Through the Looking Glass in Mount Vernon

Among the daily horrors and dangers of the Trump administration , a Politico report on the president’s “truly bizarre” (in the words of a tour guide) visit to Mount Vernon last year obviously provides some broad comic relief, and an opportunity to be staggered once again at the president’s narcissism.  Donald and Melania Trump, along with Emmanuel Macron and his wife, visited the first president’s Virginia estate, during which tour president Trump critiqued Washington’s failure to properly brand his estate by naming it after himself:

“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

As many, many people have pointed out by now, Washington was not a complete branding failure, as evidenced by the name of the nation’s capital and his often-crumpled, yet nearly ubiquitous $1 presence in our nations’ wallets, cash registers, and strip clubs.  But Trump’s belief that everything is about himself, and that this is the way that all other people should naturally operate, stands in grotesque contrast to the sensibility of both George Washington and arguably nearly all our preceding presidents.  Washington knew that how he comported himself as president would reverberate through the America political tradition he was helping to establish: and so he notably declined the trappings of a monarch, as well as a third term.  Those who followed him had a sense of being presidents among other presidents.  But not, apparently, Donald Trump, who does not care about what other presidents thought, struggled with, or did.

Trump may or may not be a stupid man, and he may or may not suffer from an undiagnosed mental affliction, but it is inescapably sad, even tragic, that he refuses to take responsibility for, to any degree, the most basic continuity with tradition that his predecessors have.  To lack the most basic respect for American history so that you wouldn’t simply fake interest in Washington’s life - beyond just getting excited when you learn how rich he is, as Trump apparently did during the Mount Vernon tour - is an affront to all Americans.  He may not give a shit - and he clearly doesn’t - but this is our history he’s disregarding, that he couldn’t care less about.  I felt something akin to this when I read early on about Trump’s apparent contempt for the actual White House.

But the most telling reverberant comment in the Politico article comes not from the president, but from an unnamed source “close to the White House,” who according to Politico indicated that Trump’s supporters don’t care if he isn’t into history, and that “if anything they enjoy the fact that the liberal snobs are upset” about his lack of knowledge.  This feels like a crude summation of the political earthquake we are all experiencing.  Conservatives, definitionally those who are interested in retaining some connection to what has come before, now see remembering our history as irrelevant, the realm of snooty liberals.  Liberals are those silly patriots who care about George Washington, tradition, freedom, equality, solidarity; real, conservative Americans know better, and care for nothing but money and power in the here and now.

Though, on further consideration, this may be a little too stark: because history is not entirely dismissed by Donald Trump, but strip-mined to suit present purposes.  George Washington is interesting to Trump because he had lots of money, and this becomes his use to Trump and his supporters in a grotesque syllogism: George Washington was rich; George Washington was president; therefore it is OK for Donald Trump to profit off the presidency, because obviously George Washington did, too (because he was president and was rich and the two are obviously connected).

At any rate, whether or not you voted for the man, we are all degraded by Donald Trump’s non-performance of basic presidential duties, and by his contempt for what common ground we have left to us.  It is the triumph of a fantasy vision of human life, reduced to wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.  It lessens us all.

Do Americans See the Problems Elizabeth Warren Aims to Solve?

This Washington Post analysis of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign captures some of the key possibilities and frustrations of her candidacy, both in terms of its substance but also in the all-important realm of media coverage.  The good news is that the article acknowledges that Warren, beyond the other Democratic candidates, articulates a comprehensive vision backed up by the policy ideas to get there.  The current economic and political order does not serve the interests of ordinary Americans, due to the out-sized power of corporations and electoral corruption; this needs to be fixed, and here are the ways to fix it.  The crux of the Post’s analysis is the question of whether America is ready to listen to her ideas, and it posits a basic tension between an inspiring vision and a more policy-oriented (i.e., Warren’s) campaign.

I think the answer to whether Warren’s candidacy will gather momentum or not lies in how deep a crisis Americans feel we’re in.  If fundamental change feels necessary, then Warren’s bid will be seen as having found the right moment.  This is a senator, after all, who has called for requiring that workers be represented on company boards of a certain size, taxing the wealthy in order to double the amount of children in day care, and building enough homes to pretty much end the housing shortage for the poor.  I wonder if enough people are yet seeing the links between the horror of the Trump presidency, and of a broader crisis of political economy that prepared the ground for his rise, not to mention the Democrats’ complicity in this devolution as they failed to offer a vigorous defense of the public good over the past decades of privatization, outsourcing, offshoring, and historic levels of inequality?  Whether enough do will settle the fate of her candidacy; whether Warren can help enough people see this will be a basic measure of whether she can win.

Democrats, and American more generally, should be deeply skeptical of any Democratic candidate who looks upon our current situation — an authoritarian president and anti-democratic GOP dedicated to elevating the fortunes (literal and otherwise) of the wealthy above all else — and thinks that deep, even radical changes are not called for. 

Why Have Democrats Shied Away From Hammering Home Donald Trump's Documented Betrayal of the United States?

If you’re feeling adrift and aswirl in the wake of the Mueller report (or, more to the point, what we know of it as summarized by Attorney General Bob Barr), wondering how all the documented ties between Trump and Russia could have yielded no affirmative decision on collusion or obstruction of justice, this piece by Mother Jones journalist David Corn may just be the journalistic Dramamine you didn’t know you needed.  Corn systematically runs through the publicly-known facts to establish the president’s betrayal of the United States, whether or not that betrayal involved prosecutable crimes committed by Trump.  Corn sets aside the fuzzy concept of “collusion” to remind us of the overwhelming reality: throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump and his staff encouraged Moscow’s efforts on behalf of his campaign, even as Donald Trump lied to the public about his ongoing efforts to build a skyscraper in Moscow.  His act of lying while Moscow knew the truth meant he put himself in a compromised position vis-a-vis this adversary of the United States.  More damningly, Trump and his campaign continued to deny that there was a Russian effort underway to assist his candidacy, even as the campaign was approached by the Russians and informed of such assistance.  Even more damningly, such public denials continued even after the U.S. intelligence community briefed Trump on the Russian hacking and disinformation campaign.  As Corn writes, “By echoing Russian disinformation—after being informed the Kremlin intended to mess with the presidential campaign to assist Trump—the Trump campaign was making it easier for a foreign power to undermine a US election.”

It is impossible to read Corn’s synopsis — much or all of which will be known to those who have followed the Trump-Russia story for the last two-plus years — and not feel both immense frustration at the apparent outcome of the Mueller investigation, and reassurance that there does indeed already exists a damning body of evidence sufficient to require the president’s removal from office.  It is also hard not to think that too many have been bewitched by the under-examined notions of “collusion” and “conspiracy,” and a certainty that with so much already documented, the president must have broken some laws (which, of course, Trump staff like Paul Manafort have indeed been convicted of).

Corn argues that Trump’s actions constitute “treachery” and “betrayal,” and his evidence backs up use of these terms.  Whatever the level of outright coordination with the Russian government and its lackeys, Donald Trump has acted, and continues to act, in ways that are self-serving and against the public interest, to put it mildly.  Given the point we’ve reached, at which Trump’s grave offenses seem not to constitute prosecutable crimes, it seems worth revisiting the way that the opposition, and particularly the Democrats, have really veered away from framing Trump’s Russia offenses using this language.  Why the emphasis on collusion and the way the notion is embedded in actual law-breaking, rather than making the public case that Donald Trump has betrayed his country?

I am wondering if part of the explanation may be that betrayal and treason are concepts mostly associated with the political right, which far more than the left is comfortable, and indeed has often relied on, such notions to divide up the body politic between patriots and enemies, makers and takers.  These are concepts, after all, that can also form part of a larger framework of revenge and restoration of some prior mythical order, which not coincidentally a pretty quick description of Trumpism.  Such concepts come less naturally to progressives, who broadly speaking place an emphasis on inclusivity and building a politics that grows into the future, rather than reaches back into the past.  It is also possible that, in part because of how the right has unfortunately coopted traditional ideas of patriotism, the left is simply less comfortable with a formulation of someone “betraying” their country; having unfairly been the target of such accusations, it may feel somewhat taboo to level such charges against political opponents, particularly if it feels like an adoption of the darker us-versus-them, exclusionary strains of right-wing politics.

