Hatred as a factor in presidential politics

Make what you will of this. In the modern era of partisan polarization, which can be dated back to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, only the president who was arguably the least hated, George H.W. Bush, was denied a second term. The others overcame intense hatred and were returned to office. Why should this be? Probably it's because the hatred of some groups for a president, or maybe for anyone, signals to other groups that that person deserves their love. You could take this idea further back in time. Who were the most hated presidents before Reagan? Lincoln? FDR? Nixon? All were reelected, Roosevelt three times. It was he who said of his bitterest and most entrenched critics, "I welcome their hatred." The current President may be too thin-skinned to echo Roosevelt, but he may yet find solace in FDR's example.

Some might ask, "But aren't the incumbents who lose obviously the most hated?" They shouldn't mistake disdain or contempt, which have undone their share of incumbents, with the passionate hatred so many modern presidents inspire. Presidents who seek reelection and fail have been judged for what they've done, not who they are. The haters try to convince voters to see the incumbent as they've see him all along, as they think he has always been, when the important thing is to convince people that the incumbent is a failure. Haters will say, "Of course he's a failure," but the rest can tell what they really mean.

Of course, failure these days depends on the eye of the beholder, and it's less certain than ever that passionate partisans can be convinced that their favorite has failed. But it's still the wiser course to try to prove the incumbent a failure than to try to prove him a menace. Since everyone is presumed to speak only for himself and not the country, calling the incumbent a menace will only show that he's a menace to you. Worse, it may only reconfirm a belief that you -- whoever or whatever you are -- deserve to be menaced or humiliated or simply defeated. The opposite approach might have better results: don't take the incumbent so seriously, and -- just maybe -- neither will his supporters. In short: 2020 could use more laughter than it'll probably get. 

What is it about Trump?

Part of it is this: millions of people who'd never want Donald Trump to be their boss now feel that he has become, or is becoming, exactly that. Something like this, I suspect, accounts for the great fear of his "authoritarian" tendencies, which in reality amount to the sort of insults and threats many expect from a disrespectful if not downright cruel employer. Unfortunately, the choice of this employer is nobody's own, unless someone is willing to leave the country rather than live under his rule -- an option few who feel this way about Trump will want to accept. The opposition to Trump thus becomes a metaphorical, almost spiritual general strike. It certainly isn't one in any material sense, or else the President might give it more attention than his usual spite. It remains true, of course, that Trump can't "fire" American citizens, as some no doubt fear he wants to, but that fear will persist as long as Trump does. Fear of the Trump movement is something else, to the extent that they want something more than Trump, but it's difficult to address that movement on its own terms while Trump himself remains on the scene. For that reason, 2024 could be an even more interesting year than 2020, but next year will be interesting enough in the proverbially Chinese sense of the term....

Has 'Why Liberalism Failed' Failed?

One of the most talked-about books in intellectual (or at least opinionated) circles over the past two years is Patrick J. Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. Recognizing conservative, leftist, populist and authoritarian dissatisfaction with the liberal order, Deneen reportedly traces it all to liberalism's ultimate inability to check self-indulgent, self-interested individualism on the social, cultural and economic fronts. I haven't read the book, but Robert Kuttner's review of the new paperback edition in The New York Review of Books tempts me to give the book a chance -- since Kuttner certainly doesn't. An editor and co-founder of The American Prospect magazine, Kuttner qualifies as a leading liberal thinker in the Democratic sense of the term. He's dismayed, if not disgusted by all the attention Deneen has received. In Kuttner's view, Why Liberalism Failed is at heart a brief for Catholic traditionalism that misrepresents both liberalism and the history from which it emerged. I can't judge whether he's fairly characterized the book until I read Deneen myself, but one fundamental distinction Kuttner draws is instructive. He quotes Deneen's definition of liberalism as an aspiration toward "the greatest possible freedom from external constraints" in order to damn it as a caricature. For Kuttner, liberalism's target isn't "external constraints" but plain and simple tyranny of all kinds, from aristocracy to theocracy, from bureaucratic statism to the tyranny of the majority.  Rather than failing or refusing to curb excessive individualism, Kuttner contends, liberalism is ever mindful of the limits imposed on individualism and collective power alike by the rights of others -- both other individuals and minority groups. Deneen, Kuttner claims, idealizes a pre-modern consensus in which few actually had any say and which often was enforced by cruel violence.

What Deneen actually says remains to be seen, but Kuttner's outraged review arguably plays into the author's hands. Deneen might well ask: what keeps a liberal from seeing any external constraint as tyranny? The answer must depend on how one defines "external constraint." From Kuttner's account, Deneen includes traditional values, including revealed religion, in the definition, but Kuttner himself, waxing anticlerical, argues that traditions often come with oppressive hierarchies and habits of intolerance that require the evolution of liberalism in defense of human rights. This might serve as evidence that liberals like Kuttner can't accept a normative consensus without looking for inquisitors behind every tree. Such heightened awareness of potential tyranny is well known in this country. It can be found on the left and the right alike as each sees the other as the potential tyrant. If we can no longer acquiesce in electoral defeat without worrying that tyranny is imminent, then one can argue -- though I don't say this is Deneen's argument -- that liberalism, however you define it, is failing. But while all sides seemingly grow more weary of Americans' absolute right to be assholes, I don't know if hyper-individualism is the true seed of liberalism's downfall. Liberalism is a product of particular historic conditions that no longer apply as they did in liberalism's heyday. You don't need to be a Marxist to believe this, and Marxists probably are wrong to see liberalism (or, as they'd say, bourgeois values) as characteristic of a mere stage, inevitably left behind, in human progress. It may be more useful to see the liberal/bourgeois epoch as an exceptional but not necessarily irreproducible episode in a more cyclical pattern of history -- perhaps as a high point from which decline rather than progress is inevitable, but definitely something that can't be permanent. If that's the case, the question of liberalism's failure would be as much a "when" as a "why." It could well be that Deneen is asking the wrong question, and Kuttner is giving the wrong answer anyway.

Evo-lution or Revolution

Evo Morales, Bolivia's leader since 2006, resigned over the weekend after losing the support of the country's military amid protests against alleged fraud in recent elections. Predictably, the global left sees Morales' fall as a coup d'etat, while the right (and many self-styled centrists) sees it as a victory for civil society, people power, etc. over a socialist caudillo. It comes as something as a surprise, since for all that Morales was as radical as Hugo Chavez and his movement in Venezuela, his government had seemed less tumultuous or dysfunctional than the Bolivarian regime. Yet there were signs that Morales' own people were tiring of him. His referendum to overturn term limits so he could remain in office had been defeated at the polls, though friendly judges found a questionable "human rights" excuse to overturn them anyway. Morales clearly saw himself as the sort of indispensable man that the sort of democratic revolution his supposedly was shouldn't really need. Unfortunately, self-conscious revolutions too often suffer from a sense of dependence upon strong personal will. Socialist revolutions seem particularly vulnerable to this dependency, and to the temptation to see individual leaders as indispensable. The Cincinnatus archetype has little appeal on the left, perhaps because it's a patrician archetype -- the leftist presumably has no plantation to which he longs to return, and does not see politics as a burdensome imposition on his personal life. They live to carry out revolution and so probably find it hard to imagine themselves retired from revolution. Yet to the extent that any of them believe their own revolutions to be democratic, they should not want them to be dependent on any one individual's will or vision. No one claiming to lead a democratic revolution should believe himself indispensable to history. That so many leaders do see themselves that way only lends credence to conservative, libertarian or anarchist charges that leftist revolutionaries are interested more in imposing their will on others than in liberating others. That being said, in Bolivia it could be argued that Morales had done enough by promising to hold a new election. To claim that the government can't be trusted to conduct a fair election is a grave charge, but one easily made by parties accustomed, as in Bolivia, to losing when victory seemed theirs by right. The possibility that Morales needed to be removed by extra-electoral means can't be ruled out absolutely -- nor can such possibilities be ruled out anywhere -- but the swiftness with which Bolivia reverted to a sad South American pattern is most likely to encourage those on the left who see the democratic revolutions in Bolivia and Venezuela as failed or hopelessly flawed experiments, overly vulnerable to counterrevolutionary or "imperialist" manipulation. Should the hapless Maduro finally fall in Venezuela, we may well see a reversion on the left to all-out Leninist tactics, including the immediate suppression of all opposition during the seizure of power. While others may draw different lessons from Morales' career, some may conclude that his real failing was his failure to seize absolute power and eliminate his enemies as soon as possible. It's not clear whether what's happening in Bolivia is a right-wing coup or not, but if right-leaning authoritarianism seems ascendant in much of the world, a violent revival of Leninism in response should surprise no one.

Sign of an off-year election

Seen today in Albany NY

Who knew that job was subject to a vote? Did anyone see a "Give Us Barabbas" sign anywhere?...

'Lock him up' part two

A day after I wrote about liberals lamenting the spectacle of baseball fans chanting "Lock him up!" at the President of the United States, a textbook example of this tendency appeared in the local paper. Jonathan Bernstein's piece exemplifies the slippery-slope thinking of those who reject the obvious when it doesn't fit their narrative, and shows an unhealthy condescension toward people who probably share many of his views. Bernstein and other concerned citizens are determined to hear "Lock him up" as a call for lawlessness. To be fair, Bernstein acknowledges what to most people would be the obvious meaning of the chant. Isn't it "Merely shorthand for saying [Trump] should be tried and held accountable for his crimes"? It can't be that, though, because another pundit thought the crowd wanted Trump "jailed without due process," which is "an authoritarian strategy, even when liberals do it," and another called the chant "an act of desperation that says that you don't believe in the rule of law." Bernstein himself rejects the implicit-due process reading because " we can't know everyone meant that. And the chant only encourages those who do not." He worries that people who say such things "can wind up valuing results over democratic processes." 

