Bust: Why Sanders lost

The Wikileaks revelations about Democratic National Committee schemes to undermine Sen. Sanders' campaign against Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination are balm for the wounded pride of Bernie Bros and other Sanders supporters who want to believe that the fix was in for Clinton. But does anyone doubt that the Republican National Committee tried similar tricks to stop Donald Trump, given how abhorrent he remains to many in the GOP establishment and the official conservative movement? Yet Trump was nominated, though his case differs from Sanders' in that he faced a far more divided field than Sanders ever did. That granted, and DNC favoritism toward Clinton granted, we should resist the temptation to exempt Sanders from any share of blame in his own defeat. No matter what the DNC was up to, Sanders lost in part because he ran the wrong race, and his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night indicates that he still doesn't realize his mistake.

"Let me be as clear as I can be," Sanders said, "This election is not about and has never been about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or any of the other candidates who sought the presidency. This election is not about political gossip..." Believing that has a lot to do with why he spoke on Monday rather than Thursday night. History may show soon that no Presidential election in American history has been more about personalities than the 2016 campaign. It will be decided entirely on ad hominem or ad feminam grounds, most Republicans (and many Democrats) believing that Clinton is irredeemably corrupt or incompetent while most Democrats (and many Republicans) believe that Trump is hopelessly incapable of constitutional statesmanship. Numerous Republicans tried to make the case against both Trump and Clinton on these grounds and failed, yet Sanders might have succeeded on those same grounds, had he not refused to run an ad feminam campaign against Clinton.

Remember that the anti-Trump Republicans were divided among themselves, while Sanders, once Gov. O'Malley dropped out of the race, was the only rallying point for anti-Clinton feeling among Democrats and independents voting in open-primary states. Of course, Clinton's fans felt that Sanders did run an ad feminam campaign merely by questioning their candidate's speaking fees and the donations she received from large corporations, if not simply by opposing her nomination in the first place. Yet Sanders effectively tied one hand behind his back when he asserted during an early debate that no one gave a damn about Clinton's emails, when it is self-evident that many Americans do give a damn, presumably including registered Democratic primary voters. Sanders was content to insinuate that Clinton was corrupt in a conventional and essentially impersonal way as a politician dependent on large donations, and did nothing to acknowledge the widespread (and still growing) feeling that she is corrupt in a more personal, venal and imperious fashion. Maybe this was because he was trying to be a good partisan, which meant avoiding as much as possible the argument that someone who might end up the party's nominee was unfit to be President. Maybe it was because, like so many Democrats and sympathizers, he believes that Hillary Clinton has been the victim of an protean yet baseless big lie for the last quarter-century, and that the Republican party has pulled off the biggest con and smear job in American history. It's more likely, however, that Sanders means what he said at the convention, and that his and Clinton's personalities are secondary to the liberal/progressive obligation to vote Democratic, no matter what, to prevent Republican oppression, no matter who their candidate is. What this would show is that Sanders, who is not quite the oldest non-incumbent ever to seek a major-party Presidential nomination, simply entered the lists too late, not realizing that a post-partisan moment may be upon us after all and that conventional partisan fearmongering may not be enough to save a Democratic nominee this time. Had he better sensed the mood of the country he might have realized the necessity of some politics of personal destruction during the primaries. Now it may be left to his erstwhile supporters to do that work for him, whether he wants them to or not.

There's another reason why Sanders might have had better luck with an ad feminam campaign than Trump's Republican rivals had with their ad hominem campaign. The difference between the two primary campaigns, and perhaps ultimately between the two nominees, is that compared to Clinton Trump is a blank slate. That may seem strange to say about Trump at this point, but my own point is that the ad hominem attack on Trump, whether waged by Republicans or Democrats, focuses on what he might do, while the ad feminam attack on Clinton is based on what she has done, or is believed to have done. To put it another way, the case against Trump is essentially speculative: because he sounds like an idiot and acts like a jerk, he'll be a terrible President. Against such attacks Trump's lack of political experience may be his best defense, not because it makes him more appealing as an "outsider," but because it leaves room for people to consider giving him a chance. Many people, and possibly a majority, will still vote for Clinton based on ideology, party loyalty and raw fear of Trump, but there won't be that same "give her a chance" quality to Clinton votes because she's far too much of a known quantity by now, both for detractors and admirers, and her Presidency would be all too predictable to either group. The question from now until November is whether the "Bernie or Bust" people, dismissed as "ridiculous" by a stand-up comedian at the convention, are willing to give Trump a chance, i.e. acquiesce in his election by withholding their votes from Clinton. On one level they are no more inclined to give Trump a chance than the Republican Congress was to give President Obama a chance. I'm sure some of the Bernie Bros (and sisters) are itching to spend four years on the streets protesting Trump's every act and utterance as President. At this point conventional Democrats would ask: what about the poor and the disadvantaged minorities who'll surely suffer under Trump? Those who sincerely intend to give Trump a chance might question whether those groups (apart from illegal immigrants and Muslim refugees) will suffer at all under Trump, but few on the left will doubt that the worst off now will be worse off as long as Trump signs Speaker Ryan's bills. In the absence of such doubt, the question becomes whether alienated progressives allow the Democratic party to continue using the poor and disadvantaged minorities as human shields or challenge the hedonic calculus (I'll get to this in a future post) that effectively compels acquiescence to Democratic party corruption and complacence. If a large group of American voters actually decides, actively or passively, that things need to get worse before they can get better, then the stage may be set for a real revolution in American politics in the years to follow this wretched election.

A good old-fashioned amoklauf

It looks like a disgruntled former employee took a knife and ran amok at a facility for disabled people near Tokyo today. The latest reports put the casualty total at between 15 and 19 people dead and many more injured. This incident, following closely after the Munich mall shooting -- which despite the ethnicity of the shooter appears to have been a classic amoklauf-inspired amoklauf -- is a grim reminder that any old thing can turn some people into murderers. Just as gun-rights advocates will point to this crime as fresh proof that banning guns won't suppress murderous evil, it should also remind us that people don't need a book of any sort to tell them to kill. For all we know, some who kill in the name of a book now would find some other reason to kill without the book. Of course, whenever something like this happens anywhere on Earth these days -- even in Japan, as I saw on one comment thread -- the first question asked is usually, "Was it a Muslim?" People seem to be afraid of terrorism now when they never seemed afraid of an amoklauf before, back when that was the only game in town in many places. In a way the discrepancy makes sense, since during a terrorist wave people feel targeted in a way the randomness of amoklauf attacks can't (though perhaps they should) evoke. It's one thing to believe objectively that some nut could appear anywhere, at any time, to open fire on you, and another to know that there are organizations urging people to kill you. I suppose that some people sincerely fear an amoklauf breaking out in their town, but many more fear terrorism even though there's no basis for believing that one is more or less likely than the other. Fear is selective, more than it would be if it were just a general fear of violent death. If many fear terrorism more than an amoklauf, there are some who feel the reverse. Over the past week I've been thinking about the selectivity of fear in a political environment where many people seem to fear the election of Donald Trump as President more than either an amoklauf or a terrorist attack. I hope to share some of those thoughts with you once I've had the time to organize them more. I'm hoping that the Democratic National Convention, an event more certain than ever to be founded entirely on a fear that may be the one thing holding the party together after the Wikileaks revelations, will help those thought cohere.

The People's Words

Since angry dark-skinned hordes have failed so far to show up at the Republican National Convention, we get stories like the Melania Trump plagiarism scandal. It would hardly be worth commenting on except that Trump fans have grown crazily defensive toward the presumptive nominee for First Lady, despite her foreign birth. They seem to deem her an asset to the Trump campaign because she's prettier and "classier" than either the current First Lady or the presumptive Democratic nominee for President -- not to mention her First Man. The prettiness is indisputable, while the "classiness" apparently consists of unconditional praise for the U.S. In any event, Mrs. Trump's honor is to be defended at all costs. One tactic is to raise the old bloody shirt of "Double Standards" and accuse the media of ignoring plagiarism scandals involving Democrats. This is a difficult tactic to pull off since the current Vice President, a Democrat, had his political career set back a generation by the first big plagiarism scandal of modern political history, while the current President was accused of plagiarism during his 2008 primary campaign. The "double standards" argument is pretty weak when a Google search of "Barack Obama plagiarism" calls up not only this week's Republican complaints against mainstream-media neglect of Obama's plagiarism  -- the candidate had borrowed lines from then-Governor Patrick of Massachusetts -- but also 2008 mainstream media reports of the plagiarism controversy. Of course, according to Republican logic the media must have downplayed it, since Obama did not withdraw from the campaign, just as Donald Trump's failure to divorce his wife (for now) will prove that the media downplayed her plagiarism as well. 

A more interesting response to the current plagiarism scandal is less partisan than populist, in keeping with the Trump movement. At this level there's a rebellion against the very concept of plagiarism. I'm hearing people argue that words belong to no one, that no one has a right to say that Melania Trump (or her speechwriters) were plagiarizing Michelle Obama's (or her speechwriters') words. I don't know if they feel the same way about phrases, but their main argument is twofold. First, "the people's words," as one person calls them, can't be claimed as intellectual property. Second -- and this may be the crucial argument for Trump supporters -- since there are only a limited number of words available to express ourselves, it's only inevitable that speeches expressing similar sentiments will sound alike, down to the phrasing, so what's the big deal? Donald Trump probably has the smallest vocabulary of any Presidential candidate in American history, and that's probably part of his appeal to many likely voters. What's the use of expanding your vocabulary, they may ask, when people can get in trouble like Mrs. Trump and her writers have? At least they can feel certain that Trump himself doesn't plagiarize, since his speeches sound like nothing professional writers would compose. Simplicity equals authenticity and honesty from this perspective, and with that in mind Trump fans really should blame the writers who forced the offending text upon Melania rather than letting her speak off the cuff as her husband prefers to.