And yet, it does feel like an inability to confidently articulate a patriotism firmly grounded in democratic, positive values has played a part in our current crisis.  Sure, our situation is more or less unprecedented — as many have noted, the incredible details of Trump’s avarice and serial wrongdoing wouldn’t pass the laugh test in a movie pitch — but something is arguably preventing too many Democrats from using not just the appropriate language, but from seeing and describing (two different things, I realize) what Trump has done in the most accurate and appropriate terms.

I don’t usually like this analogy, because it feels like preaching to the choir, but it’s apt enough here that I’ll risk it.  If President Obama had been soliciting Russian assistance to build an Obama Tower in Moscow during an election campaign, and lied to the American people about these efforts, the Republican Party would never

ever

ever

ever

ever

ever

and I mean, E-ver

have let it go.  

And for once, they would have been in the right.

The question of why the Democrats haven’t emphasized the betrayal angle of the Russia narrative may end up being one of the most important and intriguing questions of our political age.

Is Momentum Finally Growing to Explore Links Between Trump and Right-Wing Extremism?

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post has a column out this week that damningly synthesizes some of the biggest questions around President Trump’s relationship to a terrifying recrudescence of white nationalism and right-wing extremism.  He poses the question of whether Trump’s rhetoric is “emboldening white-nationalist and white supremacist activity at home and abroad,” and the experts and studies he consults indicate that this is chillingly the case.  Sargent provides a concise overview of some of the most crucial issues around the Trump-white supremacism nexus, including the growing international nature of this crisis and the undeniable way in which Trump is untroubled by providing aid and comfort to this anti-democratic and violent movement.

This little passage from an interview Sargent conducted a few months ago with Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst, is a provocative and upsetting distillation of how Trump’s words and actions overlap with those of white nationalists:

Building a border wall, deporting immigrants, a travel ban on Muslim countries — these are themes discussed on white-nationalist message boards and websites for years, now being endorsed and talked about at the highest levels of the government. He’s retweeted messages about Muslims from conspiracy sites. What keeps these groups energized and active is the fact that the administration has mainstreamed their message and tried to put it forth as policy.

The fact that Donald Trump has “mainstreamed” the most noxious white nationalist positions into his governing agenda should come as a shocking wake-up call to most Americans.  Although Sargent maintains an admirable lack of judgment in posing the question of why Trump appears untroubled by acting as essentially an ally to these backwards and violent forces, it’s hard not to conclude that Trump does so because he’s in agreement with their aims.  After all, the president has already made some of their major goals his own. 

So there’s no longer any real question as to whether there is an unacceptable and hateful synergy between this presidency and white nationalism.  The question we are well past time needing to move on to, and answer, is what Americans are going to do about it.  I have been seeing this point made here and there by various commentators, and I couldn’t agree more: one of the first orders of business is to bring all possible light to bear on this obscene political convergence.  This needs to be done by the press, by politicians, and by the public.  Pieces like Sargent’s are essential to a remedy: even if Sargent pulls his punches a little, the questions he asks are devastating, because the answers really are staring us all in the face.

But a decisive and concerted response by the Democrats is equally necessary.  It’s heartening to see that, in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks, the House Judiciary Committee is planning to hold hearings on white nationalism in the United States.  It may feel like the Trump Administration has already provoked a plethora of investigations by the new House majority, but few can be counted more important than this one.  I will not say that the white nationalist movement cannot survive broad public exposure, but I’m sure that most Americans will be shocked to learn of the rapid rise and spread of this movement in recent decades, and will be repulsed by obvious links between its hateful ideology and the policies and rhetoric of this administration.  And I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the Democrats’ credibility as a political party is on the line here.  If the party of multiculturalism and a future that brings broad prosperity does not view a growing white supremacist movement as an existential threat to both American democracy and the party’s political goals, then it is time for a new progressive party.

Likewise, if the Democrats fail to grasp the rare alignment between defense of the nation, and the need to hold President Trump and the GOP at large responsible for coddling and encouraging white supremacists, then there is likewise little hope for the party’s future.  It seems obvious that a president and a party that have no problem embracing ideologies that lead seamlessly to dehumanization of and violence towards vast swathes of the U.S. population must be defeated and discredited at every opportunity.  This is not simply because these ideas are the antithesis of what most Americans believe, but because they threaten the foundations of American society and politics themselves.  A country where Muslims constantly fear for their lives; where white nationalists can seize and trash federal facilities without repercussion (as happened here in Oregon a couple years ago); where Jews at worship can be killed by a gunman inspired by theories given credence by the president: this is not a country where all creeds and colors are equal, and free to live their lives as they please.  And this is to say nothing of the non-violent but clearly anti-democratic tools with which the GOP has targeted minority, young, and poorer voters for years, such as voter suppression and gerrymandering, which must be seen as being on a continuum that joins up with extremist ideology at a point that feels harder and harder to clearly define.

I noted Sargent’s interview with Daryl Johnson, who is actually a pretty significant figure in the story of white nationalism’s rise over the the last couple decades. This is because back in 2009, while working at the Department of Homeland Security, Johnson authored an intelligence report on the rise of right-wing extremist and violence in the United States. The report provoked a minor controversy at the time - and which has become retroactively far more significant - as congressional Republicans objected to the idea of “right-wing” extremism, and also bizarrely took offense at evidence that white nationalists were targeting members of the U.S. military for recruitment. The controversy turned into backlash, as Johnson described in a 2017 Washington Post op-ed:

Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.

I suspect we’ll be hearing more about Johnson’s 2009 report in the coming months, as both the report and the GOP panic over it now appear to be a turning point in the U.S. government’s botched response to what has become the premier extremist threat to American security. One would hope that the Democrats will make that report, and the GOP response to it, a prime exhibit in making the case that the Republican Party has at best fumbled America’s response to a grave danger, and at worst played a decisive role in its continuing rise. If we are to navigate out of this horror show without too much more damage, we are going to need to tell the whole, true story of how we got to this shitty crossroads.

Americans Need to Confront the Full Horror of Their White Nationalist President

We have had plenty of warnings up to this point.  But the slaughter of fifty men, women, and children by a white supremacist at two mosques in New Zealand last week should be a wake-up call that at various levels —governmental, law enforcement, and across society at large — both Americans and the populations of other Western countries have either looked away or failed to acknowledge the rising threat of right-wing terrorism.  And remarks by President Trump both before and after this horrific act remind us that this president seeks to downplay the threat of white nationalism even while stoking the fires of authoritarianism and racist violence.

The day before the Christchurch killings, the president suggested to Breitbart News that his supporters — specifically Bikers for Trump, law enforcement, and the military — might have a point at which they will turn violent against opponents of the president.  The White House denied that this was the intent of his comments, but there is little ambiguity in his discussion of “tough people” who support him who would make things “very bad, very bad” for his enemies.  That the president’s rhetoric was cloaked in a sort of plausible deniability only adds weight to the malign intent behind his words: he knows that this sort of violent innuendo must not be stated outright, but yet he feels compelled to signal it to certain of his backers.

The next day came his reaction to the New Zealand rampage.  In an exchange with reporters, Trump stated that he doesn’t consider white nationalism to be a mounting global threat, and attributed the issue to “a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess.”  He had nothing to say about the fact that the killer cited Trump as a symbol of a resurgent white nationalism.  Some commentators have already noted the connection to the president’s reaction to the white riot in Charlottesville, when he noted that there were “fine people” among the neo-Nazis, latter-day secessionists, and anti-Semites who brought disgrace and death to that Virginia city.  When faced with the most heinous actions committed by white supremacists, the normally emotive president becomes as demure as a parson’s wife.  

But what happened after the president’s initial comments to reporters is equally chilling.  As summarized by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo , the president “proceeded to give a meandering speech about foreign ‘invasion’, i.e., immigrants ‘rushing our border’, calling them ‘murderers and killers’. In other words, moments after denouncing the massacre he went on with a lie-laden screed much of which was indistinguishable from the attacker’s manifesto.”  The president essentially provided two things: justification for the killer’s actions, and ample evidence of a fact that can no longer be denied: that there is no clear line between the president’s attitudes on immigration and those of the most far-right, xenophobic ideologies of our time, up to and including the encouragement of violence as a response.