These pundits seem to be confusing "Lock him up" with "String him up." When crowds start chanting that, we can all start to worry. Until then, only a morbid fear of "mob rule" (the dark side of "people power") can explain these ideologues' refusal to accept the most straightforward interpretation of both the anti-Trump chant and its anti-Clinton precursor. All this shuddering over the heckling of the President betrays an unhealthy distrust of fellow citizens' commitment to the rule of law. Perhaps this is why some are so quick to describe today's angry movements as "populism." Maybe they don't trust anyone outside their own professional class to be a proper American citizen. And if they seem more worried lately, it may because they realize that the rest of us -- right, left or other -- know what they think.

'Lock him up!'

The President visited the World Series the other day to see the home team play. There's footage showing his smile collapse and his face harden as he first sees his image appear on the stadium's big screen and then hears many in the crowd chanting, "Lock him up! Lock him up!" The day after, it was interesting to learn that some liberals and anti-Trump types were unhappy with the crowd. Many in the opposition will see the incident simply as Donald Trump getting a taste of his own medicine, years after encouraging "Lock her up" chants about Hillary Clinton. Many of those experiencing qualms about the baseball crowd might have had no problem with the people simply booing the President, but hearing "Lock X up" directed at any politician really bugs them. It is a portent of the "criminalization of politics," by which is meant not the takeover of politics by criminals but an authoritarian or merely extremist tendency to treat political opponents as criminals, regardless of their actual conduct.  There's a good deal of bad faith behind the "criminalization of politics" concept, or at least a reluctance to believe that others actually might believe political candidates to be literal, statutory criminals. This defensiveness against the possibility of an illegitimate criminalization of politics has fostered a belief in what I call "partisan immunity," perhaps best described as the suspicion that any criminal charge against a candidate or elected official is motivated primarily if not exclusively by partisanship. One could believe that some people would rather let politicians get away with at least some corruption rather than risk law enforcement becoming a partisan tool. But the American political system should be able to survive even the sort of criminal scandal that could result in the dismantling of a major political party -- unless one believes that only the established institutional strength of the two main parties prevents the republic from becoming a one-party state. That's an open question for another time, but we shouldn't leave the ballpark without noting one more curious thing about the anxiety over the "Lock him up" chant. Had this been Russia, and had Vladimir Putin gone to a soccer match only to hear the fans chant zaperet' yevo, the same people who hate to see similar chants directed at either Trump or Clinton almost certainly would be applauding the Russian crowd for a brave and necessary display of "people power." Name any foreign authoritarian and the response from America most likely would be the same. What, then, is different about the United States? Do our classically liberal political institutions render "people power" of this sort unnecessary or even subversive? While other countries need more democracy, do we need not as much? These chants aren't literally "speaking truth to power," but they're at least part of what civil-society enthusiasts mean when they applaud that ideal. Rather than warn against the dire implications of such language, critics should concern themselves more productively with encouraging people to make such demands more consistently. But even when those demands aren't made consistently, that doesn't mean that all of them are wrong.

Into the vacuum

Establishment Democrats and neocon Republicans agree that the President has done a bad thing by  withdrawing U.S. troops from northern Syria and leaving the Kurds, longtime American favorites in the Middle East, to assault from Turkey. As usual, the Kurds are the hard-luck story of the region, having no enclaves of wealth or power abroad, but only pundits and politicians to promote their cause. Their claim to nationhood is no less compelling than those of other peoples, but the imperial moment when a Kurdish state could have been created passed without action, and indigenous sovereignty in Syria, Turkey and Iraq will concede nothing to the Kurds on principle. The Kurds' only hope down the line is for the sort of existential war that would carve a Kurdish enclave from one or more of those nations by force, and even that probably would mean ethnic cleansing for the Kurds in the victorious nation or nations. It may be unfair, but what price fairness? Meanwhile, those mourning in advance for the Kurds of northern Syria also bemoan the likelihood of Russia acquiring more influence in the region as a broker between their Syrian friends and their Turkish neighbors. As usual, Donald Trump is blamed whenever Russia's geopolitical prestige appears to improve, but all his latest move shows is that his zone of economic competition with Russia isn't as expansive as others' zone of ideological competition. Some would have us take alarm anytime Russia appears to benefit from some Trumpian decision, as if 21st geopolitics operates on zero-sum principles, according to which any Russian gain means harm to the U.S. Where exactly is the harm to the U.S. in leaving Russia to sort out the Syrian mess? Syria is already a Russian client state, and there never was a realistic chance of it becoming an American client. Is Russia better positioned to harm American interests now? Some certainly will argue that it is, but they presume that Russia's mere existence as a geopolitically competitive "authoritarian" regime is a threat to the U.S. It may be a threat to American businesses and maybe even entire sectors of the U.S. economy, but Russia's potential to harm the American people depends on a lot of variables and is less than automatic. To some Americans, of course, the power to harm is harm, while the necessity of dealing respectfully with other powers, regardless of their forms or styles of government, remains an insult to those who see themselves as almost the only free people on Earth. Those Americans who aren't as invested in one way or another in global hegemony or dominance of any particular part of the wider world will be less panicked by recent developments. There are plenty of reasons to oppose President Trump, but this story isn't really one of them. Meanwhile, if the Russians really want to take more responsibility for the region, let them face the likely consequences....

Can Sinophobia save the U.S.?

Ross Douthat perceives an encouraging "bipartian, pan-ideological" consensus emerging in response to China's attempt to intimidate National Basketball Association personnel into silence on the ongoing Hong Kong controversy. He hopes that this perceived outrage will become "a permanent factor in U.S. politics," believing that "it might take the looming-up of a rival power to remind us of who we are and what we do not want to be." But I wonder whether this consensus of outrage exists beneath the surface of the media and the political class. I can understand why Douthat would expect freedom of speech to be a rallying point for all sides in American politics, but all sides seem increasingly hypocritical on that particular point. One person's freedom of speech could be another's hate speech , after all -- or, depending on your perspective, treason. Leaving partisanship out of it, many Americans might well believe that Hong Kong really is none of our business, or at least nothing worth compromising profitable relationships like that between the NBA and the Chinese market. More generally, my suspicion for a while now has been that 21st century partisanship, exacerbated by social media, is making Americans increasingly skeptical of the absolute value of free speech. Whether you're partisan or not, and perhaps especially if you're not, you've probably had cause to question whether at least some opinions you've seen or heard were worth expressing. Our increased ability to have our opinions seen really hasn't clarified or elevated our political conversations. It may instead have encouraged the suspicion that the opinionated person is just an asshole who's part of the problem rather than part of the solution -- presuming that he reserves the right to object to all solutions. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if fewer people acknowledge genuinely principled objections to political proposals; all the noise seems to boil down to, "I object as a black/Christian/gay/gun owner/etc., etc." Of course, Douthat may be onto something if he anticipates Americans overcoming their objections to each other to agree that those foreigners can't tell us to shut up about anything. But in a column in which he worries about the global appeal of the Chinese authoritarian model, Douthat may underestimate the extent to which American democracy has undermined its own appeal or its will for self-defense.

Flyover Man: See ya in hell, brother.

David Brooks hates Donald Trump but strives to love his voters. He takes their side in an imaginary dialogue pitting "Flyover Man," presumably representing the country between the coasts, and "Urban Guy," apparently an indiscriminate hater of all things Trumpian. Flyover Man apparently doesn't give a damn about the Ukraine scandal, though Brooks has him acknowledge that whatever Trump attempted with the Ukrainian government isn't even "among the 25 worst things he's done." Flyover Man, Brooks believes, will stick with Trump through thick and thin, and with fewer reservations in 2020 than he had in 2016. That's because Trump remains -- in Flyover Man's or Brooks' opinion -- the only politician who "saw us." Democrats, meanwhile, remain "unable to acknowledge our problems." What are these problems? They include the disappearance of "good jobs for hardworking people," which Democrats certainly don't ignore, but also the spread of "a cultural liberalism you preach but don't practice [?]" that results in "the breakdown of families up and down my block," the belief that "China is replacing us," and -- probably the dealbreaker for many Democrats -- the belief that "mass immigration is changing my town, region and state." While these problems persist, Democrats appear concerned only with impeachment, open borders, and socialism. Flyover Man claims -- it's unclear whether Brooks agrees with this or not -- that to vote Democrat in 2020 is to "sign up for our own obliteration." Such talk, including the claim that 2020 will be about "identity and pride," most likely makes Flyover Man's complaint that "every time I open my mouth you call me a bigot" a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since Brooks is a conservative columnist, Flyover Man gets, however improbably, the last word, but the columnist must realize that he hasn't really furthered what I presume is his own agenda, which is to get real Flyover Man a more sympathetic hearing from the media mainstream. Brooks's Flyover Man seems to fear the mere fact of change or transformation, inevitable as these are in the modern world, and that fear only confirms liberal bias against him and his causes. On the other hand, determined to show that Flyover Man is not a knee-jerk bigot, Brooks emphasizes his protagonists moral concerns over a vague yet presumably hypocritical "cultural liberalism." Brooks himself is more a critic of liberalism than a political conservative at this point -- he indicts capitalist individualism as well as cultural liberalism in other writings -- but even to talk of "cultural liberalism" in such general and pejorative terms is likely to get Flyover Man, if not Brooks himself, denounced as some Moral Majority troglodyte. It's unclear whether real Flyover Men are as reticent as Brooks suggests -- his protagonist keeps his opinions to himself out of fear of "blue cultural privilege" and claims to work too hard to pay attention to social media -- but it's also unclear what they (or he) expect from the wider world. Brooks asks for the right to say that liberalism is wrong without being slandered, but liberals have just as much right, as experience shows, to say that conservatism, not to mention Trumpism, is wrong.  Again, most observers will readily acknowledge that Flyover Man, his "privilege" notwithstanding, has had it rough lately, but if acknowledging that requires you to affirm that Flyover Man is some sort of blameless innocent and right in all his concerns and desires -- if it obliges you to endorse Brooks's own agenda of restoring some sort of Judeo-Christian traditionalism reinforced by a more strident nationalism that the nation has ever known -- then Flyover Man should expect further disappointment. Brooks's protagonist, after vowing to stick with "my captain," the President, through thick and thin, closes with "See ya in hell, brother." If that's where we're going in 2020 and beyond, though, that's as much on him and his kind as on anyone else.

