On Fighting Economic Monopolies and Climate Change, Is a Fresh Breeze Blowing in the GOP?

As much as I try to act as a sober-minded, fact-based (though never poker-faced!) narrator of these tumultuous political times, there are occasions — more frequent than I’m willing to let on — that I feel like a desperate soothsayer wildly scanning tea leaves and watching for symbolic birds to clue me in to the deeper ways of the world.  I’ve got this sensation this morning as I consider a couple political stories that share a common theme: unexpected areas of bipartisan agreement and positively shifting public sentiment on a pair of pressing issues.  

The first: at New Republic, Matt Stoller writes about an emerging cross-party movement to reign in monopolies like Amazon.  I will up and confess to being somewhat shocked to learn that some prominent GOP politicians have been signaling interest in the anti-monopoly effort.  And while it’s true that Democratic politicians and liberal think tanks are the drivers on this issue, the fact that there are limits to what some Republicans are willing to accept in terms of corporate power screwing up the economy suggests in turn that possibilities for reform may not be as distant as I would have thought.  I like to argue for having faith in the ability to change people’s minds, but this hasn’t stopped me from tending to believe that the GOP is basically unreformable at this point.  That’s still my inclination, but it may be that there are some issues — like monopolies — that are so obviously inimical to a healthy economy (not to mention challenging to politicians’ non-monopolistic donors) that some otherwise cautious politicians become willing to take a stand.

The second article that’s got me wondering whether I’m too eager to read big messages in small signs, or just becoming more open to grounds for cautious optimism: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild, author of the must-read Strangers in Their Own Land, has an essay (co-written with her son, a member of the California Energy Commission) arguing that Republican voters may be more open to action to fight climate change than has generally been understood.  As with those Republicans beginning to doubt the wisdom of monopolies, the simple fact of shifting opinions on this subject is in itself remarkable.  I doubt I’m alone in having gradually concluded that GOP opinion on climate change would never alter, and that any solutions going forward would have to be pushed solely by the Democrats, which in turn has cultivated a certain pessimism in light of what a heavy political lift this would be.

The Hochschilds raise a seemingly simple point that has profound implications for how to move forward not only the climate debate, but also the fight against monopolies and other issues where there is broader agreement than previously thought: members of both major parties are heavily influenced by the sources through which they receive information.  They point out that “Many conservative Republicans feel that frightening news of climate change usually comes from alarmist liberals who belittle their religious faith, elitists who condescend to them and a federal government that, until Mr. Trump, had forgotten them.”  But they see possibilities in what might happen were more Republicans, or otherwise trusted sources, to deliver such information:

A talk by an evangelical climate scientist, one study shows, altered the views of climate skeptics studying at evangelical colleges. Similarly, we need to find ways of showing science-doubting Republican oil workers that the leaders of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP have acknowledged the risk of climate change and that steps must be taken to address it. Republicans who greatly admire the military could learn about the ways the Pentagon has already acknowledged the risk of climate change as a security issue and has quietly set about installing renewable energy projects on bases across the country.

Two other points also caught my eye: on climate change, there’s a discernible split between the attitudes of more and less conservative Republican voters, and between the attitudes of voters and elected officials.  Together with the observation about which information sources Republican voters trust, these data points suggest that part of the fight against climate change should involve those on the left figuring out how to reach persuadable voters on the right.

This has come up before in my broader arguments about how best to protect democracy in the United States, and it comes up again in discussions of reining in monopoly and climate change: the initiative on these issues is necessarily from the the left side of the political spectrum, which prioritizes these issues far more than the right.  At the same time, though, the fact that something as basic to our universal survival as environmental protection could be claimed as a liberal issue speaks as much to the pathologies of American conservatism as it does to some immutable description of what constitutes a right versus left issue.  Not for the first time (and here I feel the lure of the soothsayer), I have the sense that policies of great universal appeal have somehow been pigeonholed as belonging to “the left” rather than, say, “all Americans who need to breathe air to survive.”   Will actual conservatism, and not this radical urge to despoil our nation and planet, manage to make a comeback in the GOP?

Can Democrats Remove Trump From Office Without Excusing Republican Complicity in His Offenses?

David Leonhardt has just written a column that articulates, concisely but authoritatively, why the central question of American politics in 2019 is how to remove Donald Trump from office in light of his demonstrable unfitness.  His summation of Trump’s offenses is conservative — he sets aside the issue of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2018 election, not to mention Trump’s attempts to downplay Russian assistance, and also downplays the degree to which U.S. foreign policy now appears to be subordinated to the interests of foreign powers.  Yet even Leonhardt’s more limited case, from Trump’s efforts to profit off the presidency, to the president’s subversion of American democracy, is solidly damning.

It is heartening to see Leonhardt’s piece receiving widespread attention and admiration.  He has articulated what so many of us are thinking: that our country must not endure this president a moment longer than necessary, and that waiting until 2020 risks exponentially multiplying the harms already done.  Yet a key argument Leonhardt makes — that Trump will not be removed from office without the significant support of some Republicans — raises a critical corollary to removing Trump from office that he does not address: that the Republican Party must not be allowed to wriggle free either from its complicity with this horrid man’s rise to power, or from paying dearly for an anti-democratic and plutocratic agenda that has meshed so seamlessly with Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts and drive for personal aggrandizement.

Leonhardt argues that Republicans will need to turn against Trump in order for him to be removed or forced from office.  He doesn’t say so explicitly, but he seems to foresee a situation in which enough GOP senators ultimately signal their opposition to the president so that the president resigns rather than face impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate.  He writes that this process would be helped along both by the Democrats assiduously investigating the president’s misdeeds, particularly those, like corruption, with crossover appeal to Republicans, and by former or current members of the administration speaking publicly about the president’s unfitness.

Yet this otherwise logical approach would allow the very people who have enabled Trump’s perfidy to date — those senators and representatives who have sat by idly while the president attacked our democratic institutions, incited racist hatred, and kowtowed to foreign powers, as well as those who carried out his policies as members of his administration — to essentially shift the blame for all Trump’s evils onto Trump himself.  This may contain some measure of defensibility when we are talking about mere complicity in acts that benefitted Trump personally, such as enriching himself via certain foreign policy decisions.  But in the matter of Trump’s white supremacism and authoritarianism — such as his attacks on the free press, his false assertions of voter fraud, and his attempts to demonize undocumented immigrants — his behavior has been simply an enactment of attitudes and policies already long practiced by the GOP.

So there is a basic tension between getting the GOP comfortable with the idea of removing Trump from office, and the reality that the GOP has been A-OK with Trump’s various offenses to date.  I think Leonhardt underestimates the bind the Republican Party is now in — as many have noted, the GOP is now Trump’s party.  To expect GOP politicians to risk electoral obliteration by acting for the good of the country doesn’t seem at all a sure thing.

There is also a second tension that revolves around the the Democrats’ partisan interests and the national interest, on the one hand, and the GOP’s complicity with Trump’s bad acts, on the other.  It seems to me that the Democratic Party would be foolish not to ensure that the Republican Party pay a maximal price for its coddling of Donald Trump these last two years.  Every effort should be made to ensure the GOP wears a scarlet “T” for at least a generation.  

Yet, I do accept the premise that Donald Trump is a singular threat to our country, and to this extent, the argument that Democrats need to prioritize his removal from office, as a matter that reaches beyond purely partisan interest.  (After all, if the Democrats wanted to ensure the Republicans really pay the ultimate price for supporting Trump, they’d just sit back and let him wreck the country for another two years, then sweep in on a “I told you so” platform in 2020.  For the sake of our nation, of course, this is not an option.)  So, realistically, some Republican support is needed.  But this reality does not remove the Democrats’ obligation to make the GOP pay both for its complicity and its continuity with Trump’s impeachable offenses; rather, it requires a careful threading of the needle so that both goals are achieved.