If there's anything really damning about the whole affair, it has less to do with either Trump than with the idea that speechwriters, presumably partisan, assumed nevertheless that the words of Melania Trump and Michelle Obama, already antithetical personalities in many minds for many reasons, effectively were interchangeable. To the extent that they are props for their husbands -- Mrs. Trump blatantly so and Mrs. Obama's pretensions notwithstanding -- the writers are probably right. The real question is why the convention organizers thought Melania Trump had anything to say to the American people, or else why they thought her the right ventriloquist's dummy for whatever they wanted to say. Of course, candidates' wives are a commonplace at national party conventions; they're meant to testify to their husbands' character above all. But these appearances now encourage the dangerous belief that a First Lady is an important person upon whom votes confer some sort of power by electing her husband. We probably wouldn't be talking about plagiarism this week if people didn't believe that. You'd think that Donald Trump would prefer a more traditionally modest role for the First Lady, but just as he thought it important that Melania was more attractive than Sen. Cruz's wife, so he'll go on flaunting her as if she were Hillary and Michelle's opponent in a beauty contest. If she's been humiliated by this week's scandal, Trump has only himself to blame.

The 'privileged' anti-Clinton left

Tom Templeton of Delmar NY doesn't want to hear it any more from those he describes as the "Bernie or Bust" crowd. These are the people who voted for Sen. Sanders in the Democrat primaries and now refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election despite Sanders' endorsement. Templeton tells us he supported Sanders during the primaries but will unapologetically vote for Clinton. Those progressives who refuse to do so suffer from a "sanctimony," in Templeton's diagnosis, that makes them insufferable to him. He informs his readers that he actually blocked someone on Facebook because he couldn't stand her apparent indifference to the "harrowing consequences" of making Donald Trump's election more likely. People who dismiss those possible consequences are guilty of "privilege."

[T]hese folks are blinded by their privilege to accurately see what we as a nation would stand to lose if Trump fulfills his campaign promises. Anecdotally, I have observed that most on the "Bernie or Bust" bandwagon are both young and white. To date, their world includes legal protections they take for granted. Indeed, they are comfortable and therefore fortunate in their ability to wallow in self-righteousness. But what about those who rely on Obamacare? What about those who need Planned Parenthood to maintain their reproductive health? What about those whose love is finally legally permitted and protected by the federal government?

You see, Templeton is not "self-righteous" because he's concerned for others, while those who espouse "Bernie or Bust" are either preoccupied with their own principles or else indifferent to those, already worse of than they, who will be even worse off under Trump. There's no room for "self-righteousness" or even "righteousness" in the face of the eternal Republican threat; since Trump must not be President, progressives must vote for whatever the Democrats serve up. They must always settle for that because the Republican threat never goes away. Is it "self-righteous" to say this? Is it "self-righteous" to propose that so long as the Republican is always worse than the Democrat, there is no limit to how bad the Democrat can be? Templeton, I'm sure, would say: yes, Samuel Wilson, you're being self-righteous because you refuse to acknowledge that what is not Republican is a priori not bad but good, and just for that I won't follow your blog anymore, so there! And I suppose it's privileged of me to reject Templeton's hedonic calculus as an argument for Clinton, though for what it's worth I suspect that not only the poor and the historically disadvantaged but also I and the nation will be worse off under Trump than we are now. But the argument against Trump is not an argument for Clinton, much less the absolute mathematical formula Templeton takes it to be. I could believe that Trump is the worst option for the nation, but so long as there are more than two choices for President this fall my feelings about Trump would not oblige me to vote for Clinton. It's part of my franchise as a citizen to choose whomever I deem the best candidate without being blamed for the worst one winning, as Templeton intends to blame any progressive who doesn't vote for Clinton.

In effect, Templeton is saying that I have no moral right to choose the truly best candidate. My only obligation, as he sees it, is to prevent the suffering a Trump presidency will cause. Here again is all the proof Republicans need (may they choke on it) for their contention that Democrats exploit dependency to retain power. The poor and the historically disadvantaged are the Democrats' hostages and human shields; neither Republicans nor people on the left can hope to take the Democracy down without hurting the helpless, or so Democrats threaten. Does this mean that I'm indifferent to the plights of these groups? Absolutely not. I would expect any candidate I endorse to be the best candidate for all those groups in their particularity -- to the extent that their identities "matter" -- as well as for the nation as a whole. It's my right to propose a cure for their ills rather than the Democrats' palliative care or the Republicans' malpractice....and if anyone really thinks the Republicans have worse than malpractice in mind for the patient -- if the GOP is the existential threat to the disadvantaged that people like Templeton seem to think they are -- those people should ask themselves whether allowing Republicans to treat the patient really should be left to a vote at all instead of blaming the rest of us who don't plan on voting Republican. It seems privileged of Templeton himself, if you think about it, to let the Republican party continue existing, to let that threat hang over the poor and the minorities during every election, instead of exterminating it if it's as awful as he says. His beef shouldn't be with prospective independent voters but with the two-party system, if not the U.S. Constitution, for allowing such a state of affairs. To think voting Democrat actually solves this problem is a privileged position, indeed.

A cop-killer profile?

This month's two mass shootings of police were carried out by black veterans with an interest in "black nationalist" or "Afrocentric" schools of thought. The Baton Rouge killer -- actually a visitor from Missouri -- recently applied for a name change that reflects an intellectual if not institutional affiliation with a group known as the Ausar Auset Society. Founded in the 1970s, the Society seeks to revive a form of worship of the gods of ancient Egypt, considered by the Society's founder to be African-Americans' authentic cultural heritage. At first glance there's no evidence that the Society encourages violence of any sort, and it should be noted that the shooter appears to be an autodidact who took bits and pieces from many places to construct his own "Cosmo Way." It's interesting that people like the two cop-killers don't turn to one of the orthodox forms of Islam, considering that Islam offers the readiest legitimization of violence on Earth today, but it may be that each man was too close to fighting Muslims during his military service to feel real sympathy for the religion. It may also be that Islam's propaganda of racial equality is insufficient for men as alienated by American racism as these two. Nothing sort of a compensatory fantasy of African supremacy may do for such characters. Perhaps we should be surprised that "Islamic State" sympathizers haven't yet joined the fray against the police, but perhaps embracing Islam at that level dulls one's sense of solidarity with a particular race, your first loyalty being to the umma instead. In any event, how long will we have to wait before someone calls for new or heightened surveillance of "nationalist," "separatist" or "Afrocentric" groups or the dissemination of such ideas in social media? If someone doesn't raise the subject at the Republican convention in Cleveland this week I'd be surprised, given how the prevailing feeling on that side of the party line seems to be that black people have only themselves to blame for any feelings of alienation from American culture they experience. On a contrasting note, here's what a Christian writer had to say on the subject back in February:

Since much of the mistreatment of Blacks [in American history] was done in the name of Christianity, and because many Christian leaders who disagreed with such teachings and treatments were silent during these eras, space was provided for anti-gospel movements to rise up and proselytize people away from the church. Movements such as the Ausar Auset Society, Black Hebrew Israelites, Moorish Science Temple, Nation of Islam, and others gained prominence by juxtaposing the way White Christians treated Blacks and how the pathway to freedom from oppression started with the abandonment of the White Christian God, Jesus and Religion the slave maters imposed upon them.With the current revival of racial tensions in our nation birthing a movement such as #BlackLivesMatter, the aforementioned movements are surfacing once again on our cultural landscape.

The writer, of course, seeks a Christian way out of the problem, but we needn't and shouldn't be so particular. The problem, after all, has less to do with religion than it does with the way society is policed and the way perceptions of black men, as well as a feeling of entitlement among police, influence that. We shouldn't need God, Allah or Auset to straighten that out; if anything they are all counterproductive in a way that requires increased critical attention today.

Excessive force

A Missouri man celebrated his birthday today by going to Baton Rouge LA to kill cops. He killed three from ambush and wounded three more before being killed himself. The killer "speaks for no one," says the President, but we all know better by now. Everyone "represents" whether they intend to or not or are delegated or not. The killer will be presumed to speak for his skin color and for critics of the police. He will "speak" for those he most likely opposed, since they will say that he proves again, after the Dallas shootings, that criticizing the police leads to killing the police, as if police actions didn't "speak" for themselves to aggrieved, angry people. Whether the killer meant to accomplish anything beyond killing cops (and perhaps dying himself; the birthday angle makes me wonder...) may be impossible to know, but for anyone to expect that crimes like these will soften police behavior is foolish. It's more likely that this exploit, following so soon after Dallas, will only harden people's attitudes further. We'll know soon enough, since the Republican National Convention takes place this coming week, in an Ohio city where the police are urging a suspension of the state's open-carry law. Donald Trump has declared himself the "law and order" candidate. For some people that's what they now call a "dog whistle," but it's up to Trump and his party to clarify whether "law and order" means "the police are always right." Through the afternoon I've heard people calling for the country to unify, but every such expression of noble sentiment begs a question: what does unity require? Does it require one group to drop its attitude and forget every grievance in unilateral submission? Or does it require an acknowledgment of grievance before limits are set on its expression? One way or the other, it requires a discussion, and while today's atrocity may hurry that discussion the perpetrator deserves no credit. If this was, as it seems, a premeditated mass killing of police, it seems reasonable to label it an act of terrorism, no matter what the man's religion was, if he had any. While it may hasten necessary discussion in order to prevent further incidents like those of this July, we should be able to do this without giving the apparent murderer the dignity of "listening" to him -- and we have to do it without anyone refusing to listen to others simply in order to spite this corpse.

