Republicans: defiant in surrender

While Democratic castigations of President Trump can be dismissed as partisanship, fanaticism or outright hate, condemnations of a Republican President by Republican Senators get more people's attention. Trump's critics within the GOP can be, and are, dismissed in turn as "the establishment" by would-be insurrectionists like Steve Bannon, but it's still unclear how the Republican majority takes them. What the rank and file think of Sens. Corker and Flake, for instance, is for all intents and purposes a moot point, since both solons have announced that they will not seek reelection next year. In other words, they have declared war on Trump and simultaneously surrendered to him. Unless we learn that either man has been driven from public life solely by Trump's sheer obnoxiousness, the simplest assumption to make is that neither man wanted to contest a primary against a presumed pro-Trump challenger. Presuming such challenges inevitable, the incumbents feared either defeat in the primaries or the sheer ordeal of them. Either way, howevermuch they cast defiance at the President, they seem to be chickening out of contests that would be cast inevitably as referenda on Trump, tests to prove whether his movement has seized control of the party as completely as the Reagan movement did forty years ago. If they confine their fights with the President to Washington, theirs will all be empty gestures. The real fights will be in their home states, and the real question is whether they've surrendered the field to those presumed pro-Trump challengers or are laying the groundwork for successors more like themselves. If they retire only to have Trumpets replace them, they'll only have furthered the cause they claim to oppose. Of course, all either Senator may care about now are book sales, Flake from a volume already published, Corker from one sure to come. But that hardly seems patriotic when they've portrayed Trumpism as a danger to the republic, or at least the Republicans. Ironically, those liberals who see the danger in these moves may find themselves rooting for the familiar GOP sugar-daddies, people like the Koch Bros. who are known to oppose many aspects of Trumpism, to take an interest in these 2018 primaries. For all I know, that might only provoke Trump to threaten to "open up" campaign-finance laws, but in any event, to the extent that the American center-right now has a recognized strategic importance in the struggle with Trump, liberals and progressives may find themselves choosing strange bedfellows next year.

The Tacitus Trap

Western news media are reporting the decision by the Chinese Communist Party congress to incorporate "Xi Jinping Thought" into the country's constitution as akin to declaring a personality cult. According to the state news agency, however, it is almost routine to canonize a paramount leader's guiding principles into the fundamental law. It's not the sort of thing we'd do in the U.S., but it doesn't mean that Xi is another Mao, either. The thing I actually found interesting about the congress and the attendant hoopla was that, for all that Xi and his colleagues are committed to the "sinicization" of socialism, or molding Marx and Lenin's ideas to the contours of Chinese culture, their thinkers seem to be significantly influenced by at least one western thinker. Since the Chinese famously take the long view of things, they've looked back to the work of Publius Cornelius Tacitus, the historian of first-century CE Rome.

From Tacitus Chinese political scientists derive the concept of the "Tacitus Trap," against which Xi is trying to immunize the Communist Party.  The Tacitus Trap is a kind of tipping point, past which a government or its leaders, through corruption, dishonesty, lack of transparency etc., loses credibility so irretrievably that people won't believe them when they're actually telling the truth or doing the right thing. This preoccupation with Tacitus probably derives from China's long struggle with corruption since Deng Xiaoping liberalized the economy. Western observers, I suspect, don't take China's anti-corruption efforts too seriously. Since Leninist regimes in general fell into the Tacitus Trap long ago, westerners tend to assume that if a Communist party leader is accused of corruption, it's most likely only because he or she is a political opponent of a ruling clique that is most likely just as corrupt. While that explanation probably can't be ruled out, we probably shouldn't underestimate the seriousness with which the Chinese Communists take the corruption issue as part of their effort to present their style of government as a practical alternative to a western liberal democratic model that has fallen into a Tacitus Trap of its own, sprung by partisanship.

That the Chinese now actively promote their system as an alternative model suggests that they believe, as do many western liberal democrats, that certain types of government will be inherently hostile toward them, or inherently unstable on the geopolitical stage. The Chinese most likely would rather deal with authoritarian regimes on the assumption that they'll have consistent, predictable foreign policies, presumably based more on realist notions of national interest than on ideological agendas. The western contention, of course, is that authoritarian regimes are inherently unstable because they provide no check on a leader's ambitions while inevitably generating resistance tending toward civil war by suppressing dissent. Reality occupies a middle ground between these positions. China's concern with the Tacitus Trap indicates that the Communist Party does worry about losing the confidence of its people. The question for the future of China is whether they maintain (or regain) that confidence through a greater emphasis on transparency and honest government, or through the more typical Leninist method of conditioning people to trust the Party no matter what.

The Proposition

It's a sad measure of the decline of American politics in the 21st century that people now look to George W. Bush as a model of principle and integrity. But some people will simply say that President Trump is so bad, or such a threat, that Dubya now sounds like a welcome voice of reason by comparison. He earned plaudits last week for a speech denouncing "blood and soil" nationalism in an implicit rebuke to Trump and his alt-right supporters. In effect, Bush upheld the idea, popular among liberals and many conservatives, that the U.S. is a "propositional" nation, based more on ideas than ethnicity or any ethnically specific or exclusive culture.  Since he launched the War on Terror in 2001, his ideological justifications for redeeming "evil" nations by "liberating" them have been challenged by dissidents on the right, starting with the Pat Buchanan-type "paleoconservatives" whose criticisms were often written off as amoral isolationism. The alt-right and the Trump movement have renewed the challenge and are similarly labeled, with less reluctance to ascribe their isolationism to bigotry. They still don't believe that it was Americans' right or responsibility to liberate either country, and many still doubt whether the 21st century U.S. should be any other country's role model, but they share neocons' suspicion  that the anti-interventionist right argument is based on bigoted assumptions about non-westerners' capacity for individuality and citizenship as we understand it, if not an inhumane indifference to whether non-western people live or die. 

As for the "propositional" nature of the U.S., it's at least superficially indisputable, as the Founders staked independence from Great Britain on ideological justifications that weren't necessarily reducible to culturally-dependent "rights of Englishmen." Any revolutionary regime is a propositional nation in that sense, though the U.S. obviously was a less radical departure from ancestral traditions than the Leninist revolutions of the 20th century, the most successful of which -- as of 2024, when the People's Republic of China will have outlasted the Soviet Union -- eventually reconciled itself to much if not most of its national cultural heritage. But while the U.S. may be inescapably dedicated to certain ideas that, as ideas, can never be absolutely exclusive to one culture, the responsibility to promote liberal democracy abroad promoted by Dubya and accepted by his successor, despite Barack Obama's own criticism of Dubya's wars, simply does not follow.  The anti-interventionist right, including the alt-right, is immune to that temptation because its members are materialist conservatives. For them, the nation is never so much an idea as  it is the people (or certain people) who actually live within its borders here and now, whose material interests -- some, more controversially, would add cultural interests -- should count for more than ideology in American foreign-policy making. If they seem naive about certain nations others see as threats, it may be because they embrace an ideal of nationality according to which the U.S. should aspire to normalcy rather than exceptionalism, and they assume that most other nations are normal in that sense.

Criticizing Dubya on the Daily Caller website, Scott Greer condemns the neocon belief that the U.S. "cannot exist just like other nations in serving its citizens and protecting its sovereignty." One need not be a neocon to question whether the governments most concerned with their sovereignty in the face of international scrutiny are the ones that best serve their citizens. But you cannot be a neocon, apparently, or perhaps not even a liberal, and question whether those governments' performance is any of our business, much less question whether our own national character depends on it being our business. A nation dedicated to individual liberty is a nice idea, but the worth of individual liberty always will depend on individuals, not institutions; and making nations safe for individual liberty at all costs, at the expense of every other consideration, may not be in individuals' best interests in the long run.

'He knew what he was getting into'

Donald Trump says so many asinine things on a regular basis that it actually dilutes valid criticism to focus on one of his comparatively innocuous statements, but the new controversy over the President's attempted condolence call to the widow of one of the Green Berets recently killed in Niger reinforces my suspicion that Trump and his opponents hardly speak the same language. As you may have heard by now, a Democrat congresswoman sitting in on the call at the widow's home described the President's remarks as not only "insensitive" but "horrible" and "absolutely crazy, unnecessary." At the heart of her complaint, lately seconded by the soldier's mother, is Trump's comment, as paraphrased by Rep. Wilson, that the soldier "knew what he was getting into" when he joined the military.

It seems self-evident to me that the President was trying to say something to the effect that the soldier was a brave man to serve his country knowing the risks that service involved. If so, it's understandable that he sees Rep. Wilson's interpretation of it as deliberately deceptive. He believes he had "a very nice conversation" with the widow. Wilson heard it differently, so that it sounded like "just matter-of-factly, that this is what happens, anyone who is signing up for military duty is signing up to die." Putting it that way "disrespected" the fallen soldier in a way that Trump absolutely could not have intended. But Donald Trump speaks for a worldview profoundly different, it seems, from the people he meant to console. The difference in perception between Trump and his movement, on one hand, and their opponents may be based on nothing less than a different understanding of human existence. I don't mean to be pretentious about this, so let's put it in as simple terms as possible. The U.S. can be roughly divided between people who feel that life is tough and those who feel that it is cruel. For someone whose loss seems incommensurable and probably senseless, a "life is tough" response, however complimentary to the deceased in its intent, will seem almost cruelly inadequate. From one perspective, the idea of "signing up to die" is practically unimaginable in its horrific implications; from the other it's a moment of honor, courage and toughness. President Trump  has often said that Americans need to get tough (or "smart" in a synonymous sense), while many opposed to him see the very requirement of toughness, and what it implicitly entails, as essentially cruel. I could go on about the fundamental conflict between "tough-mindedness" that veers between aggression and complacency and a hedonic mentality dedicated to the political overthrow of cruelty, but we don't need to go into all its political dimensions to see the failure to communicate here. That failure will persist until one side learns toughness or the other recognizes cruelty. Elections probably won't hasten either event, but other events might, so that future historians will recognize an absurdity to this particular controversy that many of us today cannot.

