is above the law and unaccountable to the American people, that indicate his hatred of a free press, and that he will undermine the legitimacy of our elections when his side loses. 

It is difficult to disentangle the president’s purely authoritarian impulses from his need to block all investigations into him at all cost; at this point, they appear to have fused into a singular drive.  His need for self-protection validates and impels the authoritarian tendencies past any point of restraint.  If he must provoke a constitutional crisis in order to protect himself from the Mueller investigation, then that is what he will do.

But while the president may be the most dangerous embodiment of the authoritarian inclinations arising in the U.S. and around the world, they are continuous with seemingly less extreme behavior by the GOP.  Donald Trump’s assertions of conspiracy around the Florida election were backed by Senate candidate and current Florida Governor Rick Scott — a reminder that while the president’s authoritarianism and assertions of being above the law are in some ways sui generis, in that a lawful president is already the most powerful person in the world, there is a line of continuity leading from  the web of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter roll purges that enable Republican political power to the president’s claims to be above the law.  That these practices make it difficult to constrain an out-of-control president in a time of crisis is argument enough against them.

I suppose what I am getting at it this: the Democratic victory is only meaningful so long as it is part of a sustained and successful push against the anti-democratic tendencies of both the president and the GOP at large — against a politics that favors millionaires over the middle-class, that incites hatred against minorities and women, that puts propaganda over facts, that denies the reality of climate change, that kneecaps the will of the majority through voting restrictions, and that encourages people left behind by the modern economy to resent the success of others and blame immigrants for their situation.  The majority must continue its grinding push to take back the levers of political power, but must also engage the more immediate fight of calling out and pushing back on GOP efforts to nullify American democracy.

As some have pointed out, Donald Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud in Arizona and Florida are a dry run for his behavior during a close or even not-so-close electoral outcome in the 2020 election.  We must continue to make the case against this authoritarian mindset and its attempts to undermine democracy, even as we fight for the concrete changes that will make our country a better place for all. One of the paradoxes of our time is that there’s a good case to made that we are in a more dangerous place than ever, because now the president is feeling cornered and the GOP vulnerable to electoral defeat despite their best anti-democratic efforts. In his ability to act quickly and grab media attention, the president still has unparalleled ability to undermine our country in ways that threaten to outflank the democratic opposition. Progressives would do well to figure out how to blunt this advantage, and regain the initiative in the face of his un-American impulses.

GOP Has Gambled Its Future on the Failure of American Democracy

There are many good and cynical reasons why the GOP has, until now, avoided a full embrace of a white supremacist agenda as the party line.  Plausible deniability limited racist appeals to the dog-whistle and indirect policy variety: Republicans were not willing to risk being labeled as overtly racist, for fear both of losing independent voters and provoking an unknowable backlash from the American media and business establishment. And as for its full embrace of authoritarianism in the form of Donald Trump, well, the potential has always been there in its emphasis on law and order politics — but this emphasis at least nominally involved respect for the Constitution and a balance between the three branches of government.  The party’s authoritarian tendencies have also been embedded in the party’s extensive, systematic, and norm-breaking gerrymandering of political districts and voter suppression over the past decade: a strategy designed to maximize the GOP’s power at the expense of American democracy, and which not incidentally embodied the party’s inherent racist leanings in the way it sought to minimize the voting power of African-Americans and other minorities.  These anti-voting measures reflect the way in which authoritarianism crept up as a dominant aspect of the party’s identity, as another way to look at them is not merely as a way to give advantage to the GOP but as a strategy that leads in the direction of one-party rule.  The GOP’s current stranglehold on American politics has less to do with Republicans’ appeal to a majority of Americans and far more to do with its comfort with using undemocratic means to secure power.

But we can plausibly make the case that the GOP has systematically been working towards this end point for many, many years, whether fully-consciously or not being besides the point.  White supremacism and authoritarianism go together hand in glove: if your guiding philosophy is the superiority of whites over other races, then you will inevitably go down a path that embeds non-whites’ political inequality in the law of the land, via gerrymandering and voting restrictions.  White supremacism can be brought fully into the open when the fears of electoral backlash are minimized, as is the current situation, where Democrats must win around 55% of the total vote to have a chance of taking back the House of Representatives.

As horrific as this crossroads in our history is, it’s worth thinking about the risks that the Republican Party is running as it embraces its full Trumpian identity.  At the most basic level, a racist and authoritarian agenda puts it at odds with a fundamental American commitment to democracy and equality, and to a broad understanding that no American is born superior to any other.  There is no majority support for the sort of race-hatred or voting rollback that is at the center of the GOP today (and we will leave for another day the equally compelling case to be made that its pro-1% economic agenda likewise has scant popular backing).  Let’s put it this way: the GOP has bet its future on a vision of America that is only a dark funhouse mirror version of what this country aspires to be, and has tied its identity to that bleak vision.  The GOP’s bet only works if the America that most of us have tried to live up to ceases to be, if America becomes a place where you can’t win an election no matter how many votes you get.  Once a party turns against democracy, it takes on a stain that really can’t be washed away.

Equally, the more the GOP’s anti-democratic, racist vision is espoused, the more it incites violence against not only minority groups but against members of the opposition party — clear demonstration of which we’ve seen over the last few, alarming weeks.  Violence is incompatible with democracy, and a party that encourages it is likewise incompatible with democracy.  

I suppose what I am saying is that the opposition needs to figure out, stat, how to make the Republican Party pay a price for a vision that may bring it maximal power but at the cost of being a credible adherent of the American democratic order.  The GOP’s support for Donald Trump constitutes a reckless power grab that would wreck American democracy to achieve an apartheid-level state of discrimination and inequality that, I have no doubt, will not stand for long, but would come with a terrible human and moral cost.

We are long past the time that the Democratic Party either act in a manner appropriate to the state of crisis Trumpism has brought to a head, or be superseded by a new party or new leadership that doesn’t fear a clear fight that places democracy over autocracy, equality over racism, and economic security over mass exploitation.  Whatever the outcome of the midterms, the opposition needs to put front and center the fact that we cannot have a democracy where the party that gets less votes still gets to rule; that we cannot have a democracy where states get to pick and choose who gets to vote and who doesn’t; and that it’s somehow acceptable for a president to incite violence against anyone he deems an “enemy of the people.”

Obviously, many things have gone wrong for us to have reached this awful point.  But while we have allowed our sense of collective responsibility and commitment to democratic processes to atrophy, we are fortunate to at least have powerful traditions on which to draw.  It’s not like we have to invent democracy out of whole cloth.  The basics are known to us all.

Why is Trump Letting Foreign Spies Listen In On His Phone Calls?

As usual with such news, the sheer volume of Trump administration scandals and un-American policies has provided cover for Tuesday’s revelation by The New York Times that Chinese intelligence is eavesdropping on the conversations Donald Trump conducts on an unsecured cell phone.  But it’s important that we don’t let this one slide out of public consciousness so easily, because it involves an infuriating and deeply disturbing practice by the president that should be objectionable to all Americans of whatever political inclination.

Although Donald Trump has access to a secure land line and two secure cell phones, he has nonetheless continued to use a third, unsecure phone for conversations with friends, apparently to avoid senior aides becoming aware that he’s had such calls.  The Chinese are able to gain access to the president’s thinking, and in turn are working to influence Trump’s friends through Chinese businessmen and other contacts who can be armed with arguments they believe might help persuade the president in the direction they desire.

