Is a culture truce possible?

The day before the Charlottesville incident, one of the local papers ran a Thomas Friedman column urging Democrats to appeal to swing voters on a gut level, on the understanding that "Some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them." Friedman appeared to argue that it was possible to take a populist stand on some cultural issues without going down the slippery slope to white supremacy. He made a distinction between a pro-Trump "white nationalist constituency" that Democrats can't hope to reach and a larger, potentially more decisive group of voters to whom Democrats ought to make some intellectual concessions. Three out of his four recommendations touch on cultural issues. He asks Democrats to acknowledge that "We can't take in every immigrant who wants to come in." He suggests "constructively engaging" Muslims on their problems with pluralism. He proposes easing off on "political correctness" so people feel more "comfortable expressing patriotism and love of country when globalization is erasing national identities." His fourth recommendation is for Democrats to focus on blue-collar job creation while acknowledging the existence of "a trade problem with China" and the even-bigger problem of increased automation. These are Friedman's "gut" issues, "gut"apparently being a euphemism for "culture" at a time when some on the hard left, echoing the legendary words of a Nazi playwright, reach for a rock to throw whenever anyone says "culture." 

Charlottesville is a win for the rock-throwers because it appears to reinforce their argument that white supremacy is the true face of the Trump movement, after the media spent the weekend asking why the President didn't denounce white supremacy specifically (or exclusively) after Saturday's violence. Presumably Trump satisfied most critics with his remarks today, though no doubt it will be claimed that his condemnation of white supremacy was tardy and only made under pressure. After this, there probably will be even less desire on the left for compromise with cultural populists than there was before Friedman wrote his column. Whether or not people honestly believe that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, a desire to spite the actual white supremacists is likely to outweigh either pragmatic or principled considerations for the next little while. Nevertheless, Friedman is right to remind readers of the existence of cultural populists -- one might also call them materialist conservatives, but this isn't the time to explain that one -- who are not rednecks or any sort of hyphenated Nazi. Friedman's is a rare concession that there are Americans with exclusionary views who are not a priori white supremacists, who can't be said to want a "lily-white" America just because they're suspicious of Muslims or Mexicans, but the majority on the left -- the people most likely to dismiss Friedman himself as a neoliberal -- can't imagine any other reason for excluding foreigners. In the face of that skepticism, it was still right for many Republicans to denounce white supremacy after the car attack, because they have a job of persuasion of their own if they hope to calm the nation's turbulent mood. It's in their interest to persuade the skeptics that there is an American culture worth defending against potentially antithetical influences that cannot simply be reduced to "whiteness," and that cultural populism isn't simply a matter of white people dictating to everyone else how to be an American. If the Democrats have to go for the "gut" to regain power, Republicans may need to go for the brain to retain it.

Violence in Virginia

In Charlottesville VA the city council voted to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee, presumably on the premise that memorials to Confederate soldiers endorse slavery or racism. Alt-right groups saw the move as anti-white and are holding rallies in Charlottesville to protest the statue's removal, chanting the slogan, "You will not replace us." Inevitably, anti-racist groups, no doubt with "antifa" streetfighters in their midst, held counterdemonstrations. Just as inevitably, alt-right and anti-racist groups have been clashing all weekend. This afternoon, a presumed anti-anti-racist escalated the conflict, apparently borrowing from the Islamic terror playbook by deliberately driving his vehicle into a crowd of marching counter-demonstrators, killing one outright and injuring dozens more. The President quickly condemned the act, but his denunciation of "hate" and "bigotry" quickly proved inadequate for many critics. The problem, as they read his tweet, was that Trump had failed, predictably from their perspective, to denounce white supremacism. The President's spokespersons in the news media came to his defense, inferring a self-evident condemnation of white supremacy in Trump's more general comments. The story no doubt can write itself from there. But let's review: Confederate leaders, military or political, should be heroes nowhere in America; white chauvinists or supremacists, however odious their views, have just as much right to demonstrate without getting beat up as any one else with a controversial opinion; no offense committed by antifa or anti-racist groups in general against freedom of speech or assembly justifies an attempted mass murder of the sort that apparently took place today -- this could yet prove a DWI or apolitical road rage incident -- the victims of which may not even have taken part in street fighting. Finally, the President should be given the benefit of the doubt, this time at least, when he says he condemns what happened, when the more Trumpian response, based on some people's estimate of the man, might have been to say nothing at all. It's sad to think that some Americans think that if the President didn't say "white supremacists," he might have been condemning the victims or proposing some moral equivalence of all the weekend's combatants. In any event, white supremacism, if it was a motivating factor at all, was not the sufficient cause of today's atrocity. Neither white supremacists nor the alt-right in general is exclusively responsible for creating an environment in which vehicular homicide looks like the next natural step to take. People on all sides are taking "culture war" all too literally these days, including many who should know better. There's more than enough hate to go around right now -- but of course, no one will admit to it. We could all stand to be more honest about our biases at this moment in history. Candor certainly can't make things much worse.

Defrauding the donors?