Is liberal indifference sustainable?

You've seen this idea expressed many times on this blog over the past decade: political liberalism, as it evolved during the 20th century, is defined by its indifference to the outcomes of elections. It requires acquiescence in election results because it presumes that no result in a freely contested election can be so unacceptable that it justifies resistance to the winning candidate or party taking office. Because liberalism -- or at least the pluralist liberalism identified with Isaiah Berlin -- takes for granted that there is no ultimate universal standard or good that permits or requires us to override the will of the electorate, it follows that there are multiple if not infinite acceptable outcomes, so long as the process is respected. Modern liberalism -- you could also call it progressivism -- envisions the electoral process as a perpetual-motion machine; its faith is that no idea or policy truly antithetical to democracy can survive the electoral process. Its most fundamental article of faith is that elections in and of themselves can not destroy democracy, though what elected officials do once elected may tell a different story. It occurred to me that this modern attitude diverges significantly from the classical political tradition. That tradition assumed that political history played out in cycles, or in rises and falls, or pendulum swings from one extreme to another. The tradition anticipated decadence to overtake any political order in time, though political theorists, including the American Founders, experimented with building safeguards against decadence into constitutions. Decadence followed certain predictable patterns, most typically when the expansion of voting rights created opportunities for unprincipled demagogues to take power for their own selfish ends by pandering to equally self-interested voters, either on the basis of raw self-interest or through rhetoric that gave self-interest the appearance of principle. In modern times, leftism cast the narrative of demagoguery into disrepute, reducing warnings against it into the self-interested conservatism of established elites. Even without leftism, a democracy tending toward universal suffrage will increasingly resent the demagoguery narrative, while pluralist liberalism absolves the electorate from blame should a demagogue take power, withholding judgment on the actual demagogue until that official abuses his or her power -- by which time, according to critics of so-called authoritarian democracies, it may be too late. Liberalism has no real answer to authoritarian democracy except the idea of term limits, an idea with which many liberals remain uncomfortable because it limits the electorate's options. It would seem that liberalism, to the extent that it's committed to universal suffrage and plural goods, has no structural answer to the threat of demagoguery, except to propose immunizing the masses against demagogic appeals by enhancing their education. Contemporary observers question the effectiveness of that strategy, and a few (as discussed yesterday) go so far as to propose contracting the franchise to ensure that elections are determined more objectively. Democracy's moral claim, however, has nothing to do with any pretensions of objectivity, and while liberals may idealize objectivity as the opposite of irrational passion, they're sure to question any "objective" recommendation to limit either the options available to or the actual composition of the electorate. Liberalism remains convinced that liberal democracy is an end unto itself. In effect, it holds that the electorate and the nation are one and the same, so that there is no separate standard of national interest that could possibly overrule the electorate. While we should all be careful about asserting such a standard, or assuming that it justifies our disapproval of an election, we should be willing to ask whether the nation is something other than the electorate, and whether anything important follows from that, without being accused automatically of authoritarian tendencies. At a point in American history when we seem obliged to choose between demagogues with no other plausible options, we definitely need to rethink a lot of things we took for granted not so long ago.

The case for epistocracy?

It used to be the right- wing that believed most people too stupid to have a say in great political decisions. After the election of President Trump, more people on the left seem open to the idea. Jan-Werner Muller isn't one of them. Instead, he uses his review of Jason Brennan's new book Against Democracy in the October 9 Nation to warn against the temptation of what Brennan calls "epistocracy," the newest label for rule by the wisest. Brennan apparently believes that most Americans don't bother studying policy options closely because they assume that their individual votes make no difference, i.e. they have no real power as individuals. Worse, they tend to vote on the basis of "team" loyalty regardless of the team's merits. Worse still, the team-fan mentality encourages them to see the other "team" as the enemy; invoking European football, Brennan calls people with this mentality " hooligans." While Brennan sees these tendencies as tendencies of democracy itself, Muller (the author of a recent volume on populism) doesn't think the problem inherent in the form of government. A more committed egalitarian -- Brennan, by comparison, doesn't think epistocracy will reduce anyone to real second-class citizenship -- Muller cites the most obvious criticisms of Brendan's idea, which begs the question of who'll get to draft the tests that measure people's fitness for the franchise. In his view, epistocracy inevitably would turn authoritarian -- and in any event Muller doesn't think that ignorance and mindless partisanship are the people's fault. "Polarization is a project that confers great political and economic benefits," he writes,"unreasonableness can be big business." The blame for it all, Muller charges, lies with the right-wing media and the Republican party, and even if it's spread to the to the other party, it's important to know who started it.
On a more theoretical level, Muller disagrees with Brennan on what democracy is for. Democracy can't be judged by whether people make rational choices, Muller contends. Democracy "is a system that allows leaders to gain power on the basis of their claim to represent different ideas, interests and identities....Democratic representation is therefore neither about finding the one right policy answer nor about the mechanical reproduction of already existing interests and identities." Democracy creates new identities and thus, presumably, legitimizes the team mentality Brennan misguidedly deplores.  While I won't endorse Muller's jargon, I have to agree with him on the actual scope of democracy. In simpler terms, at the electoral level democracy will always be a decision on what we, the people want rather than a determination of what we might need. Once you've made the choice for democracy over epistocracy or any more Platonic alternative, you effectively concede that democracy will pursue something other than truth. Liberal democracy in particular is premised on the impossibility of discovering objectively correct answers to policy questions, and an assumption that a number of options, if not all optimum, all are acceptable. On the further assumption that very few possible choices are categorically unacceptable or self-evidently self-destructive, liberal democracy requires us to acquiesce in choices we don't agree with -- even those we find personally offensive.
If democracy seems to be failing now, that's largely because fewer Americans seem willing to abide by this crucial requirement. That refusal probably has less to do with levels of education or ignorance than Brennan apparently assumes, and less to do with anyone's conscious, conspiratorial manipulation -- the old word is demagoguery -- than Muller chooses to believe. Liberal democracy depends on an ultimate indifference to results, on the assumption that no result is fatal. Muller himself writes that democracy's supreme virtue is its provision for "throwing the bastards out." The problem with democracy right now is that many of us feel that we can't wait for the next designated opportunity to do that, that too much is at stake right now, and that the stakes may be higher than liberalism can stand. Constitutional reform is less likely to change that attitude than changes in society and culture. Whether those can take place by constitutional means is one of the great questions of our time.

Say Anything

I don't really trust President Trump to respect the First Amendment much more than most people trust him -- especially not after his quasi-Christianist rant at the recent "Values Voters" convention. But the latest hysteria over his threatening remarks toward the media is fueled at least in part by a willful misinterpretation of what Trump is saying. Furious over an NBC story that he calls a lie, according to which he had asked for an immense increase in the nation's nuclear arsenal, the President said, "It's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write." Well, how dare he?  Again, Trump's rhetorical incompetence when not pandering to his equally simple-minded base contributed to the misunderstanding, but given the context his meaning should have been plain enough to everyone. Yet critics took this sentence as an attack on the very principle of freedom of speech, for what else is that, they asked, but the right to say or write "whatever they want?" It should have been obvious, however, that Trump was deploring the media's assumed license to write whatever they want without regard for the truth. That elaboration may not impress those who assume that the President is the liar on the point of what he said about the nuclear arsenal, but his real meaning was probably clear enough to those whose rhetorical grammar isn't sophisticated enough to infer a different meaning.
Just about everyone now believes that someone else is lying in our political discussions, but no one seems to know what to do about it,  and few dare suggest a solution from fear of being called fascists. That's because our political culture still gives dissent -- if only certain kinds -- the benefit of the doubt, on the assumption that dissent is the health of the state, that you can't tell whether you're actually free unless you can insult the leaders and get away with it. It's possible that Donald Trump doesn't share that mindset, and not so many of us may now as we used to. We seem to have entered a new era where affirmations of solidarity and shows of respect are valued more highly and considered  more imperative  by many of us. Of course, hardcore civil libertarians will say that that makes it only more imperative for them to defend their rights of conscience against a rising "authoritarian" tide, but we can still ask them whether that makes it all right to lie. I suspect that some will say it does, or that the danger from the sort of opening up of libel law that Trump once envisioned outweighs any damage lies, which presumably can be disproven easily enough, can do.
There are two dangers here. The President probably has an unhealthy craving for praise, if not a feeling of entitlement to it by virtue of his election. At a minimum, he is more thin-skinned than any President since Nixon. But at the same time his personality and the positions he is thought to represent have alarmed many people so far beyond reason that any propaganda trick that might hurt him now seems justified. The American assumption that dissent is practically an end unto itself only exacerbates the situation, even as  a long-simmering backlash against that mentality seems to be gaining strength. What this nation needs is more dispassionate objectivity, especially in the media -- but where's the money in that? Who knows, though? A real "plague on both your houses" attitude, backed by a plausible alternative, could pay these days. Until someone can test that theory, it can't hurt the rest of us to just step back every so often, take a breath and listen to the world instead of the media, left or right. We just might see that life isn't how either side describes it -- that both sides have been lying, or are just plain wrong.

