The war for the white working class

The popularity of Donald Trump among white working-class voters has left Democrats and progressives again asking what's wrong with these people. These groups begin from the premise, to them self-evident, that Republican economic policies are the root cause of whatever economic misery working-class whites feel. Given that, they ask, like Thomas Frank has for a generation, why these people vote against their obvious economic interests. Interestingly, many Democrats or sympathizers diverge from Frank's own analysis. Joan Walsh, writing in a recent issue of The Nation, takes issue with Frank's recent contention that Trump's stand against free trade has endeared him to working-class whites who, as Frank has argued in the past, feel abandoned by the Democrats' apparent greater concern for "cultural" issues. Walsh dismisses the trade issue by citing a poll according to which only 8% of Trump supporters cited trade as a factor in their support. Throughout her article, Walsh is torn between acknowledging the pain felt by working-class whites and insisting that many in the same group exaggerate their suffering. "Whole pockets of the industrial Midwest and South have been left out of the 21st century," she writes, "and pessimism and resentment can't help but fester. Rising white mortality rates, largely due to addiction and mental illness, deserve attention." Yet to the dismay of Walsh and many other liberals, too many working-class whites refuse to acknowledge that they're better off now than they were in 2008. I've heard for myself the Trumpist argument -- I attribute it to Trump's supporters, not the candidate himself -- that the country's economic (not to mention moral) decline began with the inauguration of President Obama. For Walsh, this belief proves that working-class whites suffer from an attitude problem. She cites research by a University of California professor, Michael Tesler, that appears to show that "voters who score high on surveys designed to measure racial resentment are more likely to say that economic conditions are bad under Obama [than] those who are more 'racially sympathetic.'"

In Walsh's view, it seems, the Democrats have done no wrong and don't deserve the rebukes they receive from working-class whites. Working-class support for Trump is all the more inexplicable in 2016, given that "Virtually every position ... recommended to appeal to white working-class voters has been incorporated into the Democratic platform."This narrative contrasts sharply with Frank's. While he agrees with the left that working-class support for any Republican makes no sense at a practical level, he doesn't exempt Democrats from blame for the situation. He indicts Democrats, and the Clintons especially, for alienating working-class voters with "neoliberal" economic policies. For Walsh and other critics of Frank, the real problem is that many whites  went off the rez long before the Clintons came along, drawn to the Republicans by "dog-whistle" racism dating back to the 1960s, while Bill Clinton himself did relatively well among these voters, perhaps due to cultural affinity, compared to Democrats before and after him. Taking this longer view, Walsh can acknowledge that "many Democrats cravenly courted Wall Street and big business during the 1980s and beyond," while arguing that working-class whites "had defected from the party much earlier and for different reasons."

Walsh's implicit conclusion -- it wouldn't be smart to say it outright -- is that winning over more working-class whites requires further struggle against their "racial resentment" (and other resentments) even as the left acknowledges their "economic dislocation." I wonder whether an opposite conclusion can be drawn, and that one possible key to winning back working-class whites is to lay off the struggle a little. That doesn't mean validating whatever prejudices they have, but it might require some pragmatic ignoring of them, on the understanding that such people have little power to act on their prejudices in any systematic way anymore. Winning more white votes should not require a re-education campaign; that, in fact, would be the opposite of a successful strategy. If liberals agree with Ruy Teixeira that even if "you don't need the white working class in order to win the presidency... you need them to accomplish anything else you want to do," is it really a good idea to always treat them -- the men in particular, of course -- as the bad guys? You don't have to share whatever lofty estimate some of them have of themselves and their kind, but you needn't go out of your way to smash it, either, when it can be left alone as effectively harmless. Nor need you ignore the legitimate claims of minorities, even on hot-button (or "dog-whistle") topics like officer-involved shootings, when these can be analyzed in terms of a problematic police culture that potentially menaces everyone. Such an approach may require some swallowing of pride by liberals, for any number of reasons, but as Trump asked of blacks, what have they got to lose?

Everybody's empathy deficit

While getting ready for work this morning I browsed through the cable news channel and saw Mike Barnacle on MSNBC opining on Donald Trump's "lack of empathy for the human condition," if I remember the words correctly. This observation was provoked by Trump's reported insults, freshly publicized by the September 26 debate, of a Latina former Miss Universe who had gained weight. I suppose that was predictably boorish if not sexist of him, but Barnicle's seemed like an extreme, incorrect diagnosis of the problem. As a critic of Donald Trump I don't perceive a lack of empathy in the man. If anything, his appeal over the past two years has depended greatly on an empathetic connection with his constituents. At the least, Trump's supporters feel that he empathizes with them, and they seem to empathize with him. Democratic skeptics sneer that any perceived empathy toward the working class -- even the white working class -- on Trump's part is pure sham. Since they see him as nothing but a boorish billionaire, they can't believe that he feels empathy toward the working class. They're right about this only insofar as Trump actually empathizes with something other than the "working class" as such. The skeptics will interject that if Trump empathizes with anything, it's the "white America" that he inferentially wants to make "great again." The problem with Trump from this perspective is that he suffers from the selective empathy of the bigot or the male chauvinist pig. That still doesn't sound right, though.

My guess is that Trump loves this country sincerely if not unconditionally, and connects emphatically with people who feel the same way. Part of his appeal may be that his base only trusts someone like him -- older white male, apparently straight, superficially Christian, and rich -- to love the country as unconditionally as they do, without any of the grudges or grievances ethnic and sexual minorities and some women carry and express through declining to salute the flag. But with that unconditional love of country, I think, comes a sincere sort of empathy for "the American people" in some idealized form. This empathy, however, most likely isn't unconditional. It is very much conditional rather than selective; it does not dismiss or disqualify whole groups out of hand. But on some level the empathy of Trump or his constituents has to be earned; it doesn't come as automatically as liberals might demand. It requires a recognition that you're at least trying to pull your own weight, or would if you could. Once that recognition is granted, Trump and his kind are arguably more empathetic and indulgent than American ideological conservatism theoretically permits. The populism attributed to Trump, particularly as applied to trade issues, is a textbook case of empathy for the hard-working American trumping -- there's really no better word for it -- the Darwinian ideal of economic competition espoused by many Republicans and Libertarians. Trump at least appears to reject the "consumer is always right" thinking that demands unconditional free trade regardless of the cost in American jobs. Populism is a more empathetic form of patriotism, which is why people on the left often try to claim the P-word for themselves. The problem with populism is that its conditional (or selective) empathy cuts both ways, rejecting both elitism and universalism in its insistence that a particular group should always be the object of the nation's first regard. But before anyone condemns limited empathy as lack of empathy, let's acknowledge the persistent lack of empathy felt toward Trump's constituents by Trump's opponents, many of whom can't help seeing bigotry as the alpha and omega of their entire worldview. I've been reading articles lately in which liberals wonder how they can ever reach the white working class to break Trump's apparent spell on them. This shouldn't be a hard question to answer, yet Democrats have struggled with it all summer and into the fall. I hope to describe their struggles and suggest some remedies in a future post, but I hope I've done enough here to stop people from saying I don't give Trump credit for anything.

What debate?

For once Donald Trump will be right if he claims that the presidential debates are rigged. The only thing is that they're rigged in his favor, as the nominee of the Republican party. Once again the people who organize the debates have excluded the most viable third-party candidates, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green standard-bearer Jill Stein, from sharing the stage with the major-party candidates. The Commission on Presidential Debates still acts on the assumption that a first round of elections has already taken place through opinion polls. It thus disqualifies Johnson and Stein because neither has yet won the consistent support of 15% of the electorate in polls. This has long struck me as bass-ackwards reasoning, since in our telecommunications age it seems unfair to judge the viability of third-party candidates until you've given them a chance to perform on television alongside the big two. The commission, I'm sure, will protest that there's no other objective way to admit viable candidates without also admitting every fringe or frivolous contender. Such a protest would be an abdication of responsibility. especially at a time when Clinton and Trump have increased demand for alternative candidates. These disgruntled people may have themselves to blame for not already supporting Johnson, Stein or some other candidate, but isn't there also an obligation on the part of the news media to call more attention to the existence of alternative candidates? If so, then there also remains an inescapable obligation to separate serious from frivolous candidates, especially given the method I propose for getting candidates into the debate. There ought to be an online petition site where people can demand the inclusion of one or more candidates into the debates. Reaching a threshold number of online signatures will entitle those candidates to consideration by some panel of disinterested experts whose first responsibility will be to eliminate the truly frivolous candidates who'll be promoted as someone's idea of a joke. There's no alternative to trusting the judgment of these experts, however they're appointed, though guidelines might be provided, e.g. adding two candidates at a time, one from the left and one from the right, so one major party doesn't accuse the debate commission of helping the other major party. The ultimate guideline is that the debate commission has no right, whatever the polls say, to tell the electorate that one of only two people can become President, so you'll only see those two.

