Populism and trade

For a few minutes yesterday I watched the President defend international trade from protectionists at the side of the German chancellor. On this subject Barack Obama, supposedly a flaming liberal and definitely a Democrat, is hardly any different from most conservative Republicans. You can hear the same argument from either party: individuals suffer but the nation benefits. For Republicans (and libertarians) it's a strangely collectivist argument to make, and for the GOP in particular it's arguably an even greater betrayal of the party's founding principles than its infamous Southern strategy. Donald Trump is made out to be a heretic (or an ignoramus) for seeking the Republican presidential nomination on a protectionist platform, while Senator Sanders is seen by many Democrats as nearly as heretical on the subject. Their common failing, the free-traders say, is their assumption that in global competition American companies and employees lose unfairly. The free-traders argue that we can't have the benefits or foreign markets opened to our products without accepting the reciprocal risk of competition with foreign products in our stores. In such an argument the "we" is the nation, but the cost-risk balance breaks down when we think in individual terms.

In what way, after all, does an American worker who suffers from foreign competition benefit from another American company selling more stuff abroad? For some, this is the wrong question to ask, the point of free trade being that every American benefits as a consumer from the lower prices and better quality of goods resulting from the widest possible competition. In other words, that unemployment check will last longer thanks to cheaper imports. It's all sophistry, of course, to cover up the true feeling of free-traders that economic competition means survival of the fittest, and that patriotism that protects the unfit is misplaced if not scoundrelous. I could almost buy this as long as price isn't a factor in fitness, but the most dogmatic free-traders seem determined to make it the primary factor. They definitely seem determined to make it appear oppressive to have to pay more than you might, when people are working cheaper than others say they should. They're also unbecomingly quick to decide when Americans deserve to lose.

Free-traders make a sophistic distinction between free trade and "trade war," while populist protectionists, from Trump on the right to Sanders on the left, may be more inclined to see trade itself as a form of war that Americans should win, victory meaning that Americans keep their jobs. Left protectionists like Sanders may be more inclined to wage a war of liberation, so to speak, by pressuring other countries to increase wages, while right protectionists like Trump, also recognizing low wages as a form of foreign cheating, are less interested in leveling that playing field than in defending the homeland with tariffs. Either way, the populist protectionist simply isn't as willing to write off the worker who loses to foreign competition as the free-trader appears to be -- and that resistance may help us a little more toward getting at the essence of populism.

While individual populists remain maddeningly selective about whom they include in their zone of solidarity -- "populism" and "humanism" are never quite synonymous -- they're still defined to some extent by that unwillingness to write off those toward whom they feel solidarity as losers in the game of life, whether through their own fault or through the breaks of the game. For the sake of analogy, Black Lives Matter is a populist movement because members refuse to write off anyone to whom they feel solidarity -- not even those who, to others, seem self-evidently deserving of death. Populism and its motivating solidarity don't seem to come as naturally to white people, given how readily they'll write off people of their own race or culture for "losing" in many facets of life. But white populism roars to life when whites perceive, as blacks arguably do more often, that shit doesn't just happen, that not all bad things are simply breaks of the game. Populism is a reaction to perceived unfairness, a perception that things are rigged by malicious or indifferent powers against the average person of populist self-regard. It assumes that it's not the loser's fault when he loses a rigged game, nor his responsibility, as the free-trader claims, to adapt to its rigged rules. The rules seem most obviously rigged in the labor market these days, so that's where populism makes its stand, whether by opposing the "race to the bottom" that results from global competition with unequal wages or by opposing the immigration of competitors for the dwindling labor market. By comparison, free-traders, be they ideological Republicans or progressive Clinton/Obama-style technocrats, insist that nothing is rigged, that the global market is an irresistible force of nature, its voice the voice of God. That might be hyperbole on my part, but they do seem to demand that we all accept the global market and its discipline on faith, while populism appears when faith is broken and appeals to faith ring hollow. Populism's opponents argue that the Trump and Sanders campaigns are also appeals to faith in their respective champions' ability to do the apparently impossible. While there may be cults of personality in play in these campaigns, they also seem to be, for good or ill, appeals to people's own power to change the rules that everyone says are immutable, including the rules of global trade. At least on that subject there's been a real debate this year.

Clinton vs. Sanders: who is the enemy?

Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in her adopted state of New York by a landslide margin generated mainly in the biggest cities. Where I live, Senator Sanders crushed her, amplifying an unexpected volume of left dissent first expressed two years ago when Zephyr Teachout ran strongly against Gov. Cuomo in the Democratic primary. The way some see it, however, we must be a bunch of whitebread Bernie Bros up here. To some, the Sanders supporters are the right wing of the Democratic party, precisely because they are, to whatever extent, socialist. That seems to be the premise of a piece written on primary day for the Quartz website. According to Marcie Bianco, Sanders and his supporters are backward, or worse, in their failure to recognize, as Clinton supposedly does recognize, that "the long arc of equal rights in America is primarily based on identity." Sanders' sin is to propose a "revolution" that is primarily economic in orientation.

And despite what he may say [Bianco adds] an economic revolution is not tantamount to a sociopolitical overhaul. To put a finer point on it: Achieving a $15 minimum wage will not stop racially prejudiced cops from shooting black people. It will not stop immigrants or refugees from being detained at our borders. Dismantling Wall Street, whatever that means exactly, will not shore up or extend women’s reproductive rights.

Marxism itself is on the right of Bianco's political universe because  "The universalism of the workers’ fight against “Wall Street” or the “1%” or whatever term is currently being used to describe the capitalist bourgeoise deliberately overlooks oppressed identity groups such as women, people of color, the disabled, immigrant communities." Bianco notes cryptically that "The Achilles heel of Marxism is humanity itself." I find it cryptic, at least, because I'm not sure what she means. I suspect she means something along the line of "humanity has a tendency to oppress itself prior to the introduction of class, and Marxism at its worst only further empowers some of the oppressors." Whatever Bianco actually means, she paints herself into an uncomfortable corner with her rhetoric. What she's saying, after all, is that "the banks" or "Wall Street" (or any particular economic class) are not the real enemy, and that those who say they are are fools or knaves. What does that leave us? It seems pretty clear from Bianco's rhetoric that there is an enemy out there, and if there is, it may not be the white devil of a slightly different political imagination, but it is definitely the Man in any number of senses of the word. Equality in American won't really be equal for Bianco unless it is equal along racial, gender and sexual-orientation lines, at a minimum -- and to oppose Hillary Clinton, she implies, is to oppose all of this. Can Bianco really believe that Bernie Sanders opposes all of this? Her only real evidence for such a belief is that Sanders opposes Clinton. Perhaps any male candidate opposing any female candidate would be equally guilty of standing in the way of history, but to interpret the Clinton-Sanders race in all its particularity in this broad manner is absurd if not downright sinister. After every victory Clinton crows about breaking barriers, a concept that clearly resonates with her multicultural base. But if the Clinton campaign is as essentially about identity politics as Bianco claims, and as implicitly accusatory toward those who don't get with the program, it may build as many barriers to progress as it breaks.

An American 'spring?'

It's only coming to my attention -- which probably isn't a good sign for the new "Democracy Spring" movement -- that more than 1,000 people were arrested in Washington D.C. last week for protesting outside the U.S. Capitol. It only came to my attention because some celebrities, most notably Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame, were among those arrested. Democracy Spring wants to start a mass civil-disobedience campaign across the country, disrupting campaign fundraisers and the like in order to force their two main issues, the reversal of the Citizens United decision and the rollback of perceived vote-suppression laws, onto the election agenda. While the group cites a number of American models for their movement, not all of which can be called successful, their name -- I asked myself why it isn't "American Spring" and my cynical answer was that someone must have thought that sounded like bottled water  -- is meant to evoke all the "Spring" movements, not all of which can be called successful, either, that have appeared around the world since the Prague original in 1968. In practice, the intent seems to be to combine the passive resistance of the Civil Rights Movement, embodied in members' willingness to get arrested, with the fervor of the "Springs," the "color revolutions" and other "people power" movements. It all seems very naive.

"People power" would have a hard time catching on in the U.S. no matter what the cause behind it, because the legitimacy of "people power" in other places is based on the absence of "rule of law," "civil society," etc. in authoritarian or totalitarian countries. That is, the legitimacy of people power is inversely proportional to the availability of other options for expressing and organizing dissent. Where civil society does exist, or is declared to exist, you'll find that any mob is just a mob. Such a mob can be dismissed by the casual observer and the determined opponent alike, each of whom can call the mob sore losers because they can't get their way at the polls or in the courts. It may call itself "Democracy Spring" but it will be seen as a threat to democracy itself, as many if not most Americans understand the term. The civil-disobedience side of the movement is meant, presumably, to shame Americans into recognizing an injustice so glaring that people are willing to be jailed, or worse, to protest it. But while many Americans outside the south in the Sixties could plead ignorance of the racist injustice down there until the footage from Birmingham and other places got on TV, many Americans now are well aware of the injustices Democracy Spring is protesting, and doesn't see them as injustices. They see the potential for fraud at the polls as sufficient reason to demand photo i.d. from voters and remain suspicious of those making excuses for those without i.d. They see the commodification of political speech as a necessary (if not necessarily harmless) counterweight to the self-interest of the state and the iron law of incumbency. They are unlikely to be swayed from their own beliefs by the sight of kids and celebrities in handcuffs. Groups like Democracy Spring need to realize that they're up against not just money and power but belief, and that nothing they do will amount to an argument against that belief.  If they're really radical, they may decide that the crisis is past the point of argument. They may decide that the belief that money is speech is not to be refuted but suppressed. If they're seen as a threat to democracy, and if they really believe in democracy, their main challenge is to show that democracy doesn't mean what the other side thinks it means, but more than Citizens United might get overturned in the process. Democracy Spring's agenda seems like small potatoes compared to the stakes involved in other people power movements, but let's reserve judgment until we see how ambitious they really are.