Freedom, Happiness and Necessity

Reviewing a book on Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom in the October 7 Nation, academic Peter E. Gordon summarizes a number of philosophical arguments in favor of socialism. One of these has a familiar ring to it: "People can realize themselves and achieve true happiness only if they have the freedom to pursue their individual and collective goals, and they can do that only if they do not find their life paths obstructed at every turn by economic need." This echoes a Marxist distinction between a "realm of necessity" and a "realm of freedom" that non-Marxists, conservatives in general and perhaps most people have never accepted. The criteria for freedom and happiness implicit here are simply too stringent without reflecting people's historic lived experience. It's not "false consciousness" to believe both that the world doesn't owe you a living and that you can be both free and happy in such a world. Happiness is self-evidently subjective, but so is freedom -- it wouldn't be freedom otherwise. To assert that freedom only exists only certain conditions may seem philosophically sound, but the consciousness of freedom and the sense of happiness that follows from it are not answerable to logic. The sort of formulation paraphrased by Gordon presumes an objective definition of both freedom and happiness when none really exists. It tends to reinforce the impression that socialists, or leftists in general, simply can't cope with the world as it is -- that they, in short, are losers. It's a wrong impression so long as not everything about "the world as it is" is unalterable, and some things ought to be altered. But holding out for the abolition of necessity, or believing it can abolished by legislation, is overly idealistic and contrary to past socialist (or at least communist) practice. Fortunately for socialists, there are other potentially more persuasive philosophical arguments they can employ. But the revulsion at necessity cited here seems all too much like the way many of today's younger leftists feel about the world. It makes you wonder what they really mean when they talk about the necessity of change.

Unimpeachable?

There's no use going over the legal aspects of whether the President illegally solicited assistance in his reelection from a foreign government in the form of incriminating information on his likely opponent. Donald Trump will never be convicted or removed from office by the U.S. Senate as currently constituted. If the Senate would not convict President Clinton when the opposition controlled the upper house, conviction is infinitely less likely when the President's own party controls it. It's hard to envision a vote to convict as anything other than political suicide for any GOP senator, as the Trump movement, under whatever name, will most likely survive the Trump presidency, whenever it ends. Convinced of pervasive corruption among career politicians and as incapable of objectivity as most Americans today, they are unlikely to be convinced by any revelations that may yet emerge that voting to remove Trump would not be treasonous, or at least treacherous. The Biden family's role in the Ukraine story can only exacerbate Trumpist suspicions. They'll focus on the purported original offense, Joe Biden's alleged interference in inquiries into his son's Ukrainian activities, as if it -- whatever it is -- entitled Trump to seek the truth by any means necessary. For them, Democratic corruption is always a more pressing issue than any irregularities on Trump's part. The presumption of Democratic corruption isn't merely Trumpian, after all, but fundamental to Republican thinking. From the GOP's beginnings, Republicans have argued that Democrats have systematically used politics for personal gain, both for themselves and for their constituents. Democratic corruption will always appear more serious to them than Republican excess -- and to be fair, the only fault in the Republican charge, historically speaking, is the hypocrisy of their own implicit claim to innocence.

If it's certain that Trump will survive impeachment, the real question is whether Democrats will suffer a backlash from voters in 2020. After Clinton's impeachment, in 1998, the Republicans didn't lose their majority in Congress, but did lose enough seats to compel Newt Gingrich, an impeachment cheerleader, to resign his Speakership. The current Democratic majority in the House is smaller than the majority the GOP enjoyed in 1998, and in 2020, of course, the Presidency is in play as well.  Many Democrats today, believing Trump illegitimate from the beginning, are determined to demand his removal regardless of consequences. They may not think anything else necessary, but they have some tough thinking to do right now about Joe Biden. The Biden allegations -- some call them a conspiracy theory -- are inextricably linked, like it or not, to Trump's Ukraine scandal. Contemporary zero-sum thinking inevitably will lead people to think that damaging Trump will benefit, and is meant to benefit, the Democratic front-runner. With a backlash against Biden a sure thing, it might be advisable, if not fair, for Democratic leaders to persuade him to withdraw from the presidential campaign. Getting him out would have to be carefully done, however, to discourage the belief that there is fire in Ukraine where there had only been smoke. Biden would need to explain that his withdraw is meant to keep the public's focus on Trump's offenses, but at the same time he would need to welcome more extensive inquiries into his son's activities and his own dealings with the Ukrainian government. Biden's withdrawal would create an additional problem, since no other candidate among the Democrats seems to unite as much of Barack Obama's coalition as his vice-president does. On the other hand, Biden's departure would create an opening for a younger moderate amid continued skepticism among some core constituencies about the leading radicals in the race. Whether the nation needs a moderate Democrat at the helm at this time is a separate question, but as things stand it seems like such a person is more likely to beat Trump next year than the perceived extremists are -- though they shouldn't be underrated, as each for different reasons may be a rhetorical trap for the loose-tongued President. Wherever Democratic deliberations lead, however, they should not delude themselves into thinking that they'll have Mike Pence to deal with a year from now -- unless, of course, Donald Trump should commit the political equivalent of filing for bankruptcy when things get too hot for him.

The Bolt(on) Cutter

I'd applaud the President's dismissal of National Security Advisor Bolton more enthusiastically if I weren't still questioning his hiring of the man in the first place. To be honest, I think I know what Trump was thinking. Having a notorious neocon hawk like Bolton on his team was no doubt meant to signal to hostile powers that neocon options like regime change were still on the table in the Trump administration. It should have been clear to Trump early, however, that Bolton was unlikely to see his preferred course of action merely as one option among many. The problem with Bolton was that he didn't represent simply one option for action but a worldview most likely radically different from Donald Trump's. While Trump seems to see competition among nations as inevitable, especially in the economic realm, he seems less inclined to see relations between the U.S. and any other country, with the possible exception of Iran, as inherently or existentially adversarial. The President most likely doesn't see regime change as the ideal goal in his dealings with any other nation. He's probably too convinced of his own ability to make deals with anyone to think it necessary to replace anyone. His acceptance of competition as the norm and his willingness to criticize allies close him off from the idealistic neocon vision of harmony (and free trade?) among democracies. Meanwhile, while he may have hoped that hiring Bolton might frighten hostile governments, Trump probably realizes by now that his counterparts around the world don't scare so easily. Bolton more likely inspires loathing rather than fear among foreign leaders and diplomats. If anyone in the White House inspires anything like fear abroad, it's most likely Trump himself on the Nixonian "madman" principle. And then the fear is not so much that he might change a country's government, but that he might destroy that country outright in a fit of pique. He probably inspires less fear by now than he thinks he does -- among foreign leaders, at least, -- but he's still more suited to the "bad cop" role in his own foreign policy than Bolton ever could have been.

Are all fanatics the same?

