Is anything worth a shutdown?

It's going to be a long weekend for Congress and the President as they face fresh rounds of negotiations after the partial government shutdown took effect at midnight. Today most likely will see a lot of posturing and recrimination. The President has already done his bit on Twitter, taking the predictable line that the Democrats, who denied the stopgap spending bill the necessary supermajority in the Senate, have put the interests of illegal immigrants before everything else by making their support conditional on funding for the DACA or "Dreamer" program. It certainly doesn't look good for one party to be willing to shut down the government over any pet issue, though the Democrats are also demanding more money for a child health insurance program. But for good or ill the Democrats cannot do otherwise, at least for today, since their vision of the nation is at stake. For them, the U.S. will always be, first and foremost, a refuge for the world's oppressed, with utilitarian considerations secondary at best. That's worked for them for nearly 200 years, even as each group they welcomed and integrated into American society over nativist objections eventually turned nativist from fear of the next newcomers. Today's calls for a more utilitarian or meritocratic immigration policy no doubt strike many Democrats as hypocritical as well as bigoted, but as a general observation wisdom acquired with age often seems hypocritical when someone seems to say "do as I say, not as I did." The hypocrisy argument can only go so far, and we'll probably see the limits of it today as Democrats preach to choirs gathered across the country to curse the anniversary of Trump's inauguration. For those audiences Democrats must appear intransigent, but I expect to hear them change once the marchers go home, sine whether they or the marchers like it or not, the optics of the shutdown do not appear favorable to their side. Today might actually be Democrats' best chance to make their position look at least sympathetic if not reasonable, but the temptation to pander to base voters convinced of the opposition's irredeemable bigotry will most likely cost them that chance. The shutdown most likely has already changed the character of today's demonstrations, whether the demonstrators understand that or not. They may expect vindication on the assumption that Republicans usually get blamed for these shutdown crises, but they should also expect yet another reminder that times have changed.

Objections to conscience?

Once Americans acknowledged the idea of conscientious objection to military combat duty, we effectively surrendered our right to deny conscientious objections to other things, even when, in the case of abortion, many may argue that the patient's reproductive rights should have priority over any doctor's religious scruples. Once admit that you can refuse the state's call to arms on religious grounds, you probably have to allow others to deny that the state's recognition of reproductive rights imposes a duty contrary to a doctor's religious principles. I might like to argue that religious liberty should never override state duties or rights unless the conscientious objector can prove with reference to scripture that his or her salvation is irrevocably at stake, but that has never been the standard for allowing conscientious objection -- and in any event salvation is never out of reach for Christians, no matter what sin  they commit. That leaves no real remedy for the Trump administration's commitment to defend the rights of doctors who refuse to perform abortions (or assist in suicide where state laws permit) as a matter of religious conscience. The only effective remedy might be for whichever body that governs those specialists who might perform abortions to steer people who object to abortion away from  the profession. Such a move probably would be denounced as discrimination against religion, no matter how many professedly devout Christians continue to perform abortions, and even if the state didn't recognize it as such the idea alone would most likely rile up Christianists in counterproductive fashion. The only certain remedy would be for civil society to induce people to learn the necessary specialties in order to ensure a sufficiency of doctors to meet women's needs, but even that will be certain only for as long as the state permits abortion, and that segues to another story. I'll close this one by questioning whether those applauding the Trump administration actually endorse the principle of conscientious objection or merely want privileged protection for their own Christianist biases. Would they support a Muslim doctor, for instance, who claimed a conscientious objection, on the basis of a perceived religious obligation, to treating patients of the opposite sex? If not -- if they argue instead that Muslims shouldn't practice medicine in this country if they have such scruples -- then physician, heal thyself.

No enemies of the people

In his latest philippic against the President, Senator Flake condemned him for describing the news media as the "enemy of the American people" in February 2017. "Enemy of the people" is a Stalinist phrase, Flake argues, and the sort of slander only someone of a despotic mindset would use. The context of Trump's complaint is, if not entirely dismissed, effectively minimized by the Arizonan orator. As he sees it, the President lashed out at critics because he can't stand criticism. By Flake's standard, that pretty much disqualifies Donald Trump from any role in American politics.

Any of us who have spent time in public life have endured news coverage we felt was jaded or unfair. But in our positions, to employ even idle threats to use laws or regulations to stifle criticism is corrosive to our democratic institutions. Simply put: it is the press’s obligation to uncover the truth about power. It is the people’s right to criticize their government. And it is our job to take it.

In other words, the media must be given the benefit of the doubt, not by presuming them innocent or always truthful but by allowing them to err on the side of vigilance against encroaching tyranny. Better to let them fudge the facts, or perhaps even to lie -- I do not claim that this is how the media actually treats Trump -- than to let the leader use "fake news" as an excuse to suppress dissent. Flake claims, cluelessly I think, that the President's "fake news" rhetoric has emboldened authoritarians around the world to crack down on dissent in their own ranks. While some may have added the phrase "fake news" to their propaganda arsenals, I otherwise doubt whether the leaders cited by the senator need any instruction from America on how to suppress dissent.