Or you could give up on the debates altogether. I doubt I'll watch tonight's joint appearance by Clinton and Trump. I imagine most people, their minds already made up long ago, will be watching only to see whether one of the candidates makes a campaign-killing gaffe. If 2016 has proven anything, however, it's that Clinton and Trump are unkillable by conventional political means. Nothing either says really matters, for the simple reason that the other candidate exists. Nothing Clinton says from now to November will dissuade those who hate and fear Trump the most from voting for her -- and as I've suggested, her health scares may actually make more people willing to vote Democratic in the hope of a President Kaine within the next four years. Nor are Trump's true believers willing or capable of imagining anything their man could say that would disqualify him or break their faith in his character. Is it possible that anyone hasn't drawn a conclusion about Donald Trump before tonight? That someone will be meeting him for the first time? That anyone will make a decision based on what he says tonight as opposed to what he's said over the past year? It doesn't work that way. We like to imagine the demagogue betraying himself in a moment through some word or gesture, be he Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd or Oswald Cobblepot in Batman Returns. It's more likely that a demagogue's following is built on the understanding that he will say whatever's necessary to get power, and on his follower's faith that they know the true man and what he'll really do. This has never been more plain than with Trump, who is often quite openly cynical about this strategy without disillusioning any great number of people. Have you heard from anyone who supported him a year ago, or six months ago, who's changed his or her mind? Probably you haven't, and that's not all because of hate and fear of Hillary Clinton. There is a strange, apparently invulnerable faith in Trump that is the dominant fact of this campaign, and that I want to address in a separate post. That faith is part of what scares people about the Trump movement, since it seems immune to facts, to the frustration of critics on his left and right alike. I don't think anything he says or does tonight will shake that faith -- unless perhaps he and not Hillary faints on stage. The debate will matter only to the media themselves, of course, and those people who somehow haven't chosen among the three real options: #nevertrump, #neverhillary and #nevereither.

Terrorist lives matter, or: Take another knee, Kaepernick

This isn't the first blog to note the irony of the suspected Chelsea bomber being taken alive, despite exchanging fire with cops, while the news showed us footage of an unarmed Tulsa OK man being killed by police, apparently for touching his SUV the wrong way. But let's not overstate the irony. The suspected terrorist, after all, is a potential asset. Alive, he may tell the NYPD, FBI, etc. important things about jihadi networks and terror cells. By comparison, of what use was the "bad dude," as a helicopter cop called the Tulsa victim, to local law enforcement? Tulsa, it seems, is a bad place; one of their "finest" (a reserve deputy, actually) is already doing time for shooting an unarmed man with his revolver when he meant to taze the bro. Once again, of course, the latest Tulsa victim was condemned for failing to comply. In a possibly addled state, he seemed to think it okay not to obey instructions so long as he kept his hands in the air. He sealed his fate by moving as if to get something out of his car -- it wasn't a gun, we now know -- and was tazed and shot just about simultaneously. Someone did the right thing, at least, or at least relatively speaking.

So here we are again, just as a lot of Americans had convinced themselves that "privileged" football players had nothing to complain about. Of course, a lot of those Americans remain convinced even after the news from Tulsa. The nation arguably is more visibly divided between the "comply or die" party and those who refuse to accept such outcomes as the breaks of the game than it is along more conventional party lines. One side insists that you have to choose between maximum safety and discretion for police and the lives of self-evident troublemakers. They've already decided that "blue" lives matter more than others in this country. The rest of us believe that it's not for the cops on the street to decide whether any lives matter less than others, unless someone is indisputably threatening other lives. Shooting-involved officers are defended invariably in the name of their own self-preservation -- the idea being they should not be punished for making mistakes lest they err the opposite way before a real threat -- and not the protection of others. Yet if we accept that police risk their lives to protect the innocent, doesn't it follow that police must accept risk in order to avoid injuring or killing people who are neither real threats nor (it must be conceded) real bright? This should not be too much to ask in a purportedly civilized society, yet look what happens when people ask. They're condemned as if they're complicit in the next such incident or the death of any police officer -- and lately they're condemned as if they're traitors to their country. I suppose they might be traitors if we lived in a police state, but despite some people's wishes we're not there yet.  I will note that so far I haven't heard as much rabid defense of the police from some of the usual channels that I usually hear on such occasions. There may even be a consensus that the police really did botch this one. Why don't we ask our presidential candidates about it?...

A dialectic of distrust

David Brooks is just one of many opinionators bemoaning a surge in mutual distrust among Americans this election year. He holds Clinton and Trump partly to blame for their suspicious secrecy about many aspects of their lives, but for Brooks their toxicity only exacerbates trends he's long bemoaned that seem to leave Americans increasingly isolated and alienated from each other. He worries about the possibility of a "death spiral" in which "the loss of intimacy makes society more isolated. Isolation leads to more fear. More fear leads to fear-mongering leaders." He finds that young people, the great hope of progressives, are often "the most distrustful of all." This in turn he blames partly on the replacement of society with social media and its "illusion of intimacy." Mutual trust has deteriorated rapidly over the last generation, Brooks claims. The polarization of politics since the 1980s may have something to do with that, while American individualism probably has deepened distrust at both poles. Brooks often bemoans the disappearance of a common culture without offering really credible suggestions on how it might be restored or renewed. It will be especially difficult for anyone to appeal to loyalty to something in common when people from all directions are likely to ask, "Who are you to say...?" Each party does it when its particular sense of individuality seems threatened. When we've reached a point when we can't see past individuality, and take anyone's appeal to patriotism or humanity as a self-serving ploy, then individualism as perhaps not just an ideology but a principle of perception has gone too far past the limit of healthy moderation.

There are signs, however, of a reaction against different facets of dogmatic individualism. You see it in the divide between ideological Republicans, who cling to a utopian ideal of "may the best man win" economic competition, and the Donald Trump movement, whose "America first" sentiment rejects the idea that who wins such competition should be a matter of indifference to the individual consumer. There was a weaker expression of a similar sentiment in Sen. Sanders' campaign against Clinton. At the same time, a heightened awareness of inescapable global competition -- both the existential competition to which Islamism has challenged the world and the sort of oldschool eternal jostling for advantage practiced by Russia -- may reawaken a sense of common interest and purpose among Americans, should it be acknowledged that neither form of competition can be wished away and that we as a nation are in it together whether we as individuals like it or not. By this point in history any transition back toward solidarity and common culture will be a rough one, since Brooks wishes for a restoration of mutual trust at a time when many Americans see very specific limits to such trust. As well, the nature of any new common culture -- and it must be new to an irreducible extent no matter how it hearkens to the past -- will be contested so long as one person says "America First" and another hears it as "White People (or White Men) First." Neither Clinton nor Trump has what it takes, at first glance, to ease any such transition, unless Trump proves so profoundly different a President than he has been a campaigner that his own base may feel betrayed. Nor is there any guarantee that change can come without at least the perception of coercion. Brooks's admittedly "paradoxical" remedy -- that "somebody’s got to greet distrust with vulnerability, skepticism with innocence, cynicism with faith and hostility with affection" -- might well be wrong in every particular. But distrust, skepticism, cynicism and hostility as a package must be answered, and there will be many answers offered. Whose is the correct answer remains to be seen.

Teflon Don or Teflon Dick?

While some liberals lament Hillary Clinton's inability to open up a consistent lead over Donald Trump and rightly blame it on her own deficiencies, others -- and, really, some of the same people -- can't comprehend why Trump hasn't cratered in the polls. It seems unreasonable, if not hypocritical, of people to lambaste "Lyin' Hillary" when Trump, depending on who interprets him, lies practically every time he opens his mouth. It's hard to dispute that Trump lies frequently, and I haven't really seen or heard his grass-roots defenders deny that he does. They may believe that his lies are of a different order than Clinton's. They may feel, whether any would dare admit it or not, that the sort of fibs Trump may indulge in are just part of competitive life, or even, as the mafiosi say, "just business." It's more likely that they just don't give a damn. While it's tempting to think of Trump supporters worshiping a whitewashed idol of a wise businessman -- you'd like to believe they're naive, delusional or just plain dumb -- they probably take a more warts-and-all approach. It wouldn't surprise me if many of them conceded that Donald Trump is, or can be at times, a dick. They might then go on to say that that's his virtue, or it's what we need right now. Our best analysis of this election may come from a twelve year old movie with puppets:



The only question is whether Trump really can get it up at his age and keep it up for four years. That's the medical report we need to see!

Burkini Blowback II: Laicity and the American Left

Katha Pollitt, The Nation's resident feminist, is opposed to France's ban on the burkini, that throwback to 19th century beach fashion adopted by devout Muslim women. She takes her stand while deploring Islam's sexist modesty code. "If covering is just about faith, why don’t men do it too?" she asks. She recognizes the ban as consistent with France's longstanding policy of laïcité, which she defines with reasonable accuracy as "the rigorous denial of a public role for religion." Such a policy, she recognizes also, can be a good thing, compared with the apparent porousness of the First Amendment.

In France, for example, the Catholic Church doesn’t control one-sixth of all hospital beds and use government funds to deny women modern reproductive-health care. Public schools do not bring in religious zealots to lecture the students on the evils of birth control. You won’t find creationist propaganda in the bookstore at a national park.