Lest you think that Trump may yet stop using his unsecured phone now that we know the Chinese (and Russians, too!) are listening in, well, no.  U.S. intelligence officials have already informed the president that these rival powers are listening in to his calls. . . and he continues to use the phone anyway.  

Let that sink in for a moment. He knows he’s being spied on, but he continues to use the unsecured phone regardless.

We can speculate as to what combination of arrogance and wish for privacy from his aides may be motivating the president, but we can at least understand his priorities with great accuracy.  He would rather be able to hide personal calls from his own staff than hide information that could be used to compromise national security, not to mention his own policy goals, from hostile foreign powers.  Days have passed since I first read the NYT piece, and my mind still boggles at the dumb betrayal of both national and personal interest.  Yet it seems in keeping with what we know of Trump’s character — dismissive of experts, and unwilling to restrict his personal behavior.

In noting that the president uses his secure phones for more overtly official and classified business, the article suggests that no one knows whether Donald Trump lets slip classified information during calls on his unsecured phone.  His staff members have been trying to tell themselves that this is a small worry, based on reasoning that can uncontroversially be termed not reassuring in the least:

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

But because the president is so incurious and incompetent that there is a vast range of secret details he simply does not know and so can’t let slip is hardly grounds for relief.  Secrets aren’t just constituted by bits of information; secrets also include strategy and tactics, and yes, how our president might be thinking about a particular matter when that thinking has not yet been made public.  Under any reasonable notion of classified information, Donald Trump has surely spilled the beans to his foreign listeners during these reckless calls.  But this is only the most optimistic take on what information he has let slip.  Is it really credible that he has not once shared classified information, even accidentally?  This accidental possibility, which gives the president maximum benefit of the doubt when evaluating his use of an unsecured line, is enough to render his current practice insupportable and insane.

There is nothing partisan about requiring the president to hide his private conversations from hostile foreign governments.  This is not a right or left policy choice embodying a dispute over basic values; it’s a violation on non-partisan procedures to make sure the president isn’t spied on.  It is, in other words, an indefensible practice on the part of the president.

The ironies and absurdities of Donald Trump letting America’s enemies listen to his private talks feel nearly limitless.  This behavior is in no way compatible with his promises to “put America first” or “make America great again.”  Rather, it’s a palpable expression of the president’s inability to put anyone’s needs — even the needs of the American people — ahead of his own.  It’s also the final proof that his attacks on Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured email server — which Trump believed justified “locking her up” — were totally bogus; how else to understand that the president is engaging in parallel but far worse behavior than he ever accused Clinton of?   And in light of his midterm election closing arguments about the dangers of our allegedly porous borders being penetrated by murderous Latinos, it’s worth noting his total disregard for essentially opening up the front door of the White House for any spy to waltz on through.

By allowing foreign intelligence to listen in to his conversations, Donald Trump is not just undermining himself — he’s undermining our country.  Like it or not, he’s the president, and even his most committed opponents can’t prefer the manipulations of a foreign power to the bad policymaking of Donald Trump.  Anyone with a single patriotic bone in their body should be outraged by this idiocy — and opponents to Trump should not be afraid to wield it as a weapon, both in the hope that the president stops engaging in it, and to make the case to Americans across the political spectrum that this is a man who doesn’t even share a baseline common commitment to keeping foreign spies out of the Oval Office’s business.

Have Democrats Sufficiently Neutralized GOP Attacks Around Immigration?

As the midterm elections have approached, and polls have shown that there’s a fairly high probability that the Democrats will take the House of Representatives, the GOP and President Trump have engaged in histrionic attacks on immigrants as a threat to the country, and a reason to vote for the GOP.  I have seen some suggestions that it is the dire straits of Republican prospects that have led them to embrace this extremism as their closing argument; though that may be so, it is just as likely that the racism and nativism that Donald Trump has brought into full expression as core tenants of the Republican Party would have been foregrounded under any electoral circumstances.

The most extreme example to date is the president’s obsessive focus on a large group of migrants making their way from south of Mexico to the United States border.  His attacks on the group as a threat to the United States, his suggestion that “unknown Middle Easterners” are part of the caravan, and his slander that the Democrats have some sinister role in the appearance of this immigrant procession make up a paranoid, toxic stew that hits all the hot buttons of Trump’s distract-and-rule approach to governance.  The opposition is filled with traitors; immigrants are evil and out to destroy the United States; Middle Eastern terrorists have formed an alliance with immigrants to destroy our way of life.

These arguments are so over the top, so divorced from observable reality, and, crucially, so very predictable, that I think we need to ask the question of whether our central problem is not simply Trump’s willingness to demonize and lie in order to win, but the bizarre and inexcusable inability of the Democrats to anticipate and refute such deeply stupid and immoral arguments.  Where is the coordinated effort to unpack what Trump is doing and so rob his rhetoric of its paranoid power?  Why have Democrats not laid the groundwork for why immigration is good for the country in order to change the terms of the debate, so that Trump’s attacks are seen for the foolishness and racism that they are?  And why is there not laser-like focus on asking the question of why Donald Trump is so eager to scare people about things that aren’t actual threats?

Part of my frustration is that this work of re-framing the immigration debate needed to have been done already, before the closing weeks of the midterms.  The last thing Democrats need is for this election to be about immigration, which is just about the worst battleground for Democrats to engage in.  This isn’t because the Democrats have worse policies than the GOP — far from it — but because it puts them in the deeply unhelpful position of defending newcomers and non-citizens at the very time they need to be appealing to actual citizens for their votes.  One of the main axes of American politics right now is a widespread perception that politicians don’t fight for Americans’ interests.  This makes the Republicans‘ immigration rhetoric all the more infuriating, and all the more needing of reframing, as the biggest challenges to our country are related to a more complex mix that includes super-sized corporations, globalization, weakened unions, a lack of democracy in the workplace and boardroom, and systemic racism.

Trump and the GOP attack immigrants because they don’t want to talk about these true challenges to America.  At its best, a successful strategy would remind Americans of this fact every time Trump or a Republican politician yammers or tweets about scary foreigners.  Mockery is justified and appropriate, as Americans are being asked to view their country not as the most powerful in the history of the world, but as somehow vulnerable to poor and desperate migrants.  Trump asks us to trade our common humanity and patriotism for a fake nationalism and the sugar high of cruelty, all so that he can continue enriching his family and conning Americans into thinking manufacturing jobs will be coming back.

It may be that I’m overstating the problem.  So far, I haven’t got the sense that the Democrats are being thrown off their game and getting sucked into a debate about imaginary northbound brown-skinned hostiles.  It may be that most Americans will see through these desperate accusations. At the same time, their relentless focus on kitchen table issues can feel unequal to the great passions of hatred and nationalism that Trump is attempting to summon.  It seems impossible to fully counter this racialized hatred without a sweeping, hopeful vision of unity and betterment for all Americans.  It doesn’t help, either, that there is inevitable widespread media coverage of the immigrant caravan and the president’s rhetoric because of the president’s inherent ability to direct the national conversation.

Bureaucratic Moves Against Transgender People Showcase Trump Administration's Upside-Down Morality

The shit show, as they say, must go on.  And so we learn today that the Trump administration is working on rules to, as this New York Times headline accurately puts it, “defin[e] transgender out of existence.”  Clearly driven by the ire of its religious supporters, but also fueled by a broader conservative moralism, a policy change under development by the Department of Health and Human Services would reverse recent civil rights gains made by the transgender community both through court rulings and actions taken by the Obama administration.