Inspired by Dostoevsky, David Brooks imagines in his latest column that extremists on the American "alt-right" and their equivalents on the far left are fundamentally, or at least temperamentally, the same. Both are -- or both see themselves as -- "sick," "spiteful" and "unattractive." Their "rage is intertwined with psychological fragility" and their "anger at real wrongs is corrupted [by narcissistic] existential panic." Those "who fill the air with hate" were alike "raised without coherent moral frameworks" and "in that coddling way that protects you from every risk except real life." Always uncertain of their place in the world or the social order, yet assured that "you can be anything you want to be," they yearn for order based on "blunt simplicities" and "Manichean binaries." Inevitably drawn to politics, they "make everything political." The column goes on and on in the first person, aping the narration of Dostoevsky's underground man. Brooks's own narrative is centrist and shallow. It's also a conservative temperament of an old type, distrustful of all other "isms" and inclined to see "fanaticism" as a type unto itself that defines fanatics of all kinds more than their individual beliefs. It's also distrustful of "the political" or the tendency to politicize things presumably outside the realm of elections or legislation. From a perspective self-consciously distant from that politicizing tendency -- even though declaring anything outside politics is arguably an ultimate political act -- political fanaticism tends to blur into a spectral singularity, especially when you're trapped in a bipolarchy in which both major parties seem increasingly controlled by fanatics. From a different perspective, neither partisan nor centrist, the two factions Brooks abhors don't look so alike. You needn't believe that one is better than the other to recognize differences that remain arguably more important than the traits shared by "fanatics." Without underestimating anger on the alt-right, it still seems to me that those people are less angry than their counterparts in antifa or elsewhere on the far left. That may be for the simple reason that alt-right types now feel secure in a group identity while leftists as individuals remain in relative existential crisis. Whether that's so or not, I still work under the assumption that the 21st century American right takes a more amusedly fatalistic attitude toward life (i.e. "everything's a joke") than the perpetually-outraged part of the left. Maybe I simply see more trollishness than pure rage on the right based on what I look at, but whatever a rightist's mood there most likely remains a definitive difference in expectations between right and left grounded in the proverbial assumption, on the right, that the world doesn't owe you a living, and the left's insistence that a civilized (or "just") world actually does.  The right-wing opinions I encounter seem less driven by fear of the Other then by contempt for certain personality types regardless of ethnic or cultural origin. I don't want to suggest that there's no fear on the right -- economic and social insecurity fuels extremism across the board -- but I do think that fear is stronger, for whatever reason, on the left. There probably are ways to test these hypotheses, but my main point here is to suggest that it remains more useful to probe the differences between right and left, or between the  "alt" versions of each, than to dismiss them as a single psychological type, as Brooks does. Such thinking could lead people to think that both extremes can be purged from American life more easily than is probably the case.

The end of the democratic mission?

David Brooks lamented in a column last week that Americans seemed uninterested in the Hong Kong protest movement. Neither major political party "any longer sees America as a vanguard nation whose mission is to advance universal democracy and human dignity," he writes, though he hopes that the Hong Kong protesters will "rekindle the sense of democratic mission that used to burn so forcefully in American hearts." Brooks has an explanation for the apparent indifference of the American left; their unforgiving emphasis on "slavery and oppression" keeps them from seeing the U.S. as "a beacon or an example." He offers not even that brief an explanation for why "the American right no longer believes in spreading democracy to foreigners." If pressed, his explanation most likely would have something to do with Donald Trump, but it's more likely that whatever explains the attitude of the right, if Brooks perceives it correctly, also explains Trump. The right's objections to pro-democracy interventionism are more likely cynical than ideological. American adventurism in the Middle East since the turn of the century probably has disabused many of Trump's constituents of the idea that the mere existence of dictators is an existential threat to the American homeland. The "Arab Spring" in particular put into question whether greater democratization in some places was beneficial to the U.S. Taking a wider view, to the extent that the democratization narrative was tied to narratives of globalization and economic liberalization, it shouldn't surprise us to see Americans grow different to foreign struggles for democracy. 21st century Trumpian nationalism is more concerned with economic than ideological threats to the nation. These nationalists see Hong Kong's Chinese overlords as antagonists, but they don't necessarily believe that unfair Chinese trade practices follow necessarily from China's form of government. Dictators don't threaten us in our pocketbooks, where many Americans feel threatened today. The Chinese threat would seem little different to many Americans, probably, were China a de facto democracy like Japan. If anything, if Americans remember the neoliberal/neoconservative argument that economic liberalization would lead to greater democracy and a stronger economy for former tyrannies, they might well welcome any relapse into tyrannical practices by a major economic competitor like China. Whether Trumpets or others are right to see China primarily if not exclusively as an economic threat is a debate for another time, but while they see China that way what happens in Hong Kong won't make much difference to them -- unless they see it as an opportunity to hurt China's economy with sanctions. If that happens Brooks may see things that look like a rekindling of the old democratic mission, but he shouldn't be fooled by them -- though he probably will be.

Tragedy reenacted as farce

Just to set up a little story, let me explain that I lost my old newspaper job this spring (no hard feelings) but have landed a new position elsewhere after coasting on severance pay awhile. There was an orientation session for new hires today, and part of the program covered what was to be done in the event of an active shooter in the workplace. The instructional video pulled few punches, showing what a live instructor aptly called a "Vin Diesel type" clad in militant black marching into a building, producing a shotgun and blowing away several people. The surviving workers demonstrated recommended methods of escaping, hiding or, if necessary, fighting the attacker. Unfortunately, the video's budget didn't allow for the use of master thespians, as became clear when characters attempted to emote. So maybe bad acting can ruin any mood or disrupt any purpose, or maybe there was a certain mood in the room two days after the incidents in El Paso and Dayton. All I can say definitely is that whenever one of the fictional employees was shown panicking, there was a lot of laughter in our orientation room.  I've long noticed that lots of people look for any excuse to laugh at something seemingly serious onscreen, and not only because that something has turned out unintentionally funny. For some, that impulse expresses a preference to treat everything in life, if not life itself, as a joke, in order to not look weak or like a whiner. Others may have other reasons for laughing and needing to laugh. And if people, for whatever reason, can laugh at a sincerely-intended instructional film about surviving a mass shooting within 48 hours of the real thing twice over, that impulse must be irrepressible. Whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm not quite sure.

Amoklauf at Walmart

Investigators in El Paso are hoping to learn the motive behind today's slaughter of 20 people in a local Walmart, and the wounding of many others, from both alleged online writings of the shooter and interviews with the shooter himself, who reportedly surrendered to police without a fight. Words are merely rationalizations, however; all that really matters is that this person felt entitled to mass murder. You can believe any garbage you please without feeling such an entitlement. Not everyone learns the desire to kill from books or sermons or online ravings. Some no doubt turn to ideology or religion simply to find an excuse that fits their mood. It remains all too easy for people like this, whatever their beliefs, to kill others. Neither left nor right has the answer for this murderous sense of entitlement. The actual ideologues on both sides no doubt sincerely deplore the senseless sort of violence we've seen today; some actually may believe that specific people or sorts of people should die, but randomly motivated violence, as this most likely was, serves no purpose for them. There is, of course, an ideological predisposition on one side against limiting the ability of degenerates like the latest shooter to kill by limiting the availability of many firearms, just as there's an unjustified optimism on the other that greater gun control will end mass murder. There are also persistent assumptions that old forms of mental or emotional discipline will overcome this murderous sense of entitlement, as well as theories that eliminating certain "dehumanizing" stimuli will abort the murderous impulse. But the impulse to commit mass murder probably predates all philosophies and religions and pop culture. Yet the impulse seems stronger in our time, and not just in the gun-happy U.S. as various bladed rampages in Asia attest. City and state officials in El Paso are calling on the people to unite after today's atrocity, though they were predictably reticent about addressing the problems of gun violence and mass murder specifically. If people are to unite for a solution, however, they must be willing to address all possible solutions, or else the coming together will be merely a show. It's hard, after all -- or it should be -- to imagine a solution worse than this problem. The suspicion that some solutions might be worse may be as much a problem, if not as great a danger, as the entitlement to kill.

Bullying at the Democratic debates?

Senator Warren of Massachusetts showed herself "an effective bully" during the latest round of Democratic debates, according to New York Daily News columnist S. E. Cupp. Warren's bullying, Cupp writes, consisted of questioning the courage of more moderate candidates who refuse to endorse the "Medicare for all" idea. In her own words, "We're not going to solve the urgent problems we face with small ideas and spinelessness." Cupp equates this with questioning the manhood of those contenders -- all male from Cupp's account, who don't share Warren's vision. To call them spineless is insulting, certainly, but is it bullying? Hardly. For the progressives to call the moderates spineless is no more bullying than for the moderates to claim that the progressives effectively are handing the 2020 election to President Trump. Perhaps personal factors account for Cupp's reading of the debate -- she writes as if her own honor as a moderate Democrat has been besmirched by Warren -- but as far as I know the debates will continue with the moderates unbowed. Cupp's real complaint seems to be that Warren is unwilling to meet the moderates on the ground they prefer. They argue that "Medicare for all" is impractical and impolitic and claim, in Cupp's words, to be "strategic and realistic" about that. Whether they are right hasn't been shown yet. Unfortunately for them, they're up against a mindset that treats assertions of limits with angry skepticism. Progressives seem too ready to believe that all limits -- except those of the planet's resources -- are man-made. If someone tells them some pet project of theirs can't be done, they assume the skeptic means simply that he doesn't want it done for some selfish reason or another. At their most reckless, they assume, as did generations of tragic fools during the 20th century, that all obstacles can be overcome by political will. To their minds, it's the moderate belief that "Medicare for all" won't work, not any inherent flaw to the idea, that keeps it from becoming a reality. Again, I'm not learned enough on the subject to say whether it can be done, although it is clear that in any nearly evenly divided legislature passing the thing will be supremely difficult. But that's why we need more than assertion and counterassertion in the debates, though there probably isn't time for much more than that given the bloated field of candidates. Moderate observers like Cupp may feel that progressives like Warren are trying to cut off debate in a bullying way by questioning the courage of skeptics, but moderates should be careful not to use "it can't be done" as yet another method of cutting off debate. And for what it's worth, I would have expected the moderate Democrats to be less likely to accuse opponents of bullying than the presumably more sensitive or p.c. progressives. But when moderates are accused of spinelessness from both left and right in our time, I suppose Cupp's lament is sadly unsurprising.