The Supreme Court is politicized! Who knew???

I have to laugh at all the discussion of Justice Ginsburg's denunciations of Donald Trump. Before I get started, let me agree with those who say it was inappropriate for a Supreme Court justice not merely to express an opinion about a political candidate but to insult Trump by calling him a "faker." I also don't doubt that if the shoe on the other foot was gored and Justice Alito or Justice Thomas expressed similar feelings toward Hillary Clinton that some Democrats would be demanding that the offender resign, as Trump himself is calling on Ginsburg to resign. Let's note, however, that it's probably unprecedented, if not just as inappropriate, for a presidential candidate to make such a demand of a Supreme Court justice. There are plenty of Democrats who had called on Justice Scalia to resign for various obnoxious things he said, though none of those remarks were personal insults and none of the people demanding his resignation were candidates for high office. And who doubts that Scalia felt toward Obama and the Clintons what Ginsburg feels about Trump? It was implicit in everything he said and wrote; Scalia may have been the most partisan justice in the Court's history. That's why I laugh specifically at pundits wringing their hands and lamenting that Ginsburg, just now, has politicized the Supreme Court of the United States. Every four years (for how long, now?) American voters are urged to pick a President on the understanding that the future of the Supreme Court is at stake. Republicans are urging their disgruntled or disgusted brethren to rally around Trump in the hope that he'll appoint conservatives to the court, while Democrats are telling their disgruntled siblings that Hillary Clinton is our only bulwark against the overturning of Roe v. Wade and who knows what else by barbarian justices. The presidential power to appoint Supreme Court justices may be one of the most powerful factors keeping the American Bipolarchy alive. So here's a new idea for today: if both major parties are desperately trying to herd their people together for the sake of the Supreme Court, maybe it's time to amend the Constitution by taking the power of appointment away from the President and giving the power of election to the people. It might be a good idea to retain life tenure, or set a mandatory retirement age, rather than elect justices to set terms, if only because I'd like Americans to be stuck with the consequences of their actions over time. But Supreme Court elections (one at a time, upon the death or retirement of a justice) would acknowledge the self-evident ideological polarization of constitutional jurisprudence while possibly de-escalating partisanship by stripping the major parties of one of their most compelling arguments for party loyalty. If we don't have to worry about the future of the Supreme Court during every presidential election, maybe more people will vote according to conscience rather than fear. If today's justices themselves had any wisdom and concern for country rather than party, they might suggest this themselves.

Third parties in the U.S. Now or never?

In the media, at least, political observers seem to agree that the U.S. faces one of its worst choices ever in the upcoming Presidential election, with both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump carrying high unfavorable ratings into the general campaign. Surely, this is the moment for an independent party to get the American people's attention. Shouldn't that be more the case this year than even in 1992, when Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote? So far, it seems not to be the case. The most generous estimates of early support for the two strongest alternate candidates, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green nominee Jill Stein, give them a combined 15% of people surveyed, most of that going to Johnson. Johnson's support is likely to grow significantly from the 1% of the popular vote he got in the 2012 election, but despite his credentials as a former governor and former Republican his support seems likely to max out at about 10%, despite a seemingly quixotic effort launched today to win over fans of Bernie Sanders who are disappointed over his inescapable endorsement of Clinton. At the National Public Radio website, Danielle Kurtzleben attempts to explain (in advance) why neither Johnson nor Stein is likely to top Perot's turnout in 1992. She observes that Americans seemed as dissatisfied with the choice between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton 24 years ago as they are now with Hillary Clinton vs. Trump. The difference, she claims, is that more people in 1992 were equally dissatisfied with Bush and Clinton and thus ready to listen to an independent appeal. In 2016, while Trump and Hillary Clinton's unfavorable ratings are both high, comparatively few people view both with equal disfavor. The Age of Clinton, beginning after the 1992 vote, has seen a hyperpolarization of the electorate, Kurtzleben claims, that leaves little room for the plague-on-both-your-houses mentality that benefits third parties. Voters are more partisan and take politics more personally than ever, and many will vote for Trump to stop Hillary, or vote for Hillary to stop Trump. When election discussions are dominated by how unacceptable one candidate or another is, there's little room for experimental voting outside the standard party boxes. Johnson is growing somewhat stronger, it seems, mainly because so many Republicans despise Trump, but his support will be limited inevitably by the imperative to stop Hillary. Despite the Sanders campaign, fewer Democrats feel as alienated from their nominee, and so Stein's support remains very small. Kurtzleben's analysis makes sense, but there's arguably an even simpler explanation for independents' failure to gain much traction, and that's the enduring American feeling that a vote cast for a candidate assumed unlikely to win, no matter if he or she comes closest to your own views, is a vote wasted. Elections are a sort of team sport, after all, and Americans want to be on the winning team. The problem with that line of thinking is that the nation is everybody's team, and with a choice limited to Trump and Clinton our team is likely to lose badly, if not in November than over the next four years.

To whom do white lives matter?

There are two ways of looking at excessive use of force by police. One way, the best known, is to accuse the police of selectivity in the excessive use of force, or to assume that they are "targeting" certain groups of people. Incidents in which the victim doesn't fit the "profile" should force us to look at the problem another way. The Washington Post calls readers' attention to the killing by police last month of Dylan Noble, a white 19 year old in Fresno CA. Law enforcement calls Noble's death "suicide by cop," claiming that he said suicidal things while approaching police with one hand behind his back. Video footage shows that cops continued to shoot Noble after he was down, apparently because he would not -- and perhaps could not -- keep his hands raised. Noble's family doesn't buy the "suicide by cop" narrative, and his friends held a rally and started up a "white lives matter" chant. Incidents like this one should get as much attention in the media as the recent questionable police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. So why don't they? You could argue that it doesn't fit the "targeting" narrative, but while that may be inconvenient (if not embarrassing) for the Black Lives Matter movement, the news media's apparent indifference isn't so easily explained.

Can it be that the media would rather sell a race-war narrative than a police-brutality narrative? There's more likely a less conspiratorial explanation. The apparent indifference to the fate of Dylan Noble shouldn't be blamed on Black Lives Matter -- though the movement's self-appointed leaders ought to be asked how such killings fit into their narrative -- but on the fact that most white lives don't really matter to white people. For all that whites in the U.S. supposedly feel more beleaguered than ever, that hasn't yet translated into a solidarity that actually values each individual life. How likely is it that a white person will learn of Noble's death and lament that "our men" are being slaughtered? It's not just that saying such a thing might get the mourner accused of being a white supremacist. Such things simply aren't part of their culture. Whites -- the descendants of Europeans who identify themselves primarily by skin color as a substitute for culture -- seem more likely to write off people who come to such bad ends than blacks are. That seems to follow from their every-man-for-himself "personal responsibility"ethos, something that finds mocking expression in such things as the Darwin Awards. When someone like Dylan Noble gets killed, whites outside the victim's immediate family and social circle are less likely at first glance to question police procedure than they are to observe, sadly or satirically, that the victim had it coming in some way. They see the killings of non-whites the same way, of course, and grow defensive when anyone questions their reflexive interpretation of events. Yet all theories about blacks supposedly sealing their own fate by behaving badly in some racially characteristic way toward police have to be tested against the stories of Dylan Noble and the equal numbers of unarmed white and black people (according to the Post) who have been killed by police so far this year. The problem today isn't that some lives matter to some people but not others, but that no lives matter to many people, or else don't matter more, for whatever reason, than the rights of the police. Donald Trump, the candidate of common sense in many people's eyes, called last week's "officer-involved shootings" of black men "senseless" and got criticized by some of his normally faithful supporters because they saw his word choice as a betrayal of law enforcement. The same people probably would react the same way if Trump had been tweeting about Dylan Noble. That's what anyone elected this year is up against.

'Don't shoot!'

Something terrible has happened in Dallas, where someone opened fire on police during a peaceful demonstration protesting this week's "officer-involved shootings" of black men in Baton Rouge LA and St. Paul MN. As I write, at least three officers are reported dead out of eleven shot, possibly by two people. The news networks are receiving phone videos from people who were in the demonstration. I've just seen one that sums up the moment. A group of people are walking, doing the "Hands up, don't shoot!" chant. The audio is poor enough that you really only hear "Don't shoot!... don't shoot!... don't shoot!..." They don't realize that they're imploring an actual person in vain until the shots ring out and the procession becomes panic. At that moment no one in the streets knows whether anyone in particular is being targeted; they're all in danger as far as they know. Terror unites people in the immediate moment, but recriminations are sure to follow. Depending on what sort of person did the shooting, we'll be told that everyone from the President on down is to blame for criticizing police tactics, and the constituency for an American police state is likely to grow. Because someone was obviously wrong to shoot at cops, that will make all cops right in everything they do, while everyone they kill is wrong. "Blue lives matter" will be the cry from many who had insisted stubbornly on "All lives matter" before. But if tonight's murders provoke an unfair backlash, they might also chasten people who portray police as the enemy rather than as public servants who need serious retraining. Dallas sadly proves yet again that it's too easy for any American to kill people. If our police need retraining to prevent needless killing, they're not the only ones.

Trump and the Christianists

In late June Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, a Christian pressure group, announced that Donald Trump was now "a baby Christian," having recently entered into "a relationship with Christ" through an intermediary Dobson has not identified. Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist, was skeptical. Thomas has been opposed to Trump's presidential campaign and was one of the authors in the anti-Trump issue of National Review. He finally spoke with the presumptive Republican nominee on June 6. 

