'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.