While channel surfing this morning I saw a brief item on Fox News about a Virginia man who was suing the state and local Republican party organizations for fraud. The story is actually about a week old and started here. Bob Heghmann wants the money back that he donated to the GOP last year, contending that Republicans solicited donations under false pretenses. They solicited donations on the promise that they would repeal Obamacare, but Heghmann claims, citing statements from a former Speaker of the House, that they did so knowing that they could not or would not kill the Affordable Care Act. He believes that while "members of the House of Representatives and Senate cannot be sued for failing to abide by campaign promises," the party can be held responsible for its members' failure to fulfill its promises. He considers it the party's responsibility to "pressure" its congressional caucus to live up to those promises. Of course, party spokesmen dismiss Heghmann's suit as frivolous, and I can understand why they'd be angry at him. His complaint puts the lie to an oft-used argument against stricter regulation of campaign donations, which is that donations are not quid-pro-quo transactions. Donors don't give money in return for specific votes, we're to understand, but to support candidates who already have an affinity with donors' values and priorities. Heghmann clearly expected something specific in return for his admittedly-modest donation, and who knows how many donors, modest or not, feel the same way. Common sense may argue that you punish politicians and parties that break their promises at the polls, but that doesn't get Heghmann his money back after he expected it to be effective. If more donors begin to act as he has, or start voting with their wallets by keeping them closed, it will be harder for politicians to sustain the argument that campaign donations aren't intended to influence votes. If a judge ever hears Heghmann's case, I the official to argue that he had no right to expect a quid-pro-quo return on his donation, that too many variables of circumstances make it impossible to hold political parties to such expectations. Those would actually be perfectly valid arguments, practically speaking, but they won't change the truth that Heghmann has spoken about campaign donors and what they expect for their money.

Fire and Fury

The Secretary of State says that the President's threat yesterday to subject North Korea to "fire and fury like the world has never seen" was just Donald Trump's attempt to speak to Kim Jong Un in the only language the hereditary dictator is presumed to understand. Tillerson promptly translated the remark into more conventional language as a reaffirmation that "the United States has the capability to fully defend itself from any attack, and our allies, and we will do so." The Washington Post noted an important shift in emphasis; the secretary promised a response to an "attack," while the President threatened a response to "threats." Greg Sargent believes that Tillerson is trying to prevent "fire and fury" from becoming Trump's "red line," an equivalent to President Obama's mostly empty threats to the Syrian government. At issue is what the current President means by "threat." The current presumption seems to be that hotheaded Trump was provoked by the verbal threats of the North Korean government, and that, as Tillerson suggested, he was responding to trash talk with trash talk. If that's what the President meant when he said the Kim dynasty "best not make any more threats," then the clock is already ticking for "fire and fury," as the Kimites have already answered him by threatening to launch missiles at Guam. If Trump doesn't answer with "fire and fury," we should expect to hear criticism at least from the neocon right -- Senator McCain has already  called it an irresponsible statement -- and mockery from Pyongyang. It may be one thing to bully and bluster the same way that Kim Jong Un does, but it will be another for the bluster of a President to be as empty as Kim's often is.

Of course, no one has asked what Trump really means by "fire and fury." For all we know, it could just mean that North Korea will have made him really, really mad. They could well face fire and fury like Twitter has never seen -- and wouldn't that be preferable to the worst-case scenario some people assume? If history judges his words, they'll be judged by what Kim Jong Un does in response. Trump's hope, no doubt, is that the dictator will be intimidated by his obvious power to return to the negotiating table, in which case, if the terms end up favorable to us, the President will claim a win. For all we know, Trump may be practicing the kind of "madman" diplomacy Richard Nixon occasionally indulged in, in an attempt to persuade Kim that he is, in fact, a different kind of President whom the dictator must deal with differently. It's hard to say, however, whether Kim Jong Un is more or less likely than, say, an American liberal to perceive Donald Trump as a dangerous madman. Either way, the smart play for the dictator would be to negotiate, perhaps to meet Trump face to face. After all, the President often seems greatly impressed by strong leaders who are beloved by their people, and no one projects that image more persistently than Kim Jong Un. They might actually get along great, and while I do mean that as something of a slap at an oddly ingratiating tendency of Trump's it would also be something of a relief to have a President not conditioned by neo-thinking to see the Kim dynasty as evil incarnate, a thing to be crushed unconditionally rather than dealt with diplomatically. The risk now is not so much that Trump might treat the destruction of North Korea as a moral imperative, but that he may feel it necessary to follow through on his threat to prove his dominance, not only abroad but at home. He'd be better off asking his advisers why North Korea is building nukes. If it's not to export communist revolution, then it must be for national defense -- and that should make it simple for the President. Is it in the national interest -- by his standard, the interest of actual Americans -- to maintain a permanent confrontational stance with ad admittedly repugnant regime that still would not be an existential threat to the U.S. under ordinary circumstances? Is it in the national interest to defend South Korea at all costs? Is it in the national interest to perpetuate a conflict that inevitably will be exploited by more serious potential antagonists to distract us while they advance their agendas? All of that is for Trump and his team to decide, but not to take for granted as his predecessors have. He needs to take his vacation seriously, resist the temptation to get into some macho showdown with Kim Jong Un, and give the cooler heads he's hired a chance to prevail.