The good news is that many people have been making these basic points for a long time now, and still others have taken up the cry in the wake of the New Zealand attacks.  Yet there is an insufficiency in the response of both close observers, and of the public at large, that I find chilling if not outright horrifying.  First, it boggles my mind that a president can essentially incite violence, whether against his opponents or against a population such as immigrants or African Americans, and not immediately inspire mass revulsion and calls for his resignation.  This opinion piece by David Leonhardt makes the case for Trump’s culpability on this front (the title is pretty blunt: “It Isn’t Complicated: Trump Encourages Violence”) — yet despite its fairly shocking presentation of facts, what feels equally shocking is Leonhardt’s basic acceptance that this is a state of affairs that is in any way acceptable.

Now, I’m not saying that Leonhardt’s only path to credibility here is for him to end with the admonition that we all join him on the barricades outside the White House; indeed, I quote his peroration in full to help you make up your own mind as to how credible my take is:

It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.

These are harsh, condemning words — so why am I left with such unease that they still somehow miss the gravity of the moment?  Well, on the one hand, it is simply surreal to say that a president is encouraging violence without adding, in the same breath, that this renders him unfit for the presidency.  I am wondering if many of us have lost track of a small but essential truth: violence is the enemy of democracy; it is, in fact, arguably the one thing that must always be excluded from a democracy if that country is to remain viable.  It is not just one thing among many that the president has got wrong; it is, rather, an embrace of democracy’s kryptonite, the elevation of raw power over rule of law.

Somewhat paradoxically, the quite accurate argument made by Leonhardt and others also leaves me uneasy because it suggests a lack of continuity between outright terrorism and killings that threaten our polity, one the one hand, and a whole range of white nationalist attitudes that bend and warp our society in malign directions.  Violence is at one end of the continuum, but the reality is that the assumptions and attitudes of this retrograde mindset make violence its logical outcome.  Once you have determined that one race stands above others, de-humanization of everyone else, and the discounting of their lives as possessing worth, is a logical consequence.  Again, this is a well-established and profound point: the problem I am sensing right now is that American society and politics is maintaining a false distinction between actual calls for violence, and an ideology that legitimizes violence.  This ideology is found not just in the words of Trump, but is now embedded in the Republican Party as a whole, which among other things has normalized the idea that voter suppression, ID laws, and various other disenfranchisement strategies are somehow not clear manifestations of white supremacism, but simply hardball tactics to win elections.

Leonhardt’s use of experts and studies to bolster his case against Trump — quoting political scientist (and Hot Screen fave) Steven Levitsky on the dangers of normalizing violent rhetoric, citing studies about the increase in extremist violence — also curiously got under my skin, which I admit makes zero sense on a first pass.  The facts, after all, bolster his case against both Trump and right-wing violence.  So what’s my problem?

I think it may be this: that the outrage and immorality of the situation are so overwhelming that the mustering of statistics and expert opinion seems somehow adequate to the primal emotions, overwhelming stakes, and clear moral calculus of our moment.  Yes, the statistics about an upsurge in right-wing violence are useful in that they provide objective evidence of dangerous movements in our country, and around the world; but the struggle we are in is moral, and fundamental.  It is about making an overwhelming case for tolerance, equality, and mutual commitment to democracy.  These are not arguments to be won with statistics.  These are arguments that require a powerful articulation of moral clarity, and of a humane and inspiring vision for our society.

Land of No Mercy

Out of a morally rotten combination of personal animus and political calculation, Donald Trump has chosen to make immigration his premier issue.  The man is clearly a racist, and has had no qualms about shepherding the GOP into its current identity as a de facto white supremacist party; a party that has chosen to channel widespread fears about demographic change, economic insecurity, and status anxiety into an ideology that blames all America’s challenges on the depredations of undeserving others.  Whether it’s Latin Americans coming across the southern border, or Chinese ripping us off, there’s a dark-skinned person to blame for every ill.  Apparently, only the Russians, fair-skinned and blameless, are to be trusted in this world.

Pinning society’s problems on minority groups is the strategy of authoritarians around the world, but it’s also been a major thread of Republican politics going back to at least Richard Nixon, so it’s not like this has come out of nowhere.  But we can never lose sight of this critical question: why are Trump and the GOP going full-on white nationalist now?  I’m not so sure myself, though I strongly suspect that it’s due to reaching a tipping point born of a complicated mix of America’s demographic change, a moral collapse among GOP politicians, and those afore-mentioned economic and status anxieties, and of course all rooted in a belief in white superiority that has coursed through our entire history.

Because we are at a point where questions of American identity and relative status have become key features of the political debate — both due to tectonic shifts in American society and the economy, and because Donald Trump in particular has chosen to highlight them — the Democratic Party has no choice but to engage on them.  And indeed, the Democratic Party has done so, having become the party of multiculturalism and anti-racism.  But immigration, as I’ve written before, contains particular dangers for the Democratic Party, of which Trump and his advisors are well aware and are eager to exploit.  As the defenders of a racially harmonious and humane vision of the United States, Trump’s strategy is to define the Democrats as the party not of Americans, but of non-Americans; a party that cares more about immigrants than citizens.  (Of course, a key part of this mindset is to also suggest that Democrats care more about minority citizens than white citizens, but this cannot be stated so explicitly, so immigration becomes a proxy for that key part of his white nationalist appeal).

And so Donald Trump has consistently kept immigration at the center of his agenda, most blatantly and obnoxiously through his come-hell-or-high-water insistence on a wall at the southern border that would in fact function as a multi-billion monument to white supremacy (and which, we all well understand, would likely end up being built in large part by immigrant labor, legal and otherwise.  If I have not said it before, I will say it now: irony is lost on Republicans).  Trump has also foregrounded immigration through various other actions, such as the ban on immigration from various Muslim-majority countries, refusal to reach a deal on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and attempts to implement changes in U.S. immigration policy that would preference white, English-speaking arrivals over those from third-world “shithole” countries, in the president’s infamous wording.

Because the president has put immigration front and center, he has effectively set the terms of the national dialogue, and given the Democrats no choice but to respond.  This isn’t just because there is a general receptivity nationally to talking about these issues, but because the president can relatively easily set the terms of the national dialogue; this is just how American politics works.  The danger for Democrats is that Trump and his ilk are on to something: immigration does put Democrats in a weak position, for the reasons Trump believes.  Pushing back against Trump’s absolutist and racist views on immigration inevitably means the Democrats will be defending the rights of non-Americans, at least to some degree — which is exactly where Trump wants them.  The clincher is that Democrats have no choice but to push back against Trump, since a defining characteristic of the values that are at the heart of the party’s identity is a defense of the vulnerable and of the United States as a multi-cultural society.

Because immigration issues touch so profoundly, if often indirectly, on the identity of the Democrats, they cannot shy from this fight.  And to their credit, they largely have not, even as you can quite plausibly make the case that they have done so in ways that have both reinforced Trump and invigorated the Democratic base in what might turn out to be a zero-sum outcome electorally.  

Maybe it is naivete, or stubbornness, or simple ignorance, but I can’t shake myself from thinking that the Democrats may yet find a way to turn the tables on Trump, and make immigration a strength for the party rather than an area of weakness, ideally in a way that would make Trump regret that fateful day in 2015 when he trundled down the Trump Tower escalator and declared Mexican immigrants to be murderers and rapists.  If this is to be done, it’s going to involve calling out the racism and demagoguery at the heart of the Trump/GOP push for a whitened America.

The president’s termination of a program allowing Liberian and other refugees to live in the United States — announced last March and taking affect this month — has added fuel to my righteous fire.  This decision is revolting on various levels: it’s in line with the president’s clear racial animus, affects a vulnerable population, and presents no clear benefit to the United States once you peel away the lies about mooching and undeserving refugees.  

Here’s the background: back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush granted temporary protected status to thousands of Liberians fleeing civil war in that country.  When that program expired in 1999, President Clinton extended their protection through something called deferred enforcement departure, as did presidents George W. Bush and Obama.  DED covers thousands of others besides the Liberian refugees, but the overall numbers are minuscule compared to overall immigration into the United States over the last several decades.