For Flake, "despotism is the enemy of the people," while "The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy." Given his visceral reaction to the phrase "enemy of the people," it seems fair to assume that Flake doesn't believe that there is, or can be, an "enemy of the people" among the people. As a libertarian-leaning Republican, his base assumption more likely is that state power is the root of all danger. For the sake of argument, let's question this premise. Can there be no "enemies of the people" among the people (i.e. within the "private sector" or "civil society") in a liberal democracy? Does the senator believe that there is such a thing as treason? Most likely he does. What, then, is a traitor? Is he merely an "enemy of the state," or may one call him by extension, in a democracy, an "enemy of the people?" The terms should be synonymous, yet "enemy of the people" somehow sounds more sinister to some ears. That may be because "the people" whose enemies are denounced by dictators or demagogues is often defined in a partial or partisan way. It's often assumed that "the people" is used dishonestly, whether by the purportedly populist and allegedly racist President,for whom only certain Americans really count as "the people," or by totalitarian partisans for whom "the people" only exist through or by the grace of their party.

From an ideologically pluralist or individualist perspective, the mere idea of a "people" in a liberal state may be suspect, a threat to individualism or pluralism. It doesn't follow, however, that either "the people" or "enemy of the people" should always have menacing connotations. If populists, for instance, are only materialist conservatives, concerned with the welfare of the actually existing people of their nation instead of "human rights," one can be an "enemy of the people" in their eyes simply by harming or threatening to harm the material interests of those people. While one could see businesses as "enemies of the people" (though libertarians would rather not) in a number of ways, whether by taking jobs away, polluting the environment, operating unsafe workplaces, etc., it's hard to see how the media can be "enemies of the people" unless they are literally treasonous in the uncontroversial sense of the word, and not even Trump has accused them of that, to my knowledge. Nevertheless, that possibility always exists, if not in the media as a class than among individual media entities. For that reason, calling the media the "enemy of the people" may be a lie or a tantrum, but it shouldn't be treated as the blasphemy Flake condemns in his speech. Simply put, if the other side can portray Donald Trump -- or, for that matter, media entities like Fox News and Breitbart -- as an enemy of the people, as many clearly feel that he is, then turnabout is no more than fair play, so long as neither side uses the claim to circumvent the rule of law and people's constitutional rights. Donald Trump may be violating some unwritten rule by talking back to his critics rather than simply "taking it," but he's only exercising the same right that his critics exercise. As long as they all have the same right, let 'em fight.

'The least racist person that you've ever met'

So the President of the United States once described himself, with characteristic hyperbole and, many now reiterate, with characteristic dishonesty. Donald Trump's self-assessment seems belied by his questioning yesterday, in words the White House hasn't bothered denying, why the U.S. should take in more people from "shithole" countries in Africa or like Haiti. No denial may seem necessary (though since I started writing, the radio has reportsd that Trump has tweeted a denial) because Trump assumes that his supporters get what he means, while the opinions of those who take his words to be racist don't matter. His real meeting, his stooges insist, is that the U.S. should only take in people prepared to make immediate contributions to the economy, as Norwegians, to use the President's example, presumably are. Of course, that he immediately cited a Scandinavian country after disparaging black-clad countries only damns Trump further in the eyes of those who have assumed all along that skin color (or 'culture') is his primary concern. Had he a quicker wit, he might have named some Asian country if he did not want to be thought of as racist. As it is, even now liberals are overreacting to Trumpian boorishness and most likely guaranteeing themselves more lulz from his supporters. It can be argued, after all, that many nations are shitholes. Many liberals might consider Russia a shithole, for instance, for a variety of reasons, though for them that would be reason to welcome Russians seeking to escape their national shittiness. There are two real questions raised by the President's own designation of shittiness. Does the state of any given country effectively disqualify its citizens, as Trump seems to imply, from even the potential of contributing to the American economy or culture? How much does any nation's shithole status have to do with its racial makeup? To deal with the latter question, Trump should try to identify African nation's that are not shitholes, and if he can't, he should try to explain what, if anything besides black rule, makes them shitholes. As for the question of usefulness, there's no getting around the fact that Trump applies a utilitarian standard that represents a departure from past policy and liberal tradition. The fact that Ireland was a shithole in the 1840s didn't stop the U.S. from accepting Irish immigrants, despite cultural objections from the Know-Nothings; nor did the fact that much of Europe remained a shithole later in the 19th century stop us from welcoming people from Eastern Europe and Italy, despite more cultural objections. In each case, the nation's best years were still to come despite the inclusion of people who seemed as alien to WASPS then as Africans may seem now. In all past cases, it was not required that immigrants immediately prove their ability to contribute. It should be possible to argue that circumstance here are sufficiently different to justify applying a different standard without the new standard reflecting on other countries. It just doesn't seem possible for this President to make that argument or articulate that standard in a diplomatic or even civilized way.

Would you like to see my French postcards?

Unfortunately, I have none. Instead, I want to comment briefly on the remarkable letter that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde this month and has now been translated into English. Attributed in the American press to the actress Catherine Deneuve, who is actually only a signatory but is the one best known here, the letter represents a perhaps distinctively European backlash against the perceived witch-hunt mentality toward alleged sexual harrassers in the U.S. More sweepingly, it's a critique of the "triggered" mentality that seeks to purge the public sphere of anything that might disturb it. The letter has attracted considerable attention here, and probably considerable sympathy from the American right, because it attacks what it describes as an anti-harrassment "puritanism," exemplified by the #MeToo meme, that unfairly seeks to suppress any expression of male sexual desire. It's not intended as a defense of Harvey Weinstein, whose fall from grace began the current reign of terror -- just this week, men ranging from James Franco to Stan Lee have joined the ranks of the accused -- but a warning against the blanket indictment of every man who's ever "bothered" a woman. For the authors, the right of men to "bother" women is as "indispensable to sexual freedom" as the right to "offend" is to artistic creation, not to mention political expression. They deplore a mentality unable "to tell the difference between an awkward attempt to pick someone up and what constitutes a sexual assault."Such a mentality reduces womanhood to victimhood and encourages "a hatred of men and sexuality." The authors argue for a more sophisticated feminism that recognizes that "sexual impulses are, by nature, offensive and primitive," but refuses to reduce sexuality to a perpetual power struggle.