The unfriending of America

Republicans and right-wingers often rail at leftists who want to turn university campuses into "safe zones" where their opinions and self-esteem are never challenged by "hateful" ideas, but there seems to be a tendency on the right to treat social media as a safe zone. An op-ed in a local newspaper criticizes a number of Republican officeholders, including the President and the Governor of Maryland, who are blocking critics from their social media accounts. While I wouldn't be surprised to find Democrats doing the same thing, Republicans are supposed to be the people advocating robust debate everywhere. In the Maryland case the governor's office supposedly removed only "hateful and violent" content, but at least some of the people blocked insist that comments were "respectful, thoughtful and not profane." The ACLU is encouraging litigation against public officials who block users, on the premise that an official's social-media account is a public forum and blocking people violates the First Amendment.

Blocking unwelcome people from your social-media account is an uncontroversial practice for private citizens, though it usually reflects poorly on you in the eyes of those you block. When politicians block people from "official" accounts, it echoes the practice of relegating protesters and hecklers to some "free-speech zone." In both cases, the idea violates an assumed right of dissidents to get "in your face," to confront power directly and make your dissatisfaction with it known in the most obvious way. In the case of street demonstrations, "free-speech zones" are justified on the premise that demonstrators threaten the right to assemble of those they protest against. In social media, blocking people, however justified in some cases, is part of a much-deplored overall tendency of users to isolate themselves in "safe zones" of like-minded opinion, in an environment where any disagreement can be taken as an insult, if not an assault.

Reports this weekend of Trump TV's "real news" videos on the President's Facebook page triggered fears that social media could be made an instrument of state propaganda where alternate points of view are even less welcome than conservative opinion supposedly was in the old days of the three major networks and their allegedly biased news reports. Meanwhile, I suppose it could be argued that the social-media accounts of elected officials are not "public" in the sense assumed by the ACLU, that would confer constitutional rights on anyone who wants to comment on them. "Social" and "public" are not synonymous, and "social media" could be seen as yet another manifestation of "civil society," the flourishing of which, according to liberal thinking, is a safeguard against encroaching totalitarianism. Yet we could also be seeing a modern, secular version of the old American Christian tendency called "come-outerism," invoking the injunction from II Corinthians 6:17 to "come out from among them and be separate ... and touch not the unclean thing." Now you can do this without even leaving home, and that makes it easier for all sides to abandon the ideal of mutual accountability upon which principled democracy depends. When no one wants to hear that they're wrong, or even that they might be wrong, you have a consensus, in effect, that everyone is wrong.

The cowardice of signing statements

As President, Donald Trump is similar to his recent predecessors in one respect. He likes to attach grumbling signing statements to legislation passed with veto-proof majorities in Congress. The most recent case involves the bill imposing new sanctions on Iran, North Korea and Russia. It passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress. In the Senate, only Sen. Sanders, who felt it disrupted our nuclear negotiations with Iran, and Sen. Paul, who seems to have little use for sanctions in general, voted against it. It was obvious to the President immediately that the bill would complicate any attempt he might make to reconcile with Russia, not only because it imposes more sanctions, but because it constrains the President from negotiating away those sanctions before getting Congress' consent. Trump believes that this unconstitutionally violates his executive prerogative to negotiate with foreign leaders, and said so in his signing statement. This seems to be a higher-order objection than those that George W. Bush was wont to make in his signing statements, which usually indicated that he would still do whatever he pleased according to his (or Dick Cheney's) notion of executive power. One would think that a President has a duty to veto legislation he believes to be unconstitutional as a matter of principle, regardless of whether the veto will be overriden or not. Yet after expressing his objections, Trump feebly signed the sanctions bill for the sake of "national unity."

In one sense, I can understand Trump's capitulation. The Constitution makes no distinctions among the reasons why a President might veto a bill. Whatever the executive's objections, Congress always has the right to override. There is no procedure for referring a constitutional objection to the Supreme Court, and since the President is not the Supreme Court, Congress has no obligation to take his constitutional objections seriously. Given the consensus in favor of the sanctions, Trump would be SOL trying to dissuade Congress even if he had his immediate predecessor's academic credentials in constitutional law. Still, this might have been the time, given our increasingly tense relations with both Russia and North Korea, for a President who is not supposed to do things the way his predecessors did to do things differently. He still couldn't stop Congress from overriding a veto, but actually vetoing the bill might have been the sort of "profile in courage" gesture that might -- I know I'm being wildly theoretical here -- just might have provoked people into rethinking it. Trump did not do this, I suspect, because on a certain level he's a coward. Determined to win at all times, or to call whatever he happens to be doing a win, he probably could not stand to take a stand that was guaranteed to fail. He most likely didn't want the humiliation of an overwhelming override of what would have been his first presidential veto, particularly on a foreign policy question, as that might make him look weaker on the world stage. Well, that damage has been done anyway, as the world recognizes a reassertion of congressional influence in American foreign policy that the supposed strongman Trump could not resist. Now, presumably, Trump can only reserve for himself the satisfaction of saying "I told you so," not in the event of a Supreme Court vindication of his position, since they'll probably never hear the law challenged, but possibly after further deterioration of American relations with the rest of the world. If he really wants to tell us so, he should have vetoed the bill and damned the consequences. He'd have lost, certainly, but he might have earned a little more respect, in some quarters, at least, than he has now.