The new proposals embody far-right, retrograde views at odds with the reality of lived experience, and that favor ideologically-driven definitions over subjective human experience.  They are also a reminder that the unflinchingly patriarchal worldview embraced by Donald Trump and the Republican Party inevitably perverts reality to keep powerful men on top.  Transgender people who are subject to horrifically high rates of bullying and violence, with attendant pyschological harm, are to considered a threat to America, while presidents and supreme court justices are free to commit sexual assault without repercussion.  Our common lived reality is denied and turned upside down in favor of a plain immorality. 

Ironically, given conservative claims to oppose big government, they rely on the power of big government to impose abstract bureaucratic definitions on a contradicting reality; as the Times notes, the Department of Health and Human Services is arguing “that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined ‘on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.’”  This hypocrisy is compounded by the new rules’ inclusion of genetic testing as the ultimate arbiter of what a person’s sex is; the government would violate your physical person in a dispute over your claimed sex, with the outcome sure to go against the transgender individual.

The reality is that transgender citizens constitute a population long subject to abuse, violence, and discrimination.  But with the Trump crowd, saying that a policy helps protect a vulnerable minority against bullying and worse is incitement to dismantle the policy.  To the conservative mentality, bullying and other ways of keeping non-conforming individuals reminded of their second-class citizenship is a key to their perverse vision of social order.  

The logic being applied by the DHHS to transgender individuals can easily be extended to removing any recognition or protection for gays and lesbians.  If the lived experience of transgender people can be discounted as irrelevant, than so surely can the idea that a man would love another man in contravention of what the government decides as normal.  I don’t doubt that some in the Trump administration see this as their next move; but like bullies everywhere, they are weighing whether that community is strong enough, and supported by enough of the American population, to beat back such a move, or whether they might get away with it.

The Trump officials involved have made a judgment that they can single out the transgender population without significant political harm, and that Republican strategists view transgender rights as a wedge issue that will make Democrats appear more interested in the rights of minority groups than “normal Americans.”  Unfortunately, there is some possibility of such a gambit succeeding, and why it’s essential that the Democrats and other progressives lay out the case that this is an issue of equal rights, not special treatment; of tolerance over easy prejudice; and of human experience and compassion over reflexive moralism.

How Democracies Die Is Political Science Wonkery for Our Time

How Democracies Die may be ominously titled, but my heart may have skipped a beat or two when I first saw it.  Aren’t we all desperate for dark yet accurate explications of how we all woke up one day and found ourselves in TrumpWorld?  Co-authored by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, this book is in fact a shining example of truth in advertising, delivering exactly what its title promises: an exploration of how democracies deteriorate and fall, based on a broad historical overview that also focuses in on recent American politics.  Though its lessons are often grim, the intent of Levitsky and Ziblatt is an activist, optimistic one: they urge Americans to learn from an analysis of past democratic downfalls, with specific emphasis given to the challenges we face under the current president.

The authors argue that nowadays, democracies don’t just puddle down into anarchy or ineffectiveness, but transform into various forms of authoritarianism, typically at the hands of a strongman or a single party.  Various known elements of democracy’s decline, then, should not be viewed as simply a regrettable sign of things just not working so well, but as glaring warnings of its demise and its replacement by an antithetical form of government, with the rule of the many replaced by the reign of the one, and the rule of law replaced by the dictates of the authoritarian.

HDD carries a message that those of us feeling the surrealness and disorientation of our moment would do well to hear: that what we are going through in this country is in many ways not unique to the United States.  There is a dark side to this observation, in that it raises the possibility that the same forces that took down other democracies will destroy our own.  The flip side, though, is a positive one: this book removes any doubt that the United States is somehow immune to the evils of authoritarianism, and so indirectly makes the case that all Americans must make a choice as to how to defend our democracy.  It is also oddly liberating to realize that far from being uniquely cursed and thus uniquely, inevitably fucked, familiar dynamics can be observed playing out in American politics.  To be reminded that we are not alone, and that while other countries have succumbed to these forces, others have not, is to waken a little from a claustrophobic fever dream in which our problems feel uniquely awful and insurmountable.  

HDD’s perspective is fundamentally institutional and procedural: it looks at how democracies can fall apart both when one institutional entity — typically, the executive —gains too much power relative to other forces in government and society, and when politicians violate the rules and norms of democratic governance.  Early on, Levitsky and Ziblatt make a point that really can’t be overstated: although many of us associate the downfall of democracies in other lands, and thus in general, as the result of a sudden blow like a coup, there are in fact a range of slower, more gradual breakdowns commonly leading to democratic collapse, and that such a process has itself become the norm for democratic downfall in our times.  The fact that this deterioration is less obvious carries its own set of dangers, the primary one being that it can blind people from seeing the larger democratic decline happening before their eyes.

Reading their autopsies of democratic destruction around the world, the echoes in our situation today are glaring and undeniable.  One of the single most chilling charts that I’ve ever seen comes early, a table titled “Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior.”  It summarizes common traits of anti-democratic leaders, and it is only a small spoiler to say that our current president and his enablers in the GOP display them to the hilt.  From rejecting the democratic rules of the game and denying the legitimacy of political opponents, to tolerating or encouraging violence and supporting the curtailment of civil liberties, there is no area of the strongman playbook that President Trump has not embraced.

Similarly illuminating are the illustrations of how such maneuvers have been conducted in the real world.  From the rise and fall of Salvador Allende in Chile and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s institution of effective one-party rule in the heart of the European Union, we see the same de facto authoritarian playbook employed again and again, from the co-opting of “referees” like the media to re-writing the electoral rules to favor one’s own party.

This analysis of authoritarian behavior has helped settle a group of questions that have rattled around in my head since Trump’s election : how is it that in so many areas, Trump is attacking the structures of American democracy?  Does he have a specific plan?  Is he some sort of anti-democratic genius?  Reading HDD, you understand that, first, there is something of an inevitable logic to all authoritarian movements and leaders.  It is in their interest to discredit and undermine rival centers of power, and within the context of a democracy, there are certain approaches to doing this, since democracy establishes its legitimacy and exerts power in common ways.  This has helped me see that it is far less important to call Trump a fascist or agonize about discerning his particular ideology, and more to understand that he simply shares authoritarian impulses with others who have come before him, albeit in different countries.  This also helps explain how he knows what to do: as an avowed admirer of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, he is simply applying the easy-to-follow lessons of what they’ve done in their own countries.  The notion of an unwritten yet very real “authoritarian playbook” has never felt so tangible.

HDD emphasizes that the signs of a slide towards authoritarianism can be seen early on, and must be taken seriously by those who wish to defend their democracy.  Their discussion of the use of inflammatory and criminalizing language to describe political opponents seems of particular importance to our current situation.  I’ve written about the president’s increasingly deranged language toward the news media, and our need to take it extremely seriously.  HDD describes an established pathway toward authoritarianism, in which terrible words prepare the way for evil and anti-democratic acts.

Although they don’t identify this distinction (possibly for reasons I’ll explore below), it has dawned on me that it’s helpful to divide Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument into two broad concepts.  The first is how a leader or a party can consciously attack the institutions and norms of democracy in order to subvert and ultimately destroy it in order to replace it with an authoritarian or dictatorial structure (this is the theme of the book that makes me think that it could also be titled How Autocracies Rise with no loss of accuracy).  But there’s a second set of dangers to democracy they explore that, while overlapping with the authoritarian angle, have more to do with how the politics and parties of a democracy might turn against themselves even without the influence of a malign would-be strongman.