A woman can, in the same day, lead a professional team and enjoy being a man’s sexual object, without being a "whore" or a vile accomplice of the patriarchy. She can make sure that her wages are equal to a man’s but not feel forever traumatized by a man who rubs himself against her in the subway, even if that is regarded as an offense. She can even consider this act as the expression of a great sexual deprivation, or even as a non-event.

The letter draws a distinction similar to the one I find increasingly definitive between left and right in the U.S., if not around the world. The right sees the world as tough while the left sees it as cruel.  For the right, the answer to toughness is toughness; one must adapt and discipline oneself to deal with the world as it is. For the left, the answer to cruelty is revolution or, on a smaller scale, litigation; the world (and its cruelest people) must be tamed so we can be what we want to be or were meant to be. In the French context, the authors, Deneuve and the other signatories are basically asking American women, and those influenced by them in Europe, to toughen up and deal with sexuality as it is, in all its offensive primitiveness, instead of trying to purge the primitive from the arts or the arts community.

The obvious riposte from #MeToo types will be that the French women are, ironically misogynist in their implicit assumption that men can't be better, or can't be made better than they are. Whatever the truth on that point, the Americans certainly will reassert their right to demand better, as well as their contempt for anyone who questions their demand. The perception of world cruelty is linked to the belief that the world, or at least human nature, can be changed without limit; a cruel world would not seem so unacceptable if we didn't assume that it didn't have to be that way. In any event, I don't think the French women are saying it "has to be that way." Their argument is that #MeToo is forcing the sexual world into a rigid "that way" position in which men are always predators, women always prey, objectification is always evil, and the only remedy is a sexual police state, while their own perspective recognizes a wider range of give-and-take. The #MeToo view seems to the French writers too close to a truly anti-sexual attitude that #MeToo would consider antithetical to their own, but is, in the French view, the grim and more likely alternative to sexual freedom and its irreducible messiness.

This frenzy for sending the "pigs" to the slaughterhouse, far from helping women empower themselves, actually serves the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom, the religious extremists, the reactionaries and those who believe — in their righteousness and the Victorian moral outlook that goes with it — that women are a species "apart," children with adult faces who demand to be protected.

#MeToo certainly will protest this dystopian portrayal, if it hasn't done so already, if only because it exists to protest. That's only fair, though, since I don't think the French letter is the last word on the subject. It is, however, an intervention that should not be dismissed as readily or contemptuously as some would like.

Decline is relative

"Anti-Trump movement in decline" is how one local paper headlines David Brooks's latest column. That looks counterfactual given recent Democratic successes at the polls and the media frenzy over the Fire and Fury book, but Brooks is actually writing about what he perceives as the opposition's intellectual decline. "It seems to be settling into a smug, fairy-tale version of reality that filters out discordant information," he writes, "The movement also suffers from lowbrowism  [which] ignores normal journalistic or intellectual standards [that] makes you think and notice less." Brooks sees this as a regrettable but inevitable development, since "In ever war, nations come to resemble their enemies." That's a new one that our nonagenarian "Greatest Generation" survivors might be interested to hear, but the observation probably is more true for civil wars and milder levels of factional strife. My problem with Brooks's assertion of decline is that it makes him look very slow on the uptake. The anti-Trump movement on the street and social-media levels has been like this all along. It has done little other than demonize and caricature Trump and his movement in "fairy-tale" fashion. What Brooks seems to be missing now, to provoke his decline claim, is the moderating  presence of anti-Trump Republicans like himself, now that the GOP has gotten what they wanted from Trump: tax cuts and regulatory rollback. There's still a lot of anti-Trump opinion among conservative columnists, but with most of the leading anti-Trump elected officials preparing to leave office, a "deplorable" lowbrow left has come to define the opposition in Brooks's eyes. This is too "insular" an opposition for him, unfamiliar or simply unwilling to communicate reasonably with anyone who supports Trump. Brooks still holds out hope that a revival of civility resulting from some escape from insualrity on all sides can reverse the overall decline in political discourse, but I don't yet see what can bring that about, so long as all sides demand respect as the precondition of civility while each equates respect with surrender. Trumpism and its opposite continue to be driven by the perception that one group refuses to respect the other. Mutual respect will require some compromise, as civility always does, but few see so far what might make that worth their while. We probably have more decline to endure before that changes.

Think 3 Video News: "Life is Good."

It's the morning of January 8 at the corner of Swan and Washington in Albany, across from the Alfred E. Smith building. The view is from inside a recently redecorated CDTA bus shelter.

The man across the street has been working that corner for months, at least since last summer. His little cardboard sign asserts that he's a drug-free military veteran. Sometimes a driver stopped at the light will call him over. Like most people, I assume he had the weekend off. I hope so, at least, because it was below zero Saturday, and his spot is one of the worst in town on a cold day, the way the wind whips around West Capitol Park. Sometime that weekend, I assume, an artist did his thing with that health-insurance ad. Who knows what his inspiration was.