Flake

Jeff Flake knows how to sell a book. His new tome, Conscience of a Conservative, hit bookstores today with a vast blast of publicity emphasizing how vehemently the junior U.S. Senator from Arizona, a Republican, denounces President Trump. The title is a conscious borrowing from a declaration of principles by fellow Arizonan Barry Goldwater, Flake's model of a conscientious principled conservative. In Flake's opinion, Donald Trump is neither conscientious, principled or conservative. To an extent, this is a matter of temperament. Trump is too "inconstant, mercurial, and shallow" to be a true conservative, Flake writes, much less President of the United States. The current President's unpredictable volatility is the opposite, in Flake's view, of conservative governance. Personality aside, Trump is guilty of enticing Republicans and others with "the sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery." Flake warns that “The crash from this sugar high will be particularly unpleasant.”

The senator couldn't have picked a better time for an ad hominem attack on the Trump administration, in the aftermath of the meteoric rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci, the White House communications director for an epic eleven days, and while the President rails against his own party failing to repeal Obamacare despite its Senate majority. Unlike the senior Senator from Arizona, Flake voted for the so-called "skinny repeal" bill, but that's an increasingly rare point of agreement between him and Trump. In promoting his book, however, Flake may have overplayed his hand by describing Republican infighting as the "spasms of a dying party." It's a strange thing to say given the GOP's undefeated record in special congressional elections so far this year, but I suspect Flake means that the Republican party is turning into something he soon won't recognize, that it may soon be dead to him, rather than that the party is doomed at the polls. He fears that a GOP dominated by Trump will abandon the principles that have defined the party for the last 50 years, since Goldwater's heyday. In an MSNBC interview Flake emphasized that "protectionism and isolationism are not conservative values." That crack about isolationism is just silly, since there really is no evidence that Trump is isolationist, while Flake's claim in the interview that "The Republican party has always been a free-trade party," is an abandonment, if not a simple forgetting, of a principle that defined the Republican party when it was founded. In that respect, at least, if not also in its suspicions of immigrants, the Trump movement represents a reversion to Republican attitudes predating the Goldwater-Reagan takeover of the Grand Old Party. The death spasms Flake perceives with such anxiety may only be the last stages of a long but temporary phase of American political history. We'll probably know sooner rather than later which side of history Jeff Flake is on.

President vs. party

Contemplating the spectacle of President Trump, whom he describes as "the alpha male as crybaby," George Will consoles himself with the thought that Trump's follies will do the nation good. His difficulties with Congress should inspire the legislative branch to be more assertive, since it "cannot continue deferring to executive policymaking." His more embarrassing episodes, Will hopes, will do "invaluable damage to Americans’ infantilizing assumption that the presidency magically envelops its occupant with a nimbus of seriousness." By appearing to degrade the presidency, Trump "drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it."By this standard, "worse is better," on the assumption that the Trump administration will end any unhealthy desire Americans have for strong executive power while teaching them greater appreciation of the more deliberative, and thus more conservative, branches of government.

I suspect that Will misreads the temper of the time. Ambitious presidents around the world, from Nicolas Maduro to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Vladimir Putin, often seem boorish and embarrassing to sophisticated critics, yet retain large followings despite numerous foul-ups. The desire for strong executive  (or "authoritarian") leadership will not go away after one or more executives prove themselves fools, because that desire is driven more by persistent conditions than by any temporary faith in transient personalities. If Trump fails, it will only prove that Trump was the wrong guy. For that matter, in the eyes of his voting base, his feuds with veteran Republican leaders, most recently his Attorney General (a former U.S. Senator) and his lately ousted chief of staff (the former RNC chairman) probably aren't failures. All of us are witnessing a slow-motion showdown that will determine whether the Republican party is to be the President's instrument or his nemesis." Constitutionally, of course, the Republican party owes the President nothing; the chief executive isn't even really the de facto leader of the party, though his fans may assume he should be. While he can deal roughly with Republicans who answer directly to him after taking jobs in his Cabinet, he can't fire the party hierarchy and can only attempt to fire congressmen by recruiting candidates to run primaries against them next year. That's just as things should be for conservatives like Will, but Trump's voters more likely assumed, when they voted Republican for Congress, that people on the same ticket should be working on the same agenda. Their more dangerous assumption, in Will's judgment, is that the President is the one to set the agenda and the one to whom Republicans should be accountable when they go against it. I can't feel very sorry for them or Trump in their disappointment so far, since this is exactly what they deserve for taking the shortcut of "taking over" one of the established major parties rather than building their own party. But my lack of sympathy makes their desire for a more decisive executive no less real, and the divide between the expectations of ostensibly conservative voters and the ideology of the ostensibly conservative party no less profound.