Banning the burkini, however, strikes Pollitt as laïcité in overreach. It becomes apparent upon reading her column on the topic that she doesn't like the premise on which the ban is founded, that women wearing the burkini -- or other conservative forms of Islamic dress -- are victims who have no will or agency of their own. She rejects the idea that Muslim women would only wear such things because their fathers and brothers force them to. She finds it telling that, to her knowledge, there are no regulations in France against Islamic male fashions like long beards or cloth skullcaps. That makes her suspect that regulations against Islamic female fashions are less about stigmatizing Islam than they are about stigmatizing (or fetishizing) Muslim women. From her perspective, the burkini debate pits two forms of sexism against each other, both denying women the right to dress as they please.

The prime minister of France justifies the burkini ban by observing that “The burkini is not a new swimwear fashion; it’s the transmission of a political project, against society, founded notably upon the subjection of women. Some people try to portray those who wear them as victims, as though we were calling liberty into question." Pollitt is one of those people, despite her apparent belief that Islam often does subjugate women. She criticizes the burkini ban from what I'd call a unique (if not exceptional!) American perspective that would reject French-style laïcité despite its sometime favorable features.There's a coercive element to French secularism that Americans are unlikely to consider either desirable or necessary. That's because the typical American assumption is that people have the right to be whatever they want to be -- a further assumption being that what we want to be is what we're meant to be. These assumptions are implicitly conditional upon your right to be not interfering with others' rights, but liberal Americans, at least, will assume further still that for every cultural choice there is a way to be that choice that is certain not to interfere with others' right to be themselves. American conservatives, by comparison, are more concerned with the right to do than the right to be, but they're another story. By a more relevant comparison, France's divergent revolutionary heritage is less likely to take this right to be (on one's own terms, that is) for granted. From the Jacobins forward, in a tradition extending beyond France and beyond Europe, there has been an assumption that a citizen is something you must become, not something you can just be. Citizenship requires conscious shaping of the citizen through educational and cultural institutions, in a manner at odds with American notions of individual autonomy and "self-made" people, that can be perceived by Americans as on the slippery slope to totalitarianism. American liberals (or progressives) want a world in which any woman who wears a burkini is given the benefit of the doubt on questions of independence, agency and loyalty, just as other forms of personal expression are. Whether such a world is possible remains subject to debate, but it can't be denied that it has seemed less possible in recent years. The yearning for such a world is typically American. Many Americans, whether they think of themselves as left or right, imagine that Utopia will become real if we're all just allowed to be ourselves and do our own thing. Both the American left and the American right differ from their counterparts around the world in their individualist biases, despite the left's alleged collectivism. But there are small signs, or perhaps only hints, that Americans are growing less divergent, so that the demands France makes of its people may seem progressively less strange and unacceptable in the years to come, despite the protests of individualists on both right and left.

Clinton's health: a no-lose crisis?

Republican rumormongering appeared to be vindicated today when Hillary Clinton had to be treated for dehydration at a 9/11 commemoration and was revealed to be suffering from pneumonia. For weeks Donald Trump's supporters have manipulated every least bit of evidence that could be spun into portraying Clinton as an ill woman, the idea being that someone might thus be convinced to vote for a man one year her elder who nevertheless projects machismo, or something like it, by flaunting trophy wives and acting in a manner often described, with little basis, as "tough." The Trump strategy depends on some voters being willing to vote for the Republican candidate for no other reason than his relative state of health. How many people actually are likely to make such a decision for such a reason? Who that is even tempted to vote for Hillary Clinton is going to be scared off by her questionable physical fitness and then say, "I guess I'd better vote for Trump because he's healthy?" Anyone who presumably would vote for Clinton except for concerns about her health probably has long ago rejected any possibility of voting for Trump. A real Clinton health crisis might still help Trump get elected, but it would be because anti-Trump voters might decide to vote for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or "Other." However, such a crisis might actually help the Democratic party if the Democrats are smart enough to make the last stages of the race about party more than personality. Might not more people be willing to vote Democratic at the top of the ballot this November if they had some confidence that Clinton might drop dead just past the historic finish line, delivering them to the presumed safety of a Kaine Administration? Who knows but that having Hillary go the way of William Henry Harrison might be the best-case scenario, allowing her to make history without doing too much damage to the country? It would be a sublime irony to have Republican rumormongering backfire that way, but if the polls begin to indicate such a reversal, watch for Trump to start playing sick at his rallies. I'm sure a lot of people would rather see a Pence Administration as well....

The Deplorables

The "double standards" crowd is condemning Hillary Clinton for saying at a recent fundraiser that half of Donald Trump's supporters belong in a "basket of deplorables" consisting mainly of bigots of different sorts. For Republicans, this is the Democratic equivalent of Mitt Romney's infamous 2012 remarks about 47% of Americans (not merely of Obama supporters) were basically freeloaders. As the Washington Post reports, at that time Trump said Romney had no reason to apologize, but what else would you expect of Trump? Of course, his people insist that Clinton must apologize to all Trump's supporters, apparently on the assumption that none of them can be certain that they weren't included in Clinton's calumny. If there's a lesson to all of this, it's that candidates should never attempt to quantify such things as dependence or deplorable bigotry. Trump probably would have whined had Clinton suggested that any percentage of his support was bigoted, but it should be self-evident to all observers, including Trump's erstwhile rivals for the Republican nomination, that some of his supporters are bigots in anyone's sense of the word. Anyone who claims that the real number is zero percent is simply lying. I've heard too much from an admittedly small sample -- and I'm not talking about what they think of Muslims -- to let any blanket claim of innocence stand. Yes, some if not many of Trump's supporters are motivated by a positive belief in his expertise and his promises to restore American greatness, and there is some tone-deafness in Democratic denunciations of what they insist is Trump's exaggerated negativity about current conditions. But even these sincerely disgruntled and possibly unprejudiced people are as naive in their faith in Trump's boastful promises as others are in their hope that Clinton will govern as a progressive in any meaningful sense. What I'm saying is that while I'm not so scared of Trump that I'll waste my vote to stop him, I still can't see any good reason for anyone to vote for him. From my perspective, merely to vote for someone who sounds tough because he fires people on TV, or because you think his celebrity proves him a successful businessman and leader, is just as deplorable as voting for Clinton out of mindless fear of Trump or Republicans in general. In 2016 a large majority of the entire electorate is deplorable, and no one should have to apologize for recognizing that fact.

Trump, Putin and leadership

Liberals, along with a fair number of Republicans, think that Donald Trump damns himself every time he praises President Putin of Russia. We've had another round of damning Trump since he talked about Putin at a televised forum on military issues last night. What did he say specifically? It's worth noting that Trump noted that Russia has "a very different system, and I don't happen to like the system." It would be interesting to learn what Trump doesn't like about the Russian system, and it'd be in his interest to elaborate, though he wasn't pressed to do so this time, since he might calm critics who fear that he sees Putin as a model for governing the United States. Trump went on to say that "in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader." His next sentence was "We have a divided country," the twofold implication being that Russia under Putin's leadership is a less divided country, and that divisions in America reflect Obama's lack of leadership. A moment earlier, Trump seemed to mock liberal criticism of Putin by saying, "I mean, you can say, 'Oh, isn't that a terrible thing' -- the man has very strong control over a country." The problem with that statement is that many Americans do think it a terrible thing for a man to have "very strong control over a country" if that means using the means often attributed to Putin, i.e. the intimidation or persecution of dissidents. How terrible it sounds depends on what you're hearing. Many Americans hear that a "man has very strong control" and their dictator-alert goes off; from that perspective the problem is the man who is suspected of using that "very strong control" for his own selfish ends. By comparison, Trump is arguably a real old-school conservative, to whatever extent a real old-school capitalist can be that, because the significant part of the statement for him is probably "control" as a synonym for "order" or "stability." The opposite of Putin's "very strong control" is Obama's "divided country," howevermuch Trump's chosen political party is to blame for that condition. Trump may believe, however, that it's the leader's responsibility to resolve the divisions that exist in his country, whether he's the immediate cause of them or not.

Does that mean that Obama, or a Democratic successor, should treat the Republican party like Putin treats his opposition, or that they should treat Fox News as Putin treats opposition media, or as Trump might treat MSNBC, in order to end division and take very strong control? Not to Trump, probably, since ours is a "very different system." Yet I suspect that his notion of order or good governance is essentially non-ideological to an extent that might make his own distinction between systems less relevant than we might want or hope. I'm more certain that his idea of leadership is non-ideological, which is why he can praise Putin unreservedly by conventional American standards, and that's exactly what bugs people on both left and right. For neither group is order really an end unto itself; each has a set of freedoms that must be accommodated for order to be just and society free, and insofar as Putin's Russia appears unfree in many respects, his order is not worth having, much less praising. Trump's ultimate retort to that sentiment might be that what matters to him as a potential President is whether Putin's order is good for, or compatible with, American interests, not whether it's good for Russian intellectuals or compatible with American values. Many Americans, at least in public life, find Putin's power neither compatible with nor good for American interests -- much less the interests of people in Russia's "near abroad" whom they want to protect from Putin -- but what American interests (if not values) actually are is arguably more subject to debate this year than in recent election cycles. That's why I think Trump should be probed more about his feelings about Putin and Russia; not to goad him into a gaffe, but to find out whether he actually offers an alternative to the establishment consensus that can't help seeing Russia as not merely a competitor on the world stage -- which it is indisputably -- but also an existential enemy. I don't know if Trump has the vocabulary to elaborate his views the way I'd like, but I think he could give us enough to figure out the rest ourselves.