This second argument focuses on the unwritten rules and norms of democracies, which they see as an essential supplement to the world of constitutions and laws.  Levitsky and Ziblatt identify two basic norms of American politics that capture some of the necessary attitude and perhaps spirit required for democratic life.  The first is forbearance, by which they mean that politicians refrain from using the full range of institutional powers technically available to them.  The second is mutual toleration, which they describe as the idea that politicians consider their rivals to be legitimate competitors for power.  If you’re like me, encountering these concepts almost immediately sets off a recognition of how deeply they’ve been violated in U.S. politics in recent years, which only reinforces how basic they really are to healthy democratic politics.  (In fact, these concepts are so basic that I’ve come to believe they should be included as part of any decent civics education, as an easy-to-understand, yet profound baseline for how to behave in our democracy, not to mention for how to assess its relative health). 

HDD raises a third internal threat to democratic governance that has in fact received increasing attention from various observers of the American scene: the polarization of political parties and political beliefs.  As the authors describe the situation, “Over the last quarter century, Democrats and Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties, sorted into liberal and conservative camps.  Their voters are now deeply divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even “way of life.”  Polarization can in turn help lead to the destruction of both forbearance and mutual toleration, as opponents are seen as both illegitimate and undeserving of restraint.

It’s a credit to Levitsky and Ziblatt that even in the midst of their diagnostic framework for democracy’s ills, they open the door to a deeper exploration of not just how but why a breakdown might be occurring.  In their discussions of mutual toleration and forbearance, they identify racial politics as perhaps the main driver of when these qualities have thrived and failed in American politics.  They note that following the Civil War, these two basics of democratic life only returned after both political parties agreed to table the question of rights for African-Americans; by limiting the scope of politics to areas where there were no profound disagreements, members of both parties did not see their opponents as holding views outside acceptable bounds.  You can also see how such an understanding would reduce polarization by taking the most vexed subject of American politics off the table.  The authors then note that the modern trends against mutual toleration and forbearance, and in favor of increased polarization, started up again in the wake of the civil rights era, suggesting that the return of fundamental disagreements over basic societal questions around race, including conflicts around an increasingly diverse country, were driving this sea change.  They also take note of how these issues have been aggravated by the slowing of economic growth for many Americans, particularly towards the lower end of the income scale.

I started off with a vague sense of the limitations of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s emphasis on how rather than why a democracy, particularly our democracy, might be in trouble.  My frustrations focused in part on their highlighting of polarization as a problem for democracy, which as I noted seems to be on everyone’s radar as a problem for our country, and which I’ve sometimes viewed as a milquetoast way to avoid saying that American society is divided by irreconcilable sets of values.  To decry polarization as an abstraction, without taking note of what actual issues are causing the polarization, risks failing to look directly at the causes of conflict, and thus to perpetuate and even worsen the polarization.  

Their approach also felt problematic where their discussion turns to the United States and an account of how political norms have eroded over the last few decades.  Their recounting of how the Republican Party has rolled back and attacked not only norms, but the actual structures of politics, via gerrymandering and voter suppression, is deeply chilling.  However, in their pointing out the ways that the Democrats have responded in kind — though they make clear that the GOP has engaged in the lion’s share of this activity — I can feel my hackles going up; it is a case of even-handedness threatening to obscure the larger story, which surely is that one party in particular has increasingly turned to anti-democratic means to pursue its goals, particularly when a case can be made that outright opposition to democracy itself is at the center of the contemporary Republican agenda.

Yet I have come to see such shortcomings of their case as inevitable and excusable.  The authors, after all, have chosen a particular frame for their argument, and their ability to make it necessarily requires minimizing certain aspects of reality.  My critique is also mitigated by the conclusion of the book, which makes clear that they recognize the problematic turn the Republican Party has made; they in fact go so far as to write that “Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright.”  If those aren’t fighting words in the political science community, then I don’t know what are!

Most exonerating, though, is that I realized that the very issues they diagnose were clouding my own ability to follow their arguments.  The purpose of the book is not to place blame, but to identify the strengths of democracy, and how intentional or unintended efforts may subvert these strengths.  My concern over whether the GOP receives the full share of deserved blame within its pages obscured a more basic and disturbing observation: that an anti-democratic spiral, once begun, creates incentives for even well-intentioned parties to break norms or otherwise act in ways that further undermine mutual agreement as to the rules of democracy.  The following passage captures the danger of our current moment:

Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic - for they would inherit a democracy striped of its remaining protective guardrails.  If the Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce - and perhaps hasten - the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with.  As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump’s impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy -maybe even as a coup.  American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.

This sort of escalation rarely ends well.  If Democrats do not work to restore norms of mutual toleration and forbearance their next president will likely confront an opposition willing to use any means necessary to defeat them.  And if partisan rifts deepen and our unwritten rules continue to fray, American could eventually elect a president who is even more dangerous than Trump.

This leads to what I think of as the democratic paradox - how do you fight a fundamentally undemocratic party without undermining your democratic form of government further?  The single largest solution, it seems to me, is for the Democrats to recognize and internalize this threat, and to place basic democratic procedure and transparency at the center of the party’s ideology.  Against the slippery slope that leads to authoritarian, one-party rule, we may yet find our footing via a democratic friction generated from demanding that every vote count, that power resides in the people, and that every citizen is equal before the law.

America Just Got Kicked in the Kavanuts

If there is one very cold comfort to be had from the shit-show confirmation and approval of a likely would-be rapist, perjurer, and far-right partisan to the highest court in the land, it’s that it clarified for millions of Americans that this country doesn’t have a Trump problem so much as a Republican Party problem.  Under the cover of a fake FBI investigation, GOP senators were happy to approve a justice whose personal character, much like the president’s, rendered him unfit for high office.  There’s a good case to be made that it was Brett Kavanaugh’s very Trumpian performance before the Senate — in particular, his testimony following that of Christine Blasey Ford — that cinched the deal.  In this, you can see the outlines of a deeply disturbing synthesis between traditional Republican goals embodied in a justice like Kavanaugh — aggrandizement of the rich, repression of the poor, disenfranchisement of left-leaning voters — and a Trumpian style that rouses resentment, rage, and fear to push forward the traditional goals while rewarding the base with defeat and humiliation of women, minorities, and other purported enemies of true Americanism.

Pieces by Josh Marshall and Adam Serwer this week argue variants of this point, and should not be missed if you want to understand some basic facts about our current political reality.  Serwer in particular has been on fire this week — I can honestly say that if you’re not reading him, you’re missing out on critical insights into American politics, both generally and on more specifically on the Kavanaugh front.  A piece titled “The Guardrails Have Failed” makes the chilling case that the Kavanaugh nomination embodies that GOP’s dissolving of the lines between the three branches of government, and shows a belief in party over country that points the way to great abuse of power to come.