"Who do you say Jesus is?" Thomas asked.

"Jesus to me is somebody I an think about for security and confidence," Trump replied, "Somebody I can revere in terms of bravery and in terms of courage and, because I consider the Christian religion so important, somebody I can totally rely on in my own mind."

For Thomas, this was an incorrect or at best incomplete answer. "This is not the language most evangelicals would consider as evidence of a religious conversion," he claimed. Like a prosecutor demanding a yes or no answer from his witness, Thomas expects Trump to, well, witness. The question, "Who do you say Jesus is?" has one correct answer, at least for Thomas. That answer is, "The son of God." To say anything else means you don't get it. Thomas sees things the way C. S. Lewis did, demanding that you accept all of Jesus's claims or none. He has no patience for those who talk of Jesus as a great moral teacher or philosopher. For Thomas, as for Lewis, all the morals or philosophy that Jesus taught followed from the premise that he was the son of God. "You must take your choice," Lewis wrote, "Either this was, or is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse....let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us."

Does Thomas suspect that Trump thinks Jesus is a madman? I'd guess not, but I would guess that he considers Trump, as yet, doctrinally unsound, or enough of a naif or neophyte not to realize the stakes involved in who you say Jesus is. It's more obvious that Thomas is disappointed with those evangelicals who are willing to make excuses for Trump because they see him as a strongman who will protect Christians from all their enemies at home and abroad. "It is a strange thing when evangelicals divide their loyalty, hoping for an earthly 'deliverer,' as if any politician, or businessman, could save the country from its collective sins," the columnist scoffs. Thomas once was deeply involved in the Moral Majority movement but walked away convinced that politics could not achieve the national spiritual salvation that really matters to him. To him, Trump seems to further prove his point. It must seem ironic to him that so many evangelicals who want to reimpose traditional Christian values -- those I call "Christianists" -- seem eager to rally around a worldly figure like Trump simply because he projects toughness and longs for an idealized American past that isn't necessarily the same past Thomas or the other Christianists idealize. "They project their faith on many who do not share it," Thomas notes, "and approve of that faith only in Republicans, never in Democrats, some of whom demonstrate more knowledge of Scripture and practice its teachings better than some Republicans."

Rest assured that Thomas isn't voting for Hillary Clinton this year, and he probably won't vote for Trump, either. Like many Americans, he finds himself isolated now by the terrible choice facing us in November, and his dismay reveals some contradictions in his character. On one hand, it's absolutely admirable for him to close by writing, "If you are about to have surgery, wouldn't you want the most competent doctor you can find regardless of his faith? That should also be the standard for electing a president." On the other, there's something ominous in his inquisitorial tone toward Trump and his readiness to judge any part of the man by his answer to one dumb question. You can imagine Christianists someday asking the same question and demanding the same answer of all of us if they get riled up enough by the world evolving out of their control in a way that feels like persecution to them. I don't think it's a good thing or a bad thing that Trump didn't give the right answer, but it will be interesting to see, now that he's been told the right answer, how he answers the question the next time someone asks it.

Trump, Saddam and terrorism

Many Democrats and a lot of Republicans are again condemning Donald Trump for his alleged praise of Saddam Hussein. Speaking in North Carolina last night, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate told his fans that "we shouldn't have gone in" to overthrow Saddam in 2003 because doing so destabilized Iraq. Trump affirmed that Saddam was "a bad guy," but insisted that one thing he was good at was killing terrorists. The "bad guy" bit did nothing to change the minds of people convinced that Trump has a dangerous admiration for "authoritarian" rulers, while the part about Saddam killing terrorists outraged neocons and others who stand by their old opinion that the Iraqi dictator was a "state sponsor of terrorism." These latter critics also claimed that any "terrorists" crushed by Saddam were really -- did you guess? -- liberal freedom fighters against tyranny. Here is a representative critique along these lines from a typical source. But who can deny that Trump, in perhaps clumsy fashion, is describing something real -- that under Saddam's tyranny, for it was that, no one was killing Baghdadi civilians by the hundreds in the name of an Islamic caliphate. More importantly, under Saddam's tyranny, no one was murdering Americans in the name of an organization dedicated to overthrowing the government of Iraq. But didn't Saddam himself encourage or abet terror against the U.S.? Didn't he destabilize the region by invading Kuwait and waging war on Iran before that? In the short term, yes, but Trump seems to be trying to take a longer view to determine whether the U.S., rather than anyone else, is better off or not without Saddam.

What Trump has yet to show is whether he understands why we invaded Iraq. Does he think it was anything more than a case of bad intelligence? From what Trump says we can infer that he wouldn't take "Saddam is a murderous dictator" as reason enough to take him down, and while that might have been reason enough for some invasion cheerleaders it certainly doesn't tell the whole story. Trump should ask himself why Iraq became an enemy of the U.S. after acting as our proxy against Iran throughout the 1980s. Kuwait obviously is a big part of the answer, but Saddam wasn't threatening that kingdom again in 2003. Trump's critics are right, meanwhile, about Saddam sponsoring or subsidizing terrorism against Israel, but Trump may want to think about the price of unconditional support for Israel against its neighbors, since that certainly contributed to American undermining of largely secular "anti-imperialist" regimes in the Middle East, and still factors into our insistence that Bashar al-Assad give up power in Syria. When last heard from on the subject, however, on April 27, Trump sounded as unconditional in his Zionism as most Republicans. Could a President Trump remain unconditional in his Zionism while eschewing a regime-change strategy against Israel's antagonists, including Syria? So far he's taken a relatively realistic position on the Assad regime, rejecting regime change, but would he be able to reconcile that position with Assad's continued hostility toward the Jewish state and the dictator's friendship with Iran, the one country with which Trump seems unwilling to deal? For all we know, Trump may be the man to cut the ultimate deal that would stabilize the Middle East, but he needs to show us more before we trust him to do that.

Russian Roulette: the Republican veepstakes

Donald Trump's best option for the general election probably would be to make his running-mate irrelevant, but neither the Republican party nor the media is going to let that happen. The significance of Trump's choice for a vice-presidential candidate inevitably will be inflated by weeks of media speculation before his decision, and weeks of second-guessing afterward. The process may be as near to a no-win situation for Trump as he's encountered so far in his political career. If he opts for a veteran politician, that risks alienating fans who fetishize Trump's outsider status. If he chooses another outsider he'll probably further alienate Republicans who find Trump himself dubious on many levels. His own apparent short list is full of danger. Tapping Newt Gingrich, as may now believe he will do, would be just about as good as firing a bullet into his brain. The former Speaker is not a veteran politician but a has-been politician, and one who is not, so far as I'm aware, remembered fondly by the Republican base or the general electorate. Gingrich is the man who actually made people tired of the Clinton family's legal troubles, while emerging as a hypocritical persecutor of the adulterous President. He emerged as a quitter when a backlash against the Clinton impeachment reduced his majority in the House of Representatives. What Trump sees in him I can't say, unless the presumptive nominee sees the 1994 "Contract With America" campaign as a model of political entrepreneurship. Gingrich is supposedly one of Trump's favorites despite his support, as Speaker, for NAFTA, the Munich of protectionist history -- but conveniently enough, he's repudiating his former free-trade stance, arguing that we're in a different era now without scrutinizing his role in making the era different. Fairly or not -- since people should be able to say they were wrong in the past -- Gingrich will be portrayed as an opportunistic trimmer if he lands the second spot on the GOP ticket, and Democrats probably could not pray for a better running-mate for Trump, for their purposes. Trump simply can't be that stupid .... or can he? For all we know, the gun he has to put to his head may be fully loaded. But to be fair, he didn't make the bullets.

'Great Again'

Every utterance of the Donald Trump presidential campaign -- down to its tweets and retweets -- is scrutinized eagerly for fresh proof of the presumptive candidate's essential bigotry. The latest scandal involves the campaign's careless borrowing of an anti-Clinton graphic in which the text "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever" appears inside a six-pointed star. This is now widely described as an anti-semitic image, and it may have been intended that way by its original creators, who apparently meant to emphasize the amount of donations Clinton has received from Jewish people. I doubt greatly that this was the point the Trump campaign meant to make, but critics are drawing the damning conclusion that Trump's people are looking at some unsavory stuff. But even Trump's most innocuous sounding statements and slogans are thought fraught with similar "dog whistles," starting with his main motto, "Make America Great Again." I've personally seen the spread of a smear claiming that Trump borrowed the "Make -- Great Again" slogan from Adolf Hitler, which is refuted at the debunking snopes website.Many who don't see it as crypto-Nazi still regard the slogan with suspicion. The reason is plain enough; any invocation of a "great" American past is seen by many Americans as an appeal to white-male revanchism.

For a Republican or right-winger to want to make America great again is to want to put the white males back in charge, or the straight white Christian males, depending on how specific your suspicions are. Is this what Trump really wants? Taking the slogan at face value, I assume that he wants to restore American prosperity, if not also American world dominance, and possibly some set of cultural/moral values upon which he presumes American greatness to depend. "Make America Great Again" is not implicitly bigoted, but bigotry is inferred by people who take the slogan as both a threat and an insult. The threat is that the white men will take over again in some exclusionary fashion. The insult is the idea that America was great at a time that millions today identify with discrimination and worse forms of bigoted oppression. At the most, critics might concede, as Louis Farrakhan had to clarify about Hitler once upon a time, that the U.S. was wickedly great, but the nation could not be worthy of the unmodified adjective until the curse of white male (etc.) oppression was lifted. It should be possible to say the U.S. was great despite blatant and inexcusable bigotries, and it should be possible for Trump to say he wants to restore economic greatness without restoring the white male to unjust hegemony. In effect, those who hear bigotry in "Make America Great Again" are saying that American history before, say, 1965 is an inseparable package defined essentially by racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. It could also be inferred that they don't believe that prosperity can be restored to the levels of whatever golden age Trump refers to without reverting to a discriminatory distribution of wealth that denied large groups of Americans their proper share of prosperity, unless they make the unsustainable assumption that Trump isn't talking about economic prosperity at all when he utters his slogan. What we need, I suppose, is a debate in which one side explains once and for all what it means and what it doesn't by "Make America Great Again," while the other explains what it distrusts about those words. Whether Trump really would make America great again is a question for a separate debate, of course.