The three estates: workers, consumers, entrepreneurs

Medieval societies, France especially, were divided into estates: nobility, clergy, and the rest, each represented in the rare representative assemblies of the nation. While anyone in theory could join the clergy, with that exception you were pretty much locked into the other estates. American society is different. You can choose to which estate you belong, and while that doesn't determine how you're represented in government, it can determine how you vote. Much of our political culture actually discourages working class people from identifying as such. More specifically, most of the political establishment doesn't want the working class to think of itself as a class, much less a proletariat. Thomas Frank recognizes this. The April Harper's ran an excerpt from his latest book, a critique of the American liberal establishment as embodied by the Clinton family and their foundation. The Harper's piece was concerned with debunking the trendy global fad of microbanking, as promoted by the Clintons. It gave Frank a springboard for his main thrust against Clintonism. Hillary Clinton's drive to make history echoes her family's commitment to breaking barriers to achievement, particularly those created by discrimination; "no ceilings" is a popular motto in their circles. There's nothing wrong with that in isolation, but what Frank perceives is that the Clintons and liberals like them seem more concerned with making it easier, through remedies from microlending to affirmative action, for people to become entrepreneurs than with making life better for the working class, the people who most likely always will work for someone else. Frank fears that, amid their concern that there be no ceilings, liberals neglect the threat of "no floors," no limit to the immiseration of the permanent working class. I'm sure that Clintonites will say that Frank's portrait is at least selective, at worst unfair. They might claim that Frank betrays a bias against entrepreneurs. Perhaps they're right, but if we can't all be entrepreneurs, despite the utopian dreams of liberals, libertarians and others, then someone has to speak for the working class and affirm the primacy of their concerns.

Perhaps the Clintonian embrace of "opportunity" is another expression of the Neo-Lincolnism evolving in our time. Lincoln, we're told, was all about eliminating barriers to achievement; that was why he opposed a slaveholding oligarchy that retarded opportunities for whites, by monopolizing and wasting land, while oppressing blacks. Lincoln, of course, was also the man who said, refuting the concept of "wage slavery," that Northern workers had only themselves to blame, with exceptions for very bad luck, if they remained employees all their lives instead of becoming entrepreneurs. Perhaps the Democrats under the Clintons, rather than the Republicans, are the party of Lincoln now. But for those who see themselves as workers rather than thwarted entrepreneurs, there's still the party within the party, the party of Senator Sanders. There's even the party outside the party, the party of Donald Trump. Each candidate reaches out more to the American as a worker than his rivals within each of the major parties. Each is a critic of modern American trade policy, which each man blames for the loss of manufacturing jobs. While Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist, dismisses Trump as a misguided patriot, he regards Sanders and the liberals and progressives who support him as hypocrites of a sort. Assuming the progressives are "citizens of the world," he questions why they oppose free trade policies that have improved the lives of millions of manufacturing workers around the world. Does Bernie Sanders want these people to keep foreigners poor by denying them American markets? It's one thing for Trump to cry "America first!" but Goldberg thinks it odd for progressives to say the same thing -- forgetting the narrative that portrays Sanders and his supporters as populists. If that magical word means anything, then in this context it means that Sanders' first concern is with shoring up American workers' standard of living, while his second, at best, would be to improve working conditions for the rest of the world rather than their American market share, perhaps by using trade policy as leverage.

Even were Goldberg to abandon his sophistic argument against Sanders' alleged hypocrisy, he'd still say that Sanders is as wrongheaded as Trump about trade. When we come down to Goldberg's real argument for free trade, Trump and Sanders are wrong for the same reason. Each, on this issue at least, refuses to recognize Americans' primary identity as consumers. 'Free trade is good for most American workers and all American consumers, not just the “1 percent.”,' Goldberg writes. The columnist is a right-wing consumerist, as opposed to left-consumerists more concerned with quality than price (think Ralph Nader) and thus committed to a degree of regulation Goldberg abhors. For right-consumerists like Goldberg, only price matters -- or should matter. Any other consideration, presumably, distorts the workings of that all-wise singularity, the Market. It's also necessary for the citizen to think of himself as a consumer first and a worker second at best. Right wing consumerism differs again from the left wing variant by requiring you to define yourself as a consumer -- in effect, to renounce any solidarity with fellow workers that might require a sacrifice from the wallet. A consumer remains free to pay more for quality, but he should not feel pressured to subsidize "uncompetitive" fellow citizen when imports can be had for less. When Goldberg sneers in print that "American labor unions hate foreign competition," his hope that foreign competition will further  break down organized labor could not be more obvious. While union folk and many liberals will still tell you that organized labor swelled the ranks of the American middle class in the 20th century, Goldberg tells an alternate history according to which "it is largely thanks to trade that the average American worker is in the top 1 percent of earners in the world." In other words, you owe it not to yourselves but to consumers worldwide. In this narrative the consumers are always on the winning side of history, and to take the workers' side, probably superficially in Trump's case and perhaps more substantially in Sanders', is a chump's call. So there are your choices: liberal entrepreneurship and its risk of debt; conservative consumerism sacrificing all to competitiveness; or the world as it seemed to be not so long ago, when workers could make the market answer to them. Don't say you don't have any real choices in politics.

Goldberg closes his column on a curious note:

One irony to this all of is that despite all the textbooks that claim nationalism and socialism are opposites, the reality is that when translated into policy, they’re closer to the same thing. The rhetoric may be different, but the economic program of nationalism is socialism, and the emotional underpinnings of socialism boil down to nationalism.

The curious thing about this is Goldberg's implicit repudiation of nationalism. You'd think any self-styled conservative would be a nationalist, on the assumption that the conservative is loyal to traditions, and particularly cultural traditions, while distrusting cosmopolitanism and individualism. Of course, Goldberg may mean something more sinister by "nationalism" than a mere synonym for patriotism, as he is the man who wrote a book called Liberal Fascism. But what is he actually defending by casting these aspersions? The individual, presumably, and the consumer especially. Above all, Goldberg defends the principle that if I can make and sell a product cheaper than anyone else, I deserve to win -- and I can never sell too cheap or pay too cheap. He's defending the idea that no one has the right to say I sell or pay too cheap, much less penalize me for it. When he invites you to think of yourself as a consumer, this is what he expects you to believe. And if you imagine yourself an entrepreneur, with help from Clintonian liberals, you'll have to think this way to if you want to survive in Goldberg's world. If you don't think that way and don't want to think that way, you'd better hope that another world is possible, no matter how unfair or unfree that world may seem to other people. You have to choose which of the modern estates you belong to, and you have to act and vote accordingly.

 

Christianism in Tennessee

A Republican governor has vetoed a bill narrowly approved by the Tennessee legislature that would have designated the Christian Holy Bible as the official state book. Gov. Haslam is no liberal, but he and his attorney general recognize the obvious unconstitutional implications of this legislation. Haslam's challenge was to veto the bill without greatly offending his state's Christianists -- my word for those who believe that Christian morality is the unacknowledged foundation of American law, and that the Christian majority is entitled on democratic and moral principle to have the polity reflect their preferences and prejudices. It was necessary for Haslam to denounce perceived efforts to "drive religion out of the public square," and in addition to the obvious constitutional objections to such a bill he borrowed an idea from Teddy Roosevelt, arguing as Teddy did against putting "In God We Trust" on currency that putting a state seal of approval on the Bible actually trivializes it. Haslam's spin on the idea is that making the Bible the state book makes it equivalent to the raccoon, the state animal, and the tomato, the state fruit. He probably has to resort to such an argument because his fellow Republicans would reject the real argument, also offered, that the state-book designation comes too close for comfort to an establishment of religion. To them, it seems self-evident that the majority should be culturally dominant, that the U.S. should declare itself a Christian nation by affirming and enforcing their preferences. When Christians whine that they're losing their rights in this country, as they do so often now, they mean that some Americans won't allow them to do exactly this sort of thing. They whine the same way when anyone challenges their cultural prerogative to stigmatize and marginalize homosexuals. Haslam still has a "religious liberty" bill empowering homophobia on his desk, another result of such whining on the part of people who think doing business with homosexuals is sinful. He told interviewers last week that he hadn't yet made up his mind to sign it or not. He should recognize that both the "religious liberty" bill and the Bible bill express the same Christianist impulse. If he's capable of making a distinction between religion's real role in the public square and unconstitutional Christianism he shouldn't have to do any more thinking before vetoing the "religious liberty" bill. Unfortunately, Tennessee requires only a simple majority to override a gubernatorial veto. If Christianist Republicans override Haslam on either bill, the one he he did veto or the one he might, it might be seen as a vote of no confidence in the governor. In that case it will probably be up to American business, as it has been in other homophobic states, to cast a vote of no confidence in Tennessee.