Equally crucial, though, is Serwer’s recent article about the role of cruelty in Trumpian and GOP politics, which gets at a central fact and conundrum of where we are.  Drawing on the history and social dynamics of lynching, he makes the case for the central role of cruelty in the ability of Trump and Republicans to advance their agenda.  As Serwer puts it, “It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”  As if this weren’t bad enough, he ties this cultivation of rage and punishment to Trump’s re-definition of the rule of law:

Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Serwer’s peroration capture something of the depravity and challenge of our moment:

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

Serwer doesn’t say so explicitly, though he hints at it in his final line, but this presidential-level appeal to the worst impulses of his supporters not only rallies support against those deemed un-American, but provides a near-perfect cover for the monied interests of the GOP to continue to fuck over and otherwise exploit the rank and file GOP voter.  The Kavanaugh appointment captures this perfectly: as much as Kavanaugh will be sure to vote to restrict abortion rights and the suffrage of minorities, he’s as sure to screw over working Americans through anti-union rulings and other votes on behalf of corporations and bosses at the expense of everyone else.

I started off by saying that, if nothing else, the Kavanaugh nomination process made it that much easier to see that our true problem is not just Trump as our president, but a GOP that both absorbs and elaborates on his awful politics.  Of course, while it is good that the truth is now more evident, the nature of this truth is awful almost beyond words.  One of the two major American political parties has embraced anti-democratic attitudes and policies, whether it’s the encouragement of hate against political opponents, protection of the president against overwhelming evidence he received the assistance of Russia to gain the presidency, or the continued push to make it harder for ordinary Americans to vote.  The party has embraced these policies not only as (bad) ends in themselves, but as a way to further strengthen its grip on power and prevent the other party from using democratic means to win elections or implement progressive policies.

It may be that I am still raw from the success of the Kavanaugh nomination; but it seems to me a warning that worse is still to come in terms of the GOP’s willingness to gin up hatred and revenge to drive forward their agenda.  They started the Kavanaugh nomination at least pretending he was a moderate, judicious guy; they pushed the nomination through by having him go full Trump, as recounted by Josh Marshall.  This lesson will not be lost on the party as a whole.  While even a short while ago I might have thought this to be a good development on balance — both for revealing the lack of daylight between Trump and the GOP, and for the way it might promise to let the mass of citizens see the true nature of the party — I am less secure saying so today.  The forces being mobilized are primal, violent, and incompatible with the mutual tolerance and respect a democracy requires.

Equally unsettling is that so far, the GOP sees this path as a way to win, no matter the damage to American democracy.  And this gets us to the heart of the crisis: how does the opposition beat back this threat, and regain control of the narrative of American democracy?  I am less sure than before that the revenge politics of Trump on behalf of a minority of the population will naturally provoke an overwhelming backlash, or that the backlash isn’t without its dangers.  It seems more important than ever that the opposition engage in a frank, far-reaching discussion about the nature of American democracy, both in order to understand our goals, and, perhaps just as importantly, to describe the peril in which the contemporary GOP places the American experiment.  It seems that whatever set of rules the Democrats have been playing by have been an abject failure, not only in terms of the party’s loss of power, but also as measured by its lack of success in protecting our democracy itself.

Beyond the specifics of what Democratic goals should be, it is far past time that they embrace a messaging strategy that puts openness and democratic consensus as the center of what the party stands for.  This would stand in vivid opposition to the Republicans’ policies of bait and switch, in which working Americans are continually sold out and democracy itself undermined.  Such an approach should include a determined effort to describe GOP policies for what they are.  As a ballpark example: while the events of the Kavanaugh nomination are fresh in everyone’s minds, we need to talk about the way the president and the GOP essentially embraced an anti-woman, pro-rape worldview in which women are always lying about being raped and immoral men can continue the practice with impunity.  This Republican rhetoric threatens women with real-world consequences, and stands as an irrefutable example of the second-class citizenship to which they’d relegate half the population. 

This issue also opens up into the crucial question of how to counter the GOP’s embrace of cruelty and mass sadism as a political tool.  Any successful strategy will hit back hard against this meanness.  It is safe to say that beneath the surface contempt and cruelty one finds the weakness and cowardice of those who can only feel good if someone else is feeling bad, and who only make their views known when they are surrounded by sufficient numbers of their cohort to provide cover or anonymity.  Donald Trump is a coward; his followers are cowards; and Republican officials are cowards.  I don’t know if we can’t get them to feel shame, but I do know that behind their viciousness is a fundamental weakness, and we should exploit this fact in all its facets, whether in trying to understand how they can be persuaded back into comity with their fellow citizens, or how to make a larger argument about the invalidity of their politics.

This last point sometimes feels to me like the biggest challenge of all: how do you fight anti-democratic hate in a democracy?  How do you continue to hold out an open hand to citizens who’d deny you full participation in that democracy?  A hard burden and challenge has been placed on the democratic opposition, whose goal is not simply to rip the country to shreds so long as their cohort ends up feeling good, but knitting the country together and reversing the forces of inequality, greed, and insecurity that have allowed Donald Trump to emerge like Mothra from the radioactive cocoon of the GOP.  How do you fight back without embracing the same mentality of zero-sum competition and treating your opponents as illegitimate?

Ice, Ice. . . Maybe?

“For his part, speaking to the officers, Mr. Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the police report said.”

This event reportedly took place after a UB-40 concert. Apparently the red red wine did not make him feel so fine?

This Nomination is Just Plain Kavanuts, Part II

Yesterday, I noted the basic persuasiveness of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  But due to their initial refusal to recommend an FBI investigation of either her or other women’s accusations against Kavanaugh, GOP senators last week deliberately turned matters into a he said-she said confrontation between Ford and Kavanaugh.  So what of the judge’s unequivocal denials of Ford’s claims of sexual assault, freshly delivered with great sweaty dollops of partisan rage, self-pity, and spite?  To me, the matter of Kavanaugh’s heavy drinking in high school and college is crucial in determining how we assess this question.  If he was indeed a serious drinker, described as “belligerent” when drunk by various classmates, then this increases not only the probability that the events Ford describes did occur, but also the possibility that Kavanaugh has a distorted memory or even blind spot regarding the events.  When placed against Dr. Ford’s keenly remembered traumatic memories of that night — particularly her 100% certainty that Kavanaugh was the assailant — the judge’s lack of memory based on heavy drinking begins to appear quite troubling.

This is why it’s so important that Kavanaugh deny such heavy drinking, and why he now finds himself caught up on the perjury front as well, having already testified to only moderate drinking but currently facing an erupting woodwork of naysaying former classmates.  This suspicion is only confirmed by the White House’s apparent restriction on the FBI from investigating his drinking as a young man now that some sort of limited investigation is under way. 

Of course, Kavanaugh’s capacity to even slightly reasonably deny memory of assaulting Dr. Ford based on (unacknowledged) blackout drinking is a level of plausible deniability laced with sociopathic assholery that should make any civilized person retch.  Apart from suggesting some yet-unmade Black Mirror episode in which criminals game future mind-reading tech by erasing memories that might incriminate them, it also suggests that while Kavanaugh might not remember the events, he knows at some level that they could have happened — making his blanket denials self-serving in a way that should be unacceptable for any legitimate Supreme Court Justice.  As Talia Lavin observes at the Huffington Post, it is a sort of upside-down immaculate conception argument for this self-proclaimed virgin-until-after-college, and one that uncannily ties into the profound misogyny and immorality of the anti-abortion forces who, alongside the economic royalists, long for his elevation to the highest court in the land.  If the rape of Dr. Ford had succeeded — and even some Kavanaugh supporters accept she was indeed assaulted, only by someone other than Kavanaugh — and she had become pregnant, it is a real doozie to consider that this judge and his ilk would have opposed her seeking an abortion to end such an unwanted pregnancy.  In this theoretical, we can see the closed circle of a mindset that would allow a woman no control over her own body, either in sexual or reproductive terms, but merely views her as a vessel for any man’s domination.