For better or worse, we have to assume that voters chose Trump in the crucial states because they wanted him to practice his particular leadership style (as seen on TV) in Washington. In other words, Trump's voters probably want him to fire more people, yet he has little power to do so immediately outside his own executive-branch territory. His inability to fire top Republicans, in Congress or the party hierarchy, exposes what some may see as a flaw in American government, if not in the Constitution itself, that may not have been apparent earlier. Just the other day, so to speak, most right wingers believed that the problem with Congress was that it had no term limits for members, no maximum time in office. For the Trump movement, the real problem emerging now may be that congressmen have a minimum time in office, two years in which they are not really accountable to their constituents until the next Election Day. Ever since the first congressmen effectively shot down the idea that they should be subject to instruction from their constituents, their lack of political accountability between elections has been held sacred, the proof of their deliberative independence, their entitlement to legislate as they alone saw fit. But just as the original populists of more than a century ago included the recall of elected officials in their long-term reform agenda, so  the so-called populists of the 21st century might adopt that idea -- if they remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger ended up governing a state -- as an appropriate measure for a time of more instant accountability in every other sphere of life. That may seem unlikely to you, but how much less likely is it than George Will's expectation that we'll simply give up electing Trumps, when Americans are probably only getting started?

Should politics trump professionalism?

Donald Trump's presidency is opening a schism within the psychiatric profession. The American Psychoanalytic Association recently sent out an email advising members not to consider themselves constrained by the American Psychiatric Association's "Goldwater Rule" from commenting on the President's mental health. Readers may recall that some professionals have demanded a loosening of this regulation, instituted after Barry Goldwater sued a magazine for publishing a statement by psychologists questioning his sanity during the 1964 presidential campaign, because they consider it their patriotic duty to challenge President Trump's mental competence. The Psychiatric Association's position remains that "it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion about an individual based on publicly available information without conducting an examination." The Psychoanalytic Association continues to respect the Goldwater Rule insofar as it discourages members from attempting a diagnosis of Trump without an examination, but declares members free to "comment about political figures as individuals" and "does not consider political commentary by its individuals an ethical matter." As an organization, the Psychoanalytic Association "will continue to speak to issues about which it has something relevant to say." Representatives of the Psychoanalytic Association claim that their position was misrepresented in news articles implying that members were now free to question Trump's sanity, but a loosening of restrictions is implicit in the whole exercise. Who believed that psychiatrists had no right to comment on political issues -- to say, for instance, that Trump's healthcare agenda is bad for the country? To assume that such a restriction ever existed is absurd. The only context for this controversy is the Goldwater Rule.

The Psychiatric Association issued a report last March upholding the Goldwater Rule and addressing longstanding or more recent objections to it. The authors deny that the Rule limits freedom of speech, making a distinction between member's right to their opinions as citizen and their responsibilities when preparing professional opinions touching on mental health. They note that some psychiatrists want to "render professional expertise in matters of national security," and answer that, as when psychiatrists act as profilers for the police, experts should offer professional advice in such matters only when asked and authorized, not on their own initiative. They respond to critics who see a professional duty to "render an opinion regarding public figures" analogical to that asserted in the "Tarasoff Doctrine," which defines psychiatrists' duty to "warn and/or protect" people when their examination or treatment of a patient reveals a risk to those people. In the case of politicians who haven't been examined professionally, the psychiatrist has no more information than already exists in the public domain, and may have less information than law enforcement agencies. In short, the Psychiatric Association upholds a strict professional code against the potential politicization of their profession. The Goldwater Rule serves to protect the profession from itself, or from political interventions that could easily backfire on them. No matter how incomprehensible Donald Trump's behavior seems to many professionals and academic, probably the worst thing they could do in this populist age is label such behaviors "crazy" when millions of Americans most likely see them as similar to what they'd do as President. Many of those may well think that the real problem with the country is  that we're getting not too much but  not enough of the Trump personality they voted for. You can call that feeling unsophisticated, ill-informed, authoritarian or just plain stupid, but to call it insane would be impolitic to say the least, if not insane in its own right. I'm not a psychiatric professional, so I can say that with impunity.

Vestigial Russophobia

The other day I read in the paper that the President was expected to sign legislation imposing new economic sanctions on Russia. In the same paper I read a Michael Gerson column accusing the President of "subservience to Russia" and a "policy of preemptive concession." For those arriving late, Gerson is no Democratic spoilsport but a Republican neocon and onetime advisor to George W. Bush. He accuses Donald Trump of abandoning the Republican party's "heroic foreign policy tradition"of resistance to Russian aggression, and taking Republicans with him. He laments the finding of a recent poll that 49% of Republicans think of Russia as a friend or ally of the United States. Those people are forgetting the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Gerson believes, but he seems to forget that Russia and the Soviet Union can be seen reasonably as two very different things, apparently convinced that there's not a kopeck's worth of difference between Soviet totalitarianism and Putin-style authoritarianism and national assertiveness. 