The night of the dull knives

Can anyone still believe that President Trump is a fascist, or that his is a fascist movement, after the controversy over the Fire and Fury book? People may still feel that Trump has authoritarian tendencies, and they may be disturbed by the way Steve Bannon is groveling to get back in the movement's good graces, but howevermuch he and other sources now claim to have been misrepresented in the book, it seems clear that Donald Trump simply isn't and never will be the sort of leader historical fascism has produced. Mussolini and Hitler were know-it-all, at least in their own minds, fond of bloviating on a wide range of topics, while Trump seems to be a literal know-nothing outside his specialized business realm, but is no more modest for that. More significantly, the World War II dictators impressed their followers as visionaries rather than reactionaries, while Trump has little more vision than "Make America Great Again" and far less ability to articulate or dramatize what vision he has. For all that he demands praise, he clearly lacks the awful charisma that made even insiders worshipful toward the authentic fascist leaders; he lacks the stuff from which a fuhrerprinzip can be made. Of course, people can still remind me that someone said that American fascism will look different from the European originals, but that would only start a debate over the meaning of fascism that they most likely wouldn't win. Suffice it to say that Trump and his movement are bad enough as they are, while his voters were "fascist" only insofar as they were hoping for a punitive presidency on the model of The Apprentice. There is danger enough, depending on your perspective, in many Americans' desire to see many other Americans "fired" without accusing them of wanting something that very few, if any, actually do. And if more really want a more authoritarian or even totalitarian nation, it should be clear by now that Donald Trump isn't going to be the one to bring it.

What's the matter with Iran?

The American and Iranian republics may be irreconcilable  antagonists right now, but they have at least one noteworthy thing in common. Each sees hotly contested elections among a limited range of candidates over a limited range of issues. In the U.S. no candidate is credible outside the two-party system; Donald Trump probably would have fared little better than Ross Perot had he not committed himself to seizing a major-party nomination. In Iran no candidate can even run without the sanction of the Supreme Leader. In either case, critics from outside the mainstream can complain that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between or among mainstream candidates, but things look different from within the mainstream. In Iran the ayatollahs presumably could limit the field exclusively to rubber-stamp candidates congenial to the clerical elite, but the bitterness with which elections are contested and issues debated suggest that this isn't the case -- unless you believe that the continuance or necessary abolition of the Islamic Republic and the vilayet-e-faqih principle are the only issues worth debating. American politics is open to similar criticism from those who believe that the most important issues facing our country are not only ignored but actively excluded from national debates. Americans can claim that the people, not the fringes, decide what the real issues are, but only the most complacent apologists for bipolarchy really believe that. Regarding Iran, Americans tell the world that the Iranian  people have no say in what the issues are so long as the Supreme Leader retains his power and the basijis enforce it, but that isn't quite right, either. 2018 has begun with mass protests in many Iranian cities in an echo of the American anti-Trump protests  of January 2017. The Iranian demos seem to have started in protest against President Rouhani economic policies, the economy being the major issue in Iranian elections, but have evolved, in some instances, into protests against clerical rule itself. Some accounts suggest that this is instant blowback insofar as the original protests were orchestrated by the Supreme Leader's men to embarrass Rouhani, who has never been Ayatollah Khamenei's favorite. Some Iranians apparently blame the overall system for their economic woes, citing systemic mismanagement and corruption or, as American observers would have it, the squandering of national wealth on international adventurism in Syria, Yemen or elsewhere. In response, Rouhani has affirmed the right to assemble while warning against violence, while the Supreme Leader's men blame the escalation of protests on foreign enemies,no doubt citing President Trump's cheerleading tweets as sufficient proof. Americans inevitably are tempted to see the 2018 demonstrations as the beginning of an "Iranian Spring," a new "color revolution" or a "people power" moment. Such perceptions assume that the Iranian regime is systematically repressive, undemocratic and illegitimate. The Islamic Republic is often more blatantly and violently repressive than the U.S. has been in a long time, but if Americans accept the premise that Iran surrenders legitimacy by denying real choices and thus real power to the people, they should be prepared to judge their own government by the same standard. Most will no doubt give their own country a passing grade because they see real differences between the major parties. They would not agree that any number of protesters in the streets can override the presumed majority verdict. With that in mind they might withhold judgment on Iran as a republic, if not as a geopolitical antagonist, for the time being.

Is there a cure for outrage?