Is love of country blind?

A Delmar woman addresses the national anthem controversy in a letter published in today's Albany Times Union.  "Before we all go boycotting the NFL," she writes, "perhaps we should consider a broader definition of patriotism, one that moves beyond blind deference to the flag and military and embraces all the values our flag was created to represent." Her word choice exposes another of the conflicts of perception dividing the country. The crucial word, as you may have guessed already after reading the header, is "blind." This is another way of expressing the sentiment I've ascribed to those taking a knee, which sees any requirement to stand or otherwise "show respect" during the anthem as a requirement to ignore the pressing problems of the nation. To show respect unconditionally, as President Trump and his supporters appear to demand, is to say everything is okay when it is not okay. Put another way, the demand for an unconditional show of respect on certain occasions is seen by many as just another way of saying, "My country right or wrong," a sentiment abhorrent to those for whom the rights of conscience override every other consideration. Yet I'm fairly certain that no one demanding respect for the flag and the anthem understands himself to be demanding that anyone "blind" themselves to anything. For whatever reason, they feel that there are some times and places where the right of conscience should temporarily yield to other considerations.

It's important to understand the backlash against athletes taking a knee is not just a demand for respect but also a demand for solidarity. The present populist moment in our history is driven by an anxiety that Americans don't have each other's backs. It's a reaction to as many as three generations of escalating mutual distrust and disrespect, and what it requires of everyone is some act of affirmation. The sort of affirmation demanded depends on the people making the demand. As this controversy continues, with an ultimate showdown possible during this Sunday's NFL schedule, I grow more convinced that the demand for shows of allegiance/respect from pro athletes is the "Black Lives Matter" movement of white populists, absolutely equivalent in its insistence upon an explicit affirmation that others would rather be taken for granted. In the case of "Black Lives Matter," the refusal of activists to be satisfied with "All Lives Matter" baffles and infuriates many people. In the case of the anthem, the refusal of Trumpists and older superpatriots to be satisfied with anything along the lines of "Of course I love my country..." is equally infuriating and baffling to those who feel obliged to perform perhaps the mildest act of civil disobedience possible. The offense in both disputes is basically the same. BLM activists don't trust that their lives matter implicitly to those who say "All Lives Matter," on the assumption that if their specific lives really did matter people wouldn't have a problem making the more specific statement." Angry superpatriots don't trust people unwilling to "honor America" for one measly minute to have their backs, keep faith with the troops, etc.

If anything makes the anthem controversy  more controversial it's the athletes' understanding that they have no more public or dramatic way to publicize their dissent than what they've been doing, though by now it's probably become unclear to many people what exactly Colin Kaepernick's successors are protesting. The point remains that for all the other opportunities they presumably have as celebrities to promote their sociopolitical agendas, nothing gets in people's faces more effectively, if only to rile them up, as taking a knee on national television, and since just about everyone in the U.S. reserves a right to dissent on their own terms when they please, the athletes will surrender the field only reluctantly, if not after a fight.  Their obdurance must leave others wondering whether there is any occasion left when Americans can forget their partisan or parochial differences and affirm their common citizenship and national solidarity.  The answer to that question is yes, but lots of people have to be killed before those moments happen. For the situation to improve, many Americans will have to convince themselves that they can (and should) express allegiance to the republic -- not "the troops" -- that guarantees their freedom on appropriate occasions, while reserving and using their right to dissent every other time. As long as people remain confident of their rights -- and that may be another underlying problem right now -- a minimal show of allegiance like standing for a flag that does not stand for Donald Trump need not be seen as blind loyalty, or even as the blink of an eye.

Discovering Trump's America on Columbus Day

Today is Columbus Day, the quasi-holiday (I'm working) honoring the discoverer of the western hemisphere as the man who made the U.S. possible, as well as the secular patron saint of Italian Americans. Many Americans prefer to observe the day as "Indigenous People's Day" in remembrance of the native population for whom Columbus's appearance marked the beginning of a centuries-long invasion and dispossession of their land. USA Today points out that, in keeping with the previous Republican president, and in contrast with Presidents Clinton and Obama, President Trump made no mention of Native Americans in his mandatory Columbus Day proclamation. Instead, he hailed Columbus unambiguously as a "skilled navigator and man of faith, whose courageous feat brought together continents and has inspired countless others to pursue their dreams and convictions -- even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity." What matters to the President is that Columbus's voyages "set the stage for the development of our great Nation." He nods to the nation's "diverse history" elsewhere in the proclamation, but nowhere in the document does he acknowledge that anyone might have any reason to see Columbus's arrival as a bad thing, or the start of one. By now this should surprise no one, though it will certainly annoy many.

Does Donald Trump hate Native Americans?  I doubt it. Does he think it was their inescapable destiny to give way to a superior civilization? I doubt he's ever thought about it that deeply, and in any event such questions most likely would strike him as irrelevant if not antithetical to his obligation to proclaim the holiday. For him and his supporters Columbus Day takes place in the same sphere as the raising of the American flag and the playing of the national anthem. That sphere is neither "private" nor "public" in the usual sense of either word, but national. The continuing controversy over whether athletes should salute the flag when the anthem is played, freshly escalated by the Vice-President's angry departure from one of yesterday's games after more athletes took the knee and a threat by the owner of the Dallas Cowboys to bench players who refuse to stand, shows the existence in the Trumpist mindscape of certain spaces that are public in the most basic sense, yet not really the same as the seemingly synonymous "civil society" where everyone's right to make personal or political statements is largely unquestioned. In this national sphere, the right to principled self-expression guaranteed by the First Amendment still holds, but is overridden informally by a patriotic obligation to affirm allegiance to the country, the flag, the troops, etc. In other words, it may not be illegal to withhold allegiance, but forms of sanction short of criminal prosecution -- getting fired by an employer, for instance, are considered appropriate and encouraged by Trumpist patriots.

Where this relates to Columbus Day is the presidential position, implicit by omission in his proclamation and explicit in his railing against football players, that minority grievances are ultimately irrelevant in the national sphere, where citizens ought to be Americans first and exclusively. To my knowledge, despite his constant whining against the media's insults, Donald Trump doesn't intend to curtail our First Amendment right to protest  his policies or alleged injustices in American society. He appears to insist, however, that there are times and places where the First Amendment is not properly our first consideration, where citizen obligations trump the rights of conscience, and where others are entitled to question your loyalty to the nation when you withhold allegiance. The President's aggressive expression of this attitude comes as a shock to a culture that has revered the 1968 Olympic athletes who gave the Black Power salute during their medals ceremony as heroes of civil liberty, and it probably disturbs some ideological conservatives in his own party who might see something suspiciously "statist" about his demands. But it probably comes as a welcome relief to those Americans who feel, justly or not, that something had gone terribly wrong in the country over the last half-century that could be characterized as neglect of duty, embodied by the refusal of allegiance or the refusal to keep faith with the dead during the Vietnam era. Their feeling will be written off by many principled protesters as the sort of authoritarian nationalism that leads to fascism if it isn't there already, and it will be resented by those who feel that compulsory shows of allegiance mean having to say everything's okay with the country when they feel obliged to tell the country the opposite. But whether a line can be drawn anywhere, whether there's a point beyond which people can fairly question whether protesters will have their backs when it counts without being called fascists, seems like an appropriate question for a national debate -- if either side considered the question debatable, that is. Columbus, this is your fault!

Staring into the abyss

Nearly a week after the Las Vegas massacre, investigators haven't released any evidence of ideas that might have motivated the apparent killer, an accountant turned gambler, to accumulate an arsenal of weapons toward the end of opening fire on a mass gathering of people. We have cause to believe that he considered other venues for his attack, which would seem to refute the assumption that he targeted country-music fans specifically. We know more definitely that he sent his girlfriend away the week before the attack, and then wired a sizable sum of money to her. We -- or at least I -- have heard nothing about his opinion on any subject. This is the most troubling aspect of the investigation so far, since we've grown accustomed to seeing mass killings, whether the amoklaufs of alienated nihilists or the terrorists' propaganda of the deed, as statements of some sort, usually of some sort of grievance. There is as yet, to general knowledge, no evidence of grievance here. Into this absence of motive, some will most likely project conspiracy theories portraying the man found dead in the hotel room as a patsy for others more sophisticated and sinister, whose motives would be more familiar to us. Thomas Friedman opens a column this week by writing, sarcastically, that it'd be easier if the shooter were a Muslim, because then no one would tell us not to "politicize" his crime. His column is about gun control, as you might have guessed, but regardless of context it would be easier for everyone if the shooter were a Muslim, or a white nationalist, or antifa -- anything external to most of us. It's not so easy to judge what he might represent when there's no evidence of "radicalization" or any indication -- apart from the gun purchases and custom work -- that he'd "snapped." For the Holocaust survival Primo Levi, the definitive statement of Nazi evil was a camp guard's remark that "there is no why here." For now, it looks like there was no why in Las Vegas, and there's a chilling possibility that we'll never have any why. We're used to killers telling us why they kill, but where are we at as a society when people no longer care to tell us why, or when the implicit answer to the question is "Why not?" If no evidence of motive emerges, we could infer -- we might have to -- that it simply occurred to this man one day, maybe just by looking out a window, that he could shoot hundreds of people at once from the right place at the right time, and the idea, or the image of it he imagined, simply appealed to him. Think what you will of terrorists and amoklaufers, but there might be no more evil scenario than this one. That seems to be understood, as even the NRA seems willing to play ball on restricting the use of the sort of  "bump stocks" used in Vegas, perhaps out of an understanding that for such a man, unless we find out something else about him, the accumulation and modification of weapons may be our only warning sign. The Vegas massacre itself may be a warning sign, but of what, not to mention how we should respond to it, remains maddeningly unclear.