Gerson looks far into the past to equate Trump with Henry Wallace, the anti-Cold War Democrat who ran against Harry Truman as an independent presidential candidate in 1948. Back then, Wallace argued that Americans "have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States.” For Gerson, that quote exemplifies an unprincipled indifference to the terror of Stalinism that he hears echoed in Trump's presumed indifference to the burdens of subservience to Russia today. Now as then, aggression emanating from the Russian landmass presumably makes Eastern European politics our business. If anything, Gerson makes more of an effort to argue that it's our business now, because Russia "has made the political affairs of the United States very much its business." This analysis almost certainly puts the cart before the horse. If Russia has meddled in American politics, it's because Americans have stuck their noses where Russian leaders think we don't belong. As a neocon, however, Gerson believes we belong everywhere. Solidarity with liberal democrats wherever they exist is a moral if not existential imperative for him. While Trump most likely thinks of Russia simply as Russia, a nation that's going to pursue it's interests regardless of what we think of them, Gerson can't help seeing the Eurasian giant as the vanguard of an "anti-democratic" movement inherently antithetical to American interests. In his mind, Russia and the U.S. are engaged in a zero-sum contest for global influence. Russian success anywhere, but particularly in Syria, where self-interest in the form of a Mediterranean naval base combines with a realist focus on suppressing terrorism, is unacceptably harmful or simply shameful to the U.S.

It's telling, though, that Gerson seems at a loss to explain why Trump should so appease Russia ("Does it come from Trump’s bad case of authoritarianism envy? A fundamental sympathy with European right-wing, anti-democratic populism? An exposure to pressure from his checkered financial history?") when there probably isn't as much appeasement going on as he thinks. It should hardly count as appeasement to put a brake on the destabilization of Syria, for instance, when instability only fuels terrorism. Even in Eastern Europe, those who paid attention when Trump went there know to expect continued conflict with Russia so long as the President hopes to open the regional energy market to American providers. A conflict that doesn't rise to the level of a crusade might well be beneath Gerson's notice. It clearly infuriates him that Trump fails or refuses to see (or name) "evil" where Gerson himself sees it. But who's to say which man's perceptions more closely match reality? It probably would stink for someone of a critical and liberal mindset to live in Russia or under Russian hegemony today, but a lot about life stinks without being evil, and treating those things as evil may not be the best way to deal with them. Unfortunately, Americans seem increasingly to treat anything that inconveniences them, as individuals or as a nation, as an evil to be abolished rather than a reality to be dealt with differently. If Trump doesn't see U.S.-Russia relations as an eternal struggle of good against evil, that only proves him evil in many eyes. That attitude is all too typical of our time.

The wrong kind of pride

There was something like a scandal in my neighborhood a few weeks ago when two employees of a local tattoo parlor were effectively hounded into quitting their jobs after they were outed as members or affiliates of the Proud Boys, a self-styled "western supremacist" group. The Alt, a relatively new weekly paper following in the footsteps of the late Metroland, decided to look deeper into what the Proud Boys (and their female auxiliaries) are about. The surprising thing about Jaya Sundaresh's report is that the Southern Poverty Law Center, the leading watchdog of supremacist groups, isn't too concerned about the Proud Boys, at least for now. An SLPC representative told Sundaresh that Proud Boys founder Gavin MacInnes disavows racism and anti-semitism, opening the group to anyone who, in another writer's words, "recognize[s] that white men are not the problem." People closer to home are more concerned, mainly with the Proud Boys' reputation as street fighters. A Proud Boy reportedly attains the fourth and highest degree of membership for "enduring a major conflict related to the crowd." This is understood to mean that Proud Boys are prepared to do battle with their counterparts on the left, the "antifa" movement, though MacInnes insists that his Boys are to fight defensively -- presumably in defense of the targets of antifa demonstrations. Of course, street fighting + "western supremacism" = "storm troopers" in the leftist imagination, as confirmed by an Oregon professor who tells Sundaresh that the Proud Boys look like "a deliberate effort to reproduce the conditions that led to the emergence of fascism." From this perspective, MacInnes becomes a more sinister figure, "trying to insert authoritarianism and totalitarianism into the mainstream." Other critics point to the more eccentric rituals of Proud Boy membership -- to attain the second degree, reportedly, one must run a gauntlet while shouting as many breakfast cereal brand names as one can recall -- as reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. Elsewhere in the July 19 issue, columnist Miriam Axel-Lute argues that boycott threats against the tattoo parlor were justified. She sneers at "self-professed liberals clutching their pearls over the fact that this became an issue at all." Such liberals are "more concerned with avoiding conflict than actually protecting anybody," Axel-Lute writes. Two people losing their jobs are trivial, she contends, compared to the hate crimes that have become routine in America. I can't help wondering whether she'd be as indifferent to people getting pressured into quitting their jobs because they were found to sympathize with antifa, but had not actually participated in any demonstrations to anyone's knowledge. As far as Axel-Lute is concerned, the customer is always right, or at least those customers are who "have every right to be actually scared for their safety around people " like the Proud Boys.