Leonhardt cites the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency as a useful guide to how Trump’s downfall might come about.  He points out that even at the end of Nixon’s presidency, he still had 50% approval among GOP voters, but that political collapse did finally come, as Republican elected officials turned on the president.  But I think we need to consider the possibility that even the most cautious and skillful approach to gaining GOP support for forcing Trump’s removal or resignation will fail; that the same rotten impulses that have led so many Republicans to support and enable Trump will prevent them from ever opposing him, preferring an authoritarian endgame to a democratic resolution.  In such a case, there would be no downside at all to a no-holds-barred effort by Democrats to tie the GOP to Trump, and Trump to the GOP; in fact, the Republicans would have already done most of the work.  As terrible as the short-term pain might be for the country, it is also difficult to see a way forward absent a historical pummeling of the GOP in 2020, that might exorcise the sway of racism, scourge away the endless advocacy for the wealthy, and bludgeon its anti-democratic impulses.

Purported Threat at Southern Border is a Con Job of Epic Proportions

As the government shutdown hits its third week, with the ability for Democrats and Republicans to reach an agreement depending on Donald Trump’s absolute demand for border wall funding, it’s startling to take a step back to remark how he has worked to turn a humanitarian crisis into the preeminent national security and economic threat to the United States.  For a president, with all manner of data and advice at his disposal, to look upon the United States, with its challenges of economic inequality, a shrinking middle class, and mass impoverishment at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, and upon the state of the world, with the threats of global warming and rising authoritarianism, and decide that it is appropriate to shut down the government on the basis of immigration issues in order to get his way, is objectively insane.  At the same time, it’s the ultimate testament to the moral emptiness, demagoguery, and racism at the heart of the right-wing political wave he has both ridden and conjured.  Not only does this politics misidentify impoverished migrants as a threat to the country’s economy and safety, it’s also powered by a twisted combination of racial hatred and white supremacist attitudes that Trump can’t help but give voice to.

This country never should have allowed a situation to develop in which millions of people live under the radar, deprived of the protection of the law and fair wages through their undocumented status.  At a minimum, this was a ticking time bomb that a demagogue like Trump would eventually use against the Democratic Party and against our democracy more generally, even if both parties have been complicit in this situation.  Purely on grounds of justice, no democracy should be comfortable with a vast population of undocumented immigrants vulnerable to exploitation and unable to participate in the political system.  Yet the benefits they brought to the American economy long received a bipartisan embrace: many are the employers who built their wealth on the backs of underpaid, undocumented laborers.

And now, President Trump’s elevation of stopping immigration across the southern border, with broad support from the Republican base, signals what a diminished and petty vision of American is now held by millions of Americans.  Not only does it seek to erase the contributions these migrants have made and continue to make, it seeks to demonize them as some sort of invading army.  Even at this late date, the hypocrisy still astounds.  If the Republican Party really wanted to stop illegal immigration and the supposed threat of these workers taking low-end American jobs, then they could be done with it by passing laws that harshly penalized those who hired undocumented workers.  Instead, amazingly, all blame is placed on people who are doing what so many of our ancestors did — coming to America in search of a better life.

And the racist vision further precludes actual solutions to the flow of immigrants northward, by conceiving of all the vast lands south of the Rio Grande as a demented lawless hellscape of gangs and faceless hordes.  Completely blanked out is the idea that there are actual countries and societies where large-scale, non-exploitative assistance might promote democracy and healthy economic development, and alter the dynamics that send so many people fleeing northward from poverty and violence.

It remains shocking to me that the Democrats have allowed Trump to so thoroughly shape this debate.  His economic premise that immigrants are simply draining our economy is flawed; his assertion that they present a national security threat is laughable; and his racism is contemptible.  It is unnerving that our entire national dialogue has been centered so often on a purported threat that is, in fact, almost entirely illusory.  The con man president has once again conned America.

Though Defeated, Jersey Gerrymander Ploy Highlights Dangers of Anti-Democratic Spiral

Last month, Democrats in New Jersey were on the cusp on implementing a plan to essentially gerrymander their way into impregnable, or at least, highly secured, power in the state.  The plan went awry when enough people on both sides of the aisle paid attention to the effort and those leading it chose to back down rather than risk paying an unknowable public and political price.  

If there’s one thing readers of The Hot Screen have picked up on in the last couple years, it’s probably our belief that political and moral imperatives dictate that the Democratic Party needs to defend and expand democracy in our country.  This is both necessary in pragmatic terms, to win back power, and in identity terms, in that a Democratic Party that fails to do so would not be worth supporting.  Such a strategy necessarily includes opposition to all forms of voter suppression, whether it be arbitrary purging of voter rolls, restrictions on early voting, or, of course, gerrymandering that thwarts the ability of citizens to elect the officials of their choosing.

What transpired in New Jersey has only fed fuel into our righteous fire.  “Beware any politician who wants to avoid a fair fight” is a basic lesson that only grows more and more prominent as a guiding star in how to think about our shared democratic future.  Within the Democratic Party, there is clearly a battle being fought out between certain establishment politicians who’d love to cement their hold on power, alongside those who think fighting dirty is acceptable in order to defeat Republicans and move forward progressive causes, and those who understand that undemocratic means will bring neither accountability nor real progressive change.  A politician who is guaranteed of re-election is a politician that much less inclined to really listen to her constituents; obviously, such gerrymandered seats also stand in the way of the voters’ will when they decide it’s time for a change.

The fight in New Jersey also caught my attention because it was an unpleasant illustration of a topic covered in a book I’ve discussed previously, How Democracies Die.  The authors describe a cycle in which competing political parties begin to change the rules of the game to tighten their hold on power, each move prompting the opposition to mimic it lest they find themselves out of power permanently.  This cycle can be driven by, and further drive, the idea that the opposition is illegitimate, which justifies moves to stymie its future election.  When both major political parties embrace such tactics, the dynamic can be very difficult to reverse.  How Democracies Die cites plenty of examples from around the world; it’s chilling to see even the possibility of such a cycle begin here.

But I think we can cautiously say that the New Jersey story has had a happy ending, at least for now, and shows that a Democratic grassroots awareness of the perils of gerrymandering is only growing. A New Jersey activist quoted by Politico makes the point very well indeed:

“What got us emotionally upset was that here we had fought hard in a certain set of values that we thought Trumpism was an affront to: Lack of transparency, poor policy, power grabbing. We saw Republicans doing that all over the country,” said Sue Altman, a board member of the group South Jersey Women for Progressive Change. “To see our own party kind of make hypocrites of us and to turn it around and do the same thing in New Jersey.”

We couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. We already have one party that has become untethered from democracy, and even that’s one too many.

U.S. Backing of Saudi War on Yemen Is Indefensible

Andrew Sullivan found himself as irate as The Hot Screen at the general reaction to Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan.  He, too, identifies this widespread opposition as the manifestation of an establishment consensus supporting endless American intervention in the Middle East, despite equally endless evidence demonstrating the insanity of such policy.  Of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, he writes, “We should not be asking why Trump has decided to nip this in the bud, following his clear and popular mandate to get us out of the region. We should be asking how on earth did the Establishment find a way to occupy yet another Middle Eastern country without any democratic buy-in at all.”

Sullivan hits several important points that I didn’t touch on in my own piece.   First, he suggests that just as those on the right have been motivated by neo-conservative dreams of U.S. dominance of the Middle East, some on the left side of the spectrum have supported a “liberal internationalism” that supports interventions on humanitarian grounds.  Sullivan argues that this justification was used and discredited in the Obama administration’s forays into both Syria and Libya.  To me, it also suggests the ways in which American military force seems to possess magnetic appeal to those who hold power, a manifestation of that tried-and-true adage that for a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  This bipartisan American belief in the moral use of violence is one of the single greatest character flaws of our nation, abetted by the growth of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic and budgetary power in a way that distorts our politics immensely.

Sullivan also notes the treacherousness of involving ourselves in Middle Eastern conflicts we have no national interest in, like the Sunni-Shiite split that was so great a factor in the Iraq invasion turning into such a catastrophe.  I worry that even at this late date, not enough Americans are aware that the Muslim world is hardly monolithic, and that our siding with one sect over another entwines us in dynamics that are the very definition of none of our business.

Sullivan also elaborates on the connection between our ongoing occupations in the Middle East and the rise of Trump, pointing out that both Obama and Trump ran, and won (though, with Trump, with all the usual asterisks about his victory), on platforms that called for extricating the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan.  He suggests that Trump supporters are opposed to a government that defies the will of the people, and that the wars in the Middle East, in the face of the public’s growing lack of support, helped fuel a backlash in favor of someone who seemed not so beholden to establishment opinion.