The appeal of "socialism"

This week's Democratic debates may refocus the President's mind on the threat of socialism, since they put Bernie Sanders back in the spotlight. Until someone finds a way to say that denouncing socialism is inherently racist, Donald Trump should be on safer ground targeting Sanders, though my feeling back in 2016 was that, had Sanders won the Democratic nomination, Trump's likely ranting against socialism during the general-election debates would have left him looking like the archetypal old man yelling at the cloud. It would have made Trump look irrelevant, since he would have seemed to be fighting Cold War battles that no longer mattered much to many people. I'm not sure that approach would strike people the same way in 2020, if only because, for good or ill, the socialism issue fuels the Trump narrative that opposition to himself and his causes is essentially un- or anti-American. "Socialism" may be what you trot out when you can't tell an old white guy to go back where he came from. How such a line of attack will play with younger voters remains unclear. There's been a lot of hand-wringing in recent years about young people's openness to socialist ideas. They're too young to see "socialism" in practice, some say, identifying "socialism" with the worst of the Soviet Union. That may be looking at the problem from the wrong angle. How much of the enthusiasm shown for Sanders and his rivals on the left wing of the Democratic party results from naivete about the history of Marxism, and how much is fueled by increased disdain for capitalism? For all intents and purposes the liberal Democratic ideal of capitalism -- the belief that if you worked hard, you would do well -- is dead. Fewer people are reconciled to the contingency of modern work. Many no doubt ask: why should my life depend on being useful to someone who doesn't have to give a damn about me? To the extent that they saw capitalism as a kind of social contract that delivered security in return for work, they want to make a similar deal, but preferably with the state or "the people" and with no profit motive involved. Refute Marx or any socialist thinker as thoroughly as you can and there'll still be a demand for an alternative to capitalism. Rail against socialism all you want, yet you won't get to the bottom of this widespread discontent. For that reason, an anti-socialist campaign can only have limited appeal, especially if the campaigner stakes everything on identifying socialism completely with Marxism and Leninism. A deeper argument will be necessary to reconcile people to the current economic order -- if that's your goal, that is -- whether by persuading them that no alternative is possible or telling them that their objections are immoral. I don't know if capitalism's most vocal defenders today are capable of that sort of deeper argument -- but then again, I don't know if that'll be necessary next year....

Hong Kong's long hot summer

The immediate provocation of this year's pro-democracy protests in the special autonomous region of Hong Kong is a proposed extradition law reportedly allowed for the transfer of local defendants to the mainland for trial. This was seen by opponents as a way for the Chinese Communist Party to deal with local dissidents on its own terms rather than those set by the treaty that transferred control of Hong Kong from Great Britain to the People's Republic. The treaty lets Hong Kong retain its own political and legal system, with extensive civil liberties absent on the mainland, until at least 2047. For all intents and purposes, Hong Kong dissidents are protesting, sometimes violently, against the inevitability of greater control by Beijing and its Communist regime. But if anything, the extent of the protests, which have included vandalism of the local legislature and demonstrations targeting mainland tourists -- who will probably get in trouble with their government merely for being victims of circumstances -- could hasten that day. 1989 taught the world that Beijing abhors "turmoil," and there's hardly a better word to describe what's been going on in Hong Kong. One person's turmoil, of course, is another person's dissent, and inevitably the Hong Kong protesters have had many sympathetic observers outside China. Even though the extradition bill is a creation of Hong Kong's own legislature, the protests are widely perceived to be against the mainland. That perception legitimizes them in many eyes, even though Hong Kong is at least theoretically a liberal democratic entity. One wonders whether all the Americans cheering on the protesters would cheer as loudly for demonstrations of similar size and intensity against some new policy of their own president or some new measure from their lower house of Congress. The simple answer is that some would and some wouldn't depending on who's being protested. Legitimacy is relative -- and meanwhile, foreign support for the actual protesters feeds the Chinese Communist narrative that the protests are, to use an American term, astroturfed, fueled by foreign money if not by foreign governments. None of this means outsiders should express solidarity with Hong Kong dissidents concerned over the ultimate loss of their civil liberties. But we had better understand that people power will not prevail there. Beijing doesn't care how repression might look to the rest of the world as long as the Communists control what their own subjects see of it. Hong Kong has no chance of becoming an independent state, and not even terrorism will deter Beijing from consolidating its power there when the time comes, if not before. China has experienced terrorism, and has answered with mass re-education camps. If people in Hong Kong want to escape that fate -- if they value their right to complain more than anything the mainland can offer them -- they should plan to be elsewhere in 2047, if a barricaded world will have them.

Is individualism racist?

In the U.S., individualist thought is identified with a "conservative" economic and social policy, which prioritizes individual rights to property and free enterprise over so-called "social rights." The assumption is that upholding social rights -- positive entitlements owed to all human beings -- compromises individuals' freedom of action, or their ability to enjoy all the fruits of their labor. Although individualism also fits quite well with hedonist notions prevalent on the U.S. left, the constant appeals to individual liberty by corporate types and their Republican defenders have soured many leftists on individualism as the basis of rights in a democratic society. In the July 29/August 5 Nation, Greg Grandin praises Bernie Sanders for "waging practically a one-person crusade to legitimize social rights" and "striking at the core cultural belief that holds the modern conservative movement together." For Grandin, the concept of social rights dates at least as far back as the 18th century, when the pre-revolutionary French philosopher Montesquieu wrote that that states owed their citizens "a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health."  For what it's worth, Montesquieu also wrote that the "spirit of trade and industry," as opposed to an indolence encouraged by some charitable entities, like the monasteries of pre-Reformation England, was a precondition for a state's ability to uphold those social rights. That's not inconsistent with the familiar Democratic argument for capitalism with regulations and taxes for the common good, but Grandin seems to have something more radical than that in mind.

Grandin affirms the premise, articulated by Franklin Roosevelt, that "necessitous men are not free." In other words, also FDR's, "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." However, economic individualism rationalizes efforts to thwart the achievement of mass "economic security" or liberate people from necessity. The ideology of individual liberty, Grandin fears, can't help but perpetuate the inequality that undermines "true individual freedom." In modern times, he argues, that ideology has become actively malevolent. His article -- in which he speaks presumably for himself and not necessarily for Sanders -- leaps from the assumption that individualism = inequality to the more explosive assertion that, through the words and deeds of modern Republican conservatives, individualism has become racialized to the degree that it serves as one of the many "dog whistles" that stir up the rednecks everywhere.  Unfortunately for Grandin, there's more assertion than proof in his article. He claims that American reactionaries began to identify "social rights" with racial equality after World War II, once international bodies increasingly demanded both. "As the 'darker nations' took up the fight to legitimize social and economic rights, the opposition intensified, with individual rights embodying whiteness and social rights exemplifying blackness," Grandin writes. This is too neat a package for its own good. It ignores the fact that during the Cold War, Marxism and communism weren't really identified with "dark" people, but with the Russians and decadent domestic intellectuals, the popularity of nonwhites like Mao and Che notwithstanding. Grandin's deductive reasoning seems to go like this: individualism perpetuates inequality; inequality is largely along racial lines; therefore individualism endorses racial hierarchy. He may as well say that individualists refuse to acknowledge their privilege. "It is impossible to extricate individual rights -- to possess and bear arms and to call on the power of the state to protect those rights -- from the bloody history that gave rise to those rights, from the entitlements that settlers and slavers wrested from people of color as they moved across the land," he insists.

"Individual-rights absolutism is the flywheel that keeps all the cruel constituencies of the modern right spinning," Grandin closes, "Break that wheel, and you break the movement." That would require convincing some of those constituencies that the individualist ideology is as contradictory and self-defeating (or self-serving) as he thinks it is. I don't see that happening soon. For one thing, the modern American right rejects the Rooseveltian premise Grandin admires; for them, the realm of necessity is the realm of freedom, in which no one is owed a living and freedom consists of being able to do what you have to do without interference. For another, a wider swath of American opinion is going to distrust arguments against "individual-rights absolutism" out of concern for an individual right Grandin doesn't discuss that nonetheless is the most important right for many people: freedom of expression. I'm sure Grandin sees very little conflict between "social rights" and individual expression, though he may contemplate more state action to prevent perceived inequalities of access to mass attention than others can accept comfortably. He more likely believes that guaranteeing social rights will allow greater freedom of expression for a wider range of people than the corporate-monopolized media currently allows. But you can't go around saying "individual rights are bad" without making people worry that babies might get thrown out with the bathwater of inequality.  In short, a lot of people will have a lot of different reasons, both good and bad, to balk at breaking the wheel, though they all may be written off as selfish, or worse, by people like Grandin. Inequality will have to grow much worse than it is already before enough people decide there's nothing in it for them in the American ideal of individual rights. That could very well happen, but I'd advise against Grandin holding his breath for too long.

Liberalism in one sentence?

Albany Times Union editor Rex Smith writes in today's paper: "Dissent is more patriotic than attempting to squelch it." He writes, of course, in response to the President's insinuation that people who "hate" America -- that is, those who oppose his administration -- should find another place to live. The problems with Donald Trump's line of thinking have been widely discussed already. For the sake of argument, let's look at Smith's statement more closely. It reads like an epitome of modern liberalism, for which freedom of expression is among the highest priorities, if not the highest priority. It echoes classical liberalism, which conservatives will recall and embrace again once they're out of power. For Americans in general, the sine qua non for a free society is the right to complain, to the point where some go out of their way to find something to protest, in order to reaffirm their freedom. Appropriately, Smith's statement is unconditional. It recognizes no point at which "dissent" can become less than patriotic. That's probably because "dissent" is by Smith's definition -- which is the consensus definition -- not seditious. Sedition, however, is as much in the eye, or ear of the beholder as it is a legal category.