C.P. Time

Someone is desperate to embroil Hillary Clinton in a fresh scandal. I suspect the Sanders campaign will make much of it in the hope of alienated black voters from the front runner. It's really one of the most pathetic scandals I've seen in a while. In case you haven't found out about it already, it seems that Clinton participated in a little skit with Mayor DiBlasio of New York City over the weekend. The idea was to poke fun at the mayor for his belated endorsement of the former Senator. Asked why he took so long, the mayor explained that he was running on "C.P. time." At this point, I now understand, the audience is supposed to be hesitantly outraged at the mayor's remark. They've been set up for the punchline, which comes when DiBlasio explains that he meant "Cautious Politician time." You were supposed to have thought that DiBlasio had meant "Colored People's Time," which has apparently been a thing in pop culture since at least the 1970s. This is one of those somethings that black people can say about themselves, while the propriety of white people mentioning it is open to question. And so, even though no one in the skit actually said "colored people's time," the idea that the idea was in the air on stage has offended some people, if not as many as some hope it will.

Just this morning I was reading the latest In These Times, in which columnist Salim Muwakkil discusses debates over the Clintons in the black community. He notes that many black leftists who support Sanders have expressed frustration with their siblings' apparently uncritical support for Clinton. Muwakkil himself claims to be more understanding. He attributes black support for Clinton, despite the recurring anger of the Black Lives Matter movement over measures taken under Bill Clinton, to "functional pragmatism." The basis of this functional pragmatism seems to be an unshakable belief, regardless of the relative merits of Clinton and Sanders, that Clinton will be the stronger candidate in the general election. The only thing that matters, in this analysis, is keeping a Republican out of the White House. Muwakkil hints at divisions among blacks over the priorities of race and class. Muwakkil himself is a black nationalist, which in this context seems to mean placing the highest priority on the interests of black people and communities. He notes that black nationalists have been criticized in the past by black intellectuals of a more Marxist or generally leftist persuasion, while Muwakkil himself criticizes Sanders (on inference) for seeing blacks as a lumpenproletariat. The columnist's own belief seems to be that Marxist categories are inadequate to address, let alone remedy, the specificity of racial oppression. In simpler terms, a black Sanders supporter, Nina Turner, says elsewhere in the same issue that "African Americans are brand loyal," while a sympathetic interviewer observes that "Making the conversation only about race doesn't yield anything productive for people who are working for $8 per hour." So it seems that, despite enduring BLM anger at the Clintons, those blacks more likely to "make the conversation only about race" prefer Clinton to Sanders, presumably because they see a Republican president as something like an existential threat to them specifically. Their "pragmatism" means always taking the minimal deal the Democrats offer out of fear of a Republican terror, and thus never really pressuring Democrats to offer a better deal, rather than take a risk that might bring greater rewards by moving to the Clintons' left, either by supporting Sanders in this year's primaries or by joining a third party. Blacks have a pretty firm idea -- accurate or not -- of what Clintonian governance means for them, and yet they'll take it if that'll prevent a President Trump or Cruz. What that tells me is that, at least when it comes to politics, C.P. time is a real thing after all.

Too bad I have to work for a living

I live in Albany, New York. For a few hours today the state capital was the center of American politics. Senator Sanders came to town this morning, while Donald Trump arrived in the evening. In between, Gov. Kasich passed through during a lightning tour that took him to Troy and Saratoga Springs as well. It's too bad that I work in Troy, and that I work an odd shift that made it impossible to see anybody, and that the announcements of Sanders and Trump's appearances came on too short notice for me to take the day off. It looks like a lot of people with time on their hands had fun today.

I saw this much: at 9:30 this morning I was walking up Washington Avenue toward my bus stop. Across the street, at the corner of Washington and Lark, is the Washington Avenue Armory, the Sanders venue. He was scheduled to speak at 2 p.m. and the doors were to open at 11 a.m. Ninety minutes before, the line stretched from Lark to the other end of the block, the corner of Washington and Dove, and then it turned, extending to Elk, the street parallel to Washington. I'd never seen that long a line outside the Armory before. I later learned that the line finally snaked around the entire block, and that something like 2,000 people had to be turned away, and that Sanders, to his credit, actually came out to address those people briefly. Sanders might well have filled the Times Union Center, the city's big sports and music venue, but I assume that Trump had spoken for it first, and that the staff didn't want to herd two huge political rallies in and out of the place in one day. In any event, the Trump show was just letting out as I was coming back into Albany at the end of my work day. People were streaming up Pearl Street and climbing the State Street hill for the bus stop. I saw an acquaintance of mine who'd been to both rallies -- outside in both cases, alas -- to cheer Sanders and jeer Trump. He was carrying a sign that read "Veterans Against Hate Speech," or words to that effect. It was crazy outside the arena, he told me, but he complimented the Albany police for keeping the protesters safe from those Trumpsters who wanted to protest their protest. It seems like a good time was had by all.

For the record, Hillary Clinton and Senator Cruz had already put in appearances in the region, far less spectacularly in both cases. Clinton was the first to show up and held her rally in Cohoes High School, across the river from Troy, on April 4. Cruz was even less conspicuous, holding his rally in a Christian academy gym in Scotia, Schenectady County, on April 7. He has momentum nationally now, but all indications are that he will do poorly in New York, running behind Kasich. The Texan will not be forgiven for his "New York values" crack of some months ago, even though many people here in Upstate (i.e. anywhere north of the metropolis) sympathize with his criticism. On the other side, in New York as in many places, Sanders has the people who go to rallies, but in the Empire State the people who go to vote -- and, more importantly, the people who get people to vote, are for their former Senator and First Lady. Some may say that New York isn't "white" enough to give Sanders another win, but I don't think the problem is that ethnic minorities dislike or ignore Sanders, but that ethnic voting here is well organized, and that the organizers are all for Clinton. Sanders continues to reach out -- I learned via coffeeshop eavesdropping that he was to meet with some Black Lives Matter types this morning -- but I suspect he remains hopelessly alienated from the party establishment types who actually get people out to vote, the types for whom Clinton's questioning of Sanders' Democratic credentials resonates. Current polls suggest that Clinton will win the state by at least ten points, but there remains time in both parties for strange things to happen, and we know they can this year. But as I'm an independent and can vote in neither primary, it's out of my hands. As with today's rallies, I'm on the outside watching from a distance, but in the case of the primaries I choose to keep my distance.

Equality: what's God got to do with it?

Cal Thomas asks a rhetorical question in his latest column:

[I]f you say there is no God and then turn around and tell me I should not be a racist ... and I say, “why should I?” how do you respond? If we are all evolutionary accidents, why can’t I believe and practice anything I wish? Perhaps you respond that there are laws prohibiting discrimination. To that I answer, “Suppose the laws are changed, is it then OK to discriminate?” It was once legal to own slaves, but did that law make slavery moral? 

Thomas's query begs a question in response: Is belief in God the only reason you're not a racist? To put the question a little differently: Is belief in God the only reason not to be a racist? To think so, as Thomas apparently does, presumes that man is absolutely incapable of recognizing all human beings as fellow human beings and treating them the way he'd want to be treated. As usual, religion presumes that people are hopelessly stupid and incapable of civilization without guidance from a god. But if religion distrusts human intelligence, it distrusts human will even more. It's human will, after all, that explains why theoretical Thomas shouldn't be a racist and can't practice anything he wishes. Civilization is an expression of human will, but human nature will always distrust human will to some extent, both on the "who are you to say?" level of nihilistic individualism and Thomas's "how do I know you won't change your mind?" level of theological skepticism, which sees all secular civilization as nihilistic individualism. The answer to such skepticism is that the will to civilization, founded on reasoned principles, creates a standard of accountability to which anyone who changes his mind or betrays his ideals, even the original lawgiver, can be held. Civilization depends on will but isn't founded on will. It depends on the will to uphold and enforce the principles reason has discovered (and continues to discover) against both individualist and theological nihilism -- the belief that one's own will vetoes the will of the whole world, on one hand, and the belief that civilization is founded on nothing but a will in which reason has no voice and which sees reason as an enemy.

To return to Thomas's original question: if we reason that people should not be treated differently due to race and will that races not be treated differently, then we will that Thomas shouldn't be a racist whether he can reason his way to that point or not. And if someone changes the law to permit racial discrimination without refuting the original reasoned objections, the will to civilization should work for repeal -- by legal means first and then however reason and will deem necessary. God is not necessary for reason to be compelling to man, but will is necessary for reason to amount to anything. Theological skeptics often get reason and will mixed up because their universe is founded on a will upon which, so they believe, reason depends. Those who know better recognize that reason is independent of will as well as its judge, and that no one can undo reason by an act of will. Those who try have a god to sell, or sell themselves as gods. They're not as different as people like Thomas might think.

Does Trump know his own strength?