When did the U.S. lose its 'innocence?'

Continuing to discuss the Las Vegas massacre, a panel on the Scarborough show this morning took up the old refrain about America's loss of innocence, which at least one panel member dated back to the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the idea being that the ability of a loser like Lee Harvey Oswald to take down the most powerful man in the world made the killing an unprecedentedly demoralizing event. That didn't sound right to me, since you could just as easily describe the assassin who murdered President Garfield in 1881 as a loser or angry little nut, yet the nation endured that trauma with none of the consequences attributed to the murder of Kennedy. I leave the killers of Lincoln and McKinley out of the discussion since they could more accurately be described as terrorists in the interests of the Confederacy and anarchy respectively. Then it struck me that the whole exercise was both futile and unjustly flattering to Americans. Does any other nation have a "loss of innocence" narrative? Any nation born from revolution arguably is entitled to one, to the extent that it defines itself in idealistic terms doomed to be betrayed. On the other hand, nations born from revolution can hardly claim to be innocent because they are, by definition, born by violence. Of course, many Americans, mostly belonging to the political left or self-conscious minorities, will tell you that the U.S. was never innocent, and I see no reason to fight with them over that point. I still think, however, that "loss of innocence" is used to describe, however awkwardly, an actual epochal event in national history, even if people disagree over what specific event it was. What people have been trying to describe since the Seventies is probably better described as a loss of complacency, after which certain things once taken for granted, or ignored, can't be anymore. The Ken Burns Vietnam miniseries that played PBS last month makes (it really reiterates) a strong case for that war and the backlash against it on the home front, as the crucial moments. As "innocence" or "complacency" arguably was a privilege of white Americans, so the disillusioning, demoralizing moment came in two parts: first the spectacle of white youth protesting against their government, in apparent betrayal of the troops on the battlefield, and then the killing of white youth by the government at Kent State. It was sadly quaint -- I DVR'd the series and am still working my way through it -- to see, after watching the news from Vegas, how the deaths of only four people in 1970 traumatized the nation. And it was simply sad to see that some of the wounds of that era are still open, or barely scabbed over, even if the controversy over the proper attitude during the national anthem is just a trivial echo of the more intense controversies of half a century ago. The protests of those who feel that their nation's ideals have been betrayed, or were lies all along, still look like betrayal itself to much of the country. It should be recalled, however, that not even the Weather Underground adopted a strategy of mass murder of random victims in those days. The "loss of innocence" that accounts for the amoklaufs of our time will most likely be found closer to our time than to the Sixties or Seventies. Whether or not the search is worthwhile, at least it fills air time until someone learns something about why the Vegas killer did what he did.

The Martyrs of Las Vegas?

A few minutes ago I saw something on the Fox News morning program that was so pathetic it was almost funny. They'd acquired video footage of the crowd at the country music festival singing God Bless America about an hour before the October 1 massacre. The hosts found the sight heartwarming in some way, even though it was self-evident that, by their own standard, God had not blessed the concert goers. One of the people in the studio described the video as a "gift" from the victims in Vegas, as if by performing the Irving Berlin standard they'd assured survivors that they'd gone straight to heaven. Then one of the hosts began speculating, in the persistent vacuum where the killer's motive should be, about whether the song had triggered him. According to his brother, the shooter had no religion, so perhaps the spectacle of piety playing out across the Strip put him over the edge into a killing rage. Just speculating!, the host disclaimed, but the show's correspondent in Las Vegas was left speechless by her comment, as any sane person would be.

What happened in Vegas (updated)

In Las Vegas, a person tentatively identified as a 64 year man --at least one news network says that he was white -- took a room on the 32nd floor the Mandalay Bay casino. He set up a shooter's nest overlooking an outdoor concert venue about three football fields away, by the popular measure, where a country music festival was taking place. During Jason Aldean's performance, the distant spectator opened fire on a crowd of thousands of people. According to this morning's news, he killed at least fifty people, while more than 200 others  were either wounded by him or injured during the rush to escape the killbox. As usual, it remains unclear whether the suspect, whose name has been reported, was killed by police, who apparently identified his room by a smoke alarm, or killed himself. It is known that he was able to monitor the arrival of the police at the casino, and everything else indicates a thoroughly premeditated mass murder.

Investigators describe the shooter as a "lone wolf" but are eager to learn what his "ideology" was. They may be giving too much credit to the concept of ideology, now that we expect people to be "radicalized" and effectively weaponized by the Internet and social media. If modern American history has shown us anything, it's that many of us are perfectly capable of motivating ourselves to commit atrocities, though it might be argued that a defining American ideology of entitlement to kill enables even those killers of divergent or contradictory partisan ideologies. The public will want to know whether the shooter had an ideology in order to confirm their own prejudices or ideological biases, though at this time the massacre (or amoklauf) doesn't look like the work of a Muslim or (considering the target) a white supremacist. Some will see it as simply another occasion to remind the public of the pressing need for more effective gun control, though last night's crime raises more sweeping questions about the security of public gatherings within view (and range) of tall buildings. Others would prefer that no one "politicize" the incident, but the general threat to public safety implicit in every such slaughter seems an ideal subject for Democratic discussion. To decry politicization is to politicize it a second time, in a more partisan fashion, and nothing we learn about the shooter's motives  will change that.

Update: An Islamic State news service claims that the shooter -- whom a photo (if authentic) confirms to be white -- recently converted to Islam. While many reports are quick to note that the terrorists have offered no proof of their claim, I wonder whether they would make a claim that might be easily disproved. In any event, the Caliphate wants us to believe that the killer was Muslim. One knee-jerk interpretation of that would be that they want to provoke a Trumpian crackdown on American Muslims, or more general anti-Muslim violence, in order to radicalize the Muslim population. It may simply be that they want to show that their reach into people's minds is undiminished by Daesh's recent territorial losses in Syria and Iraq. More definite answers may come from the woman described as the shooter's companion, though the most recent reports indicate that she is currently in the Philippines. Meanwhile, depending on your news source, the number of people wounded/injured last night may be as high as 400. More updates later.

3 p.m. Without any opinion trail to follow as yet, there's some speculation that the shooter was a leftist of some sort. The sole basis for such speculation so far is the choice of target, a country music concert. That country music fans are the victims of prejudice is borne out by a Facebook post today from a legal executive at CBS who was fired this afternoon for withholding sympathy for the Vegas victims on the ground that "country music fans often are Republican gun toters." The terrible thing about that is that the executive didn't even say that all fans are that way, but judged "guilty" and "innocent" alike equally unworthy of sympathy. Country music is equated with political conservatism mainly because its fan base is presumed rural or simply "redneck," and because some critics may know little country music other than "Okie From Muskogie" or similar provocations that get mainstream publicity. But from Willie Nelson to Steve Earle -- and one could go further back if you want to include Woody Guthrie in the country tradition -- leftist views often have found expression in the country idiom. A national discussion about tastes in music would seem to be in order along with any further discussion about guns. The shooter's politics remain unknown as I write, but people have noted that his demographic profile (sixtysomething white guy) matches that of the attempted assassin of several Republican congressmen on a baseball diamond earlier this year. Beyond that, I'm reluctant to speculate about someone who appears, in the photo circulating with many news stories today, to be nothing more than a drunk. His harmless appearance has fueled some creative speculation that he may have been no more than a dupe or hostage (and victim) of whoever the real killers were. That sort of speculation is predictable when a mass murderer fails to fit a preferred profile and people in general prefer not to think about what made that person a mass murderer.