Most Americans, whether they admit it or not, recognize broad categories of informal sedition -- "dissent" that isn't actionable under the letter of the law but seditious or treasonous on some moral level. These forms of dissent, or counter-dissent, strike many hearers as betrayals of American ideals, culture or identity that require a strong response, be it denunciation, shaming, shunning or worse. The problem with defining anything as "un-American" in order to suppress it is that American ideals, culture and identity remain perpetually open to debate. Having rejected a secular American fundamentalism based on strict fidelity to the Founders' values, no faction can expect to claim to represent the "true" America without challenge; they'll have even less luck claiming a right to squelch dissent that seems to betray the "true" America. Liberalism simply assumes that no idea articulated by an American can be an un-American idea. It can be a bad idea, possibly, but no idea is so bad that it can't be aired out safely for public scrutiny. So, at least, went a liberal consensus still familiar to us, but not necessarily still in effect. Liberals themselves, or at least the harder leftists in their midst, are constantly accused of squelching forms of dissent, particularly dissent aimed not so much at the political order but at a socio-cultural order still seen as under liberal dominance. Those who bristle at anyone characterizing their opinions as un-American are perfectly willing to describe opposing views that way. There's evidence of that in Rex Smith's column, which cites a poll in which 59% of respondents describe Trump's recent comments on the "Squad" as "un-American." It may seem hypocritical for one side to say, "don't ever call us un-American" while saying, "you're the real un-Americans," but at least the majority in the poll isn't telling the other side, as far as we can tell, to go live somewhere else. That might be the one point on which today's self-styled liberals have the moral high ground. They might occupy that ground more securely if they affirmed the essential patriotism of a wider range of dissent more consistently, but that may grow more difficult as the privileging of an inviolable category of theoretically harmless "dissent" comes increasingly under question from all sides.

"Love it or leave it"

One of the few places in the U.S. where you can't call someone a racist is the U.S. Capitol Building -- or at least the congressional chambers there. The Speaker of the House was rebuked by a member of her own party earlier this week for making the commonly-heard assertion that the current President of the United States is a racist. That's because congressional rules dating back to the time of Thomas Jefferson forbid personal attacks on the President and other politicians. It  likewise forbids our representatives and senators from calling the President (or each other) a traitor, and it presumably also discourages disparagement on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. We may assume that, were Donald Trump a congressman, he would be ruled out of order for telling the four women known as "The Squad," in effect to go back where they came from. The remark that started the current trouble really demonstrates Trump's ignorance of detail more than anything else, if he made it on the assumption that all four women, not only one of them, are immigrants. The President has since revised his opinion, falling back to the typical reactionary position that people who, in his opinion, hate this country (and Israel, apparently) should leave it. On this ground the "ideas" idealized by ideological Republicans become the unalterable "culture" revered by populist Trumpists.

Dissenters hold that the nation's guiding ideas can and sometimes should change; they deny that the nation would be less "America" as a result. While the right debates whether "ideas" or "culture" define the country, some on the left take a more populist position, to the extent that their first loyalty is to "people" rather than ideas. They argue for the people's right to define the nation's ideas  without constraint from existing ideas or culture. To them, there's no such thing as an "un-American" idea -- except, paradoxically, for those bigotries some see as originally and damningly American. To them it's almost the greatest insult to be told you should leave the country for wanting to change it. They would deny that wanting to change the country, however fundamentally, means that they hate it. At the same time, of course, the other side would deny that making a "love it or leave it" demand, or even a "go back where you came from" demand of dissenters is hate speech.

Few people define themselves as haters, but just about everyone, it can seem, is seen as a hater by someone else. If you oppose Trump you hate the country. If you support him, you hate humanity, or at least large portions of it. All of this predates Trump and will persist after him. It's the slow death of a certain kind of liberalism embodied in that quaint congressional rule, which expects political differences not to be grounded in hatred. That liberalism assumes, perhaps naively in the final analysis, that the stakes in politics aren't high enough to justify hate or offensive name calling. Too many people feel differently now, and many chafe under the old rules of civility where they still apply. They may deplore a rule that seems to forbid speaking "truth" to power, but how many are ready to hear every asserted "truth?" Each of us may assume that his ideas are true, but not all truths are equally self-evident. That may grow only more apparent over time.

Culture vs Ideas

Michael Gerson is a neocon who was an advisor to the George W. Bush administration. He's a champion of American exceptionalism, which fuels his opposition to President Trump. He dislikes that Trump sees the United States as, in Gerson's phrase, a "normal" nation. Listening to the President's July 4 address, Gerson laments that "Trump presented America as a strong country, but not a country with a special historical role that grows out of certain moral commitments....He seems to love America because it is his country and a powerful country, but not because it is a country with a calling." Is a country without a calling not worth loving? Gerson probably wouldn't go that far, but such a country is only a "normal" country and limited by that normalcy. A true American patriot, Gerson implies, believes that "America somehow embodies the best and highest of human aspirations -- separate from culture and ethnicity." He traces the familiar line separating "blood and soil" nationalism from patriotism based on ideas, but also draws a sharper distinction, perhaps more crucial at this moment, between "culture" and "ideas" "Normal" nations are defined by culture in a way that makes them closed systems. As Gerson writes, a "normal nation" sees itself as "united by a common culture [that is] diluted by outsiders and weakened by diversity." But a nation defined by ideas offers "hope of mutual progress" for natives and newcomers alike.

This distinction begs a question: what's the difference between "ideas" and "culture?"  Do the principles or values we identify as American fall into one category or the other? I suspect not. The "blood and soil" and "idealist" camps almost certainly share many values and principles, but they may disagree over where these come from. Leaving out those racists who may think that certain people are incapable of comprehending, let alone embracing American values, the real disagreement may be over how those values are inculcated. Yet when Gerson favorably quotes George W. Bush's assertions that "Every child must be taught these principles" and "Every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American," he doesn't seem to be saying anything the "blood and soil" school might dispute -- unless, again, some of that school are racists. Yet Gerson cites Bush's sayings as implicitly opposite to Trumpian "cultural" conservatism. He does so, I think, because he assumes that the "culture" camp believes that values are transmitted to newcomers or new generations by means other than education in schools -- through families, churches, or even social media -- or acquired by means other than reason. He may assume this because he's familiar with right-wing distrust of the public school system, but the other side most likely believes that, if public schools have any role, it's to inculcate American values. From their perspective, the problem today is that immigrants are not embracing the crucial ideals, that children aren't learning them -- or, worse, teachers aren't teaching them. This is the familiar complaint against a perceived refusal to assimilate, compounded by suspicions of treachery within a decadent educational system. The complaint has a factual basis in opposition to some ideals, once considered uncontroversial but now seen as essentially "white," "male," "straight" and, above all, self-serving.

To an extent, the "cultural" backlash we see today is a response to the postmodern idea that "American" values actually aren't universal, as neocons like Gerson insist, but culturally specific to an oppressive degree. What's actually going on, arguably, is a vetting of American culture to preserve whatever is seen as good while eliminating the bad. Disagreement over what should go is inevitable, especially when one side assumes that the other rejects such simple yet fundamental ideas as "the world doesn't owe you a living." Is that an idea based in reason that can be taught, or is it a cultural meme one accepts on faith or as a matter of custom? In the complexity of this historical moment, it actually may be in transition from one state to the other. As a Republican, Gerson probably sees it as an eminently reasonable idea, but when some people seemingly refuse to listen to reason, it's unsurprising for others to begin to see it as something some will never get, no matter how educated they think they are. The distinction between "ideas" and "culture" may not be as stark as Gerson assumes, and it's likely to grow murkier, not clearer, in the immediate future.

Politicians and anti-social media

An appeals court has ruled that the President of the United States has less rights, in at least one respect, than ordinary citizens. The court ruled that President Trump violated the First Amendment whenever he blocked Twitter users from commenting on his own account. While you or I might block a troll from defacing our own accounts with obnoxious comments, the court holds that the President's account has an official, public character -- he sometimes uses it for the first announcement of new policies, for example -- and thus should be a public forum, with no restrictions, apart from those imposed by Twitter itself, on other users' ability to comment. This is not the first such ruling against a politician, and it certainly won't be the last judicial opinion on the subject, since the Justice Department plans to appeal. I suspect that the appeals process ultimately will deliver Trump a favorable ruling, and not just because the Supreme Court has a Republican majority. While I sympathize with the thinking behind this latest ruling, I'm not sure it can withstand constitutional scrutiny. It's widely understood that the current President uses Twitter as his primary medium of direct communication with his supporters. His account is widely perceived as a propaganda platform. It's obviously feared that, by blocking critics, Trump can create an illusion of overwhelming if not unanimous agreement with his opinions and policies. Civil libertarians may think that a public official, when expressing opinions ex cathedra, as it were, has no more right to block critics from posting comments than the President has to drive peaceful protesters from the White House fence. They may insist that Twitter is actually the most direct and peaceful way for dissidents to get in the President's face. But none of this necessarily explains why the President, or any other elected official, should have less right to block people than anyone else. If that proposition depends entirely on the idea that the President's Twitter account is official, then it has to be explained what makes it so. Trump's account predates his presidency; it was not assigned to him after his election. He has issued no executive order making it "official;" nor has Congress. It may be nothing but a propaganda platform, but in this country propaganda itself has rights. The President has no more obligation to grant "equal time" on his account to his opponents than he would to reserve part of the time his campaign committee buys for advertising for opposing points of view.  In short, politicians have as much right to use their social media accounts to make themselves look popular as private citizens have. This, I suspect, is how the ultimate court will rule, but such a ruling will fall well short of silencing the President's critics. If they still want to get in Trump's face, or in the faces of his fans, there are any number of hashtags that can be employed to get their attention -- and it wouldn't surprise me if Trump himself checks all of them.