The situation of these Liberian refugees encapsulates much of what is so wrong, and so deserving of opposition, in Trump’s immigration policy.  There appear to be only around 800 Liberians affected by this decision, but the smallness of the population makes Trump’s revocation of their status all the more telling.  There are real questions of whether Liberia is now safe — its first peaceful transfer of power since 1944 was only last year.  Beyond this, the idea that our vast country is somehow being drained by this small group of people is preposterous — but of course, as so often, it’s not the reality, but the symbolism, and the enactment of cruelty based on false premises, that’s the real point.  Indeed, the reality should give all but the hardest-hearted American pause.  All these Liberians have made lives in the U.S. for more than two decades, and are contributing members of society.  The Washington Post has two excellent recent articles about a pair of Liberian women affected by this decision.  One is a health care worker, the other an oncology nurse; no credible economic or social calculus could conclude that they are not adding to the overall national wealth of our nation.

The history of the relationship between Liberia and the United States elevates Trump’s decision on the DED program from one more example of his backwards ideology to perhaps its grotesque epitome.  Liberia, after all, was founded as part of an effort in the early 1800’s to return black Americans to Africa, born out of a racist belief that whites and black could not live together in the United States.  Just as Trump’s wall would be a monument to white supremacism, so the existence of Liberia itself already exists as such a living reminder of this mindset.  In a telling example of how Trump has tapped into long-standing currents of America’s darkest history, one of the immigrants profiled by The Washington Post, Afomu Kelley, is the descendant of a black American who moved to Liberia in the 19th century.  In other words, the same white supremacist impulses that led to the creation of Liberia in the 1800s are now leading the current American president to send Liberians back to that country.

To not call out and question this action is to be complicit in it, and it is some relief that Democratic politicians have been fighting the move (including Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who brought a Liberian threatened by deportation as a guest to the State of the Union address last month).  It seems incredible to me that identifying the historical continuities in this situation, on top of the other sound arguments against such a cruel uprooting of contributing members to American society, cannot be forged into a weapon against Trump and his anti-minority allies.  If Trump can sensationalize murders committed by illegal immigrants, and put forward families of their victims as martyrs to a white nationalist vision, then Democrats should feel free to highlight the fact that actual American citizens — the U.S.-born sons and daughters of these Liberians immigrants — will be victims of the revocation of DED protection.  Parents will have to choose between taking their children to a country with which their offspring have no familiarity, or leaving their children behind: choices that no parent should ever have to make, and with which only the morally compromised cannot empathize.  

Trump’s strategy is to make us believe he’s against illegal immigration, but revocation of DED protection for Liberians and others shows this to be a lie.  He seeks to deport people who have been here for many years, have worked hard and contributed to the American economy, and in many cases have either American-born children or children brought here at such a young age that they have deep connections to the U.S. and might be considered American citizens for all reasonable purposes.  In purporting to enforce immigration fairness, he in fact makes war on our social fabric and the notion that every individual has something to contribute.  More than this, he seeks to make us believe our country is weak, and indeed seeks to weaken it, by trying to make us afraid of the immigrant next door — by making us afraid of each other.  In this, he is a fine advocate against himself.  The Democrats must move out of defense, and learn to use his flawed policies against him.

Climate Change and Gun Violence Make the Case for Lowering Voting Age in Oregon

Democratic legislators here in Oregon have proposed lowering the voting age to 16, via a bill that would amend the Oregon Constitution accordingly.  Backers are pointing to issues like gun violence and the environment as those over which younger voters should have some say.  Both of these particular issues in fact provide ample evidence that 16- and 17-year-olds are ready for the vote in order to engage on these and other matters.  Does anyone really doubt that the direction of the gun debate was not changed by the teenage organizing of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivors, who applied idealism and belief in change to their horrifying experience in a way that shamed the nation and opened all our eyes to what is politically possible?  That these organizers were able to make change without necessarily having the vote shouldn’t be a mark against lowering the voting age, but taken as evidence that this age cohort has the intellectual capacity and moral compass to participate fully.

We should also see the looming disaster of climate chaos as a game changer on questions of the proper age to vote, as it is rapidly shifting so many other of our assumptions about how we live our lives.  Those whose adulthood will be seriously impinged if global warming is not addressed in the immediate future deserve an equal voice in our politics.

I also strongly suspect that younger voters who do not feel ready to vote. . . will simply not vote.  On the flip side, encouraging youth to be civically engaged and not waste their vote should provide vital early education on the importance of being involved in politics, and yield higher voting going forward.

It is no surprise, but still sad, to see Republican opposition to this proposed change.  Oregon Senate Republican leader Herman Baertschiger Jr. has issued a statement asserting that adulthood in the U.S. begins at 18.  As evidence, he points to a variety of activities in which 16-year olds cannot participate, including joining the military (actually, 17-year-olds can do so) or getting married.  He leaves out, though, other contradicting facts, such as 16-year-olds being able to drive and being required to pay taxes on their jobs (which they are obviously allowed to perform).  But Baertschiger’s comment that “This is nothing more than an attempt to expand the voter rolls to sway elections” provides an odd reassurance that in Oregon, as in much of the U.S., Republicans are singing from the same anti-democratic hymn book.  The assumption that making it easier to vote is inherently bad, and is part of a nefarious plot to “sway elections,” also reveals the basic GOP assumption that more people voting means more people, in aggregate, voting against Republicans.  It is also of note that he concedes that Republicans would not be competitive with this age group, which is tacitly blamed on the judgment of 16- and 17-year-olds, rather than on GOP policies out of step with the American majority, and, on issues such as climate change, out of step with basic reality.

The On-Line Propaganda War of 2020 is Already Underway

Last week, Politico reported that widespread on-line election interference against Democratic 2020 presidential candidates is well underway.  Although the data scientists and campaigns don’t have a clear idea of who’s responsible for these cyber operations, they seem to be a combination of individual actors but also, and more worrisomely, coordinated campaigns.  The degree of sophistication so far exhibited is unsettling; the coordinated actors are employing techniques that make their efforts appear more organic and real than, say, more easily-detected efforts employing bots.  And perhaps most troubling of all, some of the coordinated campaigns seem to have state-level sponsorship, including from North Korea, Iran, and Russia.

Their objectives appear to include exacerbating racial divisions, spreading lies about candidates, and “[dividing] the left by making the Democratic presidential primary as chaotic and toxic as possible.”  In this respect, those seeking to sabotage the electoral process have elements of reality on their side; this is shaping up to to be the largest field of candidates in years, at a time when the Democratic Party is fighting over its basic identity.

But the fact that there are real conflicts and high emotions involved in Democratic politics should not distract us from the overriding, incredible issue: once again, the American political system is under cyber-propaganda attack, and the U.S. government is fumbling the response.  The first of level of failure is that the U.S. response after 2016 has been insufficient to deter further attacks.  And this failure, of course, is inseparable from the horrific reality that has been facing us the last couple years: that just as he benefitted from foreign attacks on Hilary Clinton and propaganda in support of himself in 2016, Donald Trump is now the beneficiary of similar, early attacks on a new wave of his opponents.  Indeed, any framing of the situation as merely attacks on Democrats, rather than efforts in support of Donald Trump, is to tacitly abet the nefarious ends of those committing these actions.  

The Politico article strongly makes the point that the Democratic campaigns are not ready for this propaganda onslaught.  While this is true, it elides the larger point: that it is the responsibility of the U.S. government, particularly its intelligence and defense establishments, to stop cyber interference in the U.S. election process, whether it be primaries or general elections.  Only the U.S. government has the resources to do so; this role is also, not incidentally, the government’s actual job.  Suggestions that individual Democratic campaigns are simply too weak or incompetent to defend themselves plays into Donald Trump’s preferred narrative of dominance and submission, and accepts his framing of the situation as one in which individual candidates are somehow to be separated out from the integrity of the American electoral system of which they are a part.  

And this brings us back to the point I made a moment ago.  The context for these attacks is advancement of the re-election prospects of President Trump; and so the fact that the president has not only spent the last two years rejecting that there were such efforts in 2016, but has only undermined government-wide efforts to the protect the U.S. going forward, means that what the Democrats are experiencing now can be clearly traced back to the president’s own self-interest.  Throw in the unresolved matter of whether the president’s campaign coordinated with such cyber efforts in 2016, particularly those propaganda efforts by Russia, and we find ourselves face-to-face with a nightmarish scenario in which an American president cultivates interference in our elections.