Burqa blowback

This week has a while to go yet, but we've probably heard the week's funniest story already. The self-styled Islamic State has banned the wearing of the burqa, the signifier of pious modesty for Muslim women and thus the sort of thing Daesh usually insists upon with violence, in certain parts of Mosul, Iraq, after female resistance fighters used the voluminous garments to sneak in weapons, the better to blow away jihadis. It seems that God, when he sent his revelations to the Prophet Muhammad, failed to anticipate the security problems this modest garment creates for the believers as well as the infidels. It would seem now that no one anywhere can complain when burqa wearing is discouraged on similar security grounds, but I expect to see people argue instead that those who argue for burqa (or "burkini") bans are no better than the terrorists, or that this pragmatic decision proves that the IS is not so Islamic after all. But even where the IS no longer has control, Syrian women are shucking off their burqas as soon as they get a chance. You can't help but appreciate their prudence. I'm sure they'd have some interesting conversations with their sisters outside the region who seem so eager to wear the damn things. Then again, maybe some of the piously clad women in Europe have surprises waiting for their jihadi brethren....

The Age of Negativity

The current Harper's features a foreign policy forum with a wide range of opinion: neocon, anti-interventionist, Muslim, European. The most interesting comments come from Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister at the time of the invasion of Iraq and thus in American eyes, since he opposed the invasion, the archetypal "cheese-eating surrender monkey." He remains opposed to American-style unilateralism -- by which he means, in the current context, building alliances based on exclusion. NATO is defined by its continued exclusion of Russia, for instance -- though the neocons challenge that characterization. The most interesting thing about Villepin's remarks actually has little to do with alliances and interventions. In the course of warning against intervention, he speaks of "the constraints that globalization places on us.

The speed with which images and ideologies travel gives a real advantage to negative opinions. Negative ideas travel faster than positive ideas. Violent images travel faster than any other images.

If Villepin is right, it would explain a lot about the 21st century so far, from accelerated polarization to the precipitous decline in civility in public life. Of course, what he perceives may merely reflect an objective decline in conditions around the world, the first cause of which is neither social media nor (more debateably) globalization. But if our impulsive, "hot take" online culture does exacerbate conditions, that raises an important question about media responsibility. Freedom of press and speech are cherished (in principle, at least) in the U.S. because they are considered essential to the informed deliberation on which republics depend. But if modern media tend to encourage "negative ideas" -- a lot obviously depends on how those are defined, and by whom -- at the expense of deliberation, does a principle of media regulation become necessary to ensure some balance of information, so that the hot take doesn't always prevail? Even if such a principle can be formulated, however, how can it be acted upon given how widely social media has been disseminated already? The easy answer to all these questions is to educate people to think before they react, or share a tweet, rather than try to control what they see or how they share it, as China does, but the danger is that the temptation of online immediacy can counteract the effects of education -- especially if young adults become convinced that their education has no point if it can't get them work. This challenge is like getting the genie back inside his proverbial bottle, or everything back inside Pandora's box. If that sounds hopelessly daunting, maybe we should ask how we can accelerate the speed of positive ideas, assuming that we can agree on what those are. Why are they so slow, anyway? Let me know how long it takes to answer that one.

'Who is Responcseible For the State of the World???'

Early this week you could find copies of the following blowing down State Street in Albany, near the New York state capitol:

 

Is it unfair of me to lament that the author put so much time into the layout of this two-page broadside but couldn't bother checking the spelling of certain words? Does that make me something like a "grammar Nazi" or an "elitist?" Let's not bother nitpicking, then, and instead take this all in as almost a textbook example of uninhibited, uncritical, indiscriminate autodidacticism with all its inevitable contradictions, a mystery-meat sandwich of sensible observations interlarded with lunacy, and almost antique in its failure to integrate Islam into its historical demonology. Apart from a reference to the overthrows of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Khadafy, you probably could have found the same text blowing around twenty or thirty years ago, if not further back still. That antiquarian flavor probably shouldn't surprise us, since this is the typical product of someone whose thinking struggles to keep up with rapidly changing times. This is how some people cope with a society of increasing complexity -- while some seek shelter with the simplicities of Donald Trump -- in the hope that society can be made less oppressively complex by simultaneously summoning into being a power capable of nationalizing economic resources (including corporations) and demanding a democratic decentralization resulting in "local community rule." Some will dismiss a document like this the moment they see the name Adam Weishaupt, or the moment the author blames the state of the world first on the Roman Empire, this being the "Age of Pisces," and later on "Political Zionism, which are Satanic fake Jews, not the Semitic Hebrews of the Torah." But artifacts like this are worth studying, somewhat, as symptoms of a sociocultural disease rather than as quack remedies. It's easy to insinuate that something's wrong with the author, but isn't it possible that something's also wrong with a society or culture that produces such things?

Colin Kaepernick's protest: fumble or touchdown?

Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem during a pre-season game. He explained that he could not pledge allegiance to a flag he now identified with the oppression of black people, referring to the controversial shootings by police in recent years. Ever since the "black power" protest at the 1968 Olympic games, black athletes (and others, I presume) have used public moments where they are supposed to represent and/or show respect for their country to protest continued racial injustice. And ever since 1968, self-styled superpatriots have virtually accused them of treason and invited them out of the country. Inevitably, also, these complacent critics defend their "love it or leave it" attitude by claiming the same right of protest that the athletes claim. They thus try to claim the constitutional high ground while implicitly challenging critics of this country to stay out of the kitchen if they can't stand the heat. You hear the same sort of thing whenever anyone, black or white, rich or poor, famous or not, criticizes an American war. On those occasions it is claimed that Americans are risking their lives, or losing them, to protect the malcontents' right to protest. If so, then what's the problem? The problem, of course, is that Our Troops are invoked to implicitly deny our right to protest the war they're fighting, in a variation on the classic trope, "Because you have the right to complain, you have no right to complain." Kaepernick, too, is accused of slapping Our Troops in their metaphoric face by failing to do homage, while his right as a wealthy athlete to speak ill of the nation is challenged, as if NFL salaries were paid out of our taxes. On the simplest level, the right to criticize a critic is indisputable. But if you're going to assert that you and Kaepernick share the same right, doesn't it contradict your argument to deny him the right? Let's make an important distinction. Everyone's entitled to an opinion on what Kaepernick is doing. You can call him a jerk or a racist, or find some way to call him a hypocrite, or you can question whether the facts regarding officer-involved shootings justify his position. But if you call him a traitor or claim that he should leave "your" country, than you belie your own claim that you and he are exercising a common right of critical speech, since if that right exists Kaepernick should be able to say what he has and refuse the Pledge -- since refusing is no crime and the Pledge is no test of citizenship -- without having his moral citizenship questioned. If anyone should have to leave the country, shouldn't it be those who think others with unpopular and controversial opinions should leave the Land of the Free? But since this is the Land of the Free, none of them have to go, but if you think Kaepernick has no right to protest if you call him a traitor or tell him to leave the country, then you have no more (or no less) right to protest if someone calls you a fascist.

What the hell do they have to lose...?

There are glib answers at hand from left and right to Donald Trump's question to black voters, which to my knowledge he's not yet had guts enough to address to a predominantly black audience. To Trump, I suppose, something's the matter with blacks the way something's the matter with Kansas in Thomas Frank's eyes. Trump must believe it self-evident that blacks will be better off economically with him in the White House than they would be with Hillary Clinton there. It's not so self-evident, however, if you don't take for granted, as Republicans do, that reducing regulations and taxes will create more jobs, or if you simply don't know how Trump is going to compel people to build factories in this country. That aside, unless Trump agrees with what most of his supporters no doubt believe, which is that what blacks have to lose is their lazy ease, he must assume that some irrational intangible stops blacks from realizing how good he'd be for them. He may realize that many blacks think him a racist, while most know that most of his supporters are. He may also think that all it'd take to win blacks over would be to say "I repudiate racism." It can't be that simple, however. First would have to come some acknowledgment and denunciation of racism among his own supporters, but I'm not sure whether he believes that any of them are bigots. Beyond that, things get more subtle. It comes down to what Trump means about "taking our country back." Just as with the "Make America Great Again" slogan, there's a suspicion that white conservatives want to take the country back to a time when blacks (and not just President Obama), not to mention women (and not just Hillary Clinton) had less power and influence in society. The suspicion, rational or not, goes deeper than that. Many Americans believe strongly that white males long ago forfeited the right to unilaterally set the terms for what an American is, to think of themselves automatically as "average" or "normal" Americans, or to tell other Americans to go somewhere else if they don't want to live as straight white Christian males do. Those millions don't believe that they have to prove to straight white Christian males that they're "real Americans" as defined by straight white Christian males. They will not accept tutelage from straight white Christian males on how to be Americans, or how to make America great again. They demand recognition of their essential American-ness on their own terms, which may require some rethinking by straight white Christian males of what it means to be an American. For all the controversies over racist policing and other inequities in this country, most women and racial minorities in the U.S. probably now feel more indisputably American under President Obama than they had in the past. What they have to lose, then, is this feeling of unconditional belonging. This feeling can be excessive, since it does not follow that the election of a white male President will once more marginalize non-whites or further marginalize women. Nor should people rush to repudiate the whole intellectual tradition on which this republic is based by association with "dead white European [not to mention straight] males." But if women and nonwhites have that intellectual responsibility, then white men like Trump have their own responsibility to help dispel generations of suspicion that their ancestors earned for them through the ideology of whiteness and the whole world's sexism. I'm not sure how Trump is supposed to pull this off, but he might start by challenging his base's "I never got a break" self-pity and their belief that, so long as their lives have been miserable, everyone else's should be miserable in the exact same way, forevermore, or else they, the poor whites, will be shown up as fools. Why not take a chance on that approach. After all, Trump has these people in the bag, given how they hate Hillary Clinton. What the hell does he have to lose???...