Authoritarianism in America?

President Trump's voter base appears to consist of about 40% of the voting population, according to many polls. Some measurements detect a hard core within that base, making up as much as a quarter of the electorate, that shows a few alarming authoritarian tendencies. As always, we should be mindful that questions shape responses, but there's little ambiguity to the findings of the Ipsos poll cited in a recent local editorial. It asked whether people agreed with the idea that the President should have the power to "close news outlets that engaged in bad behavior." 26% of respondents agreed, including 43% of those identifying themselves as Republicans. On one hand, this is an understandable plea for accountability in the face of constant accusations of "fake news." On the other, this is advocacy of executive usurpation of what should, under any circumstances, be a judicial responsibility. To be fair, the question is inevitably vague about how the President should go about closing news outlets, buy even granting the executive the initiative is worrisome. More worrisome are the 13% of poll respondents who agreed with the specific proposition that "President Trump should close down mainstream news outlets, like CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times." The question suggests no specific reason for Trump to do so, but the implicit reason is that these entities spread "fake news" and perpetuate various "witch hunts" against the President. At this point, too, we must concede that the question doesn't suggest that Trump seek legal redress. We can assume instead that this hardest core -- which also includes 8% of self-identified Democrats -- would be perfectly happy if Trump could shut down these institutions by executive fiat. You can still say that they simply want some form of justice for presumed liars and slanderers, but you can also say with some safety that they want something closer to dictatorship than most Americans as yet are comfortable with. Even closer to home, in blue New York, a local poll has found that a quarter of respondents are, in the editor Rex Smith's words, "somewhat in accord" with the proposition that "it is un-American to protest against the actions of the government." It's more un-American to say such a thing, obviously, but it may seem that way only to those who see loyalty to America as loyalty to the Constitution first. Others, we can be fairly certain, define loyalty to America differently. They may be the authentic authoritarians in our midst.

Are liberals moderates?

Like many a writer for The Nation, historian David A. Bell is impatient with self-described liberals who seem to hesitate at some of the radical measures proposed by self-described progressives within the Democratic party. Reviewing a new book by Adam Gopnik in the July 1/8, Bell presents him as a representative specimen who exemplifies the problem with liberalism. Historically, but perhaps more than ever now, liberalism as described by Gopnik and Bell is more a temperament than an ideology. That temperament is cautious and increasingly centrist in an increasingly polarized political environment. Liberals, according to Bell, have a bad habit of staking out a middle ground between perceived extremes, with the implication that opposite extremes are equally bad in some important ways. To Bell this is "false equivalence," resulting in misguided attempts at "balance." This is the crucial liberal failure in the reviewer's opinion; by substituting the superficial category of "extreme" for rigorous analysis of conditions, liberals mistake "extremism" for the real crisis for which, Bell insists, "both sides" are not equally to blame.

For Bell, the real crisis is that the American political order has been broken by an oligarchic drive for power that relies on right-wing media, unlimited campaign spending, and lumpen prejudices to thwart genuine democracy in America. Progressives argue that the crisis requires radical remedies, possibly to the point of breaking the current system, to prevent their populist-oligarchic nightmare from becoming a reality.  While insinuating this, Bell tries to remind Gopnik that the remedies proposed by today's leading progressives, from "Medicare For All" to the "Green New Deal," actually are relatively moderate compared to the measures taken, for example, by the British Labor party when they first took power in 1945. Why, then, should they disturb liberals like Gopnik? According to Bell, it's because Gopnik, at least, still believes the system can achieve egalitarian goals, while progressives strike the author as absolutist, historically uninformed and, worst of all from a liberal perspective, uncompromising. Liberals, to the extent that they promote moderation, promote compromise. To that extent they're typically American, but progressives worry that liberals make a fetish of compromise when conditions should not require equal concessions from either "extreme." It can be argued that they fall easily into a peculiar trap that leaves them demanding more compromise from progressives the more the oligarchs refuse to compromise. If anything infuriates progressives about liberals, it's the assumption that the burden of compromise falls on progressives more than on the oligarchs. This is mainly because liberals and progressives are engaged in a debate over the future of the Democratic party, in which liberals, acting as moderates, insist that progressives compromise to make Democratic candidates more electable among presumably centrist swing voters. But it's also because liberalism really is a matter of temperament. American liberalism is concerned more with means than ends -- liberals are the ones most likely to say that ends don't justify means -- and tends to see compromise as a means that is an end unto itself. As noted here often, liberalism also abhors the very idea of crisis because it drives people to put emergency ends ahead of conventional means, raising the specter of unconstrained power. Their reluctance to acknowledge crises or emergencies makes liberals appear increasingly detached from reality from the vantage point of left-wing progressives and right-wing populists alike. The right condemns liberals for failing to perceive and respond appropriately to a different set of crises. If they offend both camps, liberals will of course be tempted to assume they must be doing something right. Whether you identify as progressive, rightist, populist or other, Bell's review article should give you an intellectual basis for challenging that perhaps-characteristic liberal complacency.

Moderates and markets

For David Brooks, to be a moderate is to embrace the free market. In his latest column Brooks contrasts the moderate favorably with the economic nationalists who support President Trump and the "progressives" who threaten to dominate the Democratic party. He spends most of his space attacking progressives, who allegedly want to "create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent." They're too willing to "coddle" people, while moderates "want to help but not infantilize." Progressives, as ever, seek to centralize things, while moderates "are always aiming to make responsibility, agency and choice as local as possible." These comparisons may leave you wondering what makes Brooks' heroes moderates rather than conservatives. His own answer would be that moderates support "a bigger role than before" for government in preparing citizens for a competitive global economy. Yet these moderates can't help looking conservative from the progressive standpoint, since they accept a number of premises about the world that progressives challenge. Progressives certainly would protest Brooks's use of (to them) pejorative terms like "coddle" and "infantilize" when they most certainly see themselves as liberating people so they can become their true selves, and not what the market demands them to be. Whether  Brooks is moderate or conservative, he presumably uses these words because he suspects progressives of poorly preparing people for conditions that are subject to neither debate nor a vote. Opponents of 21st century progressivism argue that the world simply can't be the way progressives want. Historically, that's been a conservative argument, but when self-styled conservatives in the Trump movement also seem to want a world that can't be, the moderate may well be the person who rains on both parades. If the 21st century moderate is primarily a realist, and not someone simply seeking the middle ground between extremes, he may have a useful contribution to make, but he will have to explain and defend his overall view of the world more forcefully than Brooks does here.

Hillary's curse

The consensus seems to be that two women, Senators Harris and Warren, did the best at last week's panels of Democratic presidential candidates, but columnist Michelle Goldberg warns against a pessimism about female candidates that could hurt their chances in primary season. Numerous women have told Goldberg that they like Harris or Warren best of all the many candidates, but don't think a woman can be elected President in 2020. Goldberg traces this pessimism to a perception that voters in swing states in 2016 rejected Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. "The more you think that misogyny undermined Clinton, the less inclined you might be to support another female challenger," she writes. If that's the case, it should be imperative to refute the misogyny narrative, yet Goldberg can't bring herself to do this. "Without the handicap of sexism, Clinton probably would have won a race that was essentially decided by a rounding error," she opines.

Loyalty to a woman whose political career is over could sabotage the candidacies of arguably more viable female candidates. To insist that general misogyny rather than specific criticisms and suspicions about a specific woman undermined the Clinton campaign in crucial places is to invoke a potentially paralyzing handicap that may not even exist. Feminists like Goldberg do the women of 2020 no favors by continuing to portray Clinton as a victim rather than a failure.

Since Goldberg regards Harris and Warren as, presumably, the best potential presidents, she encourages voters to overcome the perception that misogyny will cripple any woman candidate. In doing so, she adds a twist to the 2016 narrative, suggesting that Clinton fell short in part because people felt inhibited about supporting her openly. "Voters passionate about Clinton but wary of online harassment hid in private Facebook groups, which made it seem like there was no real enthusiasm about her candidacy," Goldberg writes, "countless women who voted for Clinton ... regret their failure to be public in their zeal." She then says, "It's hard to imagine that Warren or Harris would have this problem in 2020." But why should it be hard if the problem was misogyny. If misogyny drove the online harassment of Clinton supporters in 2016, why shouldn't misogynists in 2020 treat supporters of Harris or Warren the same way? Goldberg doesn't say, apart from observing that "most women don't want Trump to be president," but it's the closes she comes in this column to acknowledging that there was something different about Hillary Clinton that wasn't just a matter of misogynist perception.

The treason of the evangelicals?