Donald Trump lost badly to Senator Cruz in Wisconsin yesterday, and as with every setback people ask whether this was the beginning of the end for the Republican front-runner. The answer depends on how you account for Trump's loss. The simplest explanation is that it follows a week of bad news for the billionaire, from the assault charge against his campaign manager to his perceived gaffe about punishing women who have abortions. It's entirely possible, however, that those embarrassments had little to do with the Wisconsin result. Thanks to Gov. Walker's anti-union campaigns and the attempt to recall him, Wisconsin may be the most ideologically polarized state in the nation -- a fact that apparently benefited Senator Sanders as well. It may be that Republicans in Wisconsin are such true believers that most automatically ruled Trump out as a heretic, and it's even more likely that Walker has developed an effective get-out-the-vote machine that was put at the service of Cruz. Another factor ought to be considered: Trump's new disinterest in debates. He doesn't seem to want to face either Cruz or Governor Kasich, preferring rallies where the spotlight stays on him exclusively. I think this is a mistake on several levels. First, debates have helped Trump remain a dominant figure on the news; the casual observer may pay more attention to them, given their competitive atmosphere, than to Trump's speeches. Second, to duck debating Cruz, presumably because the Texan has a reputation as a master debater, makes Trump look afraid, which can only hurt him with his base. Third, Trump himself may not appreciate that his success in past debates has had little to do with his own forensic skills. Let's be blunt; Trump's fans respond to him on a primitive level. When they watch the debates, they want to see Trump show dominance, which he has done not by outwitting his rivals but by insulting them. They probably won't be able to tell if Cruz has outwitted Trump in a debate, but they'll be impressed if Trump doesn't appear to back down to the Senator. For the moment, Trump is tweeting away about Cruz being a Trojan horse for the Establishment. But Twitter is no substitute for the sort of face-to-face encounter that might expose what Trump's followers would take to be Cruz's true character, whatever that may be. There's an evangelical smarminess, a plastic sanctimony, a contemptuous smugness to Cruz that's obvious to all but the true believers, yet I don't think Trump has really exploited any of that in all his attacks on "Lyin' Ted." He should. It might seem irresponsible of me to coach Trump in his campaign, but I have to admit that Cruz, not Trump, is the candidate I least want to see as President. The ideal scenario for any conscientious American now is for Trump and Cruz to bleed each other white, to make each other even more toxic (if possible) than they are now, so that somebody else -- and we can still debate who that should be -- can win the general election. But if Trump doesn't confront Cruz on the debate stage, he could collapse faster than anyone expects, giving Cruz crucial time to consolidate his position and maneuver for the fall campaign. It's like rooting for Stalin against Hitler in 1941 and really wanting both to lose -- though who is who in that analogy I leave for you to decide.

The Panama Papers

The reporters at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are quick to remind readers that setting up shell companies through the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca is not itself illegal, but the implication of the ICIJ's massive expose of leaked Mossack Fonseca documents is that Panama provides the world's elite -- politicians and their families and cronies, businessmen and celebrities -- a platform for activities that are essentially if not legally corrupt, from tax shelters to money laundering.  The revelations are global in scope and apparently nonpartisan, in that both close associates of Vladimir Putin and the president of Ukraine have been shown to be up to dubious stuff. Privilege knows neither party nor ideology, after all, and both those for whom wealth is power and those for whom power is wealth seem at home in Panama. Both the Saudi royal family and the family of the current President of China have business with Mossack Fonseca, it seems. Wealth and power convey a mobility that keeps the global elite beyond the reach of local regulation. Until law is as mobile -- which is to say until law is global -- powerful individuals, families and corporations will find shelter from their duties in either sense of the word. Even if the "Panama Papers" expose isn't meant to lead to criminal charges against anyone, it's clearly meant to stir up universal outrage. It has had immediate consequences in Iceland, where growing numbers are demanding the resignation of their prime minister, and it has no doubt exacerbated political crises in other places. Let the local consequences be what they will, but if the Panama Papers prove anything it may be the need for greater world government, or at least enough to close off these shelters from the obligations of citizenship in a civilized world.

Trump yields to political correctness

Implicitly apologizing for yesterday's statement that there should be "some kind of punishment" for women who have abortions should the practice become illegal, Donald Trump's campaign now says that Trump misspoke and only wants punishment for doctors who perform abortions. Is this the beginning of the end for Trump, now that he has plainly, blatantly backed down on an issue in the face of almost universal outrage? To date, his unapologetic stance has been an important part of his appeal, but now Trump's fans have no choice but to acknowledge that he has apologized for something he said. Worse, he has done so under pressure from the media and both "pro-life" and "pro-choice" activists, when for all Trump knows his supporters may agree with his original statement. That certainly would be in keeping with their punitive mentality, their desire to see those they blame for the state of the country humiliated, at a bare minimum, by Trump's election. Meanwhile, as the Trump machine reels from its own humiliation, it's been interesting to see people attempt to explain why women who choose to have an illegal procedure that some deem murder should not be punished. As I predicted yesterday, the consensus against punishing women, against holding them responsible for their choice, is based on denying women the capacity for free choice on this particular subject. Here's what a theologian who sees himself as a pro-life feminist says on the subject:

Women’s equality was not about getting equal pay for equal work. Not about getting mandatory family leave and affordable child care. Not about passing strict anti-discrimination laws in hiring practices.What was essential for social equality, according to those responsible for our abortion laws, was that women are able to end their pregnancies when they are a burden on their economic and social interests. But being pregnant and having a child is often so burdensome precisely because our social structures have been designed by and for people who cannot get pregnant. Notice how, in this context, our abortion laws end up serving the interests of men and coercing the so-called “choice” of women.Someone who is coerced into having an abortion as a means of having social equality should not be put in jail. 

A right-wing anti-Trump website cites a 1989 survey showing that only 9% of professed anti-abortion people believe a woman should be punished for having abortions. The head of the March For Life organization argues against women's capacity for responsibility, arguing that they should not be held accountable for aborting because "women who choose abortion often do so in desperation." This desperation apparently makes women incapable of a morally or legally responsible choice -- especially if you buy the idea that evil abortionists and birth-control fanatics trick or brainwash women into choosing abortion. By this logic, people who purchase illegal drugs should not be prosecuted, since their addiction reduces them to a "desperate" state, but how many Republicans will follow the logic to that conclusion, especially when it isn't necessary to get votes. But if you see the belief that women who seek illegal abortions shouldn't be punished as illogical, then you may as well call yesterday's backlash against Trump by Republicans and pro-lifers what it seems to be: political correctness -- a reluctance to offend women based on a fear of electoral consequences. To make that clear, pro-choice women should use this moment to affirm their agency and responsibility when it comes to reproductive sovereignty, and to deny that they're dupes or victims of Planned Parenthood or the abortionists' union. They should say that even when abortion appears to be a matter of economic necessity, it remains a matter of moral responsibility that they accept for themselves, while doctors only implement their will. Let enough women say that, and we may start to hear something different from the right that probably comes closer to what they believe, or what Trump thought he believed.

Trump's modest proposal and Republican hypocrisy on abortion

Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich are scandalized by Donald Trump's statement during an MSNBC interview that there should be "some kind of punishment" for women who abort their pregnancies if abortion is made illegal. "Of course women shouldn't be punished," says Kasich, while a Cruz spokesperson recommended "healing" rather than punishment for women who abort. I'd understand and sympathize if Trump were baffled by these statements. He probably expects them from the Democratic candidates, and the Clinton campaign has predictably delivered, but his assumption, now that he's a committed Republican, surely was that Republicans want abortions to be illegal. His assumption is correct, but when it comes to the people who have abortions, Republicans have long been strangely reticent about treating them as criminals, which is why I like to propose amending any anti-abortion bill poison-pill style with criminal penalties for women who abort. Perhaps they have some notion that they'll appear less misogynist if they don't demand some kind of punishment, but any such notion is naive. If anything, they may seem more misogynist if their refusal to criminalize women who abort is interpreted as a denial of women's responsibility and agency. Could Republicans believe that impressionable women have abortions only because they're tricked or brainwashed by wicked doctors or birth-control fanatics? Probably they could, since that seems to be the logic behind all proposals requiring women to be shown pictures and other information intended to dissuade them from aborting. If so, then while the reproductive rights movement claims agency, responsibility and sovereignty for women -- their mantra, after all, is "choice" -- the anti-abortion movement, in its patronizing way, denies them all these things by refusing to recognize them as criminals rather than ditzy dupes of the doctors. Millions of women no doubt are furious at Trump today -- and in the long run his statement may prove one of the nails in his general-election coffin, but despite his caveman reputation they should recognize that, while still their enemy, Trump for once actually respects women more than his Republican rivals do.

Dictating the tone of a political campaign

Senator Sanders trails Hillary Clinton in the delegate count but continues to win states, sweeping weekend contests in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington. Sanders has challenged Clinton to debate him in New York, a state where she should have a big lead as a twice-elected Senator but also borders on Vermont. The Clinton campaign grows tired of debates and uses the occasion of the challenge to chastise Sanders for running a negative campaign, advising him to change his "tone" if he wants to share the stage with Clinton again. That Clinton is thin-skinned is well-known, but she and her people seem to be confusing the stance of the Senator with the attitude of many of his supporters, be they supposedly chauvinist "Bernie Bros." or leftists who see Hillary as a stooge of Wall Street. The Clintonites' own tone is ironic given how clearly Sanders has been battling Clinton with one hand tied voluntarily behind his back. The contrast with the Republican campaign is telling. Democrats boast lately of the high tone of their debates, and there's obvious truth to the boast. But is it really a flattering comparison when Sanders won't go as all-out to stop Clinton as Senator Cruz and his allies are going to stop Donald Trump? After early, calculated reticence toward Trump the campaign has become personal for Cruz and passionate for many Republicans who have no problem saying that they consider Trump unfit to lead their party, much less the nation. If the Sanders campaign lacks that same sense of urgency, Democrats may say that's because Hillary Clinton is no Donald Trump, but that's not saying much. Being liberals, Democrats idealize a campaign and debate in which each candidate says of the other, "You have some good ideas, but mine are better." That's presumably what the Clintonites want to hear from Sanders, and they may even claim that you do hear that about Sanders from Clinton, though what I've heard from her during the debates is that everything Sanders proposes is impractical or impossible. To be fair, she hasn't said that Sanders is unfit to be President because he calls himself a socialist, or for any other reason, but Bernie Sanders is no Hillary Clinton. It should not be off-limits during a primary campaign for one candidate to say that another is unfit to be President. You're not supposed to do that, of course, because the party is expected to rally behind the nominee and it'll look bad if someone now endorsing the nominee said earlier that he or she is unfit for office. The Republicans are tearing that rule book apart this year, and that may hurt them this fall, but there is a compelling if ugly honesty to the GOP race that transcends the stupidity of the front-runners and is absent from the Democratic campaign, where the party line, apparently, is that everything you've heard about Hillary Clinton is a big Republican lie -- and misogynist to boot! -- and Sanders doesn't give a damn about any of it. The only thing that seems to bug him is the speaking fees and the corporate donations she receives -- and his saying so was enough to get him branded a negative campaigner -- but things that bug so many others, not all of whom are chauvinist conservatives, are nothing to him. It would be strange if Sanders is refraining from going negative out of loyalty to a party to which he doesn't even belong, but he may well believe that he shouldn't say anything to damage Clinton considering what the Republicans are likely to vomit forth. But if you worry about how your words will impact someone else in November, haven't you really given up on yourself already? Sanders may talk a good game by demanding debates and drawing big crowds to his speeches, but if he hasn't already resigned himself to Clinton's nomination, his unwillingness to run an all-or-nothing campaign practically concedes it to her. If Clinton has a problem with Sanders's tone despite all this, she must have an intolerance of criticism that could rival Trump's -- which ought to make their debates really interesting.