But Sullivan’s willingness to credit Trump for his withdrawal decisions, premised on the president carrying out a campaign promise in the face of adverse pressures, fails to persuade me, and seems more borne of Sullivan’s effort to demonstrate how insane establishment opinion is: it’s so crazy that a crazy man was needed to turn things around!  Rather, we have plenty of evidence that Trump is acting due to pressures that Saudis and perhaps Putin have brought on him to make decisions conducive to their interests; in other words, that he is hardly acting out of a hard-headed assessment of the national interest, but in the interests of the only thing that counts — his own.

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Sullivan cites U.S. involvement in the Saudi-United Arab Emirates war against Yemen as another example of our country’s endless and pointless Middle Eastern interventions.  Indeed, the more you learn about what the Saudi coalition has been doing, and the ways the U.S. has backed it, the more horrified any decent American will surely become.  The Shiite Houthis overthrew Yemen’s president in 2014, and in 2015 a Saudi-led coalition began to make war on the Houthis, who are backed by Saudi Arabia’s enemy, Iran.  The Obama administration made a decision to support the Saudi war, including intelligence and logistics assistance.  Much of the Saudi effort was through an air war, which the U.S. aided via in-air refueling by U.S. Air Force aerial tankers, the provision of mechanics and technicians for the Saudi’s American-built planes, and sales of bombs and other munitions.

As this New York Times story details, such assistance has implicated the U.S. in a variety of atrocities and possible war crimes against the Yemeni people.  These horrors have come about in two ways.  First, more than 4,600 civilians have been killed directly by Saudi air strikes in the war.  This is apparently due in part to the Saudis’ wish to minimize pilot casualties by staying higher in altitude when launching attacks, which diminishes the accuracy of the attacks.  It’s also tied to faulty intelligence.  Overall, though, these mass civilian casualties appear to be linked to the Saudis simply not giving a fuck about the deaths of innocents.

This mass slaughter from the air should be enough to give any decent person pause, and to provoke questions as to the war’s morality and the U.S.’s culpability in such misdirected violence.  The U.S. not only has sold to the Saudis the weapons of war that make these horrors possible, but primes them before each sortie to make sure they can deliver their violence again, and again.  Our fellow citizens are being ordered to participate in this carnage.

What emerges from the tale is a staggering portrait of American decision-makers who have lost their ability to gauge how to defend and promote American interests in the world.  It turns out that the generals who backed selling some of the most advanced warcraft in the world to the Saudis thought they’d never actually use them, viewing the F-15’s as “expensive paperweights.”  The U.S. attempted to guide the Saudis in minimizing civilian casualties, efforts that the Saudi ignored; yet military leaders continued to provide support despite the Saudis’ refusal to abide by their recommendations, then dissembled to Congress about U.S. awareness of some of the mass casualty attacks. 

But the overall effects of the war on the Yemeni people are more terrible by orders of magnitude than the individual air attacks.  The war has led to a breakdown of the country’s economy, and Saudi strikes on its cities and infrastructure have led to malnutrition and the prospect of mass starvation that could kill literally millions of people.  Indeed, between its involvement in errant bombings and this humanitarian catastrophe, Pentagon officials have begun to worry that the U.S. may now be implicated in war crimes.  

The full reality and horror of the immoral U.S. perpetuation of this war seem to finally, sort of, be breaking through to a wider public and political consciousness.  Earlier this month, the Senate voted to end U.S. military assistance in the war,  but the House did not take up the bill.  It’s remarkable that it has taken so long for public awareness and official questioning to build to even this weak point of friction and resistance.  The situation is characterized by a near-pyschopathic official indifference to mass casualties so long as it’s foreigners doing the dying.  The vast amounts of money the Saudis pay U.S. defense contractors are also playing an outsized role, evidenced no more clearly than in Donald Trump’s gleeful accounting of the billions the Saudis are spending on American armaments.  And as with so much of foreign and defense policy, the situation is deemed too complicated for the simple minds of the public; meanwhile, experts have proved themselves incompetent judges of basic questions of good and evil. If there is a way out of this war on Yemen and our other foreign policy catastrophes, it will need to involve a lifting of the mystifications and suppressions that allow the public no clear say or picture of what the U.S. government does in our name.

The President's Recruitment of Service Members Into a War on Democrats is Another Red Line Crossed

It’s reassuring to see fairly widespread critical coverage of the president’s politicized interactions with the military during his trip to Iraq, but there’s nothing new or surprising in Donald Trump’s attempts to cloak himself in the iron mantle of a militarized nationalism.  As so many times before, something utterly predictable, and in fact, familiar, has happened, seeming to provoke astonishment when the more proper response might be a poise of grim confirmation vis-a-vis the man’s authoritarian tendencies.  Nestled darkly inside the spectacle of his actions and the outraged response is a sense that vital assumptions about American democracy are coming undone, or at least being severely challenged, and of an urgent need to revisit first principles lest they be replaced by insidious new ideas about the nature of our country.

The main issue is not that members of the military might have brought campaign paraphernalia to a meet and greet with the president, and that the president signed MAGA hats, although this is in fact highly problematic in and of itself.  The idea of members of the military endorsing a particular political candidate cannot be reconciled with either the idea of a non-partisan military or the cornerstone idea of civilian control over the armed forces.  Though the rank and file who engaged in this behavior deserve some form of reprimand, the harsher punishment by far should be levied against their superiors, who never should have allowed such activities.

Yet it is a president and his team who encouraged and indulged such a display who carry the greatest culpability, and who merit the strongest condemnation.  Trump abetted the erosion of keeping the military in its proper place in order to boost his own standing, effectively leveraging his position as commander-in-chief to orchestrate a performance of adulation by those he commands.  However, he went a dangerous step farther by using the event to accuse the opposition political party not only of being feckless, but of being outright anti-American.  When he told the service members that “You’re fighting for borders in other countries, and they don’t want to fight, the Democrats, for the border of our country,” he effectively recruited his military audience into the cause of attacking his political rivals.  Moreover, his lies to the assembled service members that they hadn’t received a pay raise in ten years was an obvious attempt to incite anger against the Obama administration and Democrats more generally, and adds to the obscenity of his behavior.

The president’s subsequent attempts to turn the criticism into an attack on the military — he tweeted that “CNN & others within the Fake News Universe were going wild about my signing MAGA hats for our military in Iraq and Germany” — would have the public ignore the overall context and scope of his anti-democratic efforts to use military support for his personal ends.  Having engaged in activity antithetical to the norms of American democracy, he has tried to turn the conversation to a false narrative about the media hating the military.  

Trump’s behavior is that of a generalissimo in a banana republic. This is not a coincidence, because like other leaders of authoritarian tendency, once you have sloughed off a commitment to democracy and the archipelago of decency, mutual respect, and collective endeavor that it involves, all that is left is a worship of power and violence, and the aggrandizement of the self. Our president is such a man; to not see this is to be either a dupe or a co-conspirator.

Yet Trump can dare to do what he has done because the United States has long been drifting into an unhealthy and unexamined relationship with its armed forces, both in terms of the political system’s and the public’s attitudes towards the military and the missions it has been given.  Since 2001, the U.S. has put war-making at the center of its foreign policy, launching invasions of an unconquerable country, in the case of Afghanistan, and a country innocent of the crimes of 9/11, in the case of Iraq, and eventually expanding military operations to dozens of countries.  And through the last 17 years, most of the public has been satisfied to outsource the sacrifice required to a tiny subset of the population.  As service members’ sacrifice has come to seem more and more pointless in some ways — witness the undeniable disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq — and yet more and more commendable in others — there have been no more 9/11’s, and isn’t that what our leaders promised would be the result of launching wars in the Middle East? — Americans have arrived at an attitude of fetishization of the armed forces.  Polls show that the military is one of the most respected, if not the most respected, institution in the United States, and the mere suggestion that not every last American service member is an outright hero earned NBC host Chris Hayes a public shellacking (even though it is obvious to the non-befuddled that a Marine who slogged his way through Fallujah and was wounded along the way is a hero, whereas a paper-pushing general playing politics in the Pentagon is not).  In a grotesque turn of events, you could count yourself as a supporter of the military not because you engaged in serious debate and prolonged consideration of why and where Americans were dying and whether it was worth it, but because you brooked no criticism of the service members and engaged in blissful ignorance of the whereabouts of American troops as your just reward.