Trolls guard a bridge

The August 29 issue of Time has a cover story about internet trolls. Joel Stein identifies trolling with the "alt-right," which he defines as "an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men's rights and against immigration." After Donald Trump hired someone from Breitbart News to take over his campaign, I saw Breitbart described as "alt-right." In the context, "alt-right" seemed like a euphemism for just plain bigotry, and Stein argues that the alt-right "may have used the computer from Weird Science to fabricate Donald Trump." He traces the alt-right's roots to the infamous Gamergate controversy, which Stein says was fueled, if not by misogyny, then by anti-anti-misogyny, if not simply a rejection of anyone without a thick skin. He notes that ball-busting was a way of life in the circles where the alt-right was born before people started criticizing its misogyny and other bigotries. With that, presumably, comes a contempt for people who can't take it, and outright hostility toward those who won't take it. If they insist that ball-busting comes with the territory, or that you should stay out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat, Stein claims that they're actually "arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet." The question really is where self-expression ends and trolling begins. Stein's implication is that people who argue that "if you can't handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer" are people who dish it out but can't take it, who don't want to be called out for their comments while reserving the right to comment on everyone else. The more specific implication is that these people are happy "viciously making fun of each other," but that it isn't fun anymore when they get called names like "racist," "sexist," "homophobe" or just plain "bigot." That may be because, as one self-styled troll hunter says, trolls don't really hate people, but "love the game of hating people." If so, what they really resent is when people don't recognize (or refuse to) that it's all just a game. To some extent, trolling may be a backlash against the way the stakes of everything have been raised in our more sensitive culture, so that lives seem to be at stake not just in politics (already a dubious notion) but in everyday discourse. As Stein notes, many trolls are in it for the "lulz," and you can recognize in trolling the same "everything is a joke" mentality I used to hear expressed when I listened to Howard Stern on free radio. In a strange way, that attitude is an unconscious defense of an old-fashioned kind of liberalism that was based on the idea that nothing in public life really was (or should have been) a life-or-death matter -- especially politics. But when identity becomes ideology, and when many people do feel that their lives are at stake in each election, and demand an ever larger "safe space" at the alleged cost of others' liberty, trolling -- or the perception of trolling -- becomes inevitable when others reject those ideas, and with them the idea that they're somehow responsible for your happiness or your sense of "safety," much less your life.

The big problem I had with Stein's article was the way he takes for granted that as a straight white male, his "vulnerabilities [to trolling are] less obvious." How he can study trolling as a phenomenon of the mostly white alt-right and not see it as an expression of a pretty obvious vulnerability is a mystery to me. To some extent trolling may be a "keep out of our man-cave" tactic in defense of ballbusters' rights, but it's also a defense mechanism, not solely against the intrusion of Others with unpredictable sensitivities and different rules of conduct into their realm, but more obviously against the argument that they are evil -- that their culture and even their attitude are to blame for inequality and suffering in the world. Donald Trump would not even come close to winning the upcoming election were he not boosted by people who no longer want to be told that they're wrong, that they must change while no one else has to. Stein closes his piece by writing that "in the information age, sound is as destructive as fury," but thinking so may blind him to the silent fury of millions who plan to do their trolling at the polls.

'Barack Obama doesn't care about white people!'

It's ironic how the politics of double standards leads to people changing their standards. It happens when partisans feel entitled to criticize politicians of the other party of the same sins of omission or commission for which their politicians were criticized by the other party, even when they didn't see their politicians' action or inaction as deserving of criticism. Because George W. Bush was condemned for his perceived indifference to sufferers from the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, Republicans now condemn President Obama for remaining on vacation while Louisiana is once again devastated by floods. Because the floods weren't caused by a dramatic hurricane, the flooding in Louisiana hasn't really gotten the attention it deserves as a humanitarian crisis. For the past few days I've started to hear people complain about Obama "doing nothing" about it, and Donald Trump apparently heard those complaints. His big photo op today was going to Louisiana to meet with flood victims. I don't know how selective the pictures I've seen are, but USA Today had a good-sized montage and it looked like the big majority of people displaced, if not also at Trump's photo op, were white. To some extent a feeling among whites that they're being ignored because of their race may be fueling the fresh anger at Obama, but the criticism is self-evidently tit-for-tat partisanship in most cases. Lots of people have missed the flood story to this point simply because they didn't have a hurricane to focus on, while the newspaper websites observe that flood stories have gotten few hits compared to election and Olympics coverage. Whatever the cause for neglect, the fact of the moment is that we have a lot of Republicans clamoring for the President to do something about flood damage. I thought Republicans weren't supposed to cry for federal intervention when stuff like that happens. What would Calvin Coolidge say??? Dyed-in-the-wool Republicans may yet feel the same way, but populist Republicans, as we've learned this year, are a different breed. They do expect government to take care of them, often in an exclusive, jealous way, and so there's probably little reason to accuse those now demanding that Obama (or Hillary Clinton) do something of hypocrisy, apart from their using the Republican party as their platform.

Trump vs. the Johnson Amendment

The Johnson Amendment is a rule that sounds like it ought to have been part of American law from the beginning, but it only dates back to 1954. That it took effect then, in the era when the government required American currency to carry the motto "In God We Trust." I guess it just shows what a master legislator Lyndon B. Johnson was. Supposedly introduced by him in order to undercut his rivals in an upcoming Texas election, his Amendment to the tax code is the rule that allows churches to be stripped of their tax-exempt status if they engage in electioneering for specific political candidates. The Republican party platform and presidential candidate Donald Trump are committed to repealing it. That's pretty ironic. Trump is often perceived as an heir to the Know-Nothing tradition of nativism in American politics, but if there was anything the original Know-Nothings of the 1850s dreaded, it was the idea of clergymen telling congregations how to vote from the pulpit. Their distrust of Catholic immigrants was based on the idea that, once naturalized, they'd vote as their priests instructed them to, rather than think for themselves. Now the Republican party wants clergy, presumably of all sects and denominations, to do that very thing in the name of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. According to this analysis, they also want churches to do more fundraising for the GOP and right-wing causes, or else they want church funds to front for right-wing fundraising. This is ironic even without dragging history into it. These are strange things for Republicans to ask for, and a strange time to ask, when Americans, and presumably Trump's Republicans in particular, presumably are more wary than ever about religion intervening in politics and religion's role in making law. Obviously, though, I've forgotten that that wariness applies only to bad religions, while the good ones should have no limit on their self-evidently benevolent influence on American life. The bad religion is bad because it treats this world as its kingdom, while the good religion says its kingdom is not of this world. But if that's so, then the good religion has nothing to say about how this world or any of its countries are governed, does it? Yet according to research cited in this editorial, lots of clergy are getting away with electioneering already, most likely because the government is afraid of stirring a hornet's nest by cracking down. Which is funny, because these Christians aren't even threatening violence -- yet.

The beef that made Milwaukee famous

While the balance of terror has been tipping in Hillary Clinton's favor lately, and no amount of scandal can dissuade millions of America from voting for her, incidents like last weekend's riots in Milwaukee may do more than any Clinton scandal to tip the scales back in Donald Trump's favor somewhat. Milwaukee might be remembered someday as the place where Black Lives Matter jumped the shark -- whether you blame that movement for the riots or only for the protests. The latest "officer-involved shooting" to go national looks a lot more defensible, based on what we know so far, than the other provocative incidents of recent years. This time, the suspect was armed, and while he was fleeing a car stop, he reportedly turned and faced the cop -- also black -- while failing/refusing to drop his weapon. It's hard to know what else the cop could be expected to do, except perhaps to hide. That's no solace to the dead man's family, of course, but the implicit message of the protests and riots is that under no circumstances whatsoever is a cop to kill a black man, except perhaps if the man has fired first. But I imagine that even then a more tribalistic mentality will protest the result so long as nothing can justify the death of one of "our men." Milwaukee may be an exceptional case, so far as protests go, due to the alleged intervention of the Revolutionary Communist Party, also known as the Bob Avakian personality cult. Avakian apparently sees blacks as the proletariat of the moment, ripe for recruitment into his Lenin-style RCP. His people deny responsibility for the rioting, of course, and there's probably some truth to accounts that describe Milwaukee as a powder keg that required but a small spark to ignite. At the same time there's probably little reason to believe that following some new Great Leader and his "line" will solve Milwaukee's problems. On the other hand, that would still be preferable to the alternative implied by one protester who described the desperation in his community to reporters and said, "And you wonder why there's ISIS in America." But no matter how toxic conditions are, I don't think many Americans will find the Milwaukee incident as sufficient a cause for protest, violent or nonviolent, as other shootings have been. There are many justified critics of police brutality and overindulgent rules of engagement who will not agree that every officer-involved shooting is a crime. If a line is to be drawn somewhere limiting police discretion, there also has to be a line drawn limiting our sympathy with career criminals behaving recklessly. We can still wish that police not act as judges and executioners while granting that circumstances can exist that require them to shoot. If some people loudly or violently reject that notion, they only guarantee a backlash that can only benefit Trump. For all I know, that's what people like Avakian really want, on the assumption that a Trump presidency will speed the day of revolution by exacerbating the oppression of the poor. If that's what they want, they'll deserve what they get, but I doubt it'll be the sort of revolution they hope for.