R. U. Syrious?

On Morning Joe today the host and his panel were bemoaning the situation in Syria and the global refugee crisis that has resulted from it. The sad part about their moaning is that they still think that the right thing for the U.S. to have done was, and the right thing to do now still is, to throw an overwhelming amount of American resources behind some moderate rebel group, enabling it to topple Assad, defeat the self-styled Islamic State, and stabilize the country if not the region. No matter how small or feeble (or deceptive) the moderate forces are in Syria, some Americans still believe that we could have made, and could yet make, all the difference. American hubris has not yet learned its lesson, nor has American ideology been revised. The first cause of the refugee crisis is the uprising against Assad, not Assad himself. The ultimate cause of the crisis is continued international support for the uprising. No amount of American support would have deterred Russia and Iran from shoring up their ally, Assad. President Obama may be weak in foreign policy, but no Republican would have intimidated President Putin or Ayatollah Khamenei into leaving Assad to his fate. Such a theoretical figure might have embroiled us in a far more dangerous war instead. Too few people in recent years have considered objectively whether the U.S. really would benefit from the fall of Assad. Too many take it for granted that he must always be an enemy so long as he remains a dictator and an enemy of Israel -- many still assume that dictators opposed Israel and whipped up hatred for the Jewish State only to prop up their own positions --  when the rise of the IS and similar groups ought to have sparked an American diplomatic revolution long ago. In retrospect, American opposition to two generations of largely secular strongmen in the Middle East looks like an epochal miscalculation, founded on little more than resentment of their anti-imperialist stance and economic nationalism, and a bias in favor of the Israeli over the Arab. In our ideological commitment to democracy Americans failed to ask whether democracy in the Middle East benefited them. Too many took it for granted that it did, whether because they assumed, as Obama does, that tyranny is the primary cause of regional instability or because they assumed, as neocons do, that liberalization -- political and economic -- civilizes and harmonizes all cultures. In either case, policy makers convinced themselves that the American people were always better off when a tyrant fell -- so long as socialists didn't overthrow him.In Syria, Assad hasn't even fallen, and the world is already self-evidently worse off for our efforts to bring him down. I don't think the reason for that is that we didn't try hard enough. Obama himself, despite his detractors, tried too hard, just as his predecessors tried too hard to intimidate or overthrow all the secular modernizing dictators who might have changed history for the better had we not swallowed our ideological pride and let them.

'Republican orthodoxy' on trade is neither grand nor old

The Washington Post headlined its report on Donald Trump's speech on trade yesterday by stating that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was "Defying Republican orthodoxy" by promoting a protectionist "America first" trade policy. Trump has objected to Post headlines recently for misrepresenting him, but I'm not sure whether this one bothered him, since it's hard to tell whether he or the Post reporter knew that "Republican orthodoxy" on this particular subject is really a fairly recent thing. From the time of its founding in the 1850s until the middle of the 20th century, the GOP was the party of protectionism in an era when trade policy was often the defining issue in national elections, if not the issue that defined the parties themselves. Until the advent of the federal income tax, tariffs were the federal government's primary source of revenue. Democrats, then the party of fiscal conservatism and limited government, believed that tariffs should be imposed for revenue only, and then only to meet the most self-evident needs of government. Republicans, competing with Democrats to be recognized as the party of the working man, equated protective tariffs with more and better paying jobs, while the Democrats, appealing to underpaid workers, questioned whether anyone but the bosses and their financial backers benefited from higher prices for everything.

Something changed after the Great Depression and World War II. Pat Buchanan traces the Republican turn toward free trade on three phenomena: a historical narrative that blames protectionist measures like the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff for turning the stock market panic of 1929 into a great depression; a nebulous bipartisan "one-worldism;" and a libertarian ideology Buchanan traces back to John Stuart Mill and identifies currently with Speaker Ryan, whom the columnist advises to "read more history and less Ayn Rand." I'd add a fourth factor: a consumerist ethos that asserts that Americans' right as consumers to the lowest possible prices trump any right of American workers to their jobs. We could argue for a fifth element: Republicans' increasing identification of protectionism with labor unions whose power they wanted to break. Part of the right-wing argument for free trade assumes that protected, privileged businesses and their workers, immunized by tariffs from accountability to the market, are licensed to overcharge consumers for increasingly shoddy goods. Free trade theoretically benefited the consumer -- an abstract figure whose sources of income are irrelevant to the discussion -- while undermining union workers' job security by undermining their employers' market security.  Whatever its sources, in the 21st century this modern orthodoxy is being challenged from the right, dating back to Buchanan's own quixotic presidential campaign and continuing with Trump's, and from the left, through Sen. Sanders' failed crusade against Hillary Clinton. Trump apparently hopes that by emphasizing the trade issue he can win over Sanders supporters who may otherwise be repulsed by his personality or overall worldview. Like his Republican predecessors of old, Trump promotes protectionism as a champion of capitalism. It doesn't seem contradictory to him for the state to be an actor in the capitalist market, using its influence to favor its citizen workers and entrepreneurs. It's open to question, however, whether any 21st century capitalist can argue for giving producers priority over consumers, since the entire global capitalist economy seems to depend on impulsive consumer spending in a market of limitless choices. It will be a challenge for a candidate of either right or left to tell American consumers in particular that they perhaps should do without some choices and pay more for things for the sake of fellow citizens. It might be a particularly hard sell for someone like Trump who presumably knows no limit on his own consumer choices. You know what probably could have helped him sell the idea? A strong, mass labor movement like we used to have before Republicans had their way with the country. Perhaps Trump will mention this to the party when he consummates his hostile takeover in Cleveland.

No cameras, no peace?

The Traditionalist Workers' Party tried to hold a rally in Sacramento CA yesterday. It's opposed to "economic exploitation, federal tyranny, and anti-Christian degeneracy," and is described by critics as white-supremacist. Not long after the TWP made its plans known, self-styled "anti-fascists" announced a counter-demonstration, and really something more than that. Some on the far left hold that groups like the TWP have no moral right to be heard, whatever the First Amendment says, and are in fact liable to violent suppression, presumably by "the masses," wherever they show themselves. Thus the TWP people found themselves outnumbered by approximately ten-to-one and got clobbered. In the end, ten people were hospitalized, including victims on both sides. More alarming than the "anti-fascist" attack on the TWP was their apparent desire to suppress media coverage of the action. At least one black-clad gang -- perhaps a typical anarchist "black bloc" demanded "no fucking cameras" while hassling some journalists. Whether this was to protect themselves from reprisal -- unlikely considering many of them were masked -- or because they felt that the TWP deserved no attention whatsoever is unclear. In footage at the local newspaper's website, one protester barks about "White supremacy in the media!" in possible rationalization of their tactics. While few tears need be shed for the TWP, or for the sake of their specific beliefs, their antagonists through such tactics surrender most if not all of the sympathy they might demand when cops clobber them. If we're supposed to worry about whatever threat Donald Trump might present to the media, we ought to be at least equally worried about spectacles like the scene in Sacramento.

The TWP's platform may be abhorrent, but as long as it's legal it ought to be protected better than it was in Sacramento. And while I suppose it can't be said often enough that racism is abhorrent, I can't help thinking that the protesters are trapped in an obsolete paradigm. How else could they think that white racism, abhorrent as it is, is the main thing they need to fight, and by implication the biggest threat to the country or society? Militant Muslims are perhaps less likely to hold public demonstrations -- and probably less likely to receive permits for such events -- but who actually believes that these "anti-fascists" would be as quick to attack such a gathering as they were the TWP rally? If I don't believe that, it's not because I think they're afraid of Muslims, but because too many 21st century "anti-fascists" haven't been able to wrap the menace of Islamic militancy around their traditional "anti-imperialist" narrative, according to which European or "white" imperialism, founded on a form of racism somehow unique to the West, is the necessary and sufficient cause of any atrocities in the developing world or any attacks on the developed world. Yet I should think that anyone so passionately opposed to "hate" would see something hateful in Islamism, or something hateful in Islam itself, presuming that our masked protesters are leftists in the old Marxist sense of the word. That issue aside, the Sacramento incident keeps alive the ironic narrative of 2016, in which everyone freaks out over the presumed latent violence of Donald Trump's supporters, while for the most part it's those supporters (apparently including the TWP) who are getting beat up. It seems to me that if the left wants to play this game, they'd better be wrong about that latent violence on the other side. If they're not, that violence will be blatant sooner or later, and when that happens leftists might not find numbers on their side.