Reporting on ongoing efforts at cyber sabotage and division is crucial; all Americans need to be aware of this unacceptable behavior, so that we can pressure our government to stop it, and so that Democrats can play out their political conflicts while keeping in mind the reality of outside pressures to force the party into unnecessary fights.  But this is only part of the story, and it must never be separated from an examination of both the interests of foreign powers to influence the election in Donald Trump’s favor, and the president’s unforgivable willingness to condone this assistance from America’s enemies.

By the same token, this is also a test of the Democratic candidates’ ability to defend the U.S. They obviously have an interest in denouncing such interference, as it impacts their own electoral prospects; yet anyone worthy of the presidency will be able to balance this self-defense with a larger defense of America’s democracy, will be able to make the president pay a maximal price for his complicity while being sure to avoid playing the assigned role of victim or weakling.

In Emergency Declaration, A Dark Glimpse of a Winner-Take-All Vision of American Politics

Nearly as worrisome as President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a wall along the southern border has been some of the Democratic rhetoric in opposition: warnings from politicians like Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Trump is setting a precedent by which a Democratic president could declare gun control or global warming to be a national emergency as well.  At one level, these counter-examples are clearly meant to grab the president’s attention, or at least the attention of those Republicans who were already thinking of the downstream implications when their party no longer holds the presidency.  Yet Democrats’ framing of any counter-argument as a case of “how’d you like it if we did this, too?” indirectly legitimizes Trump’s actions, as I suspect many or most Republicans believe Democrats would indeed do this if they won control of the government.  Rather, the Democratic position should be that they would simply never do this because they believe in democratic governance, full stop.

Observers of authoritarianism have been pointing out that emergency declarations are a sort of gateway drug to dictatorial rule, in which supposedly dangerous circumstances are used to justify a suspension of the rule of law.  Remove the excuse of an emergency, and you see that we’re basically talking about a situation in which the executive alone claims to be the whole government.

Assessing the dark place in which Trump’s declaration has left the country, Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall makes a point that might at first seem counter-intuitive: that authoritarianism is often birthed by incompetence and mismanagement.  For Marshall, Trump is a prime example of this: he was unable to get funding for his wall, essentially through his own shortcomings as president, and so has turned to undemocratic means to get what he wants.

Marshall goes on to note an observation originally made by Will Saletan at Slate: That “the GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord,” adding:

Trump is unable to govern as a normal President because his policies are unpopular and he’s completely unable – in policy terms or characterologically – to at least attempt to build governing coalitions as almost every President in US history has at least attempted to do. His hold on power depends on keeping his minority faction in a state of maximal aggrievement, activation and confrontation. That’s what this wall battle is, of course, about.

In this sense he has made the US not a failed state but a failed politics. And thus, here we are.

Marshall has made these points before in other contexts, but they seem more resonant and suggestive than ever in our present moment.  Partly, it’s because of how explosively and toxically a couple of basic elements come together in the border wall emergency declaration.  Trump has not only been driven by his personal incompetence to seek extralegal solutions to building a wall, but the need to build the wall is rooted in satisfying the clamor of a base that blames both personal ills and national challenges on immigrants, rather than in the wall serving a defensible public purpose.  The warlordism analogy seems particularly apt here: Trump serves not the nation, but the people who elected him, and he will maintain their favor by whatever means necessary.   This is clearly not an emergency situation: at bottom, it’s about the president’s attempt to build a monument to racism and white nationalism. 

The Democratic rhetoric I noted above strikes me as particularly inauspicious given Trump’s decision to govern as head of a subset of the American people.  In doing so, he shows only contempt for the larger American struggle towards diversity, tolerance, mutual support, and equality.  Just toying with the idea that the Democrats might play this game, too, is a dangerous turn for our country.  The Democrats should never suggest that the United States is made up of irreconcilable sides, and that Democratic governance would mean their opportunity to move forward Democratic goals by whatever means they can get away with.  It is not hard to see such arguments on the Democratic side rooted as being rooted in variants of the incompetence and mismanagement that underly Trump’s authoritarian slide; after all, it has taken a series of catastrophic missteps on their side to surrender both the mantle and reality of the Democrats being the party of working and middle-class Americans, with the built-in majority that status would ensure.  The Democrats need to make change the old-fashioned, democratic way: by winning elections, building governing coalitions, and passing laws that carry the legitimacy of constitutional procedure.  If building a durable majority means choosing to represent working Americans at the cost of pissing off a handful of irritable billionaires, so be it.

One great danger, in other words, is that Trump’s mode of governing for only a subset of Americans be adopted by the opposition; that it becomes normalized.  This, after all, would be in keeping with the anti-democratic spiral described in How Democracies Die, where for the sake of survival both parties must continually embrace increasingly corrosive governing practices lest they lose the struggle for power.  In a somewhat paradoxical move, for Democrats to be the defenders of our democratic order, they need to be willing to lose, even as they’re sustained by the faith that enough Americans still believe in democracy that they can build sustainable, significant majorities; majorities that will allow them to push through reforms of both American politics and an economy that’s sucking away wealth to the richest among us, and that may help restore faith in our common enterprise.  We also have to reckon with the fact that, though Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves are a combination of personal inclination and political incompetence, he has found a receptive audience in both the Republican party and in a great number of American voters. 

So how does anyone make an argument based on what seem like abstract principles, in the face of visceral impulses that one’s own side should win and push through laws that intuitively feel right and reasonable?  One thing that has been all too slow to dawn on me is that abstract principles are indeed difficult to defend.  In this, the Trumpian approach has a built-in advantage, appealing to people’s most powerful, if toxic, impulses around race and status over their less visceral commitment to their fellow citizens and the nation at large.  But is it possible that calling out this understandable yet corrosive impulse can help us understand and better practice a democratic politics that combines the pragmatic and the aspirational, the selfish and the empathetic?

Can the Wealthy Be Trusted to See Capitalism Clearly?

Howard Marks, co-chairman of the asset management group Oaktree Capital and a well-known dispenser of investment advice, has weighed in on the incipient Democratic presidential race in his latest memo to Oaktree clients.  CNBC has excerpts from the memo, and has also interviewed Marks, which together provide an intriguing snapshot of a Wall Street-centered perspective  on the Democrats’ inchoate movement toward broad-reaching economic reforms, revealing underlying assumptions and attitudes that will need to be confronted if we are to achieve progressive reforms in the American economy.

The first thing that jumps out at me is Marks’ general assessment of this moment.   “There is a rising tide of anti-capitalism and we should be concerned about that. [. . .] We have a machine in this country that makes it successful — based on democracy, our freedoms and also I think the economy and the way it operates in a free-market mode."   This is such a great summation of the  basic terms of the debate!  There is something good that is working to make America succeed; there is also this rising tide that for some reason doesn’t want us to have this successful system.  It is a tale familiar from many of our childhoods: the goose that laid the golden egg, and the fools who seek to cook it.

As examples of this “anti-capitalist sentiment,” Marks calls out the proposal by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to tax income above $10 million at a 70% rate, as well as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a 2% annual wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million.  "Americans generally accept the concept of progressive tax rates. But they must not be punitive and demotivating," Marks writes in his memo.   To say these measures are anti-capitalist, though, is to ignore their stated intention: to make sure those who are more able to pay taxes, pay those taxes, so that the great majority of non-rich people can benefit from the fruits of our economy and society via social spending that benefits all; and to reduce the record levels of economic inequality in this country that are shifting ever more political clout to the richest among us.

But to Marks, such taxes are indeed an attack on capitalism, presumably because they would take money from the wealthy and not allow them to invest it in the economy as they see fit, thus depriving the economic system of the fuel needed to keep it chugging along.  What is curious about this line of argument, though, is that it assumes that only rich people can invest in capitalism.  The problem is, redistribution of wealth via taxes doesn’t mean that capitalism and investment come to a standstill; on the contrary, it means that that more people are able to invest.  For example, if you tax the rich and use it to pay for better health care, then the great majority of Americans should end up with more discretionary income, not less! Sure, maybe they’re not individually able to buy millions of dollars of stock in exciting new startups and the like — but collectively, they would be.  Marks and other defenders of the current order generally argue that the market is an accurate assessor of value (at least over the long-term; Marks actually has some quite interesting things to say about market cycles and the market actually not often being right at any particular moment but accurate as to assessing value over many years); it seems to me that the possibility of more people participating would improve its success rate.