The idea, then, that service members are not only heroes, but also simultaneously fragile victims, is never far below the surface, as the public at large has not been able to fully suppress the awareness that it has chosen not to examine too closely the sacrifices of their fellow Americans, and is ever plagued with an unexamined combination of guilt and doubt.  Not surprisingly, Donald Trump picked up on this strain of victimhood, when he suggested that he could never turn down service members who asked him to sign their MAGA hats.  The notion that warriors would somehow be bereft or heartbroken by the lack of an autograph not only lays bare once again the president’s fundamental narcissism, but this generalized double sense of soldiers as both superhuman and super fragile.  

Trump understands our unhealthy fetishization of the armed forces, and is attempting to use it to burnish his own lagging credibility.  It may not work with most Americans, but the largest danger is that it resonates with his base, for whom Trump has further normalized the idea that the military should be considered a legitimate conservative bastion that might support a good Republican president like Donald Trump when the political establishment turns on him.  It is naive to think that Donald Trump is currying military votes; rather, he is toying with the idea that his legitimacy may not rest on the support of a majority, or winning an election, but on the support of the truest Americans of all, the men and women of the armed forces.

It is a final bit of sickening bullshit that this episode occurred at a base in Germany, a country in which U.S. troops have been stationed ever since kicking the shit out of a regime that is the poster child for the perils of militaristic Fuhrer worship.  

More Than Trump is the Problem with U.S. Foreign Policy

President Trump’s decision last week to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, and half the U.S. force currently in Afghanistan, was generally covered as a sign of mounting chaos in his administration: a president defying the counsel of his advisors, the disregard hammered home by the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.  The particulars of Mattis’ resignation letter added punch to his decision, laying out the ways in which he believes Donald Trump’s approach to defense and foreign policy departs from the mainstream beliefs advocated by the defense secretary.

The president’s decision to act precipitously on both fronts appears to carry real downsides for the United States.  In Syria, it exposes the Kurdish fighters the U.S. has been backing to attacks by the Turks, who view them as terrorists.  And in Afghanistan, the abrupt action seems to have undermined efforts to broker a peace with the Taliban.  But much of the backlash to Trump’s actions, across the political spectrum and in opinion writing, has not only pointed to these specific harms, but has assumed that the president is acting in contravention of mainstream U.S. foreign policy.  As suspect and ill-considered as Trump’s actions might be, and as disturbing is the possibility that he might have made them due to pressure from Vladimir Putin, these bipartisan assumptions are just as crazy.

How many Americans were aware that we have thousands of troops in Syria?  Or that we still have 14,000 troops in Afghanistan?  How is it that, if the U.S. withdraws from Syria, a NATO ally - Turkey - can be counted on to kill U.S. allies?  How is it possible that we have occupied part of yet another country in the Middle East without a declaration of war?  How is it that we’re still in Afghanistan, 17 years after 9/11, with the Taliban gaining strength in that country?  Is it actually within any rational national interest to engage in perpetual warfare against ever-shifting and seemingly indestructible enemies in Middle Eastern countries already long-ravaged by violence and destruction? What, exactly, are the end goals, and are our policies actually achieving them?

But the kerfluffle around Trump’s moves on Syria and Afghanistan reveals a particular tragedy of our Trumpian moment: this man is so awful in and of himself that it is preventing us from re-examining the bad assumptions and self-defeating policies that have arguably contributed to his rise in the first place.  This must be counted as one of the costs of this presidency: that we are distracted from discussions more fundamental than the horrors of this particular man.  Instead, we now witness the obscene spectacle of a broad consensus that we had better just keep doing whatever we’ve been doing in Afghanistan and Syria, because Trump’s policy is even worse.  Completely forestalled is any examination of whether what we’re doing in those counties makes any goddamned sense in the first place.

Much attention has been paid to Mattis’ references to a U.S. foreign policy based on alliances and partnerships, and how he has effectively called out Trump for abandoning this bedrock position of the U.S.  But the idea of the U.S. placing itself at the center of systems of alliances meant to preserve world peace and U.S. security, which has been the case since the end of World War II, is  hardly the whole story.  Since 9/11, something fundamental has changed in U.S. foreign policy, as the U.S. has engaged in a series of wars and generalized violence across the Middle East that rests in dangerous contradiction with the idea that this country is all about alliances that preserve the peace.  What I see in the coverage of Trump’s recent Syria/Afghanistan moves is a general impulse to conflate these two ideas: that in withdrawing from those countries, Trump is undermining our alliances and security.  But being involved in active wars, and deciding whether to continue or end involvement in them, is an entirely different question from whether it’s in the national interest to have allies and security arrangements across the world.

GOP's Banana Republic Moves in the Midwest Are a Warning Sign to the Rest of Us

I’ve had the Midwest on my mind lately, on account of the post-election political fights afoot in Michigan and Wisconsin.  What’s happening there is riveting, but it’s a fair enough question to ask why non-residents should care.  After all, isn’t there that old saying, what happens in Lansing, stays in Lansing?

Well, actually, there is no such saying, and I will take that as an opening to argue that what is happening in Lansing and Madison is in fact well worth paying attention to, whether you live in Dubuque, Denver, or the Dalles (shout out to Oregon!).  In both Michigan and Wisconsin, Democratic candidates won the governorship — a particularly welcome outcome in the latter state, as it entailed the defeat of the execrable Scott Walker.  The response of the GOP-controlled legislatures in both states, however, in conjunction with their outgoing Republican governors, has been to advocate bills that limit the new governors’ power (now passed in Wisconsin, though still pending in Michigan).  Additionally, in Michigan, the governor has just signed a law that defies voter initiatives on minimum wage increases and paid sick leave. 

In isolation, changing the rules when a candidate from the opposing party wins the governorship would be unacceptably anti-democratic.  But the parlous effects go far beyond the basic affront of negating the will of the voters in a single election cycle, which would be bad enough as an instance of what the more pollyanish among us might refer to as “bad loser syndrome.”  Rather, as Zack Beauchamp argues at Vox, it amounts to a rejection of the premise of democracy itself as the way that we settle political conflict: when one side wins, the other side allows it to rule.  As Beauchamp describes it,

The post-election power grabs amount to Republicans declaring that they no longer accept that fundamental bargain. They do not believe it’s legitimate when they lose, or that they are obligated to hand over power to Democrats because that’s what’s required in a fair system. Political power, to the state legislators in question, matters more than the core bargain of democracy.

Beauchamp’s summary resonates not simply because it accurately describes what has just happened in Michigan and Wisconsin, but because the acts he describes come after a great number of similar moves by the GOP both in those states and elsewhere.  After all, Republican restrictions on a Democratic governor’s power strongly echo similar maneuvers two years ago in North Carolina.  More than this, these moves are happening after the GOP had already gerrymandered the living bejesus out of both states, in an attempt to attain a permanent lock.  The 2018 election results tell the sordid tale: in Michigan, Republicans retained the State House with a 58 to 52 majority, even though voters overall were in favor of Democratic candidates by 52% to 48%.  In Wisconsin, the effects of gerrymandering were even more egregious - there, the GOP holds the State Assembly by a 63 to 36 margin, even though voters preferred Democrats 54% to 44%.

It’s necessary, then, to see what is happening in these states in context: as the escalation of a move against democracy that began to take clear shape in the re-districting implemented in both states, and indeed in many GOP-controlled states, following the 2010 census.  Just as Beauchamp rightly zeroes in on the belief by GOP legislators in those states that political power matters more than the handover of government to the winners of an election, Jamelle Bouie makes a complementary point: that GOP legislators simply don’t see Democratic voters as legitimate.  Citing the remarkable statement by Wisconsin’s state Assembly speaker that “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority—we would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature,” Bouie concludes:

The idea that you could remove the state’s major population centers and still have an acceptably democratic result is a reasoning that gets to the heart of the matter. It’s not just that Democrats are poised to undo gains made under Walker’s administration, but that Democrats themselves are illegitimate because of who they represent. [Speaker] Vos isn’t saying that Republicans should do better in Madison and Milwaukee, he’s saying that the state’s major cities shouldn’t count. And if they do count, says Fitzgerald, they don’t count the same way [. . .] They are the wrong voters, and the Democrats they elect have no right to roll back a Republican administration backed by the right ones.