The decline of the west or: Brexit, stage right

The European Economic Community was meant to embody the ideal of a post-nationalist, post-warfare continent. If any entity embodied "the west" it was the EEC or, as it came to be known later, the European Union. But it was never quite a perfect fit. For years, Great Britain wanted to be part of it, but Charles de Gaulle blocked their admission while he ruled France; his was a vision of a "Europe" that excluded Britain (and by extension the U.S. -- de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO) rather than "the west." De Gaulle's departure from the scene ended French resistance to Britain, and the U.K. joined the EEC in 1973. Now Britain will leave the Community after a close referendum vote, but in many ways it's now a different community from the one Britain aspired to join. Since the Maastricht Treaty of 1994 it had more political power, and its taxes and regulations were increasingly resented by right-wingers in Britain, long before the refugee crisis that arguably put the "Brexit" over the top. The left wing had plenty of objections to the Union, most having to do with its imposition of austerity economics on certain member states, but the Brexit is seen widely as a triumph for a broader Anglo-American right, represented by a gloating Donald Trump, ironically romping in Scotland, where support for the EU remained high and now has reignited an independence movement whose own referendum failed last year. A second referendum may have a different outcome, which would be ironic given how Britain appealed to Scotland to remain in the U.K., and which perhaps would confirm that ours is a centrifugal age, the traumas of globalization having provoked tribalist reactions of all sorts as people look to those around them for support and resent any diversion of their attentions. If the left remains ambivalent about phenomena like the Brexit, it's probably because, whatever their reservations about the EU as it exists, they'd still like to try again, preferably from the ground up, or with the guidance of socialist principles, while the right presumably is through with the idea of Union for good. Whatever the EU's flaws, it's hard not to see the Brexit as a step back from progress to the extent that it means a permanent step back from regional or cultural amalgamation. It's unclear, however, to what extent the Brexit represents a repudiation of the European or western ideal in favor of some sort of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism. It certainly seems to repudiate the idea that Britain is answerable to the rest of Europe, and that repudiation clearly appeals to a certain Anglo-American chauvinism that sees "Atlantic" rather than "western" civilization, characterized by the obstinance of the Anglo-American right, as man's highest achievement. This civilization or quasi-civilization has a missionary quality; it would like to see the rest of Europe or the west adopt its ways and biases and abandon all vestiges of socialism in the process. This mentality saw the EU as socialistic even as critics from the left saw the same entity as an enforcer of capitalist hegemony. The debate over what the EU is or was will continue; the question now is what alternative to the EU might someday replace it, and whether something might yet be salvaged from the idea of continental union as the alternative to perpetual rivalry and war in Europe.

Sit on it: the gun debate today

It's a bit silly to see Rep. John Lewis, an authentic hero of the civil-rights movement, treat the Democratic demonstration in the House of Representatives as a "sit-in." That's a dubious assertion of moral equivalence, considering that the original sit-ins involved an element of physical risk that was almost entirely absent in the Capitol building yesterday. The whole point of a sit-in, some would say, was to call attention to the immoral absurdity of segregation by making someone arrest you or beat you up to enforce it. So unless the House Democrats were expecting Republicans or National Rifle Association members to charge in and shoot them, their little Occupy moment doesn't rise to the gravitas of a true sit-in. The most they had to deal with was an idiot Texas Republican with a short attention span who seemed to believe that only the last two highly-publicized mass shootings were relevant to the current gun-control debate. Rep. Gomer, or whatever his name is, presumably ranks among the opponents of the proposal to forbid people on the "terrorist watch list," aka the Terrorist Screening Database, from purchasing assault weapons. Such a proposal would seem to be the no-brainer of all time, but instead we hear Republicans and NRA hacks whining that the list is too large and some people are on it unfairly, or by mistake. I take this to mean that there are too many white conservative Christians on the list for their comfort. Too bad: if there isn't a process for applying to be removed from the list, make sure there is one and go ahead with the legislation. Instead, it seems unlikely that even a compromise proposal that would limit the ban to those on the more stringent "no-fly" list will pass. In President Obama's final year in office there seems to be even more clinging to guns (and in some cases, religion) than ever. The NRA even found itself to the left of Donald Trump at one point this month, gently reminding the presumptive candidate that it might not be the best idea to let people drinking in nightclubs carry firearms. They are not far behind him, however, in their longing for a return to traditional values and the good old days -- true or not -- of the Wild West. It makes you wonder what a modern Wyatt Earp would actually do.

How much is Trump's life worth?

Reluctant as I am to echo Republican talking points, I can't help wondering whether liberal bias of some sort is limiting coverage and discussion of an admittedly feeble attempt to kill Donald Trump over the weekend. According to the latest information, a 20 year old white British guy tried to snatch a gun from a cop working security at a Trump rally. The suspect says he's been planning to kill the presumptive Republican presidential nominee since Trump first began to be taken seriously last summer, though his particular motivation for doing so remains unclear. These Brits take politics very seriously; they not only kill their own legislators but now they scheme to kill our people. It may be that reporters and opinionators are withholding judgment until they find out more about the kid's motivation, but again, I can't help thinking that there'd be no withholding had a similar scene played out at a Clinton or Sanders rally. The reason for the difference, I suspect, is that any attempt on Clinton's life would be fit quickly and neatly into a narrative of "hate" that somehow wouldn't apply to an attempt on Trump, especially one like the present case, in which the perpetrator at first glance doesn't seem to belong to the expected categories, Muslim or Mexican. Yet it's obvious that many on the left hate Trump, but their hatred isn't seen as "hate," if you know what I mean. If you don't, what I'm trying to say is that hatred of Trump isn't seen as prejudicial, that being the worst kind of hate as far as many people are concerned, so that if someone hates Trump enough to try to kill him that's his problem and not ours, so it's not as much worth talking about as would be the misogyny that would automatically be blamed for any shots fired at Clinton. At least that has to be part of why this story seems to be underplayed in the media. The other part is probably that, because the would-be shooter isn't a Muslim or Mexican, the right wing is caught with nothing to say.

It's someone else's turn to have no choice in November

Joe Scarborough was a Contract With America vintage Republican congressman who resigned early in his fourth term and later turned against the George W. Bush administration in opposition to the war in Iraq. He now hosts the Morning Joe talk show on MSNBC, where he serves as the nearest thing to a house conservative. A couple of days ago he lamented that with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the apparent nominees of the major parties, there was no one for him to support in the general election campaign. What he means, of course, is that the only two candidates likely to win are distasteful to him. A lot of Americans have felt that way every four years for a long time. It's shocking to see someone best described as a center-right Republican say it, however. How could people like him have grown so suddenly alienated from the rank-and-file who've anointed Trump? You still wonder what it is, exactly, that they hate about the presumptive nominee. Specifically, is it a matter of form or content? Do they worry about specific things Trump may do, or about the manner in which he may do anything? More profound, perhaps, than their alienation from Trump is their alienation with the people they considered their base. They seem to have so completely misread the base, so completely misunderstood the people they presumably appeal to during every election, that you might wonder in retrospect whether the infamous "southern strategy" that restored the Republican party to national power was a conscious thing, after all. Mainstream Republicans -- or should I say the Republican establishment? -- fatally underestimated the communal element in the base's thinking, the quality called "solidarity" when viewed positively or labeled "tribalism" or "nativism" when viewed negatively. They failed to recognize that patriotism is a two-way street -- that it means not just loyalty to an abstract concept of the nation and the ideas for which it's said to stand, but also loyalty to the people who form the nation and an unshirkable concern for their material interests. These Republicans' epitaph might read that they loved the country but not its people. It's been interesting reading David Brooks' recent columns on the need for a new moral politics founded on love, because there's an electorate out there that's very clearly looking for love. While Trump's followers are perhaps more jealous about it than Bernie Sanders' followers,  more angry over having seemingly been rejected in favor of others, you arguably can see a common yearning for a polity that has the people's back, that doesn't prioritize abstract principles (right or left) over people. I think Brooks underestimates how much the love he recommends can be a jealous love, while he may not even recognize that the different hatreds associated with the Trump and Sanders movements actually express a demand for love from the nation. But political Republicans have suddenly been shown to be utterly blind to that demand, offensive as it is to their sink-or-swim individualist ethos, while Democrats arguably have been promising love to everyone without appearing to love everyone as equally as they claim. In part, this now self-evident emotional neediness on the part of voters may repel mainstream Republicans, while the emotional neediness of the white working class in particular, their desire not to be seen as the bad guys all the time, seems to confuse and frighten Democrats. This election will be decided by emotions more than ideology in a more obvious way than previous elections, and while I also wish for better candidates and will start actively looking for them, I have to say that if this alienates the "establishment" to the point that they can't support anybody they have only themselves to blame.

Assassination in Britain first?

For the first time in 26 years, since the troubles with the Irish, a member of the British Parliament has been assassinated. Jo Cox of the Labour party was shot and stabbed at what they call a "constituent surgery" by a man who reportedly yelled "Britain First!" during the attack. This connects the murder tentatively with the country's contentious campaign over the "Brexit," a referendum on the U.K.'s withdrawal from the European Union, and with the refugee question, as Cox was an advocate of intervention in Syria and the settlement of Syrian war victims in Britain. Awful as any such story is on its own terms, I couldn't help wondering about it happening in Britain. After all, the way many Americans think about Donald Trump's constituents -- angry, intolerant, tribalistic, imminently violent -- you might have expected something like this to have happened here. It has not. In fact, the last time a U.S. congressman was murdered was at Jonestown, back in 1978, while the shooter who wounded Rep. Giffords during the Tucson amoklauf was just about a pure nut with an ideology entirely his own. This is one of the reasons why I can't take the panic over Trump too seriously. His supporters may be morons, but not murderously so. Assassination has fallen far out of fashion in the U.S. Not event the Islamists try it, as far as we can tell. In one respect that's no great reflection on us, since you can just as easily say that killing one person, no matter how powerful, just doesn't do it for the killers among us anymore. But it remains a valid observation that, despite the seemingly bottomless hate expressed for politicians across the American spectrum, we've gone a fairly long time without an obviously politically motivated attack on American politicians. For all that the Trump movement seems new and scary, they haven't changed that stat, and for all that Americans as a whole are supposed to shoot first and think later, here's an assassination in Britain, presumably one of the more civilized countries, and most of us across the Atlantic are still asking, "What was that guy angry about?"