The argument that capitalism will be seriously weakened if taxes are increased on the rich also assumes a deliberately obtuse understanding of how government and taxes actually work.  At its most extreme, it relies on an idea that taxation is equivalent to expropriating a rich person’s deserved millions, piling it in literal bales of cash, and setting it on fire for the sheer glee of watching it burn.  At a lesser extreme, the argument holds that the government will never spend money either correctly or efficiently, and that all investing decisions are best left to the market.  But this argument, too, is basically poppycock, as there are many areas — infrastructure, education, health care — where the government needs to make the investments because the private sector does not see the possibility of an adequate return, or any return at all; and where, moreover, the decisions as to how to invest are best left to democratic processes and accountability, not to mention human needs (as is the case with health care and education, among others), and not to profit-seeking interests.

Marks’ characterization of the wrong type of progressive taxes is suggestive.  He warns against “punitive and demotivating” rates on the rich.  Yet what two words could better describe the current tax and economic arrangements for the majority of Americans?  We work harder and longer than ever, yet face stagnant wages and wealth, the solution to which, we are told, is to keep doing more of the same, and never, ever think about tampering with the golden goose that keeps laying ever-shrinking eggs for us, even while we can see the wealthiest becoming still more unimaginably wealthy.  What could be more punitive and demotivating than that?

Under our current circumstances of gross and undeniable inequality, it must seem to the ultra-wealthy that the great majority of the country must surely want to rip them down, storm their virtual (or actual) gated community, and feast on their wealth in an orgy of socialistic revenge and righteousness.  Locked into an attitude of selfishness and self-aggrandizement, they literally can’t conceive of people choosing to act in any other way.

This helps get to the contradictory heart of Marks’ comments.  He is clearly a great believer in investing in the economy and letting the capitalist process create wealth for companies and for investors; yet this system is closed in any meaningful way to most Americans, due to the fact that they lack the discretionary income to actually participate in the stock and bond markets.  To most Americans, the rising stock market seems like a joke, helping you do better as long as you’re already doing well.  Pointing to the general creation of wealth by our present economic arrangements, when most people are either falling further behind or constantly plagued by fear of doing so, is to define success down into its opposite, at least in most people’s lived experience.

It is not just Marks, but a broader mindset, that implicitly argues that capitalism as it currently exists is in fact a platonic ideal of capitalism: it is perfect, and we know it to be perfect, and to tamper with it is to tamper with the natural order of things.  But the truth is that what we have now is what men have put in place, not what the universe has ordained.  A basic understanding of human psychology suggests that the wealthy defend present arrangements so vigorously because they benefit so greatly.  To be generous: from their perspective, a situation in which a radically enriched upper crust benefits is indeed ideal.  For the rich, money makes capitalism transcendent.  It transforms them into gods, into prophets, into leaders, into forces of righteousness.  This, in turn, allows them to act as if they are the caretakers and experts on capitalism, when they are simply its greatest beneficiaries, and in this way blinded to its downsides.

I do not mean to single out Marks, but to suggest that his assumptions are widely-held by many of wealth and power in this country. They are a combination of tautological and self-serving: the best economy is always the one at the current moment, and it is the best because the rich are rich. Intriguingly, they embrace our current moment, of grotesque insecurity and inequality, topped off by an environment destabilized by unbridled greed, as the best we can ever do. Well, maybe it’s just the best that they can do.

Will the White Nationalist GOP Learn to Regret Its Ralph Northam Pile-on?

We look for good news where we can find it, and one glad tiding is that long-time Hot Screen fave Jamelle Bouie, formerly a writer for Slate, has moved on to become an opinion writer for The New York Times.  That a much larger audience will now be exposed to his incisive writing on U.S. politics feels like a win for the good guys.

His column today makes a couple essential observations around the blackface/KKK getup scandal that has, for all practical purposes, brought an end to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s political career.  First, Bouie reviews why blackface is such a horrifically racist and unacceptable practice; it not only works to dehumanize African-Americans, but also to suggest their unfitness for participation in a democratic society.  

But as awful as the latter-day indulgence of a discredited racist minstrelsy may be, Bouie goes on to make a point that has lurked within the whole sordid Northam story: that there is a basic problem when public opprobrium “treats expressions of racist contempt or mockery as the most egregious forms of racism, when that distinction should belong to the promotion of racist policies and ideas.”  If signaling hate toward African-Americans by choice of attire is inexcusable, then how much worse is political action that directly seeks to denigrate African-Americans, or other minorities more generally?

Bouie nails the logical consequence of this situation:

If racism is principally a problem of power and resources — of race hierarchy and the denial of life, liberty and opportunity to blacks and other nonwhites — then our political culture ought to expand the offenses that earn the kinds of swift condemnation we’ve seen over the last few days. Voter suppression and the lawmakers who back it deserve the same contempt we save for open racial bigotry; officials behind policies rooted in prejudice, like the travel ban or child separation, ought to be forced from office.

Bouie’s analysis has helped me to understand my visceral disorientation and disgust at the stream of Republican politicians calling for Northam’s resignation, and chiding him for his racism.  A party that has placed white nationalism and the suppression of minority voters at the center of its political identity simply has no leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing the racism of an opposing politician, however merited that critique may be in abstract terms.  Not surprisingly, the greatest nausea was induced by the president himself tweeting about Northam’s unfitness for office, as there can be no question, given that terrible man’s long history of enmity toward African-Americans and current enactment of racist policies, that the president’s racial offenses are orders of magnitude graver than the Virginia governor’s.

It is no surprise, of course, that the president and other Republicans would seize on photographic documentation of racial animus (whether or not Northam appeared in the photo, it was on his yearbook page) as the worst racial offense imaginable.  Not only is it a tactical embrace of anti-racism to take down a Democratic politician, it suggests that racism is solely a matter of dressing up in a KKK outfit or in blackface; it is the same mentality that would say you aren’t racist if you don’t use the “N” word.  The reality, though, is that the GOP is guilty of far worse than Northam; and yet we are left with the dizzying reality that the proponents of actual, state-sponsored racism are not forced to give up their seats, as Bouie suggests they should; are not subject to public repudiation and disdain.

The fact that Donald Trump felt free to weigh in is not simply a measure of the man’s poor impulse control, although there’s that.  In addition to sticking another shiv in Northam’s governorship, I think he was also seeking to reassure his supporters that neither he, nor any of them, can be considered real racists; it’s those freaky Democrats who think they’re Al Jolson and put shoe polish on their faces to enhance their Michael Jackson routines who are.  This may be the underlying strategy of other Republicans as well.

But the president’s tweets highlight how this sort of strategy really does depend on the media accepting the president’s terms of debate; that he somehow has standing to criticize another politician on grounds of racism without inviting a closer look at his own offenses.  This strikes me as not a completely sound assumption at this point.  By making bad-faith arguments based on the unassailable idea that racism is bad, the president invites the obvious question of why, then, would he himself propagate policies, and deploy rhetoric, that says quite the opposite: that racism is the health of the white nationalist state?  I am not so sure that the GOP as a whole has really thought through the long-term damage they may be doing to the party by not sitting this one out, trading short-term gain for long-term, and well-merited, pain.

CBP's Harassment of Portland Comic is a Sick Joke

The anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration have introduced an indelible, low-level thrum of horror into American life.  Rooted in a white nationalist mindset, this presidency has done its damnedest to restrict, harass, and punish those who have done what countless generations of Americans have done before: come to this land seeking a better life.  Equating undocumented immigration with criminality, and denying any standing to long-term undocumented residents, including those brought here at too young an age to have had a choice in the matter, Donald Trump has propagated a vision of a United States suffering literal invasion.  This has been the basis for numerous measures that defy both the American spirit and basic human rights; carried out in the name of the American people, they bring shame on us all.