At the end of the year Hugh Hewitt, an anti-Trump conservative, diagnosed a nationwide addiction to outrage. He describes it as "the state of being perpetually offended, ... the need not only to be angry at someone or something, or many people and issues, but also to always and everywhere be, well, hating." Addicts, Hewitt writes, see their outrage as a sign of life. He blames social media for the condition he identifies across the political spectrum, but social media and the smartphones that allow us to take part in it everywhere at most facilitate, or at worst accelerate a decadence arguably latent in the American character.  The American ideal of personal liberty became decadent once a critical mass of Americans decided that their ability to dissent, protest or simply bitch was the only proof available that this was still a free society. The Founders may have regarded the right to dissent as a necessary safeguard against tyranny, but I'm less sure that they saw it as the essence of liberty itself. That it has become that probably proves the death of the American Dream in which the ability to do whatever you dreamed of, as long as it was profitable, was the essence of liberty. Now that opportunity seems stagnant and few see tax cuts or other supply-side measures as a liberating force, the right to outrage -- to express it and to provoke it in others -- is the only freedom, thanks to social media, that almost everyone can exercise. The last meaningful vestige of egalitarianism is the ability to "speak truth to power" or tell power, and its constituents, to fuck themselves. When this freedom is all we have, or the one thing that distinguishes us or elevates us above other powers, many of us inevitably will seek out things to be outraged over, to remind ourselves that we are still free after all. Having a President who, his reasonable complaints about media bias notwithstanding, has a bad habit of demanding praise from everyone for everything, only makes things worse lately. If the alternative to outrage is to think positive or look on the bright side, many will find the cure worse than the disease, or perhaps as a North Korean import. Fortunately, there is another alternative. The happy medium between compulsive outrage and dutiful affirmation would be a kind of enlightened cynicism grounded not in misanthropy but in modest expectations for the world and the people in it and, perhaps most importantly, a modesty about one's own feelings and opinions. Such an attitude would replace hate with a milder mockery ideally nonpartisan in its scope, based on a recognition that, just as my utopia is never going to happen, neither is my worst dystopian nightmare. This will be a tough sell, of course, since imagining the worst delivers the same kick as partisan outrage, but persistence may reward modest mockery by making it cool the way H. L. Mencken's cynicism became improbably cool in the 1920s. Promoting mockery may seem to fly into the teeth of the storm given the rage for respect that unites antifa, the alt-right and much in between. Even at this late hour, however, many of us still want to be cool, however problematic coolness itself is,and the compulsive outrage Hewitt decries will simply never be cool. If that were our ultimate safeguard against  outrage as a way of life, how cool would that be?

Whose News?

My clock radio is set to a public radio station that plays National Public Radio news briefs. On the morning after Christmas I woke up to the news that the Chinese had sentenced a dissident to a stiff prison term. The following morning, the top story was that Myanmar was detaining two Reuters news service reporters. These are events worth knowing about, but I found myself wondering whether they really were the top stories of their respective days. It's most likely a matter of perspective, and NPR's perspective is global. Its choice of top stories sustains a narrative of civil liberty and press freedom under attack around the world, implicitly including in President Trump's America. Not merely the right to dissent but the right to tell truths inconvenient to power is in danger everywhere, according to this narrative, which hints strongly that the suppression of dissent and free inquiry anywhere is a threat to the same things everywhere.  If I seem to object to this, it's not because I think repression in other countries is none of our business as individuals. I simply wonder about the priorities of a bastion of the reputedly liberal media when NPR can find nothing domestic worthy of headlining their morning news brief. One of the arguments against America's human rights-oriented foreign policy from the left was that our country had injustices of its own to deal with before it could claim the right to judge other countries. Under Trump, surely, that should be more true than ever, but NPR is more liberal than left and apparently more concerned with a perceived global threat to civil liberty than with actual conditions at home. For them, perhaps, dissent isn't just the health of the state but the health of the world. I could agree that every nation would be better off if rulers were more accountable to responsible criticism, but to see the world primarily as the battleground of a vast struggle for liberty is sometimes to come slightly too close to a neocon stance for comfort.

The new war on Christmas

The Washington Post reports today that right-wing ranting about a "war on Christmas " may prove a self-fulfilling prophecy. The war, you will recall, consists of bank and store clerks wishing customers "Happy Holidays" in order not to slight implicitly those who observe Chanukah or Kwanzaa. The objection to this has always been absurd, since Christmas is implicit in "Holidays," but some Christianists and traditionalists insist that there is no cause for complaint should they prefer to explicitly (and exclusively) wish people "Merry Christmas." Donald Trump pandered to these people during his election campaign and continues to do so, boasting of how unafraid he is to honor Christmas. To my knowledge, he has not demanded that anyone be fired for saying "Happy Holidays," but his intervention in this one-sided  kuturkampf seems to have had the same effect as his criticisms of athletes who refuse to stand for the national anthem. The Post reports that some people are more reluctant than before to say "Merry Christmas," out of fear of offending opponents of Trump, while others are more likely to say "Happy Holidays" in order to offend Trump's fans. As in the anthem controversy, the President's involvement has made the issue, intentionally or not, all about him. Just as there may be more resistance to standing for the anthem if doing so is seen as paying homage or submitting to Trump, so "Merry Christmas " may become a partisan slogan, if not a kind of loyalty oath to Donald Trump, while "Happy Holidays" loses its original neutral tone to become a declaration of hostility to Trump's particular form of Christianist. It's sad either way. While "Happy Holidays " has always seemed perfectly sensible to me, I as an atheist have never inferred a demand  that I worship Jesus from "Merry Christmas. " Non-Christians could have interpreted those words as a sharing of happiness across cultural borders on a festive occasion, not an assertion that Jesus is Lord, but this seems less possible now that the Trump, in some eyes, has stolen Christmas. May December 25 be a merry holiday for everyone just the same.

America or Israel First?