The liberation of Palmyra

Syrian government troops, supported by Russian air power, retook the historic city of Palmyra from the self-styled Islamic State over the weekend. Syrians, Russians and Iranians will say that Palmyra, home of many spectacular Roman-era ruins, has been liberated. Others will be reluctant to use that word, since the city now returns to the control of the old tyrant after a brief time under a new tyranny. But if we take a step back from the usual politics, we may remember that Palmyra's invaluable relics had been hostage during the IS occupation to the whims of iconoclastic religious fanatics who were proud to do damage to some of the sites that had been pagan temples. By comparison, the Assad regime has no motivation to damage the ruins, which in peacetime are sources of tourist revenue and, presumably, national pride. In the worst case scenario the government and Russian forces might have annihilated the site had that been necessary to dislodge the Daesh, but initial reports indicate that that wasn't the case. It seems safe to say that the ruins have been liberated, and it should be self-evident that wherever the Baathist government retakes land from the IS there is a relative liberation. The people who return to Syrian government control may be little or no more free politically, but many are more free to practise their religions. That may be a small thing to some outside observers, but it's not nothing to the people on the ground. To think of the Assad regime as a liberating force ought to be chastening to many armchair statesman and strategists in the U.S. and the west in general. Too many of us waste time wishing for a third force, better than either of the antagonists and something we can identify with, when if someplace like Syria should matter to us at all our obligation should be to identify the better of the two that exist. not on the basis of geopolitical partisanship but in terms of humanitarianism and international law. Under whom will the land's people be better off and the region surrounding the land more stable? There was a moment before the ascendancy of the IS when the west could see Syria as a simple struggle between tyranny and its opposite. Too many of us persisted in seeing things that way well past the time when anyone ideologically appealing to us had a chance. Once the Daesh became the greatest threat to Assad the "Assad must go" rhetoric should have stopped for the duration. To the extent that IS success in Syria would strengthen its ability to threaten other countries, and that the war-driven refugee crisis threatened to destabilize even more countries, the entire international community should have recognized an objective obligation to secure the Assad regime and drop support for any other faction, IS or otherwise. That wouldn't have meant lying to ourselves by calling the Assad regime a just or fair one, and nothing the international community might do or say should have obliged conscientious Syrians to obey unconditionally what remains in many ways a gangster regime. But once you determine objectively that the Assad regime is the least worst option realistically possible for Syrians today, you have to tell yourself that any genuine freedom fighters in that unfortunate country are on their own. It cannot be American or western policy to destabilize Middle Eastern governments while the risk of Islamist uprisings persists. If Syria is a representative sample, it proves that when outsiders try to incite or subsidize the internal liberation of distant nations from tyrants, it's the tyrants who'll end up the liberators.

The Cruz-Trump duel: if only!

Senator Cruz is making a spectacle of himself this week and I don't know if it's doing him any good. The trouble began, as you'll recall, when Trump held Cruz responsible for an ad -- if you can call it that -- from an anti-Trump organization that insulted the current Mrs. Trump. Cruz quite plausibly denied responsibility, but an unappeased Trump threatened to "spill the beans" on Cruz's wife. Since then, another ad -- or was it just a tweet? -- compared Mrs. Cruz unfavorably with Mrs. Trump on aesthetic grounds. That was more than Cruz could stand; he couldn't stands no more! The Senator has called Trump a "sniveling coward" for attacking or threatening to attack Mrs. Cruz -- and that was before the National Enquirer published an article claiming that Cruz has had five extramarital affairs. The circle closed with Cruz blaming Trump for the tabloid accusation, accusing either the Enquirer itself or its sources of being Trump's "henchmen." While the supermarket tabloids all seem to support Trump -- I presume they're just pandering to the preferences of their regular audience -- there's no more reason to hold Trump responsible for what a tabloid publishes than to hold Cruz responsible for every anti-Trump expression within the Republican party.

Cruz may hope that this will be the "have you no decency?" moment that marks the beginning of Trump's end, but by now Trump's supporters, if not the man himself, have shown that they have no decency. What is "decency," after all, but another word for "political correctness" that gets in the way of telling people what you really think of them? Trump's fans probably will listen to Cruz and hear only whining. Two hundred years ago, there was another way to hold people accountable for dishonorable statements and slurs against your character. Fans of the hot Broadway show Hamilton will know what I'm talking about, and I wonder if that hip-hop historical play has made people think twice about dueling in an age when the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination are brawling in an outdoor sewer. Right-minded people frown upon dueling today because "honor" seems like a poor reason to kill someone. In fact, dueling actually did little to elevate the level of discourse then, mainly because relatively few people resorted to it. Jefferson never called out anyone who told stories about him and his slaves, for instance, while many contemporaries found dueling as barbarous as we do. But ask yourselves: when even the potential for being called out and challenged on the field of honor existed, how close could someone like Donald Trump come to political power before he was called out and really held to account for the crap he said? We can all deplore dueling, but if we agree that Trump and Cruz have dishonored the political process this year, what can be done about it apart from, if you're a Republican, voting for Gov. Kasich? There should be something we can do, beyond voting, to stop this from happening again, because we share in the responsibility for all of it by letting Trump and Cruz become popular. If we expect political candidates to behave honorably -- presuming that "honor" isn't just another word for political correctness -- then Americans probably should learn some code of honor themselves.

The Cruz-Trump debate: best two out of three falls

Last night Donald Trump won Arizona while Senator Cruz took Utah, leaving Gov. Kasich in the dust of the west. The Republican party has reached a point where the most hated U.S. Senator within his own party is now the "establishment" or "stop Trump" candidate. There's little to choose between the two front-runners, but if forced to choose in some nightmare scenario I think I'd go with Trump, trusting that the billionaire would be so thoroughly checked by his own party -- assuming, as I do, that he doesn't have the fascist tendencies hysterics attribute to him -- that he'd do little damage despite his obvious idiocy, while Cruz is a smug stone cold ideologue whose face I can't look on for long without feeling an urge to punch it. As the Republican campaign appears increasingly to be a two-man race, the real debate between them -- as opposed to the talk shows they and Kasich occasionally participate in -- has found its appropriate level.  They and their supporters have gone past ad hominem attacks to ad feminam or ad uxorem tactics. It's no longer enough for Trump's opponents to note, as I did yesterday, that their nemesis performed briefly, and not so long ago, as a professional wrestler. Moving beyond that, one anti-Trump organization enraged the candidate by posting a cheesecake shot from her teen years of Trump's current trophy wife, arguing that such a creature, however, comely, was unworthy of the title of First Lady. Trump holds "Lyin' Ted" responsible despite the Senator's disclaimers, and warns Cruz that he can "spill the beans" on Mrs. Cruz if further provoked. The Texan responded to the threat by calling Trump a classless coward, which might have meant something if either man had a real sense of honor. Meanwhile, a Washington Post reporter has saved Trump some of his trouble by speculating (with some sources) on what the "beans" might be on Mrs. C. Things should really get interesting if Trump takes this spat beyond social media and starts attacking Mrs. C at rallies or, better still, at a debate. Senator C. might well sew up the nomination if Trump does something like that, as long as the Senator can pull off a Stone Cold Stunner. Of course, while Cruz celebrates Kasich could hit him with a chair -- except that the candidates stand at lecterns at the debates. The debate organizers should consider changing that arrangement if they want a debate Republicans would really understand.