At the same time, due in part to the administration’s conscious strategy, these measures have been kept somewhat abstract for most Americans. No one with a conscience has been untroubled by the separation of immigrant children from their parents, or the placement of these children in overcrowded camps and cages; yet these abuses have largely been conducted out of the public eye, with the media’s ability to gain access to such facilities severely restricted.  Likewise, the escalated harassment of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol  have been invisible to most of us.  We know this is happening all around us, yet the lack of visibility lessens the sense of moral urgency, even as it seeds American life with a sinister undertow.

This, as at least, is my current theory, as I consider the deeply unsettling and visceral impact on me from news last week that Portland-based stand-up comic Mohanad Elshieky was harassed by CPB employees while returning from a gig in Washington state.  Elshieky, a Libyan citizen granted political asylum in the U.S. in October 2018, was riding a Greyhound back to the city after a gig in Washington state when CPB officials boarded his bus in Spokane.  The agents asked Elshieky and a few other passengers for their IDs; when he was asked if was a U.S. citizen, Elshieky replied that he’s a Libyan.  From there, the interaction grew into a sadistic and unnerving display of anti-immigrant fervor being brought to bear on a documented asylee.  Although he provided them with a driver’s license and a work permit, the agents insisted he was illegal (a spokesperson for the CBP subsequently asserted that all people granted asylum must carry a particular document at all times; Elshieky says his lawyer told him the documents he carried would be sufficient).  Disturbingly, he overheard a phone conversation in which a CBP official verified his legal status, yet an agent at the scene still insisted that he was illegal.  Elshieky was informed that the documents he carried could be faked.  He told the agents that what they were doing was not legal, and that he would contact his lawyer.  After 20 minutes, the CPB officials finally sent him on his way.

Elshieky subsequently wrote a tweet about his experience that got widespread attention in the Twittersphere, and his ordeal was covered by major media outlets.  Clearly, what happened to him happens to many, many other people; but in this case, Elshieky is a media-savvy and eloquent narrator of his own experience.  Just as much as undocumented immigrants can be said to live in the shadows of our society, the same seems to be true of the actions of immigration agents: their actions must be conducted away from scrutiny and public exposure, lest their odiousness be observed and rebuked.  Part of what rankles about his story is that Elshieky has been granted political asylum, not an easy bar to reach, particularly under this malicious administration.  Asylum is not meant to be simply the opening gambit in a sadistic game in which the asylee can then be tripped up in a dozen different ways and deported back to his or her place of origin.  The agents’ presumption of Elshieky’s guilt would turn political asylum into a sick joke.

But the most twisted part of the story may be the fact that Elshieky is exactly the sort of immigrant we should welcome to our country and encourage to become a citizen.  He enriches our culture through his sharp and incisive humor, and proves himself more in the American grain than those CPB agents, by standing up to their bullying and abuse of authority. As someone who has had the pleasure of seeing Elshieky perform, it is painful for me to witness the Trump administration hit so close to home, its pursuit of a racially purified nation leading to this cruel and disheartening experience for a comic who has enriched the lives of Oregonians and others lucky enough to have heard him.

There is something obviously authoritarian and beyond redemption about a government that has unleashed its vast powers in such an indiscriminate fashion that a comic granted political asylum must be treated as an enemy of the state until proven otherwise.

There is a twist to the story, though, in that we can make an argument that Trump’s eager agents do actually have grounds to fear immigrants like Elshieky and others like him — though not for the reasons the agents would claim; not because these immigrants are criminals, or steal American jobs, or suck away social services, but because they have a more visceral attachment to actual American ideals than these uniformed officers of a white nationalist regime; because they know authoritarian bullshit when they see it and have come too far to accept it here.  In an ironic turn of events, the actions of ICE and CBP, and of the Trump administration more broadly, themselves lend weight to arguments that Americanness is not restricted to being born here, but can be rooted in belief in notions of individual autonomy, self-determination, and ambition that are not restricted to any race or nation.  I am once again wowed by the smallness of the Trumpian nationalist vision: demented by racism and dedicated to the preservation of maldistributed wealth, they can’t even seen how big America can be, how we become greater by embracing those who want to be here for the best of reasons.

Hysteria in Havana?

Readers will not have forgotten The Hot Screen’s previous coverage of the mysterious goings-on at the American Embassy in Havana that started in 2016 and ran into the following year.  First one, then two, then increasing numbers of American (and later, Canadian) diplomatic personnel experienced a variety of neurological problems, including dizziness, nausea, and memory loss, often reported to have been proceeded by odd noises.  The U.S. ended up pulling most of its embassy staff out of Cuba, accusing the Cubans of carrying out attacks on U.S. citizens via an unidentified technology.

Officials speculated that the Cubans may have employed some sort of advanced sonic weapon, or that the country’s surveillance technology somehow interacted in dangerous ways with another electronic system.  But as described in “Hear No Evil,” published in the February issue of Vanity Fair, U.S. officials with an interest in pinning the blame on the Cubans dismissed any explanations that did not involve malign intent on the part of that country.  And so investigations of how a high-tech attack was mounted continued on, including the involvement of “Jason, a secretive group of elite scientists that helps the federal government assess new threats to national security.”  (It is not much of an exaggeration to say that a technological explanation would require that the long-embargoed Cubans had developed a form of weapon so advanced that their American opponents could barely even comprehend what it was, much less how it might have been deployed.)

The mystery was deepened by the uncanny nature of how the victims described their experiences, many of which were described in this ProPublic article from a year ago.  Some described hearing what seemed to be cicadas, but louder and more mechanical-sounding.  Another described being struck by a beam of high-pitched sound.  There were also strange details, like a newly-arrived CIA operative hearing similar odd sounds despite staying incognito in a hotel.  Not only the technology, but the clandestine prowess of the Cubans, appeared to be without peer.

As “Hear No Evil” author Jack Hitt argues, though, the political agenda of various elements of the American government — including politicians like Florida Senator Marco Rubio and those opposed to reconciliation with Cuba — spurred the U.S. to persist in the “sonic attack” theory despite the lack of any hard evidence.  Although investigators “found that the victims suffered from a wide range of symptoms: balance issues, visual impairments, tinnitus, sleep disorders, dizziness, nausea, headaches, and problems thinking or remembering,”  they did not find accompanying widespread head trauma (leading medical investigators to playfully refer to this situation as the “immaculate concussion”).

Hitt provides an alternative explanation that would not only account for the known facts, but would also resolve the issue of the missing mechanism for causing the victims’ symptoms.  Recounting the way the symptoms seemed to spread from just one, to two, to increasing numbers of diplomats and their families, he points to a well-known psychological phenomenon that fits this situation: conversion disorder, described as the “rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms among members of a cohesive social group, for which there is no corresponding organic origin.”  More commonly (and less accurately) known as mass hysteria, Hitt recounts how there are countless examples of the phenomenon, and notes that the high-stress environment of the U.S. compound in Havana tracks with how the phenomenon strikes “close-knit” groups.

A couple items strike me as particularly persuasive.  First, it turns out that the government studies of the symptoms were not at all well done, including the fact that many symptoms were self-reported and turn out to occur widely in the general population (50 million Americans, for example, experience ringing in the ears.). Second, the first patient — a CIA officer referred to as “Patient Zero” — appears to have played a central and outsized role in the spread of the phenomenon.  The officers’s description of being beset by sounds seems to have established a template picked up by others; he also reportedly took an active role in urging others to report their symptoms.  Additionally, he provides the missing link as to why Canadian diplomats also started reporting symptoms — it turns out that one of the Canadians lived next door to him.

As Hitt points out, though, the fact that Canadians were also affected was eventually left out of the official narrative, as it contradicted the theory that the Cubans were waging attacks against the United States.  Indeed, damningly, U.S. investigators early on raised the possibility of psychological explanations, only to preemptively dismiss them without further consideration — which, as Hitt persuasively argues, left the field open for political agendas premised on Cuban malfeasance.