False choices on trade

Thomas Friedman seems to have several ideas mixed up in his mind. In his latest column, Friedman writes: 'We got rich by being “America Connected” not “America First.” Apparently he's trying to equate isolationism and protectionism, finding each equally inadequate to keeping up with an increasingly interdependent world. Today, he suggests, the U.S. should build its wealth "by having the most connections to the flow of ideas, networks, innovators and entrepreneurs." President Trump, he implies, prefers "a world of walls where you build your wealth by hoarding the most resources." Apparently Friedman is also trying to equate protectionism with mercantilism, though what resource Trump wants to hoard is unclear. Jobs, perhaps? In any event, the first sentence I quoted isn't even true if by "America First" Friedman means a protectionist trade policy, since Republican governments were committed to tariffs throughout the post-Civil War surge in industrial productivity. Unfortunately, it's actually fairly common for tariffs to be equated with walls, as if the latter actually prevented the importation or sale of goods from abroad. Tariffs are often described as "trade barriers," when the usual intent is more along the lines of leveling the playing field to compensate for foreigners' cheaper labor and/or economies of scale. You could still buy imports if you found them superior enough to justify the greater expense, and if the cheaper domestic product was crap, it would fail unless price was purchasers' only consideration. However people actually chose a century or more ago, economic growth did occur under protectionist trade rules, though whether growth correlated with protection or was merely coincidental is for economic historians to explain. But while Friedman goes on deploring Trump's presumed ignorance and Democrats' lack of imagination, his real beef seems to be with a mentality that entitles Americans to cling -- to use a provocative word -- to their current jobs. After his dubious history lesson, he goes off on our need to adapt constantly, both on a societal if not cultural level to climate change, but also on an individual, intellectual level to constant technological changes in the job environment. "Change" has been the neoliberal mantra since Bill Clinton's time, and "Adapt!" has been its commandment. But while the capacity to adapt is an admirable survival trait, so is the critical faculty that refuses to obey every command without question. Neoliberals treat the market as a force of nature, if not as the irresistible spontaneous order idealized by libertarians, but for the very reason that the market is a collection of individual, personal decisions we should reserve the right to question its supposed dictates on the sometimes-reasonable suspicion that they are something other than objective imperatives. It may be true sometimes to say "adapt or perish," but we should never assume that that's true every time it's said. That may sound isolationist to some ears, but it may just be an understandable reluctance to adapt to the point when you exist only to adapt and identity itself becomes all too adaptable. The market is not a climate. It is, in theory, easier to master, and it's indisputably easier to say no to when necessary. Anyone who'd have us renounce our capacity to master markets arguably wants us to adapt into something less than fully human. 

Cutting a promo is not a declaration of war

I get the feeling by now that the President enjoys trolling Kim Jong Un. He's living out many Americans' fantasy of sticking it to everyone, including obnoxious foreign rulers, from the privileged position of "the most powerful man in the world." He probably feels like he scored some great coup when he recently provoked Kim to issue an unprecedented first-person statement in response to the previous Trumpian threat against himself and North Korea. Things haven't gotten any better since then. The story earlier this week was that the Communist kingdom would treat another Trump threat -- a warning that Kim "won't be around much longer" -- as a declaration of war by the United States that justified the Kim Dynasty should it be found necessary to shoot down American aircraft. At this point I guess I'm supposed to lament the President's bellicose rhetoric toward the Pyongyang regime, as if it will be Trump's fault if an American plane does get shot down. While Trump's impulse to cut promos on the dictator, as they say in professional wrestling, is indeed embarrassing, if not also dangerous -- since Trump can't depend on intimidating the little madman into submission -- it won't be his fault if the Juche jabronies act on their assessment of one particular utterance. Since I'm sure Kim assumes himself Trump's intellectual superior, if not the wisest of all living men, he really has no excuse for not knowing what a real declaration of war from the U.S. looks like -- even if we haven't delivered a proper one since World War II. To be more clear about it, he shouldn't expect the rest of the world to assume that he'd be acting in self-defense if he shot at an American plane, just because he and his mouthpieces say that Trump has declared war. Worse, by his own standard his stooges' constant threats to obliterate the U.S. with nuclear missiles are just as much a declaration of war, and could be used with equal justice to rationalize a preemptive American attack on North Korea. The sad thing about this, apart from the millions of lives potentially in jeopardy, is that each antagonist seems absolutely certain that he can scarify the other into backing down, when the worst thing either can do now is assume that the other is a paper tiger. Donald Trump strikes me so far as someone who wants to be either loved or feared, with no middle ground available, and as someone eager to make a demonstration of American might as well as his own will. I don't dare delve deeper that that, but what may really decide the fate of the Korean peninsula is whether or not, all gossip and propaganda aside, Kim Jong Un really is crazy. A sane man won't take as big a chance as he is on a still largely unknown quantity -- though I suppose a merely stupid man might.

Oh yeah, the freedom of speech thing...

This week is probably the wrong time for President Trump's Attorney General to lecture the nation on the need to defend freedom of speech, if only because Jeff Sessions' talk at Georgetown University was not directed at the President himself. His appearance reminded us that freedom of speech is a big deal for the Trump movement and its alt-right auxiliary as far as college campuses are concerned. In fact, they're absolutely right to warn against the sometimes violent intolerance shown on campuses toward various types of conservative opinion. It just happens to sound inconsistent with the President's passionate dislike for silent protests during the National Anthem at sports events. Sessions tried to reconcile apparently inconsistent positions, reminding his audience -- including the inevitable protesters -- that professional athletes have ample opportunity outside the arena to " express their views without in effect denigrating the symbols of our nation." Of course, antifa students could as easily say that alt-right types have ample opportunity outside the campus to express their views without in effect denigrating other people. It's a very loose construction of the First Amendment to claim that because it allows speech anywhere, it also permits the banning of speech anywhere else. It's just as bad to demand that the NFL forbid protests during the anthem as it is to exclude right-wingers or different types of nationalists from college campuses.

The problem is that Trump clearly sees the singing of the National Anthem as a categorically different event, and the arena where it's sung as a categorically different venue, than those usually involved in questions of speech rights. Whatever the law might say, the President does not see the obligation to pay homage to the flag and The Troops for which it stands as subject to debate or any sort of qualification. In his mind, we may assume, a refusal to salute the flag puts your loyalty to the country in question. It becomes an offense comparable to "slandering the state," an oft-prosecuted crime in authoritarian or totalitarian countries.

Trump's nationalism demands unconditional love of country, at least on certain occasions and in certain places, and on some level you can understand why that doesn't sound to many people like an unreasonable request. I don't think he and his people are yet at the point where they want to silence all criticism of inequality, all denunciations of injustice or even all insults to his administration. But just as people on the other side demand explicit affirmation of certain premises (e.g., "Black lives matter") that others prefer, for whatever reason, to affirm only implicitly or take for granted, so the Trump movement demands some explicit affirmation from the other side that, when it counts, we're all on the same team and have each other's backs. They no doubt think that standing for the short duration of one verse and chorus of the anthem is not too much to ask, just as many on the other side think the three little words are not too much to ask. And, no doubt, just as some people deny that their refusal to say "black lives matter" makes them racist, so the sports stars and others deny that refusing to stand for the anthem makes them traitors. The issue once more is mutual disrespect, and the belief on each side that the affirmation required by the other side involves some nebulous yet unacceptable concession. When it comes to the anthem, the unacceptable concession is an implicit one; to salute the flag like everyone else would appear to concede that nothing is wrong with the country. Since the Trump movement itself doesn't believe that -- though they may think that what's wrong is that people think the wrong things are wrong, so to speak -- it might help just a little if they made it more clear that such a concession is not what they're demanding. It probably won't help too much, however, since being contrary for the sake of contrariness is probably an even more ingrained American trait, irrespective of race or ethnicity, than love of country itself. The right to be contrary is exactly what many people love about America. Telling them that's suddenly wrong is never going to go over well, as the President is finding out. But for a politician, all that really matters is that it goes over with an electoral majority, and Trump may yet have the winning argument in that case.

O'er the land of the free...

One hundred years ago this month, drafted men from Columbia County NY paraded through the town of Chatham on their way to World War I. When the band played the Star Spangled Banner, William Van Ness refused to take his hat off. A crowd demanded that he show respect, and when he persisted in refusing, they beat him. Van Ness was subsequently charged with disorderly conduct. Three days after the incident, the town justice dismissed the charge, saying that Van Ness had suffered enough at the hands of the mob. The magistrate spoke from first-hand experience; Cornelius Shubert, now a lieutenant, had led the attack on Van Ness, whom he now sent home with a reprimand and a warning, paraphrased a century later, that "any future incident of a similar nature would be dealt with much more harshly."
We may presume that disgruntled sports fans in 2017 won't storm the playing fields of America to chastise professional athletes involved in incidents of a similar nature, but many plainly agree with the President's loathsome remarks in Alabama a few days ago, when he said that any "son of a bitch" who refuses to stand for the National Anthem should be fired. The sad thing about such pathetic threats that the simple act of taking a knee during the anthem is the epitome of nonviolent protest. No doubt, however, the angry white folks in the stands or watching at home assume that the same person taking a knee will loot a store or burn a police car on the streets. The problem with such people, you'd likely hear, is that they respect nothing. Athletic protests like these date back almost fifty years to the 1968 Olympics, but patience with them seems to have run thin recently as whites increasingly resent the disrespect they feel the rest of the population shows them, even as many of those others still feel disrespected by whites.
The consistent thing over time about these threatening demands for respect is an equation of the flag with the troops. To refuse proper reverence to the flag and its theme song is to deny respect to the people who, in the usual vulgar formulation, fight and die for the flag. By this logic the flag embodies that covenant with the dead upon which authentic, sincere patriotism depends. A similar sentiment, not exactly patriotic, rallies defenders of Confederate memorials. The essence of this sort of patriotism is keeping faith with the dead; that sort of patriot resents perceived disrespect for the dead, as disrespect for themselves. That same fetishistic patriotism is in turn resented by those, including many whites, who see it as a form of idolatry and identify the associated demand for unconditional love of country with a "my country right or wrong" attitude that seems, to some, profoundly un-American. Liberalism requires love of country to be justified. While liberals may reject the idea that individuals need to earn respect, many feel entitled, if not obliged, to withhold respect from the nation as a whole, or at least its symbols or monuments, until it earns their love. Meanwhile, many on the other side probably believe unconditional love and reverence to be both natural and necessary to a healthy, great nation. What we have here is a profound disagreement over what it means to be a citizen that most likely won't be decided on the playing field, even if that's where the action seems to be right now.