Every few months, it seems, Michael Gerson publishes a column bemoaning what he perceives as increasingly uncritical support for President Trump among evangelical Christians. This time, at least, Gerson performs a sort of public service by reminding us that Ralph Reed is alive. The columnist takes Reed's recent remark that no President has "defended us" or "fought for us" more than Trump as proof that evangelicals have become "primarily concerned with the respect accorded to their own religious community" at the expense of a historic commitment to "the oppressed and vulnerable." Their embrace of Trump as their defender threatens to stigmatize them as "old, white Christians who want to restore lost social status through political power," but at the expense of Christianity itself, as Gerson understands it. As a reminder, Gerson is a Republican, and something of a neocon, who sees Donald Trump as a depraved bigot. Neither Trump nor his supporters match Gerson's ideal for Republicanism. But in appealing to an idealized past for both Republicans and evangelical activists, Gerson engages in selective history, or else he exposes his own blind spot. If he's trying to say that evangelicals never indulged in bigotry or chauvinism before Trump, he can't be taken seriously. At the same time that evangelicals cited admiringly by Gerson agitated against slavery, other evangelicals -- and in some cases, almost certainly, the very same evangelicals -- took a very Trumpian position on immigration. Who were the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, after all, but evangelical Protestants fearful of a suspected Catholic takeover of the United States through unlimited immigration from Europe? If anything, evangelical Trumpism is consistent with a historic evangelical tendency to see themselves as the authentic American people. The major difference between then and now is that many Catholics today take the same side as these evangelicals, now that both see ethnicity rather than sectarianism as a threat to American identity. This is all very un-Christian and historically inconsistent to Gerson, but it may not seem so to those with a clearer view of American history. Gerson warns that by embracing Trump evangelicals risk alienating themselves from a younger generation that is growing less religious according to the measure of church attendance. Perhaps Gerson risks alienating himself from that younger generation by insisting that some sort of Christian renaissance is the solution to Trumpism.

'the liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done.'

In the past I've been skeptical toward the fearful belief of neocons and globalist liberals that Vladimir Putin is deliberately advancing an anti-liberal agenda worldwide. I'm now compelled to address an interview Putin gave last week to the Financial Times newspaper, in which he said that "the liberal idea has become obsolete." The first thing to make clear is that he's not advocating the abandonment of liberalism by any country, except possibly for the United States. As always, in keeping with his principle of respecting sovereignty unconditionally, Putin claims not to interfere with the domestic affairs of any other country. In each country, he says, the people must decide their own future. Of course, Putin has a habit of uncritically equating "the people" with the regime or ruling party, as if every dictatorship is its people's choice in some sense, if only in the sense that it's not some other people's choice. To make his point more clear, he goes out of his way to state that he does not endorse the domestic policies of President Maduro in Venezuela, implying that much could be done better there. Putin doesn't support Maduro against his opposition because he likes Maduro or his policies. As was the case with Hugo Chavez, Putin works with Maduro "because he [is] president ... not ... as an individual." If he prefers Maduro to the opposition, it's because he abhors the chaos he takes, with Libya as his model, to be the inevitable consequence of regime change driven by ideologically motivated international pressure. No country or part of the world has the right to impose its ideology or values on any other, Putin says. While we in the U.S. identify that habit of imposition with the neocons within the Republican party, liberal Democrats have been just as eager, as in Libya during Obama's administration, to force democratization where the soil doesn't seem to be ready. From Putin's outsider perspective, this may be part of the global "liberalism" he rejects. While he's often critical of Donald Trump in the interview, he interprets Trump's "America First" attitude as a kind of normalization of American foreign policy. "I don't think his desire to make America first is a paradox," Putin says, "I want Russia to be first, and that is not perceived as a paradox; there is nothing unusual there." He sees Trump's election as an uprising against a globalization process that seemingly has done Americans more harm than good, but he warns against an overreaction against globalization that could disrupt global order.

What is "liberalism" in Putin's mind? In the interview, he implicitly equates it with multiculturalism and suggests that the global migration crisis has proven an unconstrained multicultural approach "untenable." Taking what might be called a "populist" stance, the Russian argues that governments must look after "the interests of the core population" first. It's unclear what "core" translates, whether Putin simply means the majority of any country or is asserting some sort of ethnic essentialism implying that some people are more of the body than others. He also contrasts liberalism, more predictably, with "traditional values." He tries to have it both ways during the interview, denying that Russia is officially homophobic in any way while scoffing at modern notions of gender diversity. "Some things appear excessive to us," he says, "Let everyone be happy ... But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population." Are homosexuals not part of the core population? It's hard to tell in translation, but Putin also says that "Russia is an Orthodox Christian nation" and that "traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than this liberal idea."

Putin says something else interesting about liberalism as he sees it. The problem with liberalism isn't just that it embraces multiculturalism to an excessive extent, but that "nobody is doing anything." Specifically, they're not doing anything about migrant crime. Echoing Trump, Putin tends to identify unlimited migration with crime, and he definitely sees it as a crisis. However, "the liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done." Putin believes that liberals "say that all is well, that everything is as it should be." The sort of solutions Putin might employ -- he's careful not to endorse Trump's plans for border walls and punitive tariffs -- strike liberals as worse than the problem, presumably because they violate liberal ideals of human rights. "They say this is bad and that is bad as well," Putin protests, "Tell me, what is good then?" Echoing Trump or any number of European populists, he complains that "the migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected." Whatever his views on migrant crime, Putin echoes a general point I've made about liberalism. Being uncomfortable with states of emergency or exception, liberals are loathe to acknowledge crises. Their constitutional ideals depend on the absence of crisis or any existential stake in politics. To liberals, a crisis -- or at least a crisis declared by the wrong people -- is the first slippery step toward a state of emergency and dictatorship. In this context, to be anti-migrant is to be authoritarian. This belief has much to do with an ad hominem notion of politics I've discussed elsewhere, which trusts no one to exercise emergency powers or even propose measures that might increase human suffering. If liberals can't seem to answer Putin's question, "what is good?" it may be because 21st century liberals have lost the ability or will to think in a utilitarian way. You may not agree with however Putin defines his "core" population, or how an American politician might define his, but it may still prove necessary for leaders in any country to calculate the greatest good for the greatest number, even when that number isn't "all." If liberals can't bring themselves to do this, they may find it more difficult than they think to prove Putin's claims of obsolescence wrong.

'the Constitution does not require proportional representation'

While a surprising number of cases decided in the current Supreme Court term have seen justices crossing party or ideological lines, the decision announced today in the case of Rucho v. Common Cause saw a more typical partisan split. Plaintiffs, including both Democrats and Republicans, wanted the Court to curtail the practice of so-called partisan gerrymandering by state legislatures, through which partisan majorities redraw districts with the idea of ensuring maximum representation for their own party. The Republican-appointed majority of justices, led by Chief Justice Roberts, decided that they have no authority to intervene, since gerrymandering does not violate the "one person, one vote" principle that justifies other forms of judicial intervention. In a summary of his opinion, Roberts makes the significant observation that "one person, one vote" is not synonymous with proportional representation, the implicit standard of fairness allegedly violated by gerrymandering. He states bluntly that "the Constitution does not require proportional representation." While "each person is entitled to an equal say in the election of representatives," it "hardly follows from that principle that a person is entitled to have his political party achieve representation commensurate to its share of statewide support." In short, political parties are not entitled to proportionate representation. That fact should be self-evident from the territorial principle of representation, since partisanship is unevenly distributed geographically. Roberts is careful to deny that he or the majority "condones" partisan gerrymandering, but observes that the remedy lies elsewhere than in the Court. As some instant critics of the ruling have observed, it really reinforces the necessity of defeating parties that abuse their power through gerrymandering at the polls, or thwarting them by amending state constitutions.

In dissent, Justice Kagan expresses impatience with the majority. If they concede that "gerrymandering is 'incompatible with democratic principles,'" Kagan assumes a self-evident duty of the Court to respond. She roots that obligation in the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is violated by "the devaluation of one citizen's vote as compared to others." She points out that federal courts have intervened against partisan gerrymandering at the state level without appealing to the proportionate-representation principle, rendering Roberts' objection to that irrelevant. Instead, Kagan claims, these courts hold states to their own constitutional standards as well as the nation's. Alas, one must presume that the high court overrules the lower courts. The ultimate problem, it seems, is whether the equal-protection argument can be separated from what Roberts perceives, and rejects, as an entitlement claim by political parties in place of people.  The Chief Justice sees no essential rights violation when one's party isn't represented in a legislature in the proportion to which partisans may believe it entitled. This perception misses what Kagan takes to be the real issue: partisan gerrymandering is partisan politicians "entrenching themselves in power by diluting the votes of their rivals' supporters." In short, partisan gerrymandering is cheating. But Roberts presumably ignored rather than missed this point, since he doesn't see partisan cheating as an actionable violation of individual rights. It's not surprising that the minority sees the majority opinion as undemocratic, since it appears to acquiesce in a practice widely seen as tantamount to the sort of vote-rigging that alleged authoritarians practice around the world. To be fair to the minority, I can well imagine some of those supposed authoritarians -- those that actually rig elections, as the reputed authoritarian Erdogan apparently neglected to do in Istanbul last week -- echoing the inference that an individual's voting rights are not harmed no matter how badly the rules screw over his party. Unfortunately, democracy at the macro level is diluted by every division of power along geographic lines. The Electoral College arguably violates the equal-protection principle advanced by Kagan more egregiously than any state's gerrymandering, yet it is the supreme law of the land. Roberts may be a killjoy when he points out what the Court can't do about such things, but despite Kagan's disparagement, he did point to alternate remedies. A real test of our democracy may come should partisan gerrymandering or other forms of election-rigging prove capable of thwarting those remedies, but then it will be the people's responsibility, not the courts', to respond.

ei