For those who find the question itself offensive, I'd ask the same one if the President and his UN ambassador threatened to cut American aid to countries voting the "wrong" way on a resolution pertaining to another country. On this specific occasion, I suppose, would see it as an insult to both American and Israeli sovereignty if nations vote to recommend that the U.S. reconsider its decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The real idea behind the threat is more likely that Trump wants to force a resolution of the Palestine question by intimidating countries into acquiescing in his fait accompli. He also wants to remind his "Judeo-Christianist" base that he isn't afraid of Muslims and doesn't care what the international community thinks. Israel remains the exception to the supposed Trump rule of foreign policy based on national self-interest. Many of his supporters and many of his opponents, if not the man himself, see Zionism as a moral imperative to which no one has any reasonable objection, but could be denied only on the basis of Jew-hatred.  They simply don't care whether support for Israel makes life more difficult for Americans as a nation or as individuals. Tying foreign aid to acquiescence in Jerusalem as the Israeli capital is a defining statement of this derangement. No matter what many yahoos may think, foreign aid is not a handout but a strategy premised on a calculation of costs and benefits favorable to the U.S. Trump himself may despise the calculus of foreign aid -- he sneered that the U.S. would save a lot of money if nations vote the wrong way at the UN -- but he just finished endorsing a National Security Strategy that deplored the emergence of power vacuums exploited by competitors whenever the country retreated from its rightful world leadership. It should occur to him that withdrawing foreign aid for this petty reason would create a similar vacuum that our competitors and adversaries would be happy to exploit, and that the pettiness of it will only further alienate the international community from an administration already seen, to a hysterical degree, as part of some white revanchist movement. Obviously principled arguments for reducing foreign aid can be made, and one can even argue that a degree of "ingratitude" might disqualify some countries from consideration. Denying countries aid because they won't kiss Israel's ass is not a principled argument, however. It will only further fuel (if not confirm) all the arguments against "imperialism," "arrogance," or "cold war mentality" that much of the world finds increasingly persuasive. The U.S. gives out foreign aid to further its own interests, in the final analysis. We should defend Israel if that's what the American people really want, since no one has an ultimate veto on Jewish nationhood that we're bound to respect,  but our desires and our interests are two diferent things, and we should not sacrifice our own interests out of spite for Israel's sake.

Revisionists and rogues, adversaries and competitors

"A central continuity in history is the contest for power," reads the new National Security Strategy of the United States published by the Trump administration, "The contests over influence are timeless." The new document is an indictment of post-Cold War "strategic complacency," based on a perceived denial of historic reality. "We believed that liberal-democratic enlargement and inclusion would fundamentally alter the nature of international relations and that competition would give way to peaceful cooperation." Trump's advisers believe that Chinese and Russian reassertion  (if not revanchism) was inevitable, and that Presidents from G.H.W. Bush through Obama were wrong to ignore that inevitability in pursuit of peace dividends. More interestingly, the NSS criticizes a characteristically American binary thinking that sees "states being either 'at peace' or 'at war' when it is actually an arena of continuous competition." This myopia has enabled "adversaries and competitors" alike act freely and ruthlessly "below the threshold of open military conflict" in order to "achieve maximum effect without provoking a direct military response." The President's own calls for "smarter" and "tougher" policies presumably target this neglect.  Throughout the document a distinction is drawn implicitly between "competitors" like Russia and China, who inevitably seek to expand their influence in ways that could harm the U.S., but are not existential threats, and "adversaries" or "rogue" entities like Iran, North Korea and the various Sunni Muslim terrorist organizations. This seems reasonable, possibly excepting its view of Iran, while its view of Russia in particular seems more subtle than that of the American bipartisan establishment that can't help seeing Russia, or simply Vladimir Putin, as an existential threat to something they value. The new NSS doesn't deny that Russia's different values will sometimes make its advances harmful to American interest, but the document is happily free of paranoia about Putin (or the Chinese, for that matter) promoting some global "authoritarian" agenda. It acknowledges, however, that authoritarian regimes have potential strategic advantages over the U.S. Such states are "often more agile and faster in integrating economic, military and especially informational means to achieve their goals," and are "unencumbered by truth, by the rules and protections of privacy inherent in democracies, and by the law of armed conflict." Partisan cynics may wonder whether the President envies these advantages, but the authors of the NSS remain confident in historic American ingenuity, combined with what they consider a more clear-headed understanding of American interests. This is, of course, an "America First" strategy based on the perceived interests of the actually-existing American people rather than on ideological priorities, committed to defending American values, however the Trump NSA understands the, rather than imposing them on other nations. The document sharply eschews faith-based optimism in (classical) liberal ascendancy worldwide. The "American way of life" is not "the inevitable culmination of progress," it states. For some, this will be too pessimistic a document, or perhaps too self-serving in its apparent insistence on a permanently vigilant military-industrial complex, at the likely expense of social programs. But compared to the arrogance of G.W. Bush in particular, we might start an objective appraisal of the NSS by observing that it could be worse, and we've had worse not so long ago.