A pact with the devil -- but who's the devil?

It seems as if Speaker of the House Ryan has done nothing but criticize Donald Trump since giving the presumptive Republican presidential nominee a tepid endorsement. Most notably, Ryan slammed Trump for outright racism for the candidate's criticism of the "Mexican" judge in the Trump University case. While the Orlando massacre would appear to strengthen  Trump's position with voters, his response to it seems to have weakened his position with the Republican party. Some of his ideas apparently violate their appreciation of individual liberty and the rule of law just as much as they offend sensibilities on the other side of the aisle. You still hear Republicans wishing for an "open convention" where Trump could be deposed, apparently forgetting Trump's threats of undefined reprisal from his faithful should that happen. Other observers have assured themselves that a Republican Congress will be as capable of obstructing President Trump, should it come to that, as they've been capable of obstructing President Obama. But would it be as easy as that? Remember the terms of Ryan's endorsement. He's going to vote for Trump, he said, because "I'm confident that he'll help turn the House GOP's agenda into laws." In other words, Ryan has been willing to tolerate a lot from Trump on the expectation that he, unlike Obama, will sign radical Tea-Party style legislation. Partisanship is a two-way street, however. Doesn't Trump have an equal right to expect that a Republican Congress will ratify his agenda? This expectation matters if it proves, as seems likely, that Trump's agenda and Ryan's are two separate things. If the condition of Ryan's endorsement is that Trump sign Ryan's bills, hasn't Trump an equal right to set conditions, given how Ryan and his caucus expect to ride the billionaire's coattails? Does anyone doubt that the self-styled master of "the deal" would demand a quid-pro-quo from congressional Republicans, demanding that they enact his agenda through legislation in return for signing off on their agenda? What would Ryan and the GOP do then? What if they're told they get no budget bill, no regulatory reform, no entitlement reform, unless they pass a bill to build the Mexican Wall, curtail immigration, etc.? Would they sacrifice their agenda to block Trump? It would depend on his ability to arrange for Republican opponents to be primaried for their sins against him. So far I see little sign of Trump arranging to have candidates run for Congress who are loyal to him first, the party second. That's the typical failing of the insurgent presidential candidate, but if he wins his election this year and the conflict between him and the congressional GOP proves irrepressible, the 2018 elections should prove very interesting before the Democrats even get involved. I wouldn't put it past today's Republicans to opt for gridlock, since they're always ready to opt on ideological principles against getting things done, but the x factor they may need to consider before starting that game again is the mood of the country, which Trump, like all modern Presidents, will claim to represent more faithfully than anyone in Congress or Congress as a whole. On the other hand, congressional Republicans have never been impressed by presidential mandates. All of this means that the Republican party could be in big trouble even if Trump wins the November election. It might be very entertaining to watch -- except for the chance of collateral damage, that is.

Take it from a Muslim ....

Earlier today the President was griping about some people's insistence that acts of terrorism like the Orlando massacre be attributed to "radical Islam." He mocked the idea that giving the enemy a particular name would help defeat them, and he seemed to resent more than usual the implication of Donald Trump that he was soft on Islam. "There’s no magic to the phrase, 'radical Islam.': he said, "It’s a political talking point; it’s not a strategy." The Washington Post helpfully explains that "the president has refused to use ["radical Islam'] because he believes it unfairly implicates an entire religious group for the acts of militant extremists. If that's his reason it's pretty silly. He seems to assume that no one appreciates the presence of a modifier in the epithet. His assumption seems to be that if you say "radical Islam," dumb Americans will instantly assume that all Muslims are radicals. On this occasion it looks like the President, not his critics, is playing word games, and it's just such games that frustrate Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim who renounced extremism and for his trouble has been accused of being a "native informant" and neocon toady. He posted an op-ed at the Daily Beast today lambasting American liberals for refusing to talk about Islam when talking about terrorism."The killer of Orlando was a homophobic Muslim extremist, inspired by an ideological take on my own religion, Islam." Nawaz writes. Reminding readers that jihadists have still killed more Muslims than non-Muslims worldwide, he lashes out at "Liberals who claim that this has nothing to do with Islam" when "The problem so obviously has something to do with Islam. That something is Islamism, or the desire to impose any version of Islam over any society. Jihadism is the attempt to do so by force....It is a theocratic ideology, and theocracy should no longer have any place in the world today." To deny that Islamism has anything to do with Islam -- to argue that Islamism is motivated entirely be secular phenomena and thus can be dealt with without talking about Islam -- is a betrayal, so Nawaz claims, of the multitudes of Muslims that are fighting Islamists with words and/or weapons. Worse still, from his perspective, liberal refusal to engage critically with Islam in order to show how it doesn't have to be theocratic surrenders the rhetorical field to those Islamophobes who assume (on a fundamentalist reading of the Qur'an) that Islam is irredeemably theocratic. In short, if liberals won't talk about radical Islam or Islam itself, only Donald Trump will.

So what's the matter with liberals? Trump may have his vague suspicions about the President, but in most cases he'd attribute this reticence to "political correctness." That's often understood as an unwillingness to offend -- or an obsession with being offended -- but the sort of liberals who flinch at "radical Islam" probably are less worried about American Muslims getting offended than about worse happening to them. In any case, they're individualists on this front (if not on the economic front) and above all don't want many to suffer for the crimes and plots of a few. The easiest way to prevent that is to dissociate whatever jihadists are up to from whatever the essence of Islam is. The problem with that approach is that the jihadis themselves have a very clear idea of what the essence of Islam is, and that idea inspires whatever they're up to. Therefore you can't seriously argue that terrorism committed by Muslims has nothing to do with Islam unless you define Islam and do so in a way that shows the Islamists are wrong. Liberals probably would define Islam according to the "five pillars" they learned in school while rejecting the takfiri claim that jihad is a sixth pillar, equal in importance to the others. I suspect that liberals are less interested in such a project than in defending innocent Muslims against an Islamophobia that itself probably has little to do with Islam in the liberal imagination. From a "politically correct" standpoint jihadi terrorism has only provided the eternal white bigot with an excuse to indulge in his irrepressible hatred of the Other. Whether the subject is Trump's temporary ban on Muslim immigration -- which he's modified to focus on countries with terrorist activity -- or any suggestion of surveillance of mosques, madrasas or community centers, some liberals can't see any motivation for such measures but bigotry. Never mind that Islamists are bigots by any standard -- and the Orlando shooter seems to have been a hypocritical bigot on top of that -- some Americans can't help seeing white bigotry as the greater, permanent threat to the U.S. For such people Maajid Nawaz has some advice:

Just as we Muslims expect solidarity from wider society against anti-Muslim bigotry and racism, likewise we must reciprocate solidarity toward victims of Islamist extremism. Just as we encourage others to actively denounce racism wherever they see it, so too must we actively denounce Islamist theocratic views wherever we find them. Enough with the special pleading. Enough with the denial. Enough with the obfuscation.

Nawaz is talking to fellow Muslims but others should heed his message. 

Can jihadi literature be banned?

Radicalized Muslims claim that fighting the infidel is a religious duty. They can cite verses of the Qur'an as their authorization, but how many have found and interpreted those verses for themselves? More often, radicals are told by some imam, whether in print, in person or online, that certain verses oblige them to fight. Muslims make a distinction between collective and individual (or voluntary and compulsory) duties. Modern jihadists are distinguished by their assertion that violent jihad is an compulsory individual duty. It's not enough for them that someone else does it -- the essence of collective or voluntary duty is that it doesn't matter who does a thing as long as it's done. Their claim is that every single Muslim has a duty to fight the infidel who allegedly oppresses the umma, or to impose the sharia where ostensibly Muslim rulers have neglected or violated it. This assertion that jihad is compulsory may be the key to banning jihadi propaganda in the United States.

Americans have long been uncomfortable with banning ideas. During World War II allegedly pro-Axis publications were banned, but you could still find copies of Mein Kampf anywhere in the country. Even at the height of the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War the works of Marx and Lenin remained readily available. The current Supreme Court precedent dates back to 1969, when a majority overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan organizer for advocating violence against blacks and Jews. In Brandenburg v. Ohio the Court ruled that advocacy of violence enjoyed constitutional protection unless it is intended to incite "imminent lawless action." Without that extra factor, what looks like incitement is only a suggestion. In practical terms, when a Klansman talks his big talk he's only really discussing what his fellow Kluxers could do, or might do. It should be possible to argue persuasively that when a radicalized Muslim calls for jihad there is a different, more actionable order of threat because he isn't just making a suggestion, but is really asserting a duty that must be fulfilled if his audience wants to be good Muslims. By comparison, you could read Marxist-Leninist advocacy of violent revolution regularly without acquiring an obligation to start the revolution in your lifetime. Radical jihadism demands action as immediately as possible and could only save itself from prosecution by renouncing the idea that jihad is a compulsory individual duty.

The Brandenburg standard, if I understand it correctly, would seem to allow action against the entire tradition of jihadist or takfiri literature dating back the the infamous Ibn Taymiyyah, the medieval scholar who rejected the idea of submission to rulers who tolerated Islam without implementing the sharia. The Qur'an itself is probably immune from action on First Amendment grounds, but governments should make it clear informally to mosques and Muslim organizations that interpretations of the scripture that discourage jihad are expected of them. Such interpretations were prevalent during the age of imperialism, particularly in India where the British tended to favor Muslims over Hindus. The consensus then was that governments that allowed Islamic worship (summed up by the "five pillars" you may have learned in school, and not including the sharia or jihad) were entitled to the loyalty of Muslims, whether the rulers were Muslim or not. If American Muslim leaders aren't willing to say this we have a right to ask why. More importantly, it looks like we have a right to take action against jihadist propaganda so long as it's understood as the incitement of imminent violence. If we could only deal with all the other ideas that inspire Americans to kill as easily....