The Queens Whodunit

Local news media may have jumped the gun by reporting that the killer of Imam Maulama Akonjee had been captured Sunday night, a day after the imam and an aide had been shot in broad daylight. But information from a local report already complicates the knee-jerk narrative of Islamophobia run amok. Everyone's first assumption since the news broke Saturday, it seemed, was that here, at last, was a self-evidently Islamophobic murder, something that could be blamed by politicians (and many Muslims) on Donald Trump as if Americans hadn't hated Muslims before Trump came along. I'd held out the possibility that Akonjee -- a Bangladeshi who doesn't seem to have been on anti-Islamic media radar -- had actually been the victim of Islamic extremism. Perhaps he'd been killed by some radical because he wasn't radical enough in some way. However, a New York Daily News report on a suspect in a hit-and-run near the shooting scene, who may have been the shooter fleeing the scene, raises the possibility of something more along the lines of gang violence. Investigators believe the killer at least looks Hispanic, and the News's sources are talking about "an ongoing feud between Muslims and Hispanics in the neighborhood, saying the shooting may have been payback after a group of Muslims allegedly attacked some Hispanics a few weeks earlier." I wonder what that was about. It's clearly too early in any investigation to know who started whatever beef existed or what role the imam may have played in it. But it seems safe to say that any Hispanic man who kills a Muslim is unlikely to have been motivated by Donald Trump's rhetoric. In fact, it looks like Trump can sit this one out, unless it proves that the shooter was an illegal immigrant. Then we'll probably see him show sympathy with a Muslim who can't talk back at him. But blaming Trump as the necessary and sufficient cause of the nation's hatreds in 2016 is as stupid as blaming President Obama for an economy and war on terror inherited from George W. Bush. Of course, just as one is still done so the other will be, at least until November. There's certainly plenty of stupidity yet to come.

Rage against the media

As someone who works, however humbly, in the news media, I'm getting pretty sick and tired of hearing Donald Trump's fans complain about how the news media highlights everything bad about Trump while covering up for Hillary Clinton. At my level I can testify that this complaint is fundamentally dishonest. I take calls for a readers'-comments column in a daily paper. That is, I listen to the calls once they're recorded, since no one wants to listen to callers live. I'd say that on any given day the column is more anti-Clinton than anti-Trump, and yet pro-Trump people are constantly complaining that we don't run anything, or else run hardly anything, against Clinton. In some cases, people are complaining because they want every call they make put in print, but there's no way we're going to let someone call a dozen times a day and have us print every word as if it were a groundswell of public opinion. In some cases, I think people are simply lying because they take the liberal media bias narrative for granted. But I've begun to suspect that their anger represents something else that won't be assuaged by running more anti-Clinton comments. Their real problem, I think, isn't that we (or the media as a whole) don't criticize Clinton or the Democratic party enough. I think they simply don't want to see and don't want to hear any criticism of Donald Trump. Their anger tells me that they take criticism of Trump, whether grounded in fact or founded on fear, as a personal insult, if not an insult to their country, their values, etc. When Trump is belittled, they feel disrespected. Their victory, I fear, would be forcing people to show Trump respect, if not forbidding people from criticizing him. Just as you might assume that the wildest, darkest conspiracy theories reflect what some conspiracy theorists would like to do if they had power, so I suspect that all the railing about media bias against Trump or the suppression of damaging stories about Clinton reflect no real desire for fairness or balance, but an envious wish for the power to suppress liberal or leftist opinion and force their reactionary opinions down everyone else's throats. In short, while I still see no reason to believe that Donald Trump himself is any sort of fascist, however trollish his temperament, I think a lot of his supporters this year have fascism in them, in the simplest, most thuggish sense of the word.

But for what it's worth, I think there could be more questions asked about the Clinton Foundation in light of recent email leaks, and I see no reason no to follow up on Juilan Assange's dark hints that a DNC staffer may have been murdered for leaking stuff to him. Always remember that arguments against Trump (or his fans) are not arguments for Hillary Clinton or the Democratic party. To believe that, or to believe that arguments against Clinton are arguments for Trump, is simply to be a tool of the two-party system.

The great contradiction of American liberalism

Liberal democracy as a concept presumes that it shouldn't make too much difference who wins an election; that's what makes it safe to hold elections. No election should be a matter of life and death, so it follows that none should be treated like one. In the modern United States, the Democratic party is the "liberal" party," yet it treats almost every election as a matter of life and death. Their appeal to voters is almost entirely based on fear. They warn that belligerent, reactionary Republicans could get us into a world war, not to mention a nuclear war. This year they warn specifically that Donald Trump's prejudices or his impulsive trollishness may get us into a new war. On the domestic front, Democrats warn that the poor may starve under Republican economies or, at the minimum, their lives will be made far less bearable. On the cultural front, they warn that Republicans' bullying bigotry will make life more dangerous for many kinds of minorities or dissidents. No good can come from Republican power, Democrats say, and yet Democrats seem content with a political system that gives Republicans approximately a 50-50 chance of taking power, regardless of whom they nominate for office. Either Democrats exaggerate the threats posed by Republicans (just as Republicans exaggerate the threats from Democrats), or else they're naive in their loyalty to a political system that so readily permits such illiberal forces to take power. For nonpartisan observers, the larger question is whether liberal democracy can dependably thwart illiberal takeovers like those described by Democrats. If free people must depend on something other than the safeguards of liberal democracy, the value of liberal democracy itself might be questioned. A lesser question might be whether liberal democrats can dependably resist the temptation to exaggerate the stakes in electoral competition, or whether that illiberal impulse is yet another flaw in the system. It might also be asked whether, if the stakes are real for Democratic constituents in elections that determine economic and social-welfare policy, those constituencies' vulnerability to the outcome of elections is itself a weakness or a betrayal of liberal democracy.

The Republican auto-purge

Anyone who thinks that public denunciations of Donald Trump by present or former Republican elected officials and appointees are going to seriously damage his presidential campaign is most likely making a big mistake. Trump is the anti-establishment candidate, after all, and every condemnation of him by an establishment figure will only increase his credibility among his base constituency. From what I hear from such people, Trump's GOP critics are sore losers and crybabies, and their comments can be treated accordingly. If the critics want to say that Trump is a traitor to party principles, his fans consider the critics traitors to the party itself, all the more so since opposition to Trump is, for all realistic intents and purposes, acquiescence in Mme. Antichrist's election. For that part Republicans have only themselves to blame after a quarter-century of indiscriminate execration of the Clintons. How do they expect to convince anyone that a minimum of four years of Hillary is more desirable than four of a duly nominated Republican candidate? With Trump, the Republicans seem to have won a race to the bottom with the Democrats, each having taken the position, in effect, that the other party is so unbearable and intolerable that their constituents have to accept anything the party gives them. Taking GOP propagandists at their word, the Republican base can't understand objections to Trump as anything but betrayal. These supposedly principled conservatives, neocons, etc. may think of Trump as an incipient authoritarian, but theirs seems like the truly authoritarian argument. It may not come with the threat of violence we now identify with authoritarianism, but it is an argument from authority, founded on a belief that yes, they are the establishment, and therefore their opinions should mean something to people. Theirs is a demand for deference, made to people who feel they no longer deserve any. Of course, anti-Trump Republicans have every right to speak out against the nominee, and to put "principle" or "country" or anything else before party, and Trump's fans are mostly reactionary trash whose bigotry spills over any barriers Trump himself may erect. But with that being said, those critics especially who think that by denouncing Trump, and even by denying him victory, they are saving the Republican party in the long term are more likely doing the opposite. They have invited the Trumpets to blame them more than anything or anyone else if Trump loses. They will have "rigged" the election against Trump by their betrayal of party and candidate. If Trump wins, he's sure to purge them to whatever extent he can by primarying elected officials and replacing appointees. But if Trump loses -- not if he wins, as some fear -- it may mean the end of the Republican party, if his defeat convinces his fans that the GOP will never truly represent them.