Ideologues are entitled to double standards, of course, since they really believe that some groups deserve to be treated differently from others.  The rest of us may wonder what the difference is, especially when it seems that the antifa people usually are the aggressors in public confrontations. I'm not thrilled by the emergence of street fighters on either side of the ideological divide, but beyond that I'd like to withhold judgment on the Proud Boys until I learn what they think "the problem" is. Judgment is rarely withheld for movements like this, and MacInnes probably asked for it by describing the Boys as "supremacists" rather than as a mere "pride" movement. But the difference in terminology probably wouldn't have made much difference. You always hear white people asking why they can't have a White Pride week or month, or a Western Civilization celebration. The glib answer to their complaint is that every day is White Pride Day in the U.S.A., but such a comeback shouldn't obscure the existence of an actual double standard on the subject of pride. In the 21st century U.S., it seems, only appeals to "white" or "western" or "European" pride are seen as inherently supremacist. Despite the existence of actual black supremacist groups like the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters, only among whites is "pride" assumed to be implicitly derogatory toward everyone else. For any other group, asserting "pride" is understood to mean, "We're great, too!" while an assertion of "white pride" is understood to mean, "We're the greatest, and the rest of you suck!" It would be stupid to deny that non-whites  have some historic reasons to be suspicious of assertions of white male or even "western" pride, but their suspicions should not absolutely preclude the possibility of white (or at least western) pride that is not exclusionary or derogatory. After all, for many 20th century liberals it was the supreme point of pride in western civilization that it welcomed all who approached it with open minds, and many liberals today no doubt have great pride in an idealized western civilization that theoretically encompasses all other civilizations instead of subjugating or exterminating them. The Proud Boys probably aren't so idealistic as that, but everything else being equal -- for this is America, ain't it? -- is that reason enough for them to lose their jobs? I understand that a lot of people already perceive them as the enemy, but their own treatment of them is most likely the quickest way to turn perception into reality.

THINK 3 VIDEO NEWS: A neighborhood gutted

By the time I got back to Albany from work last night a torrential rainstorm had made the State Street hill below the Capitol look like a waterfall. By the time I got home to Dana Avenue I had no thought of going back out, and with the AC running and the TV on I never heard any sirens that night. But just a stone's throw away part of the 400 block of Madison Avenue, just east of the busy Lark Street intersection, was burning. To give regular readers a sense of location, the house with all the anti-Trump posters in its windows that I showcased a while back is a few doors further up the street and apparently was undamaged by the fire.

I only found out about the fire the old-fashioned way, by reading about it in this morning's paper. On my way to work I took a very slight detour to inspect the damage.

Approximately twelve hours later I was back in Albany, and this was the same block after four 19th century row houses had been torn down.

For now, investigators don't consider the fire suspicious, but still have no real idea how it started. About a dozen people were displaced by the blaze, and the Center Square neighborhood will be scarred for some time, perhaps for years to come.

'Lenin is more alive than all the living'

This year sees the centennial of the Russian Revolution, a two-stage event in which the abdication of Nicholas II led to the creation of a republic which was in turn overthrown by the Bolshevik "October Revolution" that created the Soviet Union. I'm not sure how Russia plans to observe the occasion, for while Vladimir Putin has said the the collapse of the USSR in 1991 was a tragedy of world history, he's reportedly not that big a fan of the man who created that entity, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The current Russian leader is more of a Stalin fan, not because Lenin's successor was more totalitarian or more vicious but because he was a patriotic hero who defeated Hitler and made his nation a superpower. Whatever Putin's attitude, Lenin's on the minds of many people and bookstores are full of new books on the Revolution. Several of them have been covered in recent review articles in The Nation and Harper's. While those publications are left of center, many of the new books are, if not conservative in theme, still definitely unsympathetic or unforgiving toward Lenin as the founder of a dictatorship that ruled through terror. Some of the authors describe the Bolshevik uprising as a coup d'etat rather than a revolution, while the critics think that the authors go too far in describing the event as Lenin's opportunistic conspiracy, rather than a moment made possible, if not forced, by special historical circumstances that would not have changed much in Lenin's absence. In short, despite the fall of the Soviet Union the debate over Lenin's legacy goes on, and no doubt will go on as long as people remain unreconciled to the rule of capitalism. This is a debate within the left, of course, since the right and much of the center have been convinced since 1917 that Lenin was the devil. It's also in large part a debate about Stalin, the question being whether Stalinism follows inevitably or inherently from Leninism, or whether Stalin's excesses and atrocities were aberrations born of his own wickedness.

Even if you leave Stalin out of it, Leninism raises grave issues about revolutionary entitlement. Lenin, after all, is the man who decided that a revolutionary vanguard did not have to wait for the proletariat to develop sufficient class consciousness in the inevitable but protracted manner Marx predicted, but was entitled to seize any opportunity to push history forward. Most importantly and provocatively, he felt entitled to seize power and keep it by silencing dissenters and killing them if necessary. From a liberal perspective, there's little solace in the fact that Lenin had no desire to be worshiped, as Stalin apparently did, and was not murderously paranoid about his own comrades, as Stalin definitely was. Lenin claimed to act in the name of the people, but he did so on the assumption that he knew better on objective grounds what the people's interest was than the people themselves. Lenin will always be with us, probably, because democracy is constantly challenged by the idea that the people's (or the planet's) interest is not simply whatever the people (or any given electorate) say it is. Liberal democracy is always beset on two sides by those convinced that the people's interest has already been defined beyond dispute by divine revelation and those convinced that they can reason it out for themselves and act accordingly in defiance of all disagreement. In more specific terms Lenin still represents an alternative to capitalism to those convinced that some alternative must exist. They may recoil from Lenin's own extreme measures, but they may worry that to repudiate and vilify Lenin entirely is of necessity to endorse capitalism. They may also be the audience for Slavoj Zizek's oft-repeated advice, recycled anew for a volume exploiting the centennial, to recognize Lenin as a failure while endeavoring to "fail better," in Samuel Beckett's words, at the general goal of emancipating humanity from capitalist alienation through revolutionary mobilization. You may not want to go that far, but so long as it remains theoretically possible to reason out a common good that isn't subject to a vote, Lenin is unlikely to stay on the ash heap of history.