This observation is shocking, but I think it is also spot on, and helps get to the root of how we’ve arrived at this point, where one of our two major political parties has accelerated its embrace of an anti-democratic politics.  Racism is key to this issue of legitimacy — it is not too far of a stretch to say that there is a mindset held by some in the GOP that black voters are not real Americans, exhibit A being the preposterous birther campaign against Barack Obama.  And there is a way that this racism slops over to white Americans as well; as Bouie puts it, some Republicans view certain white voters as enablers of what they perceive to be an unwelcome defense of African-Americans, which in turn serves to undercut the political legitimacy of those white voters as well.

The latest ramp-up of the GOP’s assault on democracy in Michigan and Wisconsin deserves national attention because it represents the leading edge of the GOP’s anti-democratic animus.  It was not enough to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering to secure a majority; now that Democrats have won elections for statewide governorships that can’t be gerrymandered, the Republican response is to undercut the gubernatorial power.

But the need for national attention doesn’t end there: because, as David Leonhardt describes, the Republican effort in Wisconsin is being abetted by major corporations like Walgreens who back Republicans even as the party attempts to stifle democratic competition.  Walgreens has taken to exclusively backing the GOP in Wisconsin, apparently because the GOP has pushed through tax breaks for that company and others that, incidentally, have cost municipalities millions of dollars, and have led to rising taxes on Wisconsin in order to compensate for the resulting budget shortfalls.  But in doing so, Walgreens is also helping bankroll a movement to undercut democracy in an American state; the company is essentially giving its support to anti-democratic measures as the way to ensure a GOP majority that keeps tax advantages flowing to the company.  This is not business as usual; this is an unsettling and un-American fusion of corporate power with right-wing politics in the name of stymying democracy.

To recognize the role of corporate backers in funding state-level gerrymandering and the hobbling of Democratic governors is to recognize the scale of the threat our country faces, and to be in a better position to fashion remedies, whether it be outrage that drives voters to the polls and into activism, or efforts to boycott companies that have crossed the line into supporting backers of a one-party state.

It provides some grounds for optimism that Democratic activists in Michigan and Wisconsin appear fired up in opposition to these latest moves to deny Democrats the ability to exercise power.  One perspective might hold that the GOP has backed itself into a disreputable corner with its maneuvers to hobble democracy, and can no longer rely on voters not paying attention to traditionally abstruse issues like gerrymandering and voter suppression.  As I’ve written before, the Democrats have no choice but to embrace the mantle of democracy, both as a matter of basic morality and as a strategic move to make the GOP pay as high a price as possible for its antagonism to our democratic project.  Both as a disturbing example of where the GOP would take the country, and for the sake of supporting voters in those states, it seems to the Democrats’ advantage to nationalize what’s happening in the two states.

Focusing on the state-level machinations of anti-democratic forces is also crucial because it makes more concrete issues of democracy and voter rights that otherwise might feel abstract and abstruse.  In some ways, it is even more of an affront that a political sphere that should be even more within the control of voters, where their activism and votes should have the most impact, is where the GOP has decided it can really kick the shit out of majority rule.  For my own part, I know how viscerally I would react if the Oregon legislature were gerrymandered so that Democrats couldn’t win a majority of seats, not matter how much of the popular vote they won.  That would feel personal, in a way that hearing of the travails of Michigan and Wisconsin voters does not.  At the same time, I think it’s important that we do collectively grasp what’s happening to the citizens of Michigan and Wisconsin, both as a matter of democratic solidarity and because they could easily be us.

A Clear, Concise Story About the President's Wrongdoing is Necessary, and Within Reach

Adam Davidson at The New Yorker ends his most recent reflections on the state of the Russia investigation with an appraisal that cuts through the sprawl and still-redacted spaces of the whole sordid story.  Even if we were to learn still more than what we do now about Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, he says,

[W]e are already in an unbearable condition.  The President of the United States knowingly and eagerly participated in a scheme with a hostile foreign leader who he knew was seeking to influence the Presidential election. Trump sought to profit politically and financially, many of his closest subordinates executed this effort, and he then was aware of and, it seems likely, encouraged an illegal effort to hide these facts. His reckless, unpatriotic actions have left him compromised by at least one but likely many foreign powers and have left his election open to reasonable questions about its legitimacy. And, every day, he sets policies and makes decisions that have an impact on the lives of all Americans and the fortunes of the very autocrats who hold sway over him. It cannot stand.

Part of what’s striking here is that Davidson is limiting himself only to the known information about Trump’s efforts to build the Moscow tower, including revelations in Friday’s filings against Michael Cohen that they were more extensive and went on longer than previously known.  Equally striking is how concisely and plainly he sets forth a complicated set of circumstances into plain and morally urgent English that sets our political crisis in bright relief.  Trump’s efforts to hide the truth of what he did were not simply attempts to deceive a public that was deciding whether to elect him president, but also made him subject to coercion by other countries who were aware of his actions.  I think Davidson’s conclusion is irrefutable, which leads us to this question: Why aren’t Democrats making the case that this well-respected New Yorker writer already is?  What on earth is stopping them from making a concerted effort to accurately and effectively communicate the stakes of the Russia investigation to the American people?

Davidson isn’t the only one who’s made this point, but his clarity is hard to beat.  The inexorable conclusion is that talk of impeachment and further investigations by the incoming Democratic majority are in important ways simply efforts to avoid the more fundamental crisis staring us in the face, a crisis that hardly consists of this one thread of the Moscow Trump Tower but includes the president’s payoff of women in order to sway the 2016 presidential election, his campaign’s clear and documented willingness to accept assistance from the Russian government and not notify the FBI of such efforts, and the mounting evidence that there was coordination between Trump’s campaign and the Russians. 

Escalating the situation still further is the fact that the president’s own party has defended the president tooth and nail through the present — even when this meant hampering examination of the established Russian effort to interfere in the election, separate and apart from whether there was collusion with the Trump campaign.  That is, the GOP has made itself party to the president’s own unacceptable behavior, which means that they have an interest in continuing to protect him even in face of still more damning revelations to come.

The Washington Post’s weekend survey of how the GOP is taking the recent bad news on the Cohen front does not provide much ground for optimism.  Those Republicans interviewed seem to break into two camps: those who are in denial of the extremity of the president’s peril, and those who see the way forward in purely political terms.  One Trump-supporting Republic senator does draw the line at evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and the Russians, at which point “then they’ve lost me.”  But what, for the GOP, would constitute evidence, if even the results of an FBI investigation are dismissed by the president as the fictions of the “deep state”?

This gets to another key point that opponents of the president need to be making in a coordinated fashion.  All the talk of process and the president staffing up and hunkering down distracts from the horrific reality at the base of it all —the president appears to have secured his election by illegitimate means, both by breaking campaign finance laws (in the case of his payoffs to women he’d slept with) and (far more critically) by the assistance he accepted and cultivated from the Russian government.  That is, we’re not talking about whether the president broke a random law or two — we’re talking about a basic illegitimacy, compounded by the danger he’s put the U.S. in by placing himself under the influence of foreign governments aware of his unconscionable acts.

The irony couldn’t be greater: while Trump’s white nationalist staffers bleat on about how the United States isn’t really a sovereign nation if it can’t secure its borders against refugees, the entirety of the GOP has turned a blind eye to evidence that a foreign government helped pick the U.S. president, and now exercises malign influence on his decision-making: a lot of good that strong borders do, when you hand the White House keys to the authoritarians in the Kremlin!

Though the various threads and sheer volume of information are overwhelming, it is quite possible to construct and communicate a clear narrative of what Trump did wrong, what the GOP has done wrong in defending him, and that we face the question of whether Americans are to be citizens of a democracy or the dupes of a con man.  As I’ve said before, this is not an either/or in terms of the Democrats having a positive agenda for America; in fact, it’s entirely the opposite.  We will never have world-class education for all, and health care for all, and economic security for all, and a healthy climate for all, if our president and the GOP put personal and party interest over country.  There is no value that Republicans purport to defend that is not made into a sick joke by their defense of a president beholden to a foreign power, and so absurdly stuck on the notion of making money that he’s happy to sell his own country down the river.