This Nomination is Just Plain Kavanuts, Part I

I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Donald Trump selected Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice based on advance knowledge of the sexual assault allegations that have come to haunt his nomination process, but doesn’t it feel crudely inevitable that this was bound to happen?  That Trump, a man caught dead to rights on tape casually describing how his wealth and power allow him to grab women by the genitals, would nominate a Supreme Court justice with the same privileged and cruel sexual contempt for womankind?  The Republican Party’s decision to rally around Trump in 2016 despite such accusations clarified the GOP’s adherence to an official worldview best described as paranoiacally patriarchal, in which sexual assault is swatted away as always a lie by a woman in league with other women in a conspiracy to wrongly undermine men.  The fact that many Republicans privately acknowledged the likely reality of the charges against Trump suggests that the GOP’s unspoken adherence is actually to a sadistic, American-men-first view of the world, in which sexual assault is no big deal.  The paranoid tale of a female conspiracy thus has a double purpose: it’s a way to discredit the accusations, but also acknowledges and counteracts a suppressed reality that women have great cause to band together to tell the truth and act against the evils committed against them.

This “conspiracy of psycho bitches” is at the heart of the GOP’s present defense of Brett Kavanaugh.  To a neutral observer, Christine Blasey Ford appears to be telling the truth, and to have no good motivation to lie.  Unlike Judge Kavanaugh, she has no record of being any sort of committed partisan.  In fact, from her profession as a psychologist, backed up by her testimony and the cautious way in which she revealed her story to Senator Diane Feinstein, we can infer that she’s a judicious and cautious person.  For the Republican Party, though, there is only one truth: that any woman claiming sexual assault against a conservative politician must not only be lying, but be part of a vast feminist-liberal conspiracy to undermine men everywhere that is positively Pynchonian in its extravagance.  And so this template is absurdly applied to Dr. Ford, despite the facts of the case.

Just as the GOP’s embrace of Donald Trump in 2016 was equally an embrace of misogyny, it also showed the degree to which its desire for power overrides the most basic moral considerations.  A president who would support GOP goals was worth it, no matter his personal predilection not only for pussy grabbing, but for scamming students, stiffing contractors, and running businesses into bankruptcy.  Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court would exponentially increase the GOP’s hold on power in this country, by cementing a conservative majority that could potentially derail any future progressive legislation on behalf of workers, voters, and of course women.

In this way, the appeal to a feminine conspiracy is essential to an anti-democratic power play that could see future Court rulings that not only outlaw abortion, but also restrict voting, eviscerate unions, and blunt efforts to regulate and reform an economy that aggrandizes the wealthy at the expense of working Americans.  Put another way: a profoundly anti-woman perspective that essentially renders them as second-class citizens — for how else do you describe a person whose claims of mistreatment are automatically discredited on the grounds of being part of a vast anti-male conspiracy? — is in turn being used to clear the path for a man who will not only work to keep men on top, but to make nearly all of us, men and women both, second-class citizens as well, unable to exercise democratic governance through majority rule.

Making Sense of Why the Blue Tilt Is Turning Tectonic

Apart from his willingness to articulate grand historical takes on what’s happening in U.S. and international politics, I’ve long admired Andrew O’Hehir’s weekly Salon pieces for their unsentimental and realistic attitude to his topics.  Calling him “contrarian” might be tempting, but it’s almost never accurate; rather, I’d say his interest in getting to the root of the matter leads him to places where undue optimism and sometimes hope are either irrelevant or just another part of what keeps us from perceiving the truth.

I said O’Hehir is “almost never” a contrarian with one particular essay in mind — his argument back in May 2017 that the Democrats would not be capable of pulling off a “blue wave” in the 2018 midterms.  Writing in the wake of Democratic defeats in Georgia and Montana special elections to the House of Representatives, he pointed to the infighting and general disarray of the party as precluding a comeback in a year and a half, as well as structural impediments like gerrymandering and the sheer number of Democratic Senate seats playing defense in the next election cycle.  His enumeration of the challenges seemed spot-on, but the declaration of hopelessness so far out from November 2018 seemed to me somewhat exaggerated.

This past weekend, though, he’s done a very O’Hehir-ian thing and written a critique of that very prognostication.  Viewing the polls and other evidence that the Democrats may well take back the House and perhaps even the Senate in the 2018 midterms, O’Hehir first zeroes in on the way that the female backlash to Republican rule is driving a Democratic resurgence.  Acknowledging his own slowness in anticipating and grasping this sea change, he notes how this development has also caught many other progressive men unawares as well.  His diagnosis of what may be happening is intriguing: that “the ingrained and often unconscious reluctance among many male voters to support a female candidate is being burned away in the Trump era.  Or to put it another way, most men motivated by sexist impulses have been driven into the camp of the most overtly misogynistic political figure in modern history, and the rest of us have been forced to reckon with reality at last.”  

This take reminds me of the argument I’d made about Trump’s effect on racism: that many white Americans, seeing the racial vileness of the president, were beginning to reflect on their own racial attitudes as a form of reaction to his repellent racism.  O’Hehir seems to be arguing for something analogous (and perhaps more persuasive) on the gender front.  Faced with a president who embodies and displays a shameless misogyny, American males are effectively being made to choose sides, Trump having rendered unpalatable a formerly acceptable middle ground.  

The larger lesson here is that, in times of political upheaval, we can’t anticipate the full forces of reaction and counter-reaction, or what forms they might take: reality is really complicated, for Pete’s sake!  Yet we live in a media environment in which one of the meta-messages is that we’re being kept fully informed of all developments at all times, and that nothing will ever take us by surprise.  This blow-by-blow focus results in a sort of “can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome, in which we are led to forget that which is not so easily measured and the fundamental dynamism of reality.

So it’s actually deeply hope-inspiring but also darkly amusing that O’Hehir and many, many other observers would not have anticipated a female backlash to Trump large enough to shape politics in 2018 and beyond.  We saw early signs in the women’s marches right after Trump’s inauguration; what has ensued since then, of course, are massive waves of organizing and political commitment by countless women, who through their actions have changed what we can count on as our fundamental assumptions about politics, both in 2018 and beyond.  Meanwhile, Donald Trump has continued to remind everyone on a daily basis of his fundamental misogyny, fueling resolve to reject the president and the party that enables him.  Even in a worst-case scenario, in which female candidates were somehow widely rejected by the electorate, is there really any question that this wave would stop?  That women would simply pack up their electoral toolkits and go home?  We certainly wouldn’t expect men to give up; why would anyone expect this female revolution not to continue even if the current wave doesn’t reach as high as one could wish?

Other events since O’Hehir wrote his initial article have shown that fears about Democratic inertia and infighting have proven to be overstated.  In some ways, this is because more optimistic outcomes have been coming to fruition — enough progressives are seeing the Democratic party as a vehicle for their political platforms that they are transforming it from below, forcing more centrist and established politicians to make way or modify their own politics in a more progressive direction.  Intriguingly, O’Hehir notes that the Democrats are now beginning to look more like they did in the decades between World War II and the Reagan administration: a party that embraces a wide variety of political views, yet maintains cohesion partly by allowing space for its conflicts to be aired and debated.  He writes that: 

For close to 30 years, Democrats have operated on the principle that intra-party conflict had to be suppressed — indeed, that ideology itself had to be suppressed — and the progressive left had to be purged or silenced, because those things were electoral poison. It took an embarrassingly long time for the party to figure out that the neoliberal, anti-ideological orthodoxy of the Bill Clinton “New Democrat” years (in which issues of economic justice, for instance, were deemed not to exist or not to matter) was the real poison. I think we can conclude that era is now over, thank the goddess.