Terror in Orlando

It remains to be discovered whether the primary motive behind the worst mass shooting in American history -- not counting the battles fought on American soil -- was personal or religious, but the shooter's choice of target, an Orlando gay bar, makes his amoklauf an act of terrorism that makes the "hate crime" label seem redundant. What seems indisputable is that whether the shooter's motive was religious or personal -- he was a native-born American citizen of Afghan descent, his parents coming here at a time when Afghans were seen as anti-communist freedom fighters -- his crime was a homophobic act. His father has cited homophobic statements from the son, but investigators are pursuing hints at a broader radicalization. And yet while I expect to hear the usual calls for cracking down on guns and the currently popular calls for rounding up the Muslims, I doubt whether we'll hear many calls for cracking down on or rounding up the homophobes. That idea just doesn't fit into most people's compartments, because a lot of us still consider homophobia to be legitimate on some level. Few may deem gays worthy of death here and now, but many still believe they will have to pay for their sins somewhere. Many -- and obviously not only Muslims -- consider homophobia a constitutional right as a religious imperative. The moral revolution of our time is an assertion that there is no good reason to disapprove of homosexuality and no right to act on that disapproval or base public policy on it. Islamic objections to this idea are only a small part of the counterrevolution, though they may prove the most violent objectors. So go for the Muslims if you want, go for the guns if you must, but don't let homophobia as a whole off the hook.

Update: The shooter reportedly called 911 to pledge allegiance to the self-styled Islamic State just before opening fire at the niteclub, and an IS news service acknowledged him as one of their fighters. During the afternoon we've seen a parade of American Muslim spokesmen repudiating the shooting, denouncing the IS and trying to keep alive a common opposition to homophobia and Islamophobia. It is odd to note that the gay-rights movement still sees Christians as their main enemy. It's true that Christian activism drives efforts to limit equal rights and equal access to services, but for all that gays anticipate physical attacks from Christians the more immediate threat of violence clearly comes from radicalized Muslims, given their feeling of entitlement to violence. The gay-rights community shouldn't fall for the idea that the struggle in this country pits all the Others as allies against straight-white-male-Christian aggression. Homophobia is no more justified among other religions, and no more to be defended on multicultural grounds, than it is among Christians. There's no denying that the gay-rights revolution must inevitably conflict with all traditional religions and cultures, and no dodging an accounting with Islam along the way. It is not Islamophobia to call out the religion and its believers when they are self-evidently wrong. Some may want to say gays and Muslims have a common struggle against a tyranny of the majority but today reminds us that that's not necessarily so.

Worst election ever?

Many mediocrities have run for President of the United States and some have won. It's tempting to declare the impending contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the worst presidential election ever -- though you're likely to be branded a sexist if you don't blame that on Trump alone -- but that may only tell us that our memories are short. Are Trump and Clinton really worse than our choices in 1852, when Franklin Pierce, who proved one of the worst Presidents, defeated Winfield Scott, whose only credential was being a general in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War? What about 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden proved their character by sacrificing Reconstruction to resolve their deadlock? Or 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant, whose administration was riddled with corruption, defeated newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, a candidate so moribund that he was dead within a month of Election Day? The American past was not so meritocratic then as nostalgics today may believe. After all, in those days Clinton would not have been allowed to run -- a fact that may recommend the past to some people today but has nothing to do with Clinton's record -- while Trump most likely would have been killed in a duel long before politics called him -- a probability that may recommend the past to others. Historical perspective can be a calming thing, but there's no denying that our major-party choices stink pretty ripely. Trump remains what he's always been, a moron's ideal of a businessman, while Clinton remains what she's been ever since she betrayed whatever authentic feminism she espoused at Wellesley to be a politician's wife. Nevertheless, now is not the time to panic. Neither candidate is a sufficient argument for voting for the other. No one needs to vote for Hillary Clinton to stop Donald Trump; a Republican Congress will probably stop him as well as it's stopped President Obama. Nor does anyone need to vote for Donald Trump to stop Hillary Clinton, however emotionally satisfying doing so may be to some people. Really, there's no reason for anyone to vote for Trump except for spite; voting for him just to stick it to other Americans would be like detonating a suicide vest, only without any hope of virgins greeting you in paradise -- more likely, Trump himself will kiss you on the lips. On the other hand, there is little reason to vote for Clinton other than to spite Trump and the idiots who idolize him, and electing her will accomplish little more than that. Those who argue that it's imperative to make history have to explain why they did not draft Senator Warren, who with less baggage probably would have routed Senator Sanders in the Democratic primaries and annihilated Trump in the general election. History will want to know why the first woman President, if it comes to that, had to be Hillary Clinton, and there had better be a better answer than "the only alternative was Trump." Warren herself will have a lot to answer for if there was any thought or instinct on her part of deference to Clinton's seniority or celebrity when history called. But it's not up to us to keep the window of opportunity open for Warren by voting for Trump. Anyone who votes negatively this November is just another victim of the American Bipolarchy, which sustains itself by offering one head as the sole alternative to the unacceptable other. A negative vote for Trump or Clinton is a betrayal of our right and duty to vote for the best candidate, who this year can be neither person. Voting for an independent might be seen as a negative vote cast against both Clinton and Trump, but since there are many independents to choose from, inevitably by choosing one you are voting for somebody and making a positive statement in a year when there will be all too few of those.

Authoritarian libertarianism and Trump

The Atlantic's website recently ran a fascinating interview with a 22 year -old, college-educated, mid-income Donald Trump supporter from San Francisco. His youth and bachelor's degree belie the stereotype of the Trump fan as ignorant, nostalgic white trash. The fact that he's engaged to an Asian woman might surprise some observers, but only those who overrate pure race hatred as a factor in Trump's appeal. Predictably, this anonymous fan rails against political correctness, believing that it's no longer possible to debate any political question with certain people without being branded a bigot, as long as you're a white man. That protest is a subject for another time, and really one of the big stories of the political year, but the real eyebrow-raiser here is the Trump fan's characterization of himself as a paradoxical (if not oxymoronic) authoritarian libertarian. He'd already admitted to a mix of "left" and "right" political positions, supporting LGBT rights, universal healthcare and separation of church and state, as well as lower taxes, meritocracy in place of affirmative action and assimilationist cultural policy. No two of these positions is automatically contradictory outside of a partisan context, but what can it mean to be an authoritarian libertarian when most "libertarians" would consider "authoritarianism" antithetical to their worldview? We had better let the young man explain it himself:

I have supported the Libertarian party specifically for the policies (military non-intervention, ending war on drugs, low taxes, etc.), and the fact that, if successful, it would significantly undermine the Democrat-Republican duopoly.That said, I do not identify with the libertarian preference for a weak federal government. My ideal government would be strong enough to take on massive projects (such as the illegal immigration question) only when necessary, would prevent mass exploitation by the elites ( conservationist efforts to protect the environment, for example,) but would try not to regulate people's personal and economic lives. The authoritarian aspect comes from the fact that I think we have a lot of issues that need to be fixed. An authoritarian president needs to be able to initiate major policies that may go against party and elite orthodoxies, and I don't want some senator speaking for hours to prevent needed policies. If something needs to be done, it cannot be stalled by senators whose only interest is serving the elites.

The typical libertarian is skeptical when anyone asserts that something "needs to be fixed" or "needs to be done." That's because they rarely want to look beyond "people's personal and economic lives," preferring to see commerce as the essence if not the sum of life. They will judge whether anything needs to be done or fixed by its potential impact on commerce. From this Trump supporter's comments I infer a recognition of a collective life beyond commerce, which might be ironic given Trump's supposed qualification as a successful businessman. He seems to believe that free enterprise is compatible with strong government, while most libertarians doubt that. His authoritarianism is understandably vague. At first glance he underrates the potential for mass (rather than "elite") resistance to getting things fixed, though if he's a true authoritarian he should be prepared to answer or override both mass and elite objections. In his contrast between the normalcy of personal and economic lives and the sphere of authoritarian activity I see a glimmering of the authoritarian theory of the "state of exception," according to which the sovereign -- the state if not its ruler -- necessarily has the power to make exceptions to the conventions we identify with "rule of law" if that gets in the way of what needs to be done. This sort of authoritarianism is at odds with the entire classical liberal tradition as it survives today as liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism, all of which distrust different kinds of "needs to be done" arguments for different reasons, most of which boil down to slippery-slope assumptions that exceptions will stop being exceptions as sovereignty becomes essentially lawless. You can hear that thinking in hysterical arguments from both left and right about Trump's potential for dictatorship. We might still ask how President Trump, in his supporters' scenario, would stop a filibuster, but we should note the supporter's implicit assumption that something can be done without threatening the essential character (i.e. our personal and economic lives) of the polity -- that doing what needs to be done or fixing what needs to be fixed won't automatically make a tyranny out of the country. The proof of that will probably depend on whether we can agree that things need to be done and on how to do them, though an unspoken premise of the whole argument is that certain things need to be done no matter how many or how few of us agree or not. Donald Trump isn't the ideal person to test any of these premises. If elected, his failures could set back the cause of "authoritarian libertarianism" for a generation or more. But if he loses the election and things continue as they are, the case will most likely be made again, perhaps more convincingly or perhaps more threateningly -- and people like the man who spoke with the Atlantic are still very young.