No Moore

Was this week's special U.S. Senate special election in Alabama the first truly post-partisan vote? It was, at minimum, a uniquely ad hominem verdict in one of the reddest of Republican states. The balance seemed to tip decisively against Judge Moore last weekend when Sen. Shelby repudiated him.  History will most likely show that Moore died of a thousand cuts, from lingering suspicion of his Christianist bent to disgust with his alleged preference for very young women. These outweighed appeals to partisan solidarity from the President, who had supported Moore's opponent in the Republican primary, and to tribal solidarity, for want of a better term, from Steve Bannon. There was a rush to judgment against Bannon after Tuesday's result, the feeling being that, as Moore's biggest booster, he had foisted a fatally flawed candidate upon Alabama Republicans. Partisans there have themselves to blame, however, for choosing Moore when the President was urging them to nominate someone else. His ambivalent stance probably minimizes the damage to his own prestige from the Alabama debacle, though Democrats will portray the election as part of a wave repudiating Trump  and Trumpism. Apologists for Bannon -- and we should be careful to distinguish him from  the "alt-right" despite  Democratic and antifa perceptions -- might note that their cause almost prevailed and would have if not for Moore's toxic persona, but the Republican establishment could answer that, compared to typical Alabama elections, Moore's defeat was not a near-miss but a catastrophic abandonment of the party. While Democrats credit black turnout for putting their candidate over the top, a more typical GOP voting pattern would have more than compensated for that, as it has in the recent past. If any lasting lesson is to be learned from Alabama, it'll be the same lesson the nation as a whole has been taught this year. While the sexual-harrassment craze endures, more intensive vetting will be necessary for both major parties, not only for aspirants to office lest they share Moore's fate, but for incumbents lest they share Sen. Frankenstein.   This could go on at least until 2020, when we can now expect Sen. Gillibrand to position herself as the people's scourge of male swinishness in general and a seemingly swinishness President in particular. But while that develops, the cultural wars waged by Moore and Bannon will continue to rage as if nothing really significant happened in Alabama this week, since on that battlefield, nothing really did.

Press freedom and accountability

The President once more enraged most of the media establishment by issuing a tweet demanding that a Washington Post reporter be fired for issuing a tweet misrepresenting the attendance at a presidential rally in Florida. The tweet ironically described the event as "packed to the rafters," illustrating that with a picture of a far from full venue actually taken a few hours before the event began. The reporter claims he made an honest mistake because the picture shows Trump on stage, the President having arrived in advance of the event. The President sees this as another case of "fake news" intended to belittle him, and it's fair to ask whether he'd give a damn if any other politician or entertainer was treated the same way. One can't help wondering whether he thinks the reporter's real offense is lese-majeste or something tantamount to "slandering the state." Almost certainly, this President thinks he's entitled to more respect, if not more deference, than he's been getting in the media. But if his inferred attitude represents an extreme of intolerance of criticism or lampooning, there is, inevitably, an opposite extreme indulgent of almost any excess justifiable by suspicion of power, that would rather see reporters err, intentionally or not, with impunity than have them unwilling to take risks for fear of punishment. The idea here is that any prosecution or penalization of a journalist, justifiable or not, will have a chilling effect on all future scrutiny of leaders while giving those leaders a slippery-slope rationale for persecuting any reporter who doesn't see things the same way they do. But that would be like arguing that actually holding leaders accountable through impeachment and criminal trials would discourage anyone from seeking political office. In either case we would be better off viewing every case in objective isolation instead of treating them as episodes in perpetual campaigns effecting everybody. To be clear, I don't think the Post reporter should be sacked for a bit of Twitter snark that blew up in his face. But to argue that the media need answer to no one for its excesses, or that to demand some answerability is tyrannical, is itself potentially tyrannical, albeit in a different register, so long as you understand tyranny as that to which no one can say no.

The Jerusalem Provocation

How bad is your Trumpophobia? One way to tell is what you make of the President's decision today to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocate the U.S. embassy there. I can imagine extreme cases seeing this as a deliberate provocation, designed to provoke a terrorist attack Trump could then use to justify some extreme measure of his own, whether that be a roundup of American Muslims, a punitive attack on Iran,or something similarly chilling to this mindset.  Objectively, his decision is a provocation that almost certainly will have a violent response somewhere. But I don't think that response is something Trump really wants, much less depends upon. At worst, he may see it as a way to show the world that he isn't afraid of any consequences to come, or of the Muslim world. But his very careful, repetitive prepared speech today suggests that he, or at least his diplomatic advisors see this as they call it, as a fait accompli that will settle the Jerusalem question irreversibly. For an occasion that gave him ample opportunity to say "Fuck you, Islam," he adopted an almost painfully conciliatory tone, reserving the smack talk for the unnamed past Presidents who couldn't solve this problem before he cut the Gordian knot. He sounds little different from them, however, in his stated desire for peace conditional upon Islamic reconciliation with the permanent existence of Israel.
What happens next depends on the extent to which those in a position to worry about the repercussions of the next terrorist attack are in a position to restrain those who have less reason than ever to give a damn. That's the short term. The long term may depend on powers outside the Middle East that might find just as much reason to keep Muslims riled up as they have to prop up Kim Jong Un. Donald Trump's Zionism is an inconsistency in his America First policy that makes him vulnerable to those who might turn the security of Israel into something for which Trump may have to make concessions elsewhere, e.g. Eastern Europe or the South China Sea. It is not inconsistent with his nationalistic view of the world for him to believe strongly that the Jewish people are entitled to a nation over which Islam or the Third World hold no anti-imperialist veto. But I'm not sure if he's calculated how much that should matter to the U.S., or what price Americans should pay to affirm that principle. He may well see only benefit to himself in the form of Jewish and End Times-obsessed Christian voters. But in less than a decade he won't be President anymore, while the rest of us continue to deal with whatever consequences follow from what he's done today.