This isn’t any sort of hyper-patriotism I’m arguing for; it’s more of a baseline but nonnegotiable position that our country is nothing without fair elections, and that the Democrats are nothing without making defense of democracy, including elections, central to their identity as a party.  The GOP stands in the way of the future Americans need and deserve.  Every day that they take the side of Trump and Russia over the United States is another day that climate change becomes harder to stop; is another day that we’re getting no closer to universal health care; is another day that we’re not talking about real reforms that could help people left behind by the 21st century economy.

Let’s not forget, too, that we’ve been frozen into a red-blue mindset for so long that too many people are convinced that this is the permanent state of things, rather than the product of limited political imagination.  That Washington Post story I cited notes that “The White House is adopting what one official termed a “shrugged shoulders” strategy for the Mueller findings, calculating that most GOP base voters will believe whatever the president tells them to believe.”  This is truly amazing.  The GOP’s voter-outreach strategy is now one of pure propaganda, relying on the idea that Republicans can no longer think for themselves.  But surely most Republicans would be enraged to learn they’ve been duped by the president.  What are the Democrats doing to reach those voters, or to channel their anger to good should matters reach a breaking point and they abandon the president en masse?

H.W. and Me: Epilogue

As a bookend to last week’s cathartic discussion of George H. W. Bush’s role in my personal political development and the unlikely debt I owe him, I want to flag two informative takes on his presidency.  Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine makes a perverse but persuasive case that, despite current praise from his co-partisans, Republicans learned all the wrong lessons from his administration.  They’ve doubled down on the racism and intolerant nationalism that the past week’s encomiums downplayed, while rejecting his willingness to compromise and act in a bipartisan fashion.  Meanwhile, Jeet Heer at New Republic has a concise rundown of the ways H.W.’s record has been whitewashed in recent days, partly out of a wish to highlight his differences from the current president, and revealing an elite longing for when the nation was ruled by. . . other elites.

Indeed, the idea that H.W. embodied the wealthy, Ivy League-educated upper strata taking their rightful place at the top of government may, in retrospect, may have been the single-most important early lesson I drew from the man.  That high office in a democracy is something that you should inherit because of your luck of birth, connections, and better sense of the common good struck me as bullshit back then, and there was perhaps no better person than H.W. to impart the lesson.  Beneath his noblesse oblige lay insecurity, intellectual and moral weakness (as demonstrated by the way he shifted from a pro-choice, anti-supply sider to Ronald Reagan’s anointed heir), and a nastiness that made itself known when his assumptions about the hierarchical nature of America were called into question.  He helped me learn early on to see through the pretensions of those who claim privilege in America, for which I feel a reluctant gratitude even today.

The Hot Screen Is Not Feeling So Hot About Recent Facebook Revelations

Last month’s New York Times’ exposé about Facebook’s failures around Russian interference in the 2016 election has been weighing heavily on my ongoing debate as to whether to continue posting The Hot Screen to the social network.  I’ve never been comfortable using Facebook to get my writing out — I despise its privacy-invading mission of reducing its users to sets of data points that it can exploit and profit from — and have always viewed my arrangement as a matter of expedience.

To read about Facebook’s failure to act in a credible manner against attempts to influence a U.S. election, putting profit over patriotism and greed over public responsibility, is utterly nauseating and unsettling.  The company is revealed to be a fraud — not in terms of its ability to make money, but in its portrayal of itself as a benign friend of millions of people who use it to connect and communicate.  Facebook sought to discredit those it saw as enemies by unethical and underhanded means, and preferred that foreign spies dupe Americans to taking action that might harm its bottom line.

This is not the only time that management has failed to apply the level of ethical thought required by the powerful and unprecedented nature of this technology.  Mark Zuckerberg may be a genius, but he’s proved himself a moral featherweight, unwilling or unable to grapple with the darker consequences of his invention.  I can safely say that if I had created an application that was used to facilitate genocide, I would probably never sleep again, but that’s just me.

I sense that there are a lot of people with increasing second thoughts about being on Facebook, and I do wonder if we are soon to see a mass exodus from the platform.  There are such amazing benefits to be able to connect with other people online, but I think we are at a point where we really need to think through the downsides and the ways that Facebook in particular has been hijacked by the enemies of a free and open society.

I have told myself that there is value in being a source of reliable information on a platform undermined by propaganda, instant gratification, and the cultivation of surface over depth.  The phrase “Occupy Facebook” sometimes comes to mind, but I have to admit that I don’t really know what that would mean beyond sounding cool.  At any rate, I would be sorry to lose any readers by signing off from this site, but at the same time, the miracle of the internet means that The Hot Screen would still be as accessible as always, a-hover in the ether, for those who care to bookmark the page.  And there are obviously other ways for me to get the word out: I am thinking of a weekly or monthly newsletter, and maybe engaging in the world of Twitter.

Believe me, I feel somewhat silly and hesitant to share these thoughts.  The Hot Screen is a speck of sand in the billions-strong world of Facebook, and my decision here is not going to make a dime’s worth of difference.  Millions of people had already rendered judgment on Facebook long before that New York Times piece came out, and turned their backs on its insistently cheery, claustrophobic electronic clime. 

Yet the only way big corporations will act as good public actors is if we force them to, at both and individual and collective level.  Their foundations in the quest for profit and the temptations of greed will always be ground to distrust their motives and their actions; somewhat ironically, the higher their claims to benefit the public, the higher the scrutiny and skepticism that are called for.  You can dismiss this attitude as anti-business or anti-capitalist all you want, but a more clear-eyed perspective see it as pro-democracy and pro-citizen, and based on a realistic view of human nature rather than an ingenuous ideology of the glories of the marketplace.

H.W. and Me

By coincidence, I’ve been thinking about George Herbert Walker Bush over the past couple of days, on account of being partway through Steve Kornacki’s The Red and the Blue, a history of 1990’s politics, and specifically in the midst of his account of the 1988 and 1992 elections.  Until I learned of his death last night, my thoughts were wholly divorced from the H.W. of our time, a man whose wife recently passed and who himself was reported to be in declining health.  Instead, I had only been considering Bush at the height and then sudden nadir of his power; a man who had achieved the highest presidential approval ratings in U.S. history in the wake of the Gulf War, only to find himself soundly rejected in a national election that subjected him to the one-two punch of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.  What I had been reading in Kornacki’s book provoked familiar feelings, of contempt for the man and pleasure at his comeuppance.  (One of my favorite political photos of all time is of H.W. and James Baker III in the latter days of the 1992 campaign, the strain and understanding of their coming defeat clear on their faces (though the joke would ultimately be on me, as Baker would subsequently head up George W. Bush’s legal efforts in the 2000 Florida recount)).

It was under the Reagan presidency that I began to be aware of politics, but it was with the election and presidency of H.W. that I became more fully conscious, beginning with following the 1988 election closely, being a (useless) elector for Michael Dukakis under a high school social studies project, and then running through the next four years of his dramatically arcing presidency.  H.W. was my first intimate Republican villain, partially against whom I began a lifelong process of developing my own political knowledge and framework.  In many ways, he was a great teacher; for instance, as a sometimes comic example of the unsuccessful image-making politicians engage in, as he tried to overcome the so-called “wimp factor” by cultivating an image of Hollywood toughness that simply did not match his character.  Yet this effort went beyond image to substance; as has already been pointed out countless times today through the miracle of Twitter, this rebranding effort led his campaign to issue the infamously racist Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis, a deeply flawed candidate who surely would have been defeated without it.

There is a strong case to be made, one that I largely agree with, that our nation is not well-served by greeting the death of major politicians with a white-washing of their records; to honor the dead by dishonoring history is not an exchange I’m comfortable with (for an effective and no-punches-pulled argument for this perspective, I recommend this thread by Amanda Marcotte on the afore-mentioned Twitter machine).  I am as self-righteous as the next guy, and have, though with mixed feelings, felt no small satisfaction in reading this morning’s accounts of H.W.‘s various political sins.