Speaking of history, here's a funny story. One of the things Putin doesn't like about Lenin, reportedly, is that he allowed a right to secession that was taken advantage of in 1991, killing the USSR. It makes you wonder why Stalin didn't do something about that. The answer probably is that Stalin's own 1936 constitution was full of civil liberties that no one took seriously, so what did he care about any one of those rights? Make of that what you will, but what do you make of the apparent fact that the Soviet Union, the epitome of totalitarianism, permitted exactly that thing which Abraham Lincoln claimed that the U.S. Constitution, the epitome of liberal democracy, did not, and that when Americans asserted that right in spite of Lincoln hundreds of thousands of people died, but when Soviet republics asserted their right, the "evil empire" went down without a fight?

Corrupt politician freed on technicality

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sheldon Silver's conviction for corruption in office has been overturned by a federal appeals court. Not so long ago, Silver arguably was the most powerful politician in New York State as speaker of the state assembly and leader of its Democratic majority. Like his Republican counterpart in the state senate, Dean Skelos, Silver exemplified pay-for-play politics in the Empire State until federal prosecutor Preet Bharara brought both men down. Today's decision doesn't reflect on Bharara's legacy from what I can tell, for the appeals court doesn't dispute that Silver did what he was accused of doing. Apparently, what you call whatever he was doing is the problem. The appeals court was guided by a unanimous ruling issued last year by our notoriously divided Supreme Court. That ruling overturned the conviction of a former governor of Virginia and in doing so narrowed the range of activities that count as "corruption" in criminal cases, excluding what the New York Times paraphrased as "routine political courtesies" like arranging meetings or securing contacts for "constituents" (i.e. donors) In the Silver case, the appeals court holds that the instructions to the jury should have reflected this new standard for corruption. Silver's conviction is held to be unfair since, despite the appeal judges' own doubts, a jury properly instructed may have seen wiggle room for an acquittal. Unsurprisingly, Bharara's successor as federal prosecutor vows to get Silver convicted again, but the highest court in the land may have made that result less likely. Just as opponents of limits on campaign donations argue that no corruption results from them unless you can read a politician's mind and prove that money changed it, so the courts now claim that there is no "official" corruption in most of the favors politicians may do for their most favored constituents. This is the sort of subject I'd like to see the President tweet about. As a mighty businessman, Donald Trump may well find the Silver ruling a just one. As the self-styled champion of ordinary Americans against a corrupt political class, might he think or at least tweet differently?  I wonder if we'll ever find out....

Are Republicans mourning Joe?

Joe Scarborough was a "Contract With America" Republican who was elected to Congress in the anti-Clinton wave of 1994. He served four terms before dropping out. Since then, he's been best known as the co-host and namesake of Morning Joe and the main representative of conservative opinion on MSNBC. Scarborough announced last night that while he still considered himself conservative on many issues, mostly economic, he no longer considered himself a Republican. His switch to "independent" status is intended as a personal repudiation of President Trump and a Republican majority too cowardly, in Scarborough's eyes, to criticize Trump's excesses. The TV host has in mind not just the insults Trump lobbed at his co-host and fiancee Mika Brzezinki via twitter, but a stench of bigotry he senses in the Trump movement. Perhaps now Eric Alterman will stop complaining in his Nation column about Scarborough's supposed sycophancy toward Trump, but I'm not sure this news will make anyone else change their minds about Trump or Scarborough. It may count as a milestone, however, in a Trumpification of the Republican party that may in return revise the terms of political discourse in this country. On Fox News, Sean Hannity calls Scarborough "Liberal Joe" for no better reason that I'm aware of than that Scarborough opposes Trump. I suspect many rank and file Republicans, or Trump voters at least, feel the same way: you're either for Trump or you're with the enemy, i.e. "liberalism." But as many ideological or self-styled "principled" conservatives continue to oppose the President of grounds of policy and/or temperament, will they all become "liberal" too? What does "liberal" mean at that point? If we still think of anti-Trump Republicans as "conservatives," since that's how they still think of themselves, can "liberal" still mean the opposite of "conservative?" Of course, these terms only became antonymical when Democrats identified with one term and Republicans with the other. Historically, the "conservatism" identified with the late 20th century Republican party was an outgrowth of "classical" (i.e. 19th century) liberalism, and probably wouldn't be recognized by the "conservatives" of earlier times as much like their own beliefs. Does that mean that Trump represents a "real conservatism" re-emerging as old debates over the role of the state in the economy lose their defining force? It's probably too early to say. For now, and should the Republicans crack up further, keep in mind that "liberal" can be the opposite not only of "conservative" but of "radical," by virtue of liberalism's reluctance to undertake reforms, much less revolutionary action, that