The foreign vote for Donald Trump

Since some people like to say that Donald Trump's speeches are perfect recruiting tools for the self-styled Islamic State -- I've heard that again today -- turnabout is fair play: the IS attacks on Brussels today make perfect campaign ads for Trump. In fact, while I don't really buy the argument that Trump will radicalize anybody, I have a stronger suspicion that each Daesh attack this year will radicalize more Americans, if you think voting for Trump is a radical act. The next thing you know, someone here will predict that IS will step up the attacks this year in order to get Trump elected, on the assumption that his words and policies will radicalize more Muslims, prove the IS point about a war on Islam, etc. etc. This would be a really narcissist stance for Americans to take, though I suppose it's inevitable when you think of terrorism as violence intended to change victims' minds. But it's easy to get tangled up analyzing the motivations of terrorists, especially when you throw in the whole notion of "propaganda of the deed." Are those people perpetrating terrorist acts in order to terrorize us into complying with their geopolitical or religious demands? Or are they doing it in order to provoke the enemy into showing its true, evil face, and thus drive more people to the terrorist side, as the "propaganda of the deed" concept suggests? I think it's a lot simpler than some people make it, and I don't think it's about us as much as other people make it. Muslim terrorists do their thing because they're convinced that they have a duty to do so. A generation or so ago Arab terrorists may have been reacting to specific acts of oppression, but by now terror is an end unto itself, a religious duty imposed not so much by the persistence of oppression as by the persistence of jahiliyyah, the state or pre-Islamic "ignorance" now identified by Islamists with wherever sharia doesn't prevail -- including many Muslim-majority countries. For those who've bought into that idea of Islam, there's nothing we can do short of submission to stop them from taking the fight to us. With the proclamation of their would-be caliphate, they're the aggressors now, and I don't think they care at all who gets elected President this year -- they're getting bombed now, after all, and that's unlikely to stop next January. Nor should we care what they think of whom we might elect. None of that means they can't have an influence on the election, as I suspect they inevitably will; it just means they don't do it in order to influence the election. In any event, why should it benefit Trump in particular? Senator Cruz is as belligerent on Islamism as Trump, after all. But somehow Cruz doesn't project power and resolution the way going-on-70 Trump does. Cruz has not stood in the squared circle the way Trump has. He has not taken the Stone Cold Stunner and survived, like Trump did. Obviously if Trump can do that he has nothing to fear from the headcutters of Raqaa.



Well, maybe that's not how all Trump's supporters see it, but what they all probably like about him, and what many others abhor, is Trump's indifference to consequences, or more specifically his indifference to what some will think of him doing what he thinks has to be done. Fortunately, what Americans think of him can have a consequence in November. But what we do about Trump should have nothing to do with whether the terrorists want him as President or not.

Politics is the continuation of fighting by other means

Charles Krauthammer wrote a well-meaning column last week condemning both Donald Trump's belligerent rhetoric and the tactics of protesters seemingly out to silence him. He probably goes too far when he describes the protesters as "totalitarian," but that's an issue for another time. The real problem with his column is that, in attempting to explain why Trump, his more pugnacious supporters, and the protesters are all wrong, he unwittingly explains part of the nation's belligerent mood. He does this in one sentence: "Politics is the civilized substitute for settling things the old-fashioned way -- laying your opponent out on a stretcher." This is a dig mostly at Trump, who's expressed nostalgia for a former time when the sort of agitators who disrupt his rallies would be stretchered out of them. But I'm not sure whether Krauthammer himself entirely understands what he wrote.

In what way does politics substitute for physically beating down your opponent? According to Krauthammer, it's a more civilized way of settling things. But if more people in 2016 seem to want to beat opponents down, or drown them out by screaming, that's probably because politics, i.e. elections, seem less and less capable of settling anything, because no one really acknowledges that they are -- figuratively speaking, for now -- beaten. There's no deference to the electorate by those in the political minority, and the presidential electorate gets the least deference of all. In part that's because American constitutional government limits the amount of deference a President can expect. Our system of checks and balances gives each legislator in Congress the prerogative to defy the President, a power exacerbated by partisanship, while the President's own prerogative is inherently limited by the Constitution. No American is obliged to give the President anything he wants simply because he won an election. At the same time, Americans feel that elections entitle the President or the winning party to something, but they see the major parties conceding virtually nothing. They may even agree with strategies of obstruction, depending on who the President is, while complaining that politics accomplishes or settles nothing.

With the modern intensification of ideology and identity politics, more Americans may feel that the winning candidate or party simply doesn't represent them and thus is owed nothing by them -- not even the benefit of the doubt for a "honeymoon" period. It was probably inevitable that this would rub against the democratic (or should I say "populist?") grain. Whatever the Constitution says, common sense tells people that the result of an election should settle something. Specifically it should settle that the country should move in a chosen direction whether the opposition likes it or not, though within constitutional bounds. Common sense probably tells people that those who supported the losing side have an obligation, if not to roll over and obey, then to respect that the winning party represents the majority and can't be treated like an alien menace, subject to something more akin to unconditional resistance than to principled opposition. Common sense most likely tells people that the opposition may have a right to say that the winning side is wrong, but also has something like a moral obligation, presuming that democracy itself is a moral imperative, to give the President or party in power a chance, if not the benefit of the doubt.

The anger of 2016 is based largely, I suspect, on a feeling that politics settles nothing because no one will give anyone else a chance. Democrats, liberals and progressives -- throw some other groups in and call it "the Left" -- are angry because they feel that Republicans have never given President Obama a chance. Trump's supporters started angry over many things but are growing even more angry that many seem unwilling to give Trump a chance. Behind all this is a feeling, perhaps incompatible with the Constitution, possibly consistent with "authoritarian" impulses elsewhere in the world, that opposition needs to be toned down to some extent between elections. That feeling is complicated in this country by both the First Amendment and the fact that, for now, the U.S. is governed, if that's the word, by a concurrent majority, a Democratic President and Republican Congress checking each other. But who thinks things will be settled if a Republican (especially Trump) wins the White House while the GOP retains Congress? Or if the White House remains Democratic and that party reclaims the Senate, as some think possible? Yet this country, to coin a paradox, will never get moving again until some things are settled, and on an instinctual level both the protesters trying to bumrush Trump rallies and the Trump supporters itching to clobber the protesters seem to understand this. They may recognize that if politics alone doesn't settle things in the way Krauthammer suggests, they may have to be settled the old-fashioned way. If Americans want to avoid that sort of settlement, they should acknowledge that no matter what their political philosophy or their demographic stake in government, they are answerable to everyone else in the country and bound in some inextricable and irrefutable way --which still needn't put a gag in their mouths -- to the will of a majority of their equals. In short, if your party or your candidate lost, you can't act like the other one didn't win, or else winning means nothing and neither does democracy. Such an acknowledgment may come hard to those conservatives who want government to do nothing or those liberals who want elections to settle nothing (if settling things requires any self-restraint of opinion), but that would only confirm our established impression that neither liberalism nor conservatism as practiced here can help us much. What does that leave?

No civility, no peace?

Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, defends the protesters at Donald Trump rallies and implies strongly that they were justified in forcing the cancellation of a Chicago rally one week ago. In the face of Trump's desire to see protesters arrested, Robinson warns the candidate that "demonstrators have the legal right to protest — and that a candidate for president of the United States has no countervailing right not to be protested." Trump and his people might attempt a distinction between protest and disruption, saying that the latter crosses some legal line, but Robinson contends that protesters have just as much right as anyone else to attend a Trump event, as long as they are peaceful. Here's another sticking point. Trump insists that the protesters are not peaceful, implying that they behave violently before security ejects them or before his own supporters attack them. Robinson and many others dispute this claim, and to my knowledge no video exists showing protesters spontaneously attacking Trump supporters in the seats. Robinson also defines "peaceful" protest as broadly as possible, to an extent Trump and others might not accept. "I’m talking about nonviolent demonstrations, of course," Robinson writes, "but nonviolent does not necessarily mean quiet, timid or small."

In effect, Robinson is arguing for protesters' right to drown Trump out, but it's fair to ask, as Trump himself has, whether liberals would feel the same way were Trump supporters organizing to drown out Hillary Clinton or Senator Sanders. However you fell about any of these politicians, the honest answer can only be that liberals would accuse pro-Trump hecklers and shouters of being bullies like their hero. Likewise, it could be argued that a cross burning on its own is a non-violent form of protest, but would Robinson agree, or would he see it as some unacceptable form of intimidation? In Trump's case, Robinson seems to believe that a desired end ('[T]hose who believe in the hallowed American values of openness, tolerance, decency and the rule of law have the absolute right to say “No!”') justifies means he might not justify when used for different ends. The volume, brazenness and size of anti-Trump demonstrations are justified for Robinson mainly because he sees Trump as a bigot. "These protests are important because they show that Americans will not take Trump’s outrageous nonsense lying down," he writes, "I believe it is important to show that those who reject Trumpism are as passionate and multitudinous as those who welcome it."He rejects the cautionary objection that shouting Trump down will only strengthen him by "heighten[ing] the sense of persecution and victimhood that Trump encourages among his supporters."Instead, he believes shows of mass disapproval "might help energize voters to come out and reject Trump in November."

On one level, Robinson is making the leftist argument that "bigotry" isn't entitled to a respectful hearing and deserves to be shouted down, whether the "bigot" sees himself as one or not. But since he's defending the protesters on freedom-of-speech grounds, he ought to acknowledge that the freedom to drown out your opponents can only be mutual and not reserved for subjectively-defined thoughtcrimes. He writes that Trump has "the absolute right" to say the things Robinson finds awful and bigoted, but he doesn't quite mean that. In effect, Robinson is arguing for a primitive sort of democracy in which public speech is equally the prerogative of everyone yet ultimately competitive in a zero-sum way. If a critical mass of protesters silences Trump in Chicago, to Robinson that seems to be democracy at work. It is, in an old sense of the word according to which the vox populi belonged to whoever gathered more people to yell louder in some public square. It's still true, however, that Trump's supporters greatly outnumbered his supporters at the Chicago venue. Could they have drowned out the protesters had Trump decided to go on with the rally? It wasn't an option, since drowning them out would have drowned out Trump himself. The pro-Trump majority would have no alternative but an appeal to a still-more primitive sort of democracy, since determined protesters can be silenced only by physical force, as when security guards remove them individually. Only the sort of mass brawl Trump apparently feared could have "drowned out" the Chicago protesters, apparently. Why wouldn't that be democracy at work as well? Robinson's answer would be that the counter-protesters would have resorted to violence, but if they want to hear their man, why should their will be vetoed by a loud minority? The implication of refusing them would be that if any minority is so angry and loud that only physical force can silence them, the majority must defer to them. Has a minority -- a political minority, that is, -- any obligation to defer to a majority? Not so much as you'd think, since this is America, but more Americans may be coming to believe that in a real democracy the will of the majority should, if you'll excuse the word, trump most minority objections, particularly when those objections are expressed in the arguably nonviolent but also uncivil manner seen in Chicago and elsewhere this year. And as I've asked before, what will the protesters do if Trump becomes President? Would the winter of his inauguration be followed by a "spring" of the sort seen in Egypt or Ukraine, and then by a long, hot summer?

Democracy in America wasn't meant to be a matter of who can yell the loudest or who can bring more fists to a fight. The Framers probably never imagined a time when a candidate for office -- who by their rules of etiquette shouldn't electioneer for himself anyway, much less in Trump's vulgar manner -- was so odious to so many that he could barely make himself heard on the stump. Of course, had any of them rivaled Trump for any office the billionaire probably would have found himself called to the field of honor, if he wasn't caned in the street. Perhaps Trump should consider himself lucky he lives in our time, the only time, perhaps, when as vacuous a boob as he could vie plausibly for the highest office in the land. We can argue that attempts to shout him down are an affront to liberal democracy, but his success to date probably means that liberal democracy was in big trouble before any of Trump's antagonists raised their voices, not just because the party-primary system lets him flourish, but also because people have grown so disgusted with the whole political process that they just want to see Trump wreck things and humiliate people. Inevitably, that makes people want to humiliate Trump and his fans. Democracy has become a petty thing, but unless you can name any likely dictator material out there I guess we're stuck with it, though neither Donald Trump nor Eugene Robinson are doing it any favors.

Trump's priorities

During the recent brouhaha over David Duke's endorsement of Donald Trump some people noted that while Louis Farrakhan had not formally endorsed the billionaire candidate, the Nation of Islam leader had spoken favorably of him. Farrakhan was particularly pleased that Trump, whose campaign is self-financed, was not currying favor with Jewish donors. To my knowledge, no one asked Trump to repudiate Farrakhan's praise, but if he hasn't done so with words he now does so by action. Claiming a schedule conflict, Trump says he'll skip the next Republican debate -- and thus will kill it, since Gov. Kasich says he won't attend just to debate Sen. Cruz -- in order to address AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Granted, this isn't the same thing as putting on a show of Zionist devotion to impress Sheldon Adelson, but while Trump may not need any Jewish donor's money, he obviously feels a need to nail down the Jewish vote. Apparently they're the one group other than white Christian males that he dares not alienate.

For what it's worth, AIPAC routinely invites all major-party presidential candidates to its annual conference. Hillary Clinton also will be there, while Senator Sanders has not yet confirmed his participation. Since the AIPAC conference is a three-day event there are openings for Cruz and Kasich to appear also, but their plans are unclear. Cruz probably is the most fanatical Zionist of the remaining candidates, having notoriously walked out of a gathering of Christian refugees from the Middle East, whose cause he normally champions, when they booed Israel. Sanders is the only Jewish person in the race but is non-observant. Kasich is a critic of President Obama's stance toward Israel. What Trump will say is hard to predict, but it's easy to say at this point that he'd rather have a podium to himself than debate his rivals again. I wonder, however, what his populist base would say if either of Trump's rivals had the guts to state plainly that he'd rather perform for the Israeli lobby than test himself against them. If his base leans toward Christian Zionism, seeing Israel's existence as part of God's end-times plan, there probably isn't much to wonder about.

Inclusiveness as a form of extremism

Katha Pollitt is a diehard supporter of Hillary Clinton and in the minority among Nation magazine contributors, as attested by the magazine's endorsement of Senator Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Pollitt believes that a double standard prevails when feminist Clinton supporters are accused of being "vagina voters" but male Sanders supporters must not be called sexist or labeled "penis voters." Sanders himself has disavowed any appeal to male solidarity or chauvinism, as Pollitt notes, but as with many self-appointed representatives of groups that have suffered discrimination, she sees privilege behind his attitude. "When the whole system has been set up by men for men since the founding of the Republic," she writes, no explicit appeal to male supremacy is necessary -- and no appeal to gender-blind objectivity is adequate. In a recent Nation column Pollitt states bluntly that "Women should have 50 percent of power in every area of life, if not more....It's simple justice." She believes the U.S. should emulate Ireland, which recently enacted a law requiring political parties to give at least 30% of their nominations to women in order to receive public campaign funds. She remains convinced that despite all the counterexamples available of reactionary female politicians, from Margaret Thacher to Sarah Palin, "more women in government benefits women."

"Is that such a wild thing to say?" Pollitt asks immediately afterward, and I'd answer that it is if she believes that only more women in government can benefit women. I suspect that Pollitt does believe that, since she spends the rest of her column asserting that the one big thing Sanders can do as President to benefit women is to make sure there are more women in government. Pollitt's kind of feminism is a form of extremism. In her insistence on proportional representation by gender as a minimum demand she's asserting an extremist form of "inclusive" politics, at the opposite extreme from the blatantly discriminatory, exclusionary politics of the recent past. This sort of inclusivism shouldn't be confused with the compensatory policies designed (or desired) to counter past discrimination. Those policies, viewed objectively, are designed to level a playing field with an eye toward the true meritocracy dreamt of by Martin Luther King. While debates continue to rage over when the compensatory regime should end, most advocates of those policies envision an end, however distant and however unilaterally determined. Pollitt is advocating something else: inclusivity as a permanent principle of government, according to which there must always be a certain minimum of women in power. That demand is based on the sort of essentialist thinking we were supposed to have overcome, the assumption being that women, as women, have something unique to contribute to any deliberation or decision, both for the common good and for women especially, so that the community as a whole and women in particular suffer when women are insufficiently represented in government. The implicit corollary assumption is that no man can represent or serve women's interests as well as women, for reasons of temperament, perhaps, or as a plain matter of identity. At some level, the demand for permanent proportional representation for women (or for men) presumes an inimical element in gender relations. Pollitt half-jokingly suggests minimum representation for races as well, and the message would be the same then: one race can't be trusted to serve the others' interests fully or all equally. She may as well demand minimum representation for gays, with specific quotas for lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, etc., but we really should discourage this sort of thinking, especially if all of this is an argument for Hillary Clinton. To say that questioning Clinton's integrity  is misogynist, as some (if not Pollitt) imply, is as bad as saying that any critic of Israel is an anti-semite.

The whole point of the great anti-discrimination movements of the 20th century and beyond, or so I thought, was not just that no group was superior or inferior to the others, but that no group had special qualities or attributes to exalt or stigmatize them. The argument against racial discrimination was that there was no difference between black and white, yellow or brown. The argument against gender discrimination was that the biological differences between male and female were irrelevant to their intellectual capacity or fitness for responsibility. Any argument for proportional representation rejects these premises, asserting instead that women, for instance, do have essential, exclusive qualities and attributes, the only difference being that now these must be recognized and included -- in some cases without asking too many questions about who specifically is included -- rather than excluded. But if every group recognized (or stigmatized) under the old hierarchy of discrimination and chauvinism has some essential quality or attribute, then what is the special particular attribute of the white male -- or, if you will, the Christian or the straight white male? I can't help suspecting slightly that some if not many outside that circle, however you draw it, will say its special quality is evil. If that group is assumed hostile to every other group, what else can you assume about it? Granting that many straight white males (to include myself), not to mention Christians (to draw the circle wider) have done evil in history, to believe, as extremism like Pollitt's implies, that this group is inherently adversarial if not oppressive toward all the others, and incapable of representing anything but itself, is to be a bigot.

Counting coup on Trump doesn't count

Student groups celebrated their driving Donald Trump out of Chicago over the weekend, while the man who tried to rush Trump's podium in Dayton OH --without a weapon, as far as I know -- boasts of having "bullied the bully" and "delegitimizing" Trump. In other words, there's a lot of self-delusion going on if these people think they have at all weakened the Republican front-runner. If anything, they'll probably make him stronger as a backlash builds against increasingly organized disruptions of Trump's campaign events. People like these should know from experience that nothing enrages or emboldens extremists than attempts to silence them. They should understand that they aren't delegitimizing Trump at all for anyone outside their ideological safe space. Seeing an older video of Tommy DiMassimo, the Dayton provocateur -- whom Trump seems to have mistaken for an Islamic State sympathizer -- makes it plain that people like him are operating on id as much as Trump and his fans are. They seem to be driven by the same impulse to denounce by insult while basking in their own righteousness. You don't make a spectacle out of stepping on the American flag and expect to accomplish anything positive in this country. Iconoclasm and a threat to occupy the public sphere are all such people have to offer. I'm not normally bothered by this sort of leftist excess, but for leftists to mistake their exhibitionism for political accomplishment at this time, much less exalt it to a higher plane of activism than the electioneering outreach necessary to stop Trump, is pathetic. What do they propose to do if Trump is elected President? Bumrush the inauguration? What will that prove? That they won't accept Trump as their President? They don't get to do that unless they do everything in their power to get people to vote against him,and if they fail he'll be just as much their President, whether they like it or not, as Obama is the President of his haters, whether they like it or not. And even though the Obama haters were dedicated to opposition and obstruction from day one, they did not make a scene at either of Obama's inaugurations of the sort that you know the Trumpophobes are planning should the day come. The sort of displays DiMassimo puts on, equivalent to the tantrums of Trump and his people, won't accomplish anything toward any goal he may have for a better country or world. But I doubt whether he has any real goal apart from self-expression, which under a decadent sort of liberalism becomes an end unto itself, whatever else happens to the nation. After all, isn't that what we boast of, in essence, when we condemn the authoritarians of the world: that we are free as long as we can say Fuck You to our leaders and our fellow citizens? You'd think the authoritarians would take note and let their people blow off steam as ours do -- but they probably take their people too seriously to do that.

Sauce for the gander: what is Sanders' responsibility?

Fair is fair: if we want to hold Donald Trump responsible for his fans when they attack protesters -- if we want to say that Trump has a responsibility to tell his fans not to hit protesters, or not to wish they could be hit -- than Senator Sanders has to be held responsible to the same extent when avowed supporters try to shout Trump down at his rallies. That is, Sanders has to disavow any attempt to shut down Trump rallies and to remind his fans that Trump has as much right as any candidate to get his message out. To be clear, I feel pretty certain that Sanders is in no way encouraging anyone to make scenes at Trump rallies. But if one candidate is to be judged by those who support them, so must all the others. Like it or not, Trump was right this weekend when he said that the media would go berserk in a way we haven't really seen yet if his fans disrupted rallies by other candidates, especially the Democrats. He surrendered that moral high ground a bit when he threatened to have Sanders rallies disrupted, but the point remains valid independent of the man. The fact is, the left does get a free pass to an extent in cases like this because they're perceived as the common people speaking truth to power, while Trump, to the extent that he is perceived to preach "hate," is implicitly deemed eligible to be shouted down.

The real problem remains that there's a failure to communicate even before the hecklers get started. A typical scene took place yesterday: Trump repeatedly had to utter his "Get 'em out!" catchphrase as protesters rose up one by one. Finally he vowed that he would "take the country back" from them. He really needs to clarify from whom he means to take the country back, because people insist on hearing that he wants to take it back from ethnic minorities while restoring political if not also cultural primacy to whites. I really don't think that's what he means, but he shouldn't take it for granted that everyone knows what he means, especially if he believes that people are out to distort his message. I don't advise this thinking that he can clarify his position to everyone's satisfaction, since some people are bound to link or stake their personal identity to whatever political faction or class from whom Trump might want to reclaim the country. Unfortunately, it's probably impossible to completely detach Trump's sort of populist-conservative discourse from racial politics, since it seems inevitably at odds with the compensatory regime on which many minorities and women feel dependent for protection from perceived straight-white-male-christian hegemony. In turn, the other side is so convinced of its moral superiority, which could never be subject to a vote, that it finds an "all means necessary" defense against Trump tempting, however limited their means may actually prove, even though not all Americans will share their assumption that silencing a perceived hater is a moral victory. If Bernie Sanders still dreams of winning a national election, he needs to set these people straight and take responsibility for their future conduct without accepting blame for their past deeds. If Sanders himself entertains the idea that it's right for anyone to disrupt Trump's rallies and try to silence him, then in that respect he's no better than Trump himself and possibly worse. Nothing would be more likely to confirm Trump's perception of Sanders as a "Communist" in the worst sense of the word. Again, I don't think Sanders is guilty of ordering or approving of the disruptions, but if Trump continues to spin these incidents into a left-wing conspiracy it won't be enough for Sanders to be not guilty. He has to make a stand for civility as soon as possible and leave Trump to hang himself with his own words.

The whole world is watching...

Donald Trump sounded almost philosophical about cancelling a rally in Chicago after fights broke out inside and outside the venue between supporters and protesters. He personally did not sound angry; rather, he seemed more cognizant than ever of the anger breaking out on all sides during this presidential campaign season. He seemed unwilling to acknowledge that the protesters were angry at him, but he seemed to concede that they had reason to be angry at the general state of things in the country. Presuming the protesters to be mostly black, he mentioned the high unemployment rate among black men and blamed it on incompetent government. He obviously meant the Obama administration but, this being Trump and no respecter of the Bushes, he may have been thinking further back in time as well. I think he sincerely believes he can offer blacks a solution as part of his effort to make American great again, but he seems at a loss to comprehend why they and other minorities seem so hostile to him, why they seem to assume that he and his simply want to kick them to the curb or beat them away from the lifeboat. For all we know, any of Trump's remaining Republican rivals, and even his new friend Dr. Carson is more likely to want to throw masses of Americans to the wolves in the name of ideology or "morality." But Trump is trapped, by his fault or not, in a perception that his is the angry white movement, that all his appeals to national pride are coded appeals to whites only, and he may not know how to reach out, especially at a time when some minority spokesmen seem determined to make it more difficult for others to reach out to them. Democracy, as I keep on saying, means mutual accountability. On the most primitive level, you saw that if you saw Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters fighting tonight. If Trump wants to convince the enduring majority of skeptics that he's the sort of uniter he claims to be, let him figure out a way to move the debate to a higher plane.

Idiot confirms Trump voter stereotype

John McGraw is now the face of the Donald Trump movement, whether Donald Trump likes it or not. This 78 year old North Carolinian is an angry, old white male. Taking Trump's wish that he could punch protesters in the face to heart, McGraw saw his chance last night when the usual delegation of protesters was getting escorted out of a Fayetteville venue. I'll let InsideEdition tell the rest.


Dismiss David Duke and his ilk if you will, but I think Trump does have to repudiate this guy, or at least what he did. Trump and his people may resent hecklers, and others besides them may resent these hecklers' agenda, but unless you're going to buy into the dubious idea of "free speech zones" you have to concede that democracy comes with a certain amount of confrontation. People want the powerful to hear them, and that means getting in their faces in a sometimes obnoxious way. But no matter how obnoxious they get, it's the first person who resorts to violence who loses. McGraw hasn't made his hero's life any easier, since people already suspect Trump and his followers of "fascist" tendencies, and Trump himself has shown an impatience with dissent. To an extent I can empathize with him -- Trump, that is, and not McGraw. The hecklers clearly don't go to his rallies to give Trump a fair hearing; they clearly have a set notion of what he's about and they don't like it. Trump has a right to feel that his own rights are being violated, but the sort of dissent he's encountering should be taken seriously as a warning, just like the dissent authorities try to restrict to "free speech zones" wherever the WTO or the G8 gathers. It may be bad form for some people not to listen respectfully to Trump, but if the rest of us are obliged to respect the anger behind the Trump movement, then Trump as a candidate for elected office has an even greater obligation not to ignore people's anger at him or wish it beaten into submission. Despite his self-proclaimed outsider status, he is exactly the sort of power to whom all should be free, or should have the courage, to speak the truth as they see it.

The Michigan Mystery

Senator Sanders won the Democratic presidential primary in Michigan by a very narrow margin, but it now looks like his mightiest blow of the campaign so far. The Vermont socialist is showing endurance and unexpected strength. Michigan was most unexpected and may go down as a debacle for opinion pollsters on a level with their call of the 1936 presidential election for Alf Landon. They were predicting a comfortable victory for Hillary Clinton, but as Wired magazine points out -- and they're not the first -- conventional polling simply isn't reaching the younger voters who form Sanders's base because pollsters haven't yet adapted to the age of the smartphone. Their polls are based disproportionately on callers who can be reached on landline phones, and they disproportionately favor Clinton. Beyond this apparent blind spot, opinionators were predicting a Clinton win since the last debate, believing that Sanders was alienating minorities with his body language and word choices, and that Clinton had nailed him by bringing up his vote against a bailout bill she credited with saving the Detroit auto industry. As far as demographics went, Sanders benefited because blacks, despite Detroit and Flint, formed a smaller part of the overall vault, while those who voted favored Clinton by a considerably smaller margin than their counterparts in southern states. The real color that dominated in Michigan may be rust. As many have noted the morning after, Michigan favored the two candidates, Sanders and Donald Trump, most hostile to bipartisan free-trade orthodoxy. Whatever else they were thinking by voting for either man, their Michigan supporters deserve credit for not thinking as consumers first, as Republicans in particular want them to do when it comes to working-class issues like trade, wages, etc. For nearly two hundred years, the argument for free trade has been an argument for the primacy of consumers' interests, as laissez-faire advocates have urged citizens to think of themselves primarily as consumers who can only benefit from tariff-free competition. They've said the benefit comes when domestic manufacturers are compelled to make better products, but the real benefit, such as it is, has always been cheaper products, better-made or not, and the real consequence inevitably is jobs lost. This has only grown more obvious once labor markets around the world could compete practicably for the privilege of manufacturing products. The reigning consumerist ideology asks each of us only to think of our own pocketbooks, but doing so is an economic equivalent of the "first they came for..." complacency Martin Niemoller denounced in Nazi Germany. No job or sector of a national economy is an island, after all, and both Sanders and Trump signal that they understand this, though Trump, as a Republican, is still more likely to scapegoat government and labor for the mass outsourcing he denounces. Michigan may show the ascendancy of a protectionist electorate that no Republican but Trump is likely to win, while Clinton's challenge, should she prevail over Sanders, is to repudiate a major part of her husband's legacy. Enduring uncertainty about what she stands for -- the right thinks her a far leftist, but of course the left knows better -- helps explain the Michigan result as well. The state wasn't exactly make-or-break for Sanders given his wins over the weekend, but it was certainly the greatest opportunity this week for Democrats to say that they don't want this primary campaign to be over just yet. Just as the more ideological Republicans are keeping Senator Cruz viable, either to stop Trump or to force him towards orthodoxy, so many Democrats, including many donors, are keeping Sanders in the running, even while realistic about his long-term chances, in order to show Clinton what a real Democrat, or a real liberal, or a real progressive should look like -- and I don't mean the gender.