Yet this pressing need for speaking the truth must be balanced against acknowledgment of our common mortality, and of the fact that even people with whom we vehemently disagree leave behind loved ones and friends who are deeply affected by their passing.  This alone would call for some measure of respect and compassion in the healthy critiques of the deceased’s record; at a minimum, it seems inhumane to offer such critiques without pairing them with an acknowledgment of the inevitable sorrows of the man’s passing.

But beyond this, a particular obligation comes with how we mark the passing of a politician in a democracy.  Whatever his political failures, George H.W. Bush was elected president by the American people, and deserves some measure of respect for this.  And even more crucially to the argument I am trying to make here, he was then removed from office by the American people.  That is, in answer to those of us who believe in fighting for an accurate view of history in the face of efforts to lionize his accomplishments, the inescapable reality is that voters long ago already rendered a judgment on the man’s capacity to be president — and it was not a pretty judgment.  In a three-way race, he won only 37% of the vote; quite a thumping, as his son might say.  

Beyond this, the race subjected H.W. to various humiliations (including the mis-told story that he did not realize that grocery stores had bar code scanners (he had simply observed that he had not seen a new handheld scanner before) - a fable that captured his patrician distance from ordinary Americans, but that also told an untrue story of a completely out-of-touch and feeble-minded dolt who through the course of his presidency descended to the mental level of his absurd vice president, Dan Quayle), up to and including the final humiliation of losing an election after being the most popular president in the history of polling only a year or so before.  This is to say nothing of H.W.’s earlier flip-flopping on his “read my lips: no new taxes pledge,” which is still used as the default example of presidency-defining reversals of policy.

You would have to be a hard soul indeed not be moved, at least on the grounds of nostalgia for a seemingly simpler time, by the handwritten welcome note he left behind for Bill Clinton at the White House.  But there are other reasons to feel something about that note.  H.W. wrote it at a time when he was doubtless feeling anger at the president-elect and deep sorrow over his own defeat; you don’t have to agree with his politics to understand that he likely had real fears about the fate of the nation at that moment.  Sure, he may have been a saint who simply transcended such feelings; far likelier, he was a man who acted against some of his own most profound inclinations and did the right thing in a very difficult moment.

What I am getting at is that we gain nothing by closing ourselves off to the humanity of our political opponents, no matter how nasty we judge their politics, because we begin to close ourselves off from the possibility of persuasion and redemption that are at the heart of a democratic nation.  Beyond this, and against the necessity of pushing back against propaganda and the donning of rose-colored glasses about a politician’s record, we need to bear in mind that the political movement in our country dedicated to democracy, racial equality, economic fairness, and tolerance is powerful, and has the force of history and justice on its side.  Sometimes it is enough to defeat your opponents; other times it is necessary to kick them around a little when they’re down; but being in the right also means that there is rarely a need to engage in scorched earth put-downs 24 hours within their deaths, even of politicians whose actions had lasting and damaging consequences, as is surely the case with H.W.  Viciousness betrays a lack of faith not simply in the rightness of your cause, but in its power and persuasiveness.  Those who see the wealthy as the best Americans, who see minorities as not real Americans, and who see democracy as a game to rig and subvert are swimming against a tide more powerful than they can know.

Questions of how to balance political condemnation and righteousness with reconciliation will present themselves to us in force over the next couple of years.  An administration that has subordinated the national interest to private gain will have much to answer for, as will a Republican Party that has enabled obscene offenses against American security and democracy.  I recently read a critique of the term “the resistance,” and it has continued to resonate with me; the author’s point was that Americans who believe in the rule of law are hardly the resistance, but the true possessors and inheritors of our country’s highest traditions.  We are far more powerful that we think, and it does not help to tell ourselves story about the boundless evil of the other side; it makes them seem more powerful than they are, and ourselves, weaker.  We are certainly strong enough to strike the right balance between truth-telling and magnanimity, particularly in the face of a former president’s death. Many of George H.W. Bush’s actions surely merit our condemnation and criticism, but this doesn’t mean he also doesn’t deserve our compassion, respect for the good things he accomplished, and, if not now then eventually, forgiveness for the bad.

Corporate Shakedowns of Cities and States Attack Our Bonds of Citizenship

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a concise but thorough review of the public shakedown constituted by Amazon’s just-concluded “search” for a second headquarters location, which resulted in the on-line goliath picking Long Island City in Queens and Crystal City in northern Virginia.  The troubling dynamic involves Amazon settling on two locations — Washington, D.C. and New York City — that were glaringly top contenders at the start of its search, but with Amazon extracting billions of dollars of tax benefits from the two winners through its pretense of a competition.  But Thompson moves on to a larger point: that this practice of pitting localities against each other is both widespread and economically dubious. 

The numbers are huge; according to Thompson, “American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states” every year. These expenditures take money away from other government services, like schools and police.  Yet defenders argue that companies have a right to try to make money, and that states have a right to try to lure business in; and so is this behavior really a problem, or just an inevitable cost of the modern economy?

Thompson cites three enormous and damning refutations of this common practice.  First, companies often have already decided where they’re going to expand, and simply use the charade of looking to shake down their target location for money.  Second, companies don’t always follow through with their commitments.  But his third point is the most damning - even under the best circumstances, “it’s still ludicrous for Americans to collectively pay tens of billions of dollars for huge corporations to relocate within the United States.”

Another way I’ve been thinking about looking at this decisive third point: every year, American taxpayers are collectively throwing away $90 billion dollars that could otherwise have been spent on actually growing the economy.  This is staggering, yet it also seems so obviously wasteful.  So why isn’t this raising even more red flags (as Thompson damningly points out, the consensus behind this practice is bipartisan)?  The two broad reasons he cites — that companies have a right to make money, and that states have a right to lure in business to benefit their communities — seem correct, yet the logic and implications are worth exploring.

For corporations to be in a position to pit cities and states against each other speaks to the imbalance of private and public power in our time.  I’m struck by how natural this is to so many people, when the ultimate reality of an economy is that it should serve the citizenry, and not the other way around.  In this, there is an almost feudal element in such arranged competitions, our political groupings fighting it out for the pleasure of corporate overlords who win no matter what city or state ends up the victor.

This gets us to a fundamental upending of the free market capitalism that’s held to be at the heart of the economy, and which common wisdom would say is the most efficient system for producing economic wealth.  Rather than corporations engaging in competition that benefits the consumer, it’s our political system that is made to compete, against itself, for the benefit of corporations.  Corporations, it seems, are the new consumers, and consumers, the new corporations.  Alongside this, it becomes glaringly obvious the degree to which economic ideas have supplanted political ones in the realm of politics, and to which not only cities and states, but individual Americans, have been encouraged to see their fellows as opponents and competitors, rather than as fellow citizens and allies.

The alternative to cities and states competing for business, after all, is cooperation.  The possible solutions to this current pitting of all against all cited by Thompson lie in such a direction: federal laws against the practice, tax policies that nullify certain incentive structures, fiscal punishment of cities and states that steal jobs from other localities, and use of the presidential bully pulpit to call out corporations that set Americans against each other.  The fourth is obviously not going to happen under the current president, and Thompson doesn’t seem optimistic about the first three.

Yet this is an issue that will need to be addressed if we are to restore economic fairness in this country.  This is not just because forcing Americans to compete for jobs in such a wasteful way in inherently unjust, but also because of how it embodies the darkest developments of both our economic and political systems.  At a time when we need far more government intervention in the economy, whether it’s to break up monopolies, ensure all Americans can make a decent living, or transition our economy to a carbon-neutral future, state-sanctioned bribery of corporations constitutes a sort of anti-socialism or crony capitalism.  The urgency of a better way is amplified by how distorted economic outcomes have become, both in terms of inequality among individual citizens, and between those regions that benefit and those that fail to thrive in the current economy.

Here are some statistics that are essential to understanding our current predicament, whether it be the rise of Trumpism or why it’s so necessary to press the Democratic Party for real economic change.  First, as noted by Annie Lowrey in another piece on the Amazon headquarters search, “the wealthiest 20 percent of zip codes have generated more new businesses than the bottom 80 percent combined.”  Second, the economic power and growth of a small number of urban areas dwarfs that of the great majority of American regions: according to Lowrey, “[j]ust five metro regions, out of the nearly 400 across the country, produce more than a quarter of all economic output.”