There are enormous and perhaps even irreconcilable conflicts within the Democratic coalition - will the party be able to hold on to those in the 1% earning bracket when it ends up raising their taxes in order to fund the college education of middle-class kids? - but in the age of Trump, there are also unifying beliefs that it would serve the party well to highlight.  I am thinking in particular of a fundamental commitment to the Constitution and American democracy, a commitment that is only highlighted by the current president and the GOP’s embrace of his authoritarian tendencies.  A common adherence to the rules and norms of American democracy can unite red state senators and democratic socialists, and outcomes based on these rules are more likely to gain acceptance across the party.  Even if you don’t like a result, you are more likely to accept it if you think that your concerns were heard, and that the process for reaching it was at least based on majority rule.

The party’s essential normalcy in contrast to Donald Trump’s deranged and anti-democratic tendencies also adds to the party’s general appeal. And in providing cover for the president, the GOP as a whole is deeply complicit in policies and attitudes deeply at odds with American values and the wishes of the majority. Not only does this leave the Democrats as the only “normal” American party, but it also gives them more room for maneuver, whether in terms of hashing out intra-party conflicts or putting forward more progressive policies like Medicare for all. We could also speculate that Donald Trump’s attacks on both decorum and a bipartisan economic consensus means that there is more room for ideas previously considered outside the bounds of possibility, and that Americans will end up preferring policies and ideas that build up our country rather than tear it down and tear us apart.

Finally, I think it will become increasingly clear that our concepts of what is far-left versus far-right will be increasingly viewed as far more obscuring that illuminating, as Americans realize that there is no equivalence between a “far-left” idea like universal healthcare and a “far-right” idea like mass internment for undocumented immigrants. The inequality and every-man-for-himself savagery of our dominant economic arrangements have created fertile ground for a humanistic, egalitarian backlash just as surely as it’s created the grounds for right-wing demagogues like Trump.

In Hollow Spectacle of John McCain's Funeral, A Reminder That We Are in Uncharted Political Waters

This Twitter thread by Jeet Heer is the best analysis I’ve seen about why the apparently bipartisan anti-Trumpism at John McCain’s funeral struck me, and many others, as so unsettling and inadequate to our present needs.  Heer argues that while the funeral was meant to contrast the “old establishment” with Trump’s behavior, this is actually a “false dichotomy,” since it was the old establishment itself that created Donald Trump.  He points to Trump as the inheritor of the GOP’s race-baiting Southern Strategy, and to McCain’s choice of proto-Trump figure Sara Palin as his vice presidential candidate in 2008.  Crucially, he also cites the Iraq war, mainstreamed Islamaphobia, the 2008 financial meltdown, and the Obama administration’s non-prosecution of those responsible for the financial crisis.  In suggesting that things would be better if elites like them were back in control, those attacking Trump at the funeral undermined their own claims by ignoring their clear responsibility for getting us where we are.  As Heer humorously and chillingly puts it, “The American elite really thinks they can subtweet their way out of a fascist crisis. It's not so easy, my friends [. . . ]  We've had decades of elite failure, elite impunity, and elite coddling of racism, elite promotion of anti-intellectualism (think of climate denial). Are we surprised that the end result is President Trump?”  For good measure, Heer also asks whether, given high-level tolerance of corruption for literally decades, it is “Any surprise they would take the next step & elect, with foreign help, Trump?”

But even more importantly than contextualizing the hollow resistance on display at McCain’s funeral, Heer’s concise summary reminds us that one of the under-appreciated aspects of our current political crisis is the basic difficulty the American public faces in fully understanding its nature and scope.  To some extent, of course, this is just how reality goes: it’s always a complicated, contested thing, and establishing an illuminating framework within which people can better understand their experiences and knowledge is itself a political task necessarily subject to constant dispute and revision.  But Jeer’s diagnosis of the McCain funeral dynamics helps demonstrate that our public discourse remains cluttered up, if not outright dominated, by an establishment perspective that has lost both its way and its legitimacy.  The dominant storyline in the funeral coverage, after all, accepted that those politicians who spoke at McCain’s funeral possessed standing to criticize Trump.  Jeer’s analysis, by contrast, shows us that there are real limits to relying on elites who are complicit in his rise to effectively critique or counter him.  Proceeding as if they do possess such standing obscures a more accurate assessment of our current plight: that in many ways, the American citizenry is in uncharted waters, without an acceptable status quo to return to, and so with no choice but to create a new political and economic order.  

Donald Trump offers one explanation for where we are and a related way forward (although as many have pointed out, his way forward looks a lot like a return to a past that’s both retrograde and imaginary).  America has problems because its establishment has sold out the American people (many grains of truth), but the way the establishment has sold us out is by privileging immigrants and minorities over the American people (racist lies).  Thus, the solution is to elect Trump, give him maximal power because no one else can be trusted, and to implement a white supremacist agenda that will, if nothing else, ensure that white Americans at least feel like they’re better off politically and economically than Americans of color.  This white supremacist agenda is doubly important because of Trump’s economic policies, a mishmash of trade wars that drive up costs for consumers without commensurate compensation in wages or job creation, and a tide of pro-plutocratic policies which will raise not all boats but just the yachts of the already rich.

But the main point I want to make here is that this explanatory framework for what’s gone wrong with the United States and what the fix is has a significant presence in our current political discussions, via Donald Trump’s election as president and his massive media presence and expertise.  It jostles up alongside a more mainstream, establishment perspective that is critical of Trump, yet has a vested interest in ignoring the untenable nature of pre-Trump America, let alone its role in bringing Trump to power.  Between these two major frameworks, the American public receives only a distorted, partial view of our collective situation.  Many people understand something has gone wrong, but we are daily presented with news and perspectives that continue to confuse more than clarify.

On the positive side, there are plenty of writers and news organizations that are zeroing in on the political and economic injustices and inequalities that provide a more accurate view of our collective lives.  There are also lots of politicians, pretty much all on the progressive side of the spectrum, who appear to recognize the true stakes and challenges we face.  But at this moment, it feels important to note how structured by bad and discredited ideas our national dialogue remains, and how important it is to win this fight to accurately define our American reality.

Neo-Nazi Riots in Germany Highlight the Danger and Moral Bankruptcy of Far-Right Movements Worldwide

For The Hot Screen, there is no news in the last week more unsettling and requiring the spotlight of international condemnation and outrage than the neo-Nazi-led protests and assaults of immigrants in the German city of Chemnitz.  Purportedly meant to protest the alleged killing of a German man by a Muslim and a Syrian refugee, these activities are clearly intended to demonize and physically intimidate Germany’s immigrant population in order to increase the power of extremist political parties, at the cost of human rights and the rule of law. 