Russophobia and "neo-McCarthyism"

When I saw the "Against Neo-McCarthyism" headline over the lead editorial in the latest issue of The Nation, I assumed that the progressive weekly was going after Donald Trump for his alleged questioning of the loyalty of certain groups of Americans. Instead, the editorial was a defense of Trump --admittedly held at arms length -- against the charge that he is Vladimir Putin's favorite in the presidential campaign, if not Putin's pawn. The editorial, presumably reflecting the viewpoint of editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuval and her husband, Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, deplores efforts by Democrats to vilify Trump merely for appearing to espouse a more pro-Russian foreign policy. For anyone familiar with The Nation, it should be obvious that the editorial is more a defense of Russia than it is a defense of Trump. Cohen has emerged over the last decade as the leading (and himself most vilified) critic of American Russophobia. For his trouble he is called an apologist for Putin, no matter how often he acknowledges the Russian's domestic misdeeds, but his fundamental position is that there is no good reason for a new Cold War with Russia, or anything hotter. And for that some probably call him a coward and an appeaser, though those labels are meaningless if, like Cohen, you don't think that Putin represents a strategic threat that the U.S. is obliged to confront.

Even more than a defense of Russia, "Against Neo-McCarthyism" is a defense of Cohen and vanden Heuval's anti-Russophobic position against all smears. Whether it's Stephen F. Cohen or Donald Trump, an American ought to be able to propose friendlier relations with Russia without having his character impugned. The problem, of course, as is most obvious in Trump's case, is that if you don't see Putin as the Devil himself, you're presumed to be soft on authoritarianism, and thus a sort of moral coward, if not a budding authoritarian yourself. The neoconsensus of our time is that authoritarianism is never an acceptable style of government for any people in any place at any time of history. With that belief comes a moral imperative to denounce authoritarians wherever they are found, and a corollary imperative to deter and contain them, whether on a piecemeal basis or on the assumption that there is some global alliance of authoritarians to guarantee their prerogative to grind their subjects under heel. For many this seems to be a risk-free imperative that comes with no obligation to weigh costs and benefits for the national interest. The American imperative to tell the world what we think of it without caring what they think trumps (no pun intended, I think) all other considerations, but Cohen is sadly right to warn of the practical dangers of this approach.

At this point in history there is more benefit to be had from the U.S. working with Russia than in opposing Putin's every move on principle, even if you agree that it probably sucks to be a dissident in Russia, or to be one of its immediate neighbors. If Putin is not Stalin, as I think everyone will concede, than there should be fewer scruples over cooperating with him (and, yes, his Syrian client) to crush the self-styled Islamic State and similar movements than there were over an alliance with Stalin against Hitler. That doesn't mean that Russia is a natural or inevitable ally at all times. Some may see Russia that way because they see both Russia and the U.S. as part of "Christendom," but if your first loyalty is to "the West" as a distinct culture founded on "freedom," Russia is always going to be something of a stranger to you. But that doesn't mean there's an irrepressible conflict between Russia and the West, as many in our political establishment seem to think. If they think there is such a conflict, it's more a creation of their own minds than anything that follows automatically from Russia's culture and history. It's also a byproduct of excess compassion for all the people Russia does oppress, both within its own borders and in its near abroad. I can't say those people don't deserve compassion, but it can't outweigh the American foreign policy establishment's obligation to consider the interests of the American nation and people above all. A middle ground must be found between an utterly amoral indifference to how a ruler behaves within his borders (or his sphere of influence) and a moralizing approach that takes too much interest for our own good. This requires a discipline of which Russophobia is incapable, but it's also unclear whether Donald Trump is capable of discipline of any sort. Maybe if we heard from the third parties on foreign policy at this point they might improve their chances.

Rigged

The President recently belittled Donald Trump's fear that the 2016 presidential election could be rigged. To be sure, Trump's statements were worth of rebuke. He had shown already that he has a low threshold of rigging, having complained during the primary season that the abortive collusion of Cruz and Kasich threatened to rig the remaining primaries against him. For Trump, rigging an election seems to encompass anything that reduces the Trump vote from its theoretical maximum. For him to suggest that the general could be rigged against him was incredibly irresponsible, no matter how suspicious you are toward the Clinton machine. The last thing we need is to have Trump's followers assume for the next four years after a narrow Clinton victory that her election and her Presidency were illegitimate. But in his eagerness to admonish Trump and his apparent contempt for the very notion that a presidential election could be rigged, Obama has unconsciously contradicted his own party, if not his own past statements. For is it not a fundamental premise of the 21st century Democratic party that the Republican party is striving constantly to rig elections through the passage of voter ID laws that are assumed always to depress turnout among key Democratic constituencies? Don't they even cite evidence to that effect in the words of one Pennsylvania Republican who promised that an ID law would deliver that state to his party? In fact, it's an article of faith among Democrats that the sole purpose of such laws is to depress turnout and thus rig elections in Republicans' favor. The Republican argument that elections can be rigged by swamping the polls with fraudulent voters is dismissed out of hand, of course, so the Democratic argument against the possibility of rigged elections really boils down to outrage at the notion that they would dare do such a thing. History argues otherwise, and in this case Democratic history is more relevant than it is when Republicans try to identify the party of Obama with its long-gone segregationist past. Both major parties have proven themselves capable of corrupt electioneering many times in the past, and in this most competitive era it seems naive to rule any possibility out as blithely as the President seemed to. What was really objectionable and irresponsible in Trump's speech was the implication that the only way he can lose is if the election is rigged. That may be what his idolators want to hear, but Donald Trump himself probably does more than anyone else to belie that assumption every time he makes an idiot of himself on the stump.

Will Ryan's reckoning come early?

The Speaker of the House endorsed Donald Trump for President on the premise that, as President, Trump would sign the legislation Paul Ryan favors. The question now, three months before the election, is whether Ryan will be there to bang the gavel on that legislation. He's being primaried by a Republican even further to the right, while Trump takes a stance of mocking neutrality, using some of the same language Ryan used while he took his sweet time endorsing Trump after the primaries. Meanwhile, Trump has praised Ryan's rival, Paul Nehlen, for being one of the few Republicans to take his side in his feud with Khizr Khan, the Pakistani-American whose son was killed in Iraq while fighting for the U.S. Army. The Khan-troversy has left many Republicans shaking their heads. It seems to show that Trump simply can't let something drop. In fact, he didn't have anything to say immediately after Khan appeared at the Democratic convention to question the constitutionality of Trump's proposed regulations of Muslim immigration. It was only when prodded on one of the weekend panel shows that Trump crossed a line. Not content to defend his own position, he noted the silent presence of Mrs. Khan on the stage next to her husband and wondered aloud whether hubby would not allow wifey to speak. This was, arguably, the first actually bigoted thing Trump has said about a Muslim, and by prevailing standards it was still pretty mild. You wouldn't think so to follow the news, but Trump really hasn't had anything to say about the religion of Islam. But now he had committed a double sin in some Republican eyes: he had insulted Muslims implicitly and he had insulted the family of a soldier who had given his life for his country.  Speaker Ryan took a "hate the sinner, not the sin" approach to this, praising the Khan family and reiterating his own opposition to "a religious test for entering our country" without mentioning Trump. For Paul Nehlen, however, Republicans are either for Trump or against him. He defended Trump's position and criticized Khan for insufficiently denouncing radical Islam, while warning that Ryan would only prove an obstacle to a Trump Presidency. Whether Trump's fans agree remains to be seen, and depending on what happens in Wisconsin next week other Republicans may think twice, or thrice, about criticizing Trump or his positions -- or about supporting him at all.

Fur Lives Matter

In my neck of the woods people are angry at cops for an apparent case of excessive use of force. It is alleged that two off-duty police officers from the city of Rensselaer NY who were playing golf at a Troy course pursued and then ran over a groundhog or woodchuck. This report suggests that the animal had actually stopped fleeing, only to be run down mercilessly by its pursuers. What else is new, right? But the funny thing about this is that I'm hearing a lot more anger from people over this purported cruelty to animals than I've ever heard through similar channels when unarmed human beings are killed by police. I'm hearing people say things like "If they'll do that to an animal you can imagine what they'd do to a person," with no apparent self-consciousness, irony or awareness of current events. Of course, there are contrarians who, if they don't exactly find the woodchuck at fault, still extend it no sympathy, regarding the species as nothing but pests, but you hear this less often than you might expect among the lily-white samples of opinion I've heard. If it's a commonplace that cruelty to animals predicts cruelty to people, it's another that many animal lovers show more concern and compassion to the brute creation than they show toward fellow human beings. It will be remembered that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian who abhorred cruelty to animals, for instance. I guess it goes to show that it's always easier to presume animals innocent than people ... and yet this animal was running away. Did it not get "the talk" from its parent or parents? Must it not have had something to hide or feel guilty about? Don't the rest of us know better enough to be quiet, still and compliant when possibly drunken policemen approach us headlong in their vehicle? Perhaps an objective review of the facts, free from prejudice and name-calling, will show that the creature had only itself to blame. After all, the very existence of police forces means that somebody somewhere must be guilty of something, and in this age of increased skepticism toward both law enforcement and the criminal justice system, perhaps it would be best to let the deity of your choice sort it all out.

What do working-class whites want?