Cheap Speech

George Will credits the coinage of "cheap speech" to the prescient law professor Eugene Volokh, who in the 1990s predicted the coarsening and increased polarization of public discourse as a consequence of the Internet. Volokh meant "cheap speech" literally; information technologies, and now social media, have dramatically reduced the cost of disseminating anyone's opinions. The term sounds oddly yet rightly pejorative relative to our cultural idea of "free speech." The problem with "cheap speech" seems to be that it's just too easy for everyone to inflict their opinions on others. The theoretical benefit of this democratization arguably has been outweighed by social media's tendency toward confirmation bias and ideological or partisan safe zones. As Will himself puts it, "Technologies that radically reduce intermediaries and other barriers to entry into society’s conversation mean that ignorance, incompetence, and intellectual sociopathy are no longer barriers." Volokh, reportedly a libertarian, worried about the consequences for public life, but also worried about over-hasty remedies.  While warning against statist solutions, he wrote, “The law of speech is premised on certain (often unspoken) assumptions about the way the speech market operates. If these assumptions aren’t valid for new technologies, the law may have to evolve to reflect the changes.” Will, who sees Volokh's direst predictions proven by both the rise of the Trump movement and the left's hysterical response, is even more opposed to regulating "cheap speech." The columnist has consistently opposed any measure designed to regulate political speech, and especially campaign-finance regulation, on the ground, repeated in his latest column, that "laws, written by incumbent legislators, inevitably will be infected with partisanship." Having seen no similar harm in the profligate speech of the wealthy, Will apparently prefers to endure the embarrassments of cheap speech in order to preserve the prerogatives of rich speech. He reassures himself that cheap speech does no great harm by claiming that the vast majority of Americans -- more than 95% -- "are not listening to excitable broadcasters making mountains of significance out of molehills of political effluvia." That estimate may be too conservative, but it's still fair of Will and others to ask whether anything can be done about cheap speech as a cultural phenomenon without endangering free speech as a political necessity.

Perhaps in Will's ideal world most people would naturally gravitate toward dispassionate arbiters like himself to distinguish the free from the cheap, but the trends predicted by Volokh and confirmed by Will make such an arrangement increasingly unlikely. Sadly, Will doesn't seem to consider whether the sort of skepticism he expresses reflexively, his refusal to believe that authority can ever be objective, is a fundamental part of the problem. Deny that possibility, after all, and you enable all forms of skepticism indiscriminately, and you elevate distrust to a fundamental right. While that skepticism pretty much prevents any attempt at even the most innocuous regulation of social media through law, the sort of remedies for the consequences of an altered speech market that Volokh conceded might become necessary may have to evolve informally. You can see an unhealthy evolution already in the antifa movement's assumption of a prerogative to silence perceived fascists or their fellow-travelers, a development likely to be mirrored once the alt-right gets angry enough. There may, however, be some cases, particularly in the field of "fake news" that Will rightly deplores, where similarly informal remedies for the most obvious lies or self-evident slanders could have some educational effect. All that would be needed then would be for the state to look the other way for a moment. Sometimes the remedy for cheap speech might be a cheap shot -- but not a gunshot, of course. Feel free to dismiss this as an immodest or too-modest proposal. That, for good or ill, is your prerogative. All's fair in the endless race for the last word.

The vote-fraud libel: old news is older news

Cynthia Tucker writes: "Among true believers on the right, there is no sturdier fiction -- no fairy tale more popular -- than the one that insists American elections are plagued by voter fraud." So far, so true, as far as the belief is concerned, but Tucker doesn't realize just how sturdy the supposed fiction has been. A few sentences later, she writes: "the myth has been circulating for decades now." Decades? Try generations, if not centuries. Tucker apparently suffers from tunnel vision that limits her historical perspective. She wants to trace the vote-fraud libel back to "the same time that the Voting Rights Act guaranteed black citizens access to the ballot," or fifty years ago. But it was old news a century before that. She may miss that in her belief that the libel is an idea of "the right," but the truth is that the Republican party has been accusing the Democratic party of voter fraud from the time the GOP was born. That's because the Democrats, howevermuch their overall attitude towards blacks has shifted over time, have always been dedicated to integrating newcomers or marginalized people into the electoral process as quickly as possible. From their beginnings, Republicans have accused Democrats of cutting corners on that integration process in order to win elections. Then as now, Republicans accused Democrats of bringing unnaturalized aliens to the polls to vote. Republicans have always accused Democrats of cynical if not treacherous inclusiveness, giving voice to an irrepressible nativism despite Lincoln's contempt for Know-Nothingism. Republicans in turn might be accused of practicing a cynical nativism that was never much more than a sour grapes argument. If Democrats had the immigrant vote locked up, then immigrants were going to ruin the country. In the 19th century the Irish were going to turn the country Catholic. A few generations later Italians and Slavs were going to drive down the national I.Q. while spreading dangerous political ideas like the plague. And so it goes. To imply that the voter-fraud libel had been invented only recently to spite black people specifically is historically blind and additionally handicapping when the real facts might earn the present targets of voter-fraud conspiracy-mongering some empathy from the descendants of people targeted the same way generations ago.

Trump's Axis of Evil

The President singled out five evil regimes in his speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations today. His threat to "totally destroy" North Korea if necessary will certainly get the most attention, but while he issued no similar threat to Iran, his indictment against the Islamic Republic was more sweeping. Dismissing its republican pretensions as the "false guise of democracy," Trump takes the Sunni line that the Shiite power is the greatest destabilizing force in the Middle East. This remains inconsistent with his once-more avowed "America First" policy, since Sunni rather than Shiite terrorists have been carrying out attacks on the United States since 2001, but he may believe that Shiite aggression is a root cause of Sunni militancy. In any event, he seems satisfied that the Sunni states are taking positive steps to suppress terrorism, while beleaguered Syria, an Iranian ally, remains one of the bad guys. Continuing westward, the President turned his hostile attentions to Cuba and Venezuela, again hinting at American intervention in the latter country. Of course, the Bolivarian regime has been on the neocon hit list for more than a generation now, presumably because Americans want Venezuela's oil resources in pro-American hands. Whether that really counts as an "America First" strategy by established Trumpian standards is hard to say. Of these countries, only Iran can plausibly be deemed an aggressor in its region, however it justifies itself on anti-imperialist, anti-zionist or anti-Sunni grounds. North Korea simply wants a deterrent to regime change, Syria remains in a state of civil war, and Cuba and Venezuela are in no position to export revolution. Calling all of them out today simply puts Trump in line with recent presidents in letting a personal distaste for certain forms of government or leadership styles influence his foreign policy, despite his repeated insistence that he doesn't wish to impose American culture or ideology on other countries. I don't think he's become an ideologue all of a sudden, but he does seem to have succumbed, almost inevitably, to the American tendency to personalize geopolitics by reducing conflicts of national interests to the pathologies of evil men. Of course, Americans seem to think of domestic politics the same way lately, so this shouldn't surprise us, though it should still disappoint us. Trump's speech probably will disappoint everyone here but the neocons. It will alarm liberals and anti-interventionist types with its menacing rhetoric toward North Korea and its "Rocket Man," while it may more deeply disappoint base supporters who might have hoped to hear their hero stick it to Islam on the ultimate global stage. No doubt Trump himself will think of it as the greatest speech ever delivered to the UN by an American President, but who's really keeping score?

Utilitarianism and trade policy

The International Trade Commission is considering whether to recommend the imposition of a tariff on solar panels imported from China. Two American manufacturers want a tariff that would "effectively double" the prince of Chinese panels, according to Justin Worland's report in the September 25 Time magazine, in order to make the American product competitive. The Heritage Foundation and a number of U.S. solar energy companies are lobbying against a tariff.  One lobbyist compares a solar-panel tariff to "cutting off your entire body to save your pinky." Their argument is that as many as 250,000 jobs, including installers and repairmen, could be negatively impacted by a tariff designed to benefit the approximately 8,000 people who manufacture panels in the U.S. While one may suspect that the "massive negative impacts" of any tariff are exaggerated by its opponents, the argument raises a fair question, and an important one for the President who'd be in a position to act on the ITC recommendation.