These are staggering and upsetting numbers.  In light of this, the idea that already-successful areas of the country continue to lure even more business at the expense of other regions, in a way that ends up wasting money better invested in the American people, seems even more objectionable.  This also raises the possibility that there may be more support for an end to this useless economic arms race than most observers realize.

With Lethal Force Authorization Against Migrants, the President Embraces Violence As a Political Tool

President Trump’s decision to send troops to the border in response to a group of refugees making their way through Mexico was always part of an effort to foment hysteria among his base; insisting that military action is needed has helped him create out of whole cloth a narrative that the U.S. is about to be invaded by criminals and even terrorists.  Many have pointed out how these and other efforts to make the midterms about immigration have simply disappeared since, well, the midterms.  But the White House’s authorization this week for the military to use deadly force to defend border patrol agents suggests that presidential rage and a hard-line anti-immigrant stance may have combined into a very real national crisis that has now taken on a life of its own. 

Authorization of lethal force against migrants moves the series of inappropriate responses to those seeking a better life and shelter from harm out of the realm of black comedy, and into a more tragic sphere.  As so many times before, the president would have the most powerful nation in the history of the world quail before unarmed, impoverished refugees, many of them women and children, in the name of goosing his approval ratings.  But unlike before, the president is now apparently prepared to cross a line from hateful rhetoric to outright violence.  The Trump administration seems intent on committing murder in the name of repelling an imaginary invasion.

This is the opposite of defending America’s borders and sovereignty.  This is committing crimes in the name of illusionary political gain, by a man who has repeatedly proved himself unfit to hold the presidency.  In the name of defending our borders, he would kill our nation’s soul, re-defining us a country that preys on the powerless and has been convinced of its own victimhood.

One illogical notion follows another, all based on the premise that immigrants and refugees are an existential threat to the United States.  All manner of preposterous thinking flows from this premise, up to the notion that the military is needed to shoot immigrants rushing border posts.  Take this statement from a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, who tells us that, “we will not allow our front-line personnel to be in harm’s way.”  In other words, armed border patrol agents are actually incapable of defending themselves against these fantastic threats, and need the military to commit homicide in their defense.  By this logic, the president will next be calling in the Marines to defend the helpless National Guard, so formidable is the challenge from down south.

For Trump, the important thing is not to secure the border so much as to introduce violence into the American political discourse.  I think he has come to see his commander-in-chief role as something he can exploit to political advantage; he can order troops around, he can order them to kill, and he can use the troops as a sort of human shield, relying on Americans‘ widespread support of the American military to shield himself from horrific policy decisions.  What scares me is that the president and his closest advisors seem not to understand how easily the line between threat and actual violence can be crossed.  There is a bloodthirsty quality to this lethal force authorization.  It is one thing to make war against our actual enemies; it is another thing entirely to make war against those who don’t pose a threat.  It suggests a fundamental cowardice and unbalanced quality that we’ve seen many times before, and that we need to take seriously. 

How Do Democrats Go Big in a World of Necessary and Perilous Compromises?

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein each have articles out that address and widen some of the issues for Democrats that I mulled over in last week’s piece.  They dig down into the complicated dynamics of what confronting Donald Trump looks like now that the Democrats can pass legislation and conduct investigations in one house of Congress.  Neither states so explicitly, but both raise a central question of our political moment: what is the balance to be struck between stopping Trump and advancing a more progressive, affirmative vision for America?  It is not so simple as saying the first will accomplish the second — as Yglesias and Klein discuss, there are many ways in which vigorous pursuit of the first may backfire and undermine the second.  

First, Klein suggests a basic tension between, on the one hand, the Democrats’ desire and obligation to investigate the corrupt activities of Trump and his administration, and on the other, their interest in pushing forward legislation that improves the lives of Americans.  A basic cause of this attention is the way that Trump-related stories tend to dominate the mediasphere, which in the case for scandals might be fairly bad for Trump but also bad for Democrats in that it makes it easier to counter-attack them by arguing they only care about destroying the president.  Klein raises the possibility that this would be the case even if such an aggressive Democratic posture were matched by bold legislative proposals, with the media providing overwhelming coverage of the former at the expense of the latter.

Klein’s point isn’t that the Democrats are simply screwed, but that they have difficult choices to make and a need for discipline in the face of Trump’s ability to dominate the media and thrive off confrontation.  His suggestion for threading the needle is to take on Trump on the policy front, in a way that ends up driving the conversation and exploiting Trump’s temperamental weakness in thinking about policy details.  Yet dangers abound here as well; as MoveOn.org’s Ben Wikler tells Klein, Trump is an unreliable negotiating partner who may well reneg on any agreements reached, and force the Democrats into base-dispiriting compromises in the process.

Yglesias’ piece drills down to a particular piece of possible legislation — an infrastructure bill that might cost as much as $1 trillion — to highlight the conflict between stopping Trump and improving the country.  His premise is that a revived push for infrastructure contains great danger for Democrats, in that a successful bill would allow the president to claim a patina of bipartisanship and crow about boosting the economy straight through to election day 2020; the downside for Democrats would be compounded if the bill ended up pouring vast amounts of money into an environmentally-unsustainable and wasteful batch of projects.  Like Klein, he ends up arguing that the Democrats would benefit most from boldness; if they put forward a transformative bill, it would at least contrast their vision with the retro one of Trump and the GOP.  If Trump ended up supporting it, he’d get some credit, but the Democrats at least would have gotten something major passed that redounded to the party’s credit and long-term goals.

Yglesias and Klein make me think I was on the right track with my argument that the Democrats need to go big, even as their gaming out the legislative battles of the next two years make me wonder if I’ve under-estimated the dangers facing the party once we start grappling with what “going big” means at the nitty-gritty level of actual legislation, confronting a president with unparalleled ability to dominate the political conversation, and entertaining compromise at the price of handing Trump re-election-enhancing victories.

Ensuring Donald Trump is a one-term president is the highest priority in American politics, yet it really can’t be separated out from re-making the Democrats into a progressive majority and holding the GOP as a whole accountable for the authoritarian, white nationalist abyss into which we all find ourselves collectively peering.  At this point, we have seen what unified Republican rule means, and it has resulted in nothing that helps working Americans and a whole lot that hurts them; voters rendered a verdict on this by giving the Democrats their biggest electoral success in the House since the post-Watergate election.  Against chalking up meaningful victories that make Americans’ lives better, even at the cost of compromises that enhance the electoral prospects of an unfit president, must be weighed the larger goal of changing the overall terms of economic and cultural debate.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, one way forward for the Democrats is to make public and explicit their own efforts to figure out a way forward.  If the Democrats are to be the party of democracy, then they should embrace dissent and open dialogue.  And if and when they do compromise on legislation with the president, they must make the argument that such legislation is simply a downpayment on more far-reaching measures to be implemented once a Democratic president is elected.  The Democrats may not be able to unite on much, but it seems quite possible for them to hammer home the message that Trump and the GOP are simply getting in the way of improving the lives of all Americans.  The same is true for investigations of Trump administration corruption: the mission should be to hold the powerful accountable and ensure that no American is above the law, and the Democrats should be transparent about their goals and methods.

There is also no way forward without the Democrats bringing voting rights front and center, and perhaps no better means to set the terms of public debate over the next two years. Investigating GOP voter suppression efforts and proposing laws to ensure that voting is accessible to all Americans is both good politics and good for America. There are dozens of great ideas floating around for improving our elections, from making Election Day a public holiday to reinstating in the Voting Rights Act in states that still systematically suppress the votes of African-Americans. This is legislation that the Democrats would be fine not to compromise on, and could possibly balance out the possibility for compromise on matters less critical to the survival of American democracy. It would also paint the Trump and GOP further into a corner as opponents of one person, one vote. The midterm outcomes in Georgia and Florida have given national attention to what it looks like when the Republicans cheat their way into office; Stacy Abrams’ argument that Brian Kemp is the legal but not legitimate winner of the Georgia gubernatorial race is an example of the tough talk that combines the moral high ground, democratic accountability, and a road map to future pro-voter reforms.