Michael Gerson has become another frustrated cheerleader for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. In his column following the Democratic National Convention Gerson offers a critique similar to David Brooks' from last week. To their minds, the Democrats focus too exclusively on economic matters to the exclusion of what Gerson calls "cultural matters." His implication is that Clinton will need to address such matters if she wants to win over white working-class voters, who seem overwhelmingly to favor Donald Trump. Gerson's convinced that Clinton's "liberal communitarianism" will not win them over. Well, why shouldn't it, apart from Clinton's questionable credibility as a spokesman for such a philosophy? What does she need to say to this demographic, defined largely by their lack of college education? Gerson suggests that she and Democrats in general need to be more tolerant of conservative views on reproductive rights, for instance, and offers Bill Clinton's welfare-reform agenda as a model for outreach to so-called cultural conservatives. But what exactly is "cultural" about welfare reform, or even about a dislike for abortion? Is Gerson using "cultural" as a synonym (or euphemism) for "moral?" The word has an obfuscating effect since culture in some sense of the word seems to weigh heavily on the 2016 race, most obviously in the way many whites perceive "their culture" to be under attack, not only by terrorists in the name of Islam or immigrants importing alien ways and languages but by an intelligentsia, if not a whole political class that sees "whiteness" as an evil at the heart of American life. Trump appeals to those whites most determined to push back against this last sort of attack by affirming that theirs is the one, true American culture that must prevail if the country is to be great again. That appeal, I think, is largely a backlash against the narrative of "white privilege" identified with "political correctness" in general. I think I understand intellectually what is meant by "white privilege," but I still think it is an unwise, alienating argument to make. The assertion that working-class whites enjoy a "privilege" that is essentially negative -- that they're "privileged" because they're not stigmatized or profiled wherever they go, for instance -- can't help but seem insultingly absurd to people who see no positive material benefit from such privilege. Those same people often see themselves as the people who never get a break in life, and definitely aren't given any breaks by the government, while everyone else wants and gets breaks all the time. Who, then, is privileged? The "white privilege" narrative strikes me as absolutely the wrong way to address actual enduring racism, much less police excesses that don't really respect white privilege at all. It wouldn't hurt Clinton to drop the subject. She can still talk about racism and other forms of discrimination in which gender and sexual preference factor in, so long as she and her surrogates lay off the privilege thing. She shouldn't have to compromise her liberal or progressive principles any more than she normally does to win back at least some working-class whites. But what she (or any candidate out to beat Trump from the left) absolutely must do is reassure those white people that, as far as the candidate, the party and the country are concerned, they are not the enemy. That shouldn't be hard for someone who actually wants to be President of the United States.

The Siberian Candidate?

For what it's worth, I thought all along that Donald Trump was joking when he urged Russian hackers to find Hillary Clinton's missing e-mails, but many Americans fail to find Trump funny. Some of them found the Republican candidate's comments tantamount to treason. Added to suspicions of Russian involvement in the hack of the Democratic National Committee, this week has seen Trump's supposed affinity for Russia and its president come under greater scrutiny than ever. One writer suggests that, by the same standards that render the Clinton Foundation's ties to foreigners suspect, Trump's financial ties to Russia ought to raise concern, while another, more skeptical writer suggests that the Trump-Putin bromance may be somewhat one-sided. From the Russian perspective, a preference for Trump seems understandable, because the Obama administration (including erstwhile Secretary of State Clinton) has stubbornly opposed Russian hegemony in the country's "near abroad," while Trump is more likely disinterested in that part of the world. But any Russian preference for Trump is most likely tempered by questions, shared worldwide, about his stability and his capacity for consistency. Meanwhile, many Americans are less concerned about where Trump stands on Ukraine or the Balkans than about what his purported admiration for Putin says about his character and intentions as President. Since Putin is one of the world's leading "authoritarians," Trump must have an authoritarian streak if he admires Putin's leadership so much. I have no desire to see Trump become President, but I refuse to share the hysteria that portrays him as a nascent fascist. I don't dispute that he often comes across as a bully with his often-menacing language, e.g. his vaguely expressed impulse to "hit" certain speakers at the Democratic convention. But I think it more likely that politicians train themselves to eliminate that sort of common idiom from their rhetoric, while Trump simply echoes the millions of Americans who say they want to slap, smack, kick or even kill annoying people without ever doing so, simply to express their anger. His saltiness only enhances his insultingly paradoxical common-man appeal. If Trump admires Putin's strength, it's not because he has some ideology of strength, much less any intent to emulate Putin's treatment of opposition politicians and media. It's more obviously because he believes these times require a strength he finds lacking in conventional politicians, Democrat or Republican, but believes himself to possess without ever being tested by the requirements of statesmanship. Any invocation of strength, however, makes not only liberals but many American conservatives suspicious. Both groups, albeit at different times and under different circumstances, seem to fear the abuse of power more than they fear powerlessness, while many liberals also reject a world where strength can or should decide anything. Yet I think that if a President Trump tried any funny stuff with the Constitution these groups would show their strength readily enough, though I suspect with some sense of irony that the people usually most inclined to resist authority in this country would most likely end up as his enforcers, should the crisis come.

Is there an alternative to Democratic 'materialism?'

David Brooks is one of the New York Times' house Republicans, and as might be expected of a New York Times Republican, he has for all intents and purposes endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Presidency. The alternative, to him, is the advent of "American Putinism." It thus becomes his job to advise the Democratic candidate, from the perspective of a sort of conservative, on how not to lose the election. He diagnoses a problem, if not a handicap, in the Democratic approach in his most recent column. The Democratic party, Brooks claims, suffers from "a materialistic mind-set" that reduces everything to economics while ignoring cultural health.

This is a crisis of national purpose. It’s about personal identity and the basic health of communal life. Americans’ anger and pessimism are more fundamental than anything that can be explained by G.D.P. statistics. Many Democrats have trouble thinking in these terms. When asked to explain any complex phenomenon, they instinctively reduce it to a materialist cause. If there’s terrorism there must be lack of economic opportunity. If marriage is declining it must be because of joblessness. This materialistic mind-set means that many Democrats are perpetually surprised by events that involve cultural threats and national identity. Why don’t working-class Kansans vote for us? We offer them more programs. Why did the Brits leave the E.U.? It’s against their economic interest.

What's interesting here is that Brooks is implicitly opposing "materialism" not to "spirituality" but to "culture." To be sure, he's been advocating a sort of spiritual revival recently, without being religiously specific, but this particular column doesn't seem to be about religion at all. Nevertheless, his dichotomy of materialism and culture begs the question of the difference between the two. From a post-religious or anti-religious perspective, shouldn't I want the culture itself to be materialist? If Islam is many people's alternative to materialism, shouldn't we be all for materialism insofar as it rejects theology and theocracy? The answer depends on what Brooks ultimately means by "materialism." Obviously he identifies the word with economic reductionism, and there's some truth to his perception that Democrats, not to mention many in the broader Left, tend to trace all the violence and irrationality of the poor, wherever they are found, to poverty; if they're depraved, it's on account of they're deprived, as the kids told Officer Krupke. But is that all Brooks means or implies? I think people on the Left can distinguish and criticize reductionism (or determinism) while remaining essentially materialist, but I'm not sure that would satisfy Brooks. I suspect that on some level he also identifies the "materialism" he criticizes with a kind of crass individualism of the "what's in it for me?" sort. His theoretical Democrat has a ready answer to that question: "We offer them more programs." Perhaps this "materialism" is a sort of social consumerism that sees the citizen (or the Democratic constituent) as a consumer of programs who need be nothing more. This materialism would share in the hedonism I perceive at the heart of 21st century liberalism, which is dedicated above all to an easier life for the working class and disadvantaged minorities. 

By comparison, then, what might "culture" require? Brooks suggests that it has something to do with a "civic religion" that Clinton should "talk bluntly" about, but what that entails remains mysterious. Then he adds, addressing the candidate, "You’re going to have to show you understand the way members of your class have slighted people who are less educated and less cosmopolitan." The implication here is that Democratic "materialism" itself slights these people and thus threatens "the basic health of communal life." I suppose what Brooks wants to say is that citizenship must have a dimension that is not "materialist" in the individualist or consumerist or hedonist sense, a dimension that answers to the description of  "civic religion," providing the nebulous "spiritual" quality Brooks deems necessary without necessarily being theological or mythic. He seems to want to say that the yearning for a civic religious experience among the "less educated and less cosmopolitan" should not be disdained by Democrats who may judge the nation more by the programs it offers and their material benefits than by any other standard. Of course, since what we're talking about now is love of country, the question of whether love of country should be as unconditional or uncritical as many of the less educated and less cosmopolitan seem to demand is inescapable, though we can defer it to another post for now. The question on which I'll close this post is whether the "basic health of communal life," whether it depends on any civic religion or not, requires some compromise of "materialism" in any sense of the word -- in short, whether it demands sacrifice of citizens, not just in war but in peace, not just by the rich but by the poor -- sacrifice of what, to what, for what? -- or whether this is all a false distinction. Despite Brooks's immediate concerns, it's not a question for Democrats or liberals alone, since it's debatable whether Republicans, Libertarians, Greens or anyone else is less materialist, in whatever sense of the word you like, than the party of Clinton, and some are clearly more materialist in certain respects. In fact, it's funny that Brooks is preaching against materialism to the Democrats when there is perhaps no one more materialist in the entire country than their antagonist, who nevertheless arouses feelings in his followers that seem to have a different quality.