Populist trade policy tends to be protectionist on a sort of "no job left behind" principle, while free traders are more likely to see tariffs as robbing Peter the consumer to pay Paul the manufacturer. Worse still from their perspective, a political decision to conserve any American manufacturing industry is a case of "picking winners" instead of letting the Market, in its infinite wisdom, do its necessary work. Free-trade apologists would point to the quarter-million solar energy jobs as proof of the overall benefit of a free-trade policy, on the assumption that far fewer jobs would exist were the American manufacturers able to impose their preferred prices on everyone else. On classic utilitarian grounds, they'd seem to be correct, so long as you assume that all or even most of those jobs depend on the availability of cheap imports. Should 250,000 jobs be jeopardized to keep 8,000 people at work in a domestic industry that has, arguably, already failed in the global marketplace? The "greatest good for the greatest number" argument definitely doesn't favor a tariff, but it could be argued that a focus on literal numbers is an overly simplistic utilitarianism, while a "greatest good for the whole" argument might justify maintaining and encouraging an American solar-panel industry, even if that requires fellow Americans to pay more for panels than they'd like.

Whether the U.S. ought to have a healthy panel-manufacturing industry capable of meeting domestic demand is the sort of practical question our representatives should spend more of their time debating. I find such debates interesting because they seem to belie the individualist ethos of many free-market conservatives. It's probably more accurate to say that the implicit utilitarianism of their free-trade position belies their oft-expressed anti-collectivist bias, since it means that they're willing to sacrifice any number of individual workers, or at least their jobs, to the collective economy. I suppose they could argue that they remain individualists at heart because they uphold the supreme right of individual consumer choice against selfish manufacturers who would limit our choices, but whenever they condemn a domestic industrial sector to the death they feel it inevitably deserves, they are unavoidably sacrificing individuals to the collective. They might not be killing anyone literally on the altar of free trade, but they may well make life more difficult for thousands or millions of people, depending on the industry in question, and consumer choice doesn't always seem like justification enough for that.

A fireable offense?

The White House press secretary crossed a line earlier this week when she implicitly recommended that ESPN fire anchorperson Jemele Hill for having called the President a "white supremacist" in a tweet. The network only went so far as to dissociate itself from her statement, and to publicize her acknowledgment that the tweet was inappropriate. Needless to say, this hasn't satisfied some people who, as usual, see a double standard at work. They recall that ESPN fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling for posting "anti-transgender" content on his Facebook page, and feel that Hill's comment about the President was at least as offensive as Schilling's post. On the other side of the debate, no doubt, distinctions will be drawn between Schilling's presumptive "hate speech" and Hill's personal political commentary. More so than in the Schilling case, the Hill case has been controversial because, as an anchor, she is presumed to speak in some way for ESPN. My call would be that unless her Twitter account has "ESPN" in the name anywhere, it should be seen as representing no other opinion than her own. That would be true for Schilling's Facebook page, too, but there, apparently, whatever he said or shared about trans people was deemed beyond the pale for a public figure. Should we feel likewise when someone makes a charge against the President in the face of his explicit repudiations, however little believed, of white supremacism? Trump himself, who appears to have only just joined the discussion today, seems to demand no more than an apology while claiming, as he always does, that his critics in the media are and have been losing popularity. Is he entitled to even that? Those who recall his unapologetic dabbling in birtherism think not,while many others, rationally or not, find his statements against racism grudging at best and probably insincere.

Is there any formula for moral equivalence between Hill's anti-Trump tweet and Schilling's anti-transgender whatever? It's hard to see the former as "hate speech" in the usual sense of that term, since Hill was criticizing an individual, albeit on subjective suspicion, while Schilling presumably disrespected an entire group of people. Trump supporters may feel disrespected by Hill's tweet, but it's hard to believe that their sense of identity is offended in any similar way -- presuming, of course, that any transgender person took offense upon actually reading Curt Schilling's Facebook page. It could be argued, however, that these social-media smears are approximately equivalent in their slanderousness -- that there could be a moral equivalence between disrespecting a group of people and maliciously lying about an individual. Is it slanderous to call Trump a white supremacist? Some would say it's self-evidently so in light of Trump's statements post-Charlottesville, but can they forbid anyone from thinking that the President was practicing white-man's taqiyya on this explosive subject? It won't be hard to find people ready to argue that this or that action of the President, including even his reiteration yesterday that both white supremacists and their antagonists had shares in the blame for the Charlottesville violence. In the 21st century, can a public official (or anyone) compel people to take him at his word by treating the refusal to do so as slander? Can Donald Trump -- or, some might ask despairingly, any white person -- prove a negative on this point so conclusively that no one would have a right to question his stance? It seems impossible, especially when the proof demanded by many is conflated with ideological tests by those who see Republican economic policies as racist in some way. This may seem unfair, but it explains why many people see the press secretary's statement as an un-American attempt at intimidation, and not as a defense of the President's honor. Nor is this anything new in our history. The difficulty of establishing the truth of certain points of controversy probably was a big reason why calling someone a liar 200 years ago was effectively to challenge him to a duel, or to invite a beating in the street. You might not be able to make someone believe you, but you might have a better chance at simply shutting him up. Back then, of course, dueling was a gentlemen's game, and it was a gentleman's prerogative to cane an inferior in the street for calumny. We probably don't want to go back to those rules in our more egalitarian age, but we still need to work out a new etiquette for the social-media age, as it becomes increasingly easy for people, whether presidents or reporters, to speak their minds without thinking.

The ACLU comes through

Writing in the September 28 New York Review of Books, American Civil Liberties Union national legal director David Cole cites with alarm a 2015 poll indicating that "40 percent of millennials think the government should be able to suppress speech deemed offensive to minority groups."  You're more likely to think this way the younger you are, it seems, since only 12% of people aged 70 and over at the time of the survey agreed with that view. Cole attributes this unhealthy attitude to "several arguments, all ultimately resting on a claim that speech rights conflict with equality." Those arguments rest on a zero-sum calculation of discourse, presuming that "the weak are silenced [when] the strong speak, or if some have more to spend on speech than others," as well as an assumption that speech hostile toward minorities "reinforces harms" already done to them. For now, under Cole, the ACLU goes against this tide of opinion. It defended the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" marchers when the city tried to relocate their August rally away from the site of the Robert E. Lee statue they meant to defend. It's yet another case where right-wingers benefited from the intervention of an organization they often affect to despise, but their hypocrisy shouldn't influence judgments of the ACLU's record of defending unpopular and provocative speech. In his article, Cole explains that his organization defends speech rights just about to the absolute limit. They'll defend people who advocate violence, relying on a 1969 Supreme Court decision finding such advocacy unlawful only when "it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action." In other words, "the government should be overthrown in a violent revolution" might be OK, but "attack the government now" wouldn't be.

Currently, the ACLU draws the line only when people plan to carry weapons during their demos, since that's something different from speech. Cole justifies this loose approach by noting that "Our history illustrates that unless very narrowly constrained, the power to restrict the advocacy of violence is an invitation to punish political dissent." On a related note, he finds it strange that many self-conscious minorities want governments to have more power to suppress speech when 1. "in a democracy the state acts in the name of the majority, not the minority" and 2. "if we were to authorize government officials to suppress speech they find contrary to American values, it would [at present] be Trump -- and his allies in state and local governments -- who would use that power." In general, while "One can be justifiably skeptical of a debate in which Charles Koch or George Soros has outsized advantages over everyone else, [one can] still prefer it to one in which the Trump -- or indeed Obama -- administration can control what can be said." Unfortunately, I doubt whether those whose views Cole challenges will be swayed by his logic. Their demands for government power to suppress oppressive speech are inseparable from a demand for power for themselves, after all. I think they're just smart enough not to empower anyone like Trump to silence them, though they still need to consider, should they get power in turn, that they may not always have it. As for minority rights and majority rule, it wouldn't surprise me if some radicals actually look forward to something like the concurrent-majority form of government envisioned by John C. Calhoun, the great defender of slaveholders' rights, in which protected groups (slaveholders in Calhoun's case, take your pick today) could check the potential tyranny of the majority through veto powers, local nullification or other expedients. Civil libertarian groups like the ACLU rarely get on well with radicals, and I confidently expect to see Cole attacked in the letters columns of subsequent issues for his apparent blindness to the moral imperatives behind the movement to silence oppressive speech. But just as the right sneers at the ACLU one day and seeks shelter with them the next, the left will do likewise inevitably. The ACLU's work must often seem thankless, but so, probably, does much essential work in a democratic republic.

Will Trump lead to a three-party system?