Not noted by Hitt, but certainly suggested by his reporting, is how the conversion disorder of the diplomats stationed in Cuba was in significant respects mimicked by the official American response.  This would account for the widespread willingness to believe that the Cubans possess mind-bogglingly advanced technology despite all evidence to the contrary, and were for no good reason attempting to destroy the rapprochement with the U.S. they’d wanted for so long. Of course, the situation is a bit more complicated that this simple parallelism.  On the one hand, long before these attacks, Cuba had been the object of mass hysteria on the part of many Americans, who saw it as a canny exporter of revolution and danger to U.S. national security far out of proportion to its impoverished and backward condition.  On the other hand, this fear and revulsion has mostly struck me as ginned up for political purposes, whether to appeal to Cuban-American voters in Florida or to more generally bolster American opposition to socialism in all possible forms.  This concept of “manufactured mass hysteria” may also be the better description of the behavior exhibited by American officialdom in response to the recent mystery in Havana.  Piggybacking off a psychological phenomenon rooted in the very real stresses of diplomatic and espionage postings that inevitably carried the burden of a highly fraught Cuban-American history, elements of the U.S. government seem to have used an episode of conversion disorder to further a long-standing, exaggerated antagonism against Cuba.

Will Republicans Self-Immolate in Their Rage Over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Since the ground seemed to fall away from beneath our feet on Election Night 2016, many millions of us have been trying desperately to fight our footing again, by working to understand a political landscape that has seemed both profoundly changed and hauntingly familiar.  There is plenty of grounds for criticism of the media over its role in aiding and abetting the catastrophe of Donald Trump’s election; yet before the election and after, many reporters and opinion writers have worked to investigate and explicate the truths of America’s economic, racial, and cultural conflicts that have brought us to this awful pass.  There is a liberation in finding out the facts of the case, no matter how bitter they may be, in that it helps the world feel knowable again, and lays the groundwork for making positive change.

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has consistently taken accurate and incisive measure of this Trumpworld in which we find ourselves, in part because he’s keenly aware of the deep links between our pre- and post-Trump realities.  Serwer’s devastating takes on the racial and cultural dynamics of our current moment bring an odd comfort in describing the continuity with what has existed before, and continues to exist, in our country.  To reprise a fundamental, widespread observation about this presidency: it is shocking, but not surprising.

Serwer’s take on Republican antipathy to newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a case in point: by focusing on this one political and cultural flashpoint, he describes broader dynamics, unawareness of which might be said to render any American citizen a relative political naif.  Digging past the basic fact that Republicans have latched onto Ocasio-Cortez as a figure of hatred and revulsion, he persuasively diagnoses the dynamics at play:

More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place.  She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics.  The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to.  And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.

The focus on undeserving minorities receiving unearned benefits at white expense is not an incidental element of modern Republican politics; it is crucial to the GOP’s electoral strategy of dividing working-class voters along racial lines.

It is not too much to say that, in a single stroke, Serwer reminds us that the racial elements of Trumpism have long been at play in the Republican Party, while going straight to the added threat that Ocasio-Cortez presents.  She represents the fear of rising minority power and diminishing white privilege, which is fed by a Republican strategy of stoking fears that minorities basically steal wealth at whites’ expense.  Yet she also represents something of a double threat to politicians who appeal to such anxieties to maintain power: the possibility that a figure like Ocasio-Cortez can cut through such racial fear-mongering via a recognition of shared interests among working class Americans that transcends race, and re-calibrate political awareness more along the lines of a 1% versus 99% dynamic.

Likewise, Serwer contextualizes the basic status threat that minorities pose to whites when they gain positions of power, as noticeably happened in the 2018 midterms, which as Serwer notes resulted in the election of the most diverse Congress ever:

When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system. That poses a choice to those whose access to such cloistered communities is unquestioned: They can recognize that others might also succeed given the right circumstances, or they can defend the inequities of that system in an effort to preserve their self-image, attacking the new entrant as a charlatan or the group they belong to as backwards.

As the coup de grace, Serwer reminds us of how this relentless focus on supposedly undeserving minorities draws the focus away from the actual threats to security and power for white Americans: 

The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans. As long as rank-and-file Republicans are focused on these supposed villains, they won’t realize who is being conned, and who is trying to con them. And it isn’t Ocasio-Cortez.

For anyone who has marveled at the hatred Ocasio-Cortez has inspired — in a sickeningly sexist and racist breach of decorum, she was apparently the only Democratic member of Congress to draw Republican boo’s when she cast a vote for Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker — Serwer offers something of a skeleton key to unpack the mix of irrationality and calculation displayed by the GOP.  He hints at it but doesn’t explore the idea in depth — but clearly what has begun to infuriate the right still more is Ocasio-Cortez’s fundamental composure, righteousness, and fighting spirit in the face of their relentless disparagement (her reply to those GOP jeers? A tweet suggesting that they “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.” ) In this, Republicans may be helping bring to fruition their greatest nightmare: supercharging national focus on a politician who may end up playing an outsize share in helping refute generations of lies and propaganda about how a rise in minority power can only bring ruination upon white Americans.  Republicans also seem blind to the fact that the slings and arrows hurled at Ocasio-Cortez are felt sympathetically by untold millions of voters, minority and white, who understand that there is no more fundamentally American a story than the underdog who takes down those who cling to unmerited power.

Lost in the Suburbs

For anyone interested in understanding how the Democrats were able to flip the House so dramatically last November, even in the face of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, I’d recommend taking a look at this Vox article by Dylan Scott.  That the vote switching of suburban voters was a major driver of Republican losses has been generally reported; less explored has been what this fact actually means.  Scott digs into why so many of these voters switched parties in 2018, which is both fascinating in itself and vital to understanding how the Democrats might build an enduring House majority.

The broad move of suburban voters in the direction of the Democratic Party is striking; drawing on research by The Washington Post, Scott describes how the more densely populated a suburb was, the greater the share of Republican losses.  For instance, in 11 competitive races in rural districts, the GOP lost one seat; but in 9 heavily suburban districts, the GOP lost 6 seats.  

Scott identifies revulsion against President Trump as a prime reasons for this major shift in suburban voting patterns, a dislike amplified by his particularly low ratings among female voters.  But beyond this, these voters’ major political concerns are not shared by the president or the GOP, and vice versa.  First, Scott points to their higher education and income levels as giving them a greater sense of economic security; this, Scott asserts, means that they “don’t respond to Trump’s hardline rhetoric on immigrants and a border wall in the same way rural voters do.”  Likewise, their economic and educational status makes them less fearful of jobs being moved offshore.

Instead, their preoccupations are more “middle-class”: worries about health care costs, and about the Republican tax bill that scaled back breaks around state and local taxes that tend to help higher earners who tend to itemize their deductions.  He also suggests that support for gun control and fighting climate change are also on these voters’ radar.

One might think that voters who’d supported the GOP in the past would reward the party for the strong economy, but Scott observes that, “In an unfortunate paradox for Republicans, the economy mostly chugging along fine freed up these voters to devote more of their time to concerns about the president, who has an unparalleled ability to focus all attention on himself at all times.”   There’s merit in this point, but I wonder if it may understate the degree to which suburban voters were indeed motivated by economic concerns — such as rising health care costs — that the president and Republican Party have failed to address.

While a good chunk of previous GOP suburban voters chose not to support the party in 2018, I think it’s helpful to view this development from the flip side: that the GOP essentially moved away from these voters in both style and substance.  The government shutdown over the last month has hammered home that opposition to immigration, and a broader agenda of white nationalism, is at the center of Donald Trump’s politics - a politics supported with little dissent by the broader GOP.  If this is the new identity of the Republican Party, then a key question is why many previous GOP suburban supporters possess a sort of immunity to nationalist appeals.  After all, other studies have found that Trump’s support, in particular, isn’t necessarily linked to socio-economic status in a direct way; there is plenty of evidence that those not directly threatened by the prospect of an immigrant taking away their jobs are nonetheless supportive of the president’s nativist stance.  My guess is that these voters tend to be more integrated into, and thus more supportive of, an economy that depends on international trade.  Beyond this, perhaps their professional lives bring them into more frequent contact with those from other nations and backgrounds than someone living in a more rural district, effectively humanizing those that the president would seek to demonize.

Given the outsize importance that suburban seats played in the Democrats’ midterm victory, and the need to retain control of competitive districts (I’m thinking in particular of the various squeakers in Southern California), I’m quite curious to see how the Democratic Party will seek to consolidate these gains, and what tensions might emerge between the perceived needs of suburban voters and the progressive forces pushing the party toward goals like a Green New Deal and health care for all.