Whatever legitimate cultural and economic concerns may exist in the wake of Angela Merkel’s decision to let in a million refugees from parts of the world ravaged by civil strife have been overshadowed by a disproportionate and vicious response that hearkens back to German behavior in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Once again, scapegoating of minority populations is the order of the day.  And so a small but growing group of citizens in the country that started both world wars, implemented the Holocaust, and found part of itself occupied for 40 years by a brutal Soviet overlord are now convinced that all their problems are the fault of. . . a tiny minority of Muslim immigrants, most of whom only entered the country in the past few years?  These citizens apparently believe so much in the sanctity and superiority of German values that they now hunt these immigrants in the streets in order to beat and bloody them, or attend rallies alongside those who participate in such activities.

One can only imagine the moral turpitude of any German who, faced with his or her country’s history, looks at the model of Nazism and thinks, “Hey, that sounds pretty good to me.”

This deranged and violent response by German protestors ironically defeats the participants’ own claims that the German race is special and needs to exclude outside influences.  If ever a country needed to let in fresh cultural air and extirpate notions of national purity, Germany is that country.  It’s significant, and may offer some hope, that these protests are happening in East Germany, which until 1990 was not part of modern Germany and its democratic institutions and culture, and is a part of the country that suffered Soviet occupation until 1990.

The bad faith of the German right is in plain view.  The demonization and, on the farther fringes, outright violence against primarily Muslim immigrants, tells the story.  Faced with a group of people that the German state itself has allowed into the country, the right turns a political issue that might be resolved by normal political dialogue and decision-making into an existential threat to the German state — not with the intent of fixing the problem, but of exasperating it with the goal of transforming the nature of German society and politics itself in an illiberal direction. 

In the case of Germany, a simple mental exercise helps clarify the situation.  Let’s say that a new German government decided to completely reverse the liberalized refugee policies of recent years, and went so far as to expel the million newcomers.  Is there any doubt that this would hardly satisfy the nativist forces who claimed to want this outcome?  Rather, it seems more likely to me that these forces would continue hunting for new enemies to demonize and blame for their troubles.  Once they run out of Muslims, what religious minority might they target next?

The attempt to paint all immigrants as violent based on the acts of a few significantly parallels President Trump’s strategy to do the same to Latino immigrants to the United States.  There is a logic to the contemporary right-wing, white supremacist playbook that reaches now to both sides of the Atlantic.  It’s a right-wing populism that at its core defines a legitimate, deserving us (aka “The People”) in opposition to a parasitic, undeserving other.  In Germany as in the United States, the relatively weak position of immigrants in comparison to the power of the state and its citizens is rhetorically reversed, so that the immigrants are seen as all-powerful and the vast majority as weak and under dire threat.

What we are witnessing in Germany is not just a challenge to that country, but a challenge to the United States as well.  We lost many thousands of lives extirpating fascism from Europe during World War II, and the idea that the inheritors of this sick world view are now on the march, even in small numbers, should resolve all Americans to do what they can to support the great majority of decent and democratically-minded Germans against this threat.  Without any legitimate or helpful way to intervene directly in a challenge that Germans must resolve on their own, there is one vital means by which Americans can support the resistance against this Teutonic illiberalism: vote out Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, and stop their efforts to impose a nativist, anti-immigrant vision on the United States.  The far right in Germany should not be able to look to the United States for moral support of its retrograde agenda; instead, Germans should be able to look to the United States as an example of a democracy that’s stronger for its multiculturalism and humanitarianism, not weaker.

Do Democrats Just Need to Dream As Big as Trump?

In an opinion piece at Crooked.com, Tim Miller notes Donald Trump’s “expansive view of the possible,” a quality that led the president to place “no artificial limits on his aspirations in business or in life,” up to and including the presidency.  In contrast, Miller observes, opponents of Trump lack any commensurate imagination in opposing him, viewing the president as somehow invulnerable.  Nowhere is this divide more telling or dangerous, he notes, than in our current moment, in which “the writing of [Trump’s] demise is on the wall and it is past time his critics started acting like it.”

Miller concentrates the majority of his critique on fellow Republicans who have failed to stand up to the president, though he damningly notes that the Democrats appear to have largely decided to keep their powder dry for now in the hope that the midterms bring a hoped-for blue wave.  This, along with his observation that not a single likely Democratic presidential contender has thrown him- or herself wholesale into gumming up the ability of the Senate to get any work done as means of slowing down this presidency, provide a good summary of what lack of imagination looks like on the Democratic side of the aisle, for good and for bad.  The Democrats are largely committed to resolving the crisis of the Trump presidency at the ballot box in November and beyond, and by avoiding the substance or reputation of being a purely obstructionist party while still opposing Donald Trump on most or nearly all matters of substance.

What Miller suggests with his “lack of imagination” critique is that the Democrats may have failed to understand that their attempt to thread the needle in their opposition to Trump ignores or downplays two factors: that unyielding opposition might in fact weaken the president and/or strengthen the Democratic Party, and that this presidency has now arrived at a point where Trump is much more vulnerable than his opponents suppose him.  In fact, this new, weakened phase of the Trump presidency should encourage the Democrats to re-think and stiffen their opposition to the president.  In many respects, this is due to the specific nature of his vulnerability: the mounting and irrefutable evidence that Donald Trump has been, and continues to be, enmeshed in criminal enterprises of diverse scope, from conspiracy to break election laws, to using his charitable foundation for personal gain, to accepting the assistance of Russia to gain the presidency.

The Democrats’ fears of being pigeon-holed and punished as the party of "no" have been amplified by their ongoing internal struggle over identity and direction; the risk of being seen as obstructionist logically rises along with a lack of a clear agenda being advocated.  But I think the Democrats have greatly underestimated the room for maneuver Trump has given them to adopt policies and arguments that can unite the vast majority of Democrats, a great many independents, and even non-Trump-worshipping Republicans.  For instance, in his subversion of the rule of law and attacks on voting rights, the president has opened up great swathes of uncontroversial American values for the Democratic Party to claim as its own.  This is one area in which “lack of imagination” is a decent critique for why the Democrats are not moving more forcefully to identify themselves as the party of law and defense of the Constitution.  The Democrats may still have troubling and serious conflicts to work out, but for the time being, there is plenty of common ground on which to put forward substantive policies.

Likewise, “lack of imagination” might describe the failure so far to press the case that the Trumpified GOP is simply no longer fit to hold power in our democracy.  Republican officials have largely compromised themselves by running cover for this administration’s law-breaking, collusion, larceny, and general corruption.  All opposition to Trump should ever and always be tied to a larger strategy to make the GOP pay for becoming indistinguishable from this absurd president.  A party that has adopted policies of voter suppression and ginning up support for white nationalism in order to maintain its grip on power until the end of time deserves only to be discredited and defeated.

Thinking imaginatively also seems like a good prescription in light of the dangers that accompany the president’s increasingly besieged state.  There’s a good case to be made that we’re entering the most dangerous phase yet of the Trump presidency.  The heartening news, though, is that Trump’s behavior to date means that his maneuvers in the coming months will follow predictable patterns.  Such predictability provides an opportunity for his opponents to anticipate and either block or mitigate the harm he might do.  At worst, putting forward a narrative of an increasingly desperate president who will do anything to save himself will provide a framework for public understanding of the awful intent of his actions, and help build a case for unyielding opposition.  At best, such a narrative will constrain the president from doing his worst out of concern for engaging in actions already painted in the public sphere as unacceptable.  At the most fundamental level, Democrats need to regain the initiative against this president, which is at odds with their deference to the Mueller and other investigations, but necessary when faced with a president who is willing to undermine the rule of law in order to save his own skin.