Neighborly naivete

The other day I saw a blog post arguing that the left doesn't owe the right a debate on anything; that a leftist would be justified in telling a right-wing er to "go eat a dick" no matter how eager he was to debate the issues. While there was a perhaps legitimate complaint about right-wingers "shifting the goalposts" in their sophisticated enthusiasm, I was inclined to dismiss the post as typical antifa arrogance, until the latest David Brooks column reminded me that some things really shouldn't be subject to debate. Brooks is unhappy over the Supreme Court having to deliberate whether the state can sanction a baker for refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding on religious grounds. He's quick to remind us that he supports gay rights, but he also claims that the beleaguered baker wasn't disputing them, either. Rather,"He's simply asking not to take part," and in the end, "It's just a cake." Rather than take this matter to court, Brooks believes that the Baker and the betrothed could have dealt with their dispute in a "neighborly" manner. This would entail the gay couple inviting the Baker home for dinner  "so you can see our marital love, and so we can understand your values. You still may not agree with us, after all this, but at least we'll understand each other better and we can live more fully in our community." Well, wouldn't that be special? We may scoff, but Brooks warns that the litigiousness exemplified by the current case contributes to social polarization and  anger, when "the holy messiness of actual pluralistic community ... could be addressed in conversation and community." In this case, however, is conversation really possible when one side is guided by an absolute rule of divine authority? Does Brooks's pluralistic ideal really require one group of people to "understand" another's belief that their way of life is "sin?" I suppose Brooks would say it must, so long as no group can impose its belief in another's sin on the community as a whole. Ironically, of course, it is the more intolerant community that complains against acceptance of the "sinful" community being shoved down their throats. If Brooks sees a moral equivalence between this too-familiar complaint and gay people's demand not to be treated as implicit second-class citizens for any reason, than his pluralism is as naive and hopeless as his Frank Capra fantasy of homosexuals and religious homophobes having a happy dinner together.

Conservatives vs. Conservation

The President has used his executive authority to shrink two large tracts of Utah national park land created in recent years, outraging environmentalists and Native American activists who see his action as a blatant move to open land seen as sacred or simply pretty to ruthless economic exploitation. Republicans in Utah are hailing the President's action as a necessary correction of federal overreach, while Trump himself invokes the principles of states' rights and local control. The main idea in his mind, most likely is "Jobs!" He seems convinced that resource extraction is the quickest way to achieve the job growth he's promised Americans. He probably also agrees with the Republican ideology of "responsible stewardship," which sees no necessary incompatibility between job creation and environmental protection. The opposition considers "responsible stewardship" a bad joke, and more Republicans used to agree with them. The national park system is what it is, arguably, because Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt -- whom, for all I know, Trump admires as a tough guy but Tea Party conservatives despise as an original "progressive"-- didn't entirely trust the robber barons of his day to be responsible stewards of anything. TR saw himself as a moderate steering clear of the extremes of oligarchy and populism, and a moderate might well make the case that even though limits on economic exloitation of the landscape remain necessary, past Presidents went too far in seizing Utah land, or that maximizing park land isn't necessarily the best course for everyone. The problem, of course, is finding a true moderate today, when even centrists are getting fewer and further between.

Republicans, Tories and 21st century conservatism.

The Conservative party of Great Britain is angry at the President of the United States, a fellow conservative by virtue of his membership in the Republican party, over his uncritical retweeting of videos posted by the "Britain First" group and described as scenes of Muslim migrants randomly attacking people. The Tories thought this irresponsible, while the President characteristically riposted that the British government should focus its attention  on radical Islamic terrorism. The Tory position seems to be that there's a difference between that and the allegedly indiscriminate Islamophobia spread by groups like Britain First. The subtext of this little flame war is a struggle to define conservatism for the 21st century. In Britain, the Tories have been "Conservative" since long before there was a "conservative movement" in the U.S., but the sort of conservatism they preach now is mainly a version of 20th century U.S. movement conservatism, at least when it comes to individual  rights. Evolving in opposition to Bolshevism, this sort of conservatism -- history may need to assign it a more accurate label -- focused on individual liberty based on supposed natural rights above and beyond the positive law of any nation. Shaped as well by the imperatives of globalized capitalism, this conservatism prioritizes the free movement of people and products as necessary to the operation of the free market and civil society upon which civilization depends. Across the Atlantic, many Republicans who see themselves as principled conservatism still advocate free trade and, to varying degrees, the free movement of people seeking to improve their lives wherever the Market creates opportunities. President Trump's conservatism differs to such a degree that many Republicans question whether he's conservative at all. That's because his more nationalist conservatism seems detached from any idea of "natural" or "human" rights, concerned only, it seems, with the interests of "our kind." From Trump's perspective, abstract notions of individual liberty take second place, at best, to the interests of actually existing Americans. To many more individualist conservatives, as to their estranged liberal kin, to deny all Muslims entry into the U.S. because some might commit terrorism automatically violates the human rights of the presumed vast majority of Muslims. Trump or his supporters might concede this point in the abstract, but would rather not take chances with the lives of those citizens who are their actual responsibility. In short, 20th century conservatism disapproves of any attempt, for any reason, to assign one group of people more or less rights than another, since the natural-rights assumption is that rights aren't ours to confer or deny. President Trump represents those who distrust the older generation of conservatives' refusal to make necessary distinctions, their seeming refusal to take "their own" side on questions of security or survival. This strikes me as a debate unlikely to be resolved through conventional debate. Instead, it may be resolved democratically,depending on how public opinion on either side of the Atlantic is shaped by the history to come.