While the Republican party holds the majority in both houses of Congress,  last week seemed to show that a deal between an ostensibly Republican President and the minority party was all it took to get the debt-ceiling increased for another three months. That signaled fresh disarray in the GOP, since a united front should have sufficed to thwart any alliance between Trump and the Democratic party. Republicans were caught flat-footed by Trump's swerve. Not long before, he was threatening to veto any bill to raise the debt ceiling that did not include funding for his beautiful border wall. Now, anticipating emergency spending for hurricane relief, he backed a Democratic plan to raise the ceiling without the spending cuts demanded by the fiscal conservatives and deficit hawks in Trump's own party. For some GOP congressmen, this was the latest betrayal; for others, perhaps, it was the first. It provoked fresh speculation on Morning Joe and other talking-head shows about a Republican crack-up separating the ideologues from the Trumpists, the latter defined by little but their personal loyalty to the President and their likely emulation of his pragmatic/opportunist/ad hoc approach to politics. Of course, some observers have been waiting for the last quarter-century for the GOP to split, or ever since Pat Buchanan's primary campaigns. At first it was expected, or hoped for, that the libertarians would split from the social conservatives. Now the threat seems to be the departure of voters who share Buchanan's economic nationalism, and probably a degree of his cultural conservatism, but are otherwise as unpredictable as their current hero. The debt-ceiling decision may or may not prove a definitive moment in retrospect, but it's immediately telling the the President, if I understand his motives correctly, was willing to waive all previous conditions for the sake of hurricane relief, while rank-and-file Republicans spent the days of Harvey and Irma arguing over who among them had been hypocritical for demanding relief now while voting against it in the past, or whether past bills were more pork-laden than current measures. At times like this the cut-the-bullshit approach that Trump's admirers attribute to him -- rightly or not -- seems more like the right one. At the same time, his deal with the Democrats should refute for good the old argument that businessmen in politics will be fiscal conservatives. That argument never should have held water, given how often businessmen like Donald Trump go into debt in order to carry out their projects, or declare bankruptcy to further their interests. As President, Trump clearly isn't going to fit into anyone's mold. You can try to label or pigeonhole him based on some position he's taken that you admire or (more likely?) despise, but he's never going to be that predictable because he's never going to be an ideologue. Whether a new party can emerge and contend credibly for power without an ideological base is a big question for the future, but if Trump is tempted to break with the GOP, there's probably no better circumstance imaginable for the instant credibility of a new political party than if it has a standing President behind it. Such speculation should be kept on a low burner, however, until after next year's congressional primaries, when we'll most likely see whether Trump and Breitbart can bend the Republican party to their will. If they can't, then all bets are off.

What if you had to vote?

There's an interesting exchange on the letters page of the September 28 New York Review of Books on the subject of voting. Peter Heerey, the former chair of the Australian Electoral Commission, comments on a recent article by Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen, two Nobel prize winning economists, favoring the Instant Runoff Voting system by noting that Australia has a ranked-preference system similar to what the economists advocate. As a reminder, the idea is to rank all the candidates running for office in order of preference, so that if your first choice is eliminated for failing to meet a threshold of minimal support, your vote will count instead for your second choice. Around the world, the real driving idea behind such arrangements is to enable people to vote their consciences for left-of-center candidates without guaranteeing the election of right-of-center candidates. Heerey notes that Australian elections have a safeguard against extremism in the form of compulsory voting. "Arguably compulsory voting lessens the need to appeal to a party's hard-core supporters, to make sure they vote," he writes, "Thus debate tends to be less polarized."

Maskin and Sen respond with a cautionary note about compulsory voting, which might not achieve optimum results in American elections. "According to US data, citizens who don't vote tend to be less well informed about candidates and issues than those who do," they writes, "Compulsory voting might well introduce a raft of additional voters who are more susceptible to the false claims and simplistic solutions of extremists."

In Australia, compulsory voting apparently minimizes extremism, while American observers fear that it would empower extremists. Why the difference? The appealing answer would be that Australians, being obliged to vote, feel obliged to educate themselves on the issues. By educating themselves, they immunize themselves, presumably, against "false claims and simplistic solutions." How likely is this, actually, in the land where Rupert Murdoch was born, or anywhere? It sounds more plausible to assume that Australia requires people to vote whether they've bothered informing themselves or not. This, in fact, could explain the moderating effect of compulsory voting, since candidates must appeal to voters who, as Heerey claims,  most likely aren't really politicized, much less radicalized. If the U.S. is different in a way that makes an extremist result more likely, would that be because more uninformed people would be voting, or because more people would be voting who have already been radicalized? Many Americans claim that they don't vote because the major parties have nothing to offer them. Such people aren't necessarily uninformed about issues, though they may be uninformed about solutions, or they may have their own ideas about solutions that aren't usually echoed by the major parties. It might be premature even for Nobel laureates to dismiss all their ideas as "simplistic," and their forced entry onto the voter rolls might influence election campaigns the other way round from what Maskin and Sen fear. It might not be a matter of these marks falling naively for some demagogue's "false claims and simplistic solutions," but of canny politicians adopting more extreme positions simply as a matter of reaching out to a potentially critical mass of new voters. In short, if similar electoral systems were to produce radically different results in two countries, something other than "uninformed" voters would most likely be behind it. If compulsory voting in the U.S. would produce a more extreme or radical result, the most likely reason is that Americans already are more radical than Australians. The question than becomes whether elections should be arranged to prevent extreme or radical results or whether they should, as Maskin and Sen appear to believe, reflect "what voters really want."

Equality of powerlessness

Here's an insight culled from an otherwise typically vacuous David Brooks column: "I had assumed that as society got more equal we would all share a measure of equal dignity. But it turns out that without an obvious social hierarchy we all get to feel equally powerless." He's commenting on the rage and fear felt by nearly every distinct group of people in the country, but the comment begs some questions, most obviously: how much does our sense of having a secure place in society depend on the existence of a "hierarchy," either in the broadest sense of a structure or the more familiar sense of a class or caste system? Brooks seems to describe a historic development similar to what Pankraj Mishra presents in Age of Anger, in which the spread of liberal capitalism worldwide leaves people uncertain of their place in society, or of whether they have a place at all. That, apparently, is the price of freedom as understood by capitalist culture. To be free to make your own place, all bridges must be burnt behind you. You either make your own place, or you have none. Until recently, it was relatively easy for any American to make a place for himself, or even herself, thanks to American economic dominance. As the playing field levels out and economic rivals compete at a lower level than most of us can accept, a sense of insecurity spreads nationwide, even among supposedly privileged classes. That feeling is exacerbated by the apparent collapse of any code of mutual respect as everyone plays the ever-popular game of musical deck-chairs on the damaged ocean liner, othering and anathematizing each other. Growing numbers of otherwise conventionally conservative people are horrified by their belated discovery that the freedom touted as their birthright and their guarantee of success has evolved into an unrelenting requirement of constant adaptation fueled by the competitive imperative to economize through imposed obsolescence. Many of these newly-horrified masses may lash out at lower-echelon scapegoats, but don't mistake their hostility toward their nearest competitors for an enduring failure to recognize the competitive order for what it is. For some, the only way to protest the competitive order is to go after the weakest or least-welcome competitors, on the assumption that their presence only perpetuates an oppressive system, or proves its oppressive nature. The simple hope here is that there'll be places for everyone after those who don't really belong are cast out. But while populism, for want of a better term, seeks to secure places for all its constituents -- the people here and now -- capitalism continues to be driven by an opposite imperative to reduce the number of places in order to increase profit and "productivity." As a populist politician, President Trump seems to be trying to transcend his own capitalist instincts, to judge by his desire to create jobs at all costs, with whatever consequences to the environment or other factors. His core constituents most likely are people who are sick and tired of having constantly to adapt to myriads of forces, cultural as well as economic, with decreasingly realistic hope of achieving security. Eventually they're simply not going to be able to blame everything on people who are "different" in some way or other, but if there's to be a real solution to the dilemmas of our time, it probably won't come any faster by preaching at people to stop blaming each other. Whoever offers a solution to the larger problem first, without all the moral exhortation, may well see hostile groups joining forces with them, whether they really like each other or not, against the real common oppressor. What comes after that will depend on whether any or all of us can learn to think differently about the pavlovian buzzwords that trigger us -- "freedom" most of all.

The tears of antifa

While the President was being sort of presidential, trying to deal with the hurricane and flood damage down in Texas -- and it looks like he'll get another chance to do this sort of thing shortly -- last week was a bad one for the antifa movement. Not only did the mainstream media portray them as the aggressors in the latest round of violence in Berkeley, but the host of The Daily Show mocked them as a "vegan ISIS." There was definitely enough going on for antifa and their apologists to throw shit fits in social media, basically accusing anyone who criticized them of being soft on Nazism. They're accusing the media of playing the moral-equivalence game, as if anyone was saying that whatever ideology antifa espouses is morally equivalent to Nazism, white supremacy or fa. With fanatics like these, it's hard to tell whether they're missing the point of most recent criticism, or whether they simply don't give a damn what anyone outside their safe zone thinks. The reason it's hard to tell is that some of them probably believe that merely espousing white supremacist, white nationalist or even "white identitarian" views is a form of violence to which violence is an appropriate response. Most people won't go that far. They may find such views grossly offensive, but they can hardly be expected to equate them with a physical assault, unless you count the queasy gut feelings white supremacy may induce in some audiences. The antifa narrative is that the people they go up against actively advocate mass murder, but in practice they seem to go after just about anyone in a MAGA hat. They may assume that a person so topped has murder in his heart, but you know what happens when they assume? They make an ass out of themselves, and more and more people are noticing. Antifa is an embarrassment to anti-Trump opinion as a whole. By perpetuating the assumption that every Trump supporter is a white supremacist, antifa also perpetuates a stereotype of anti-Trump opinion, namely that it's founded on nothing but the assumption that Trump and his supporters are white supremacists. What does antifa have to offer as a positive, unifying agenda around which an effective anti-Trump coalition can rally? Nothing, really. Their entire existence seems founded on a belief that any threat to equality or social justice can simply be beaten into submission. That would be a puerile view of society, and just the one you'd infer from the their bullying tantrums. Sadly, their "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude is all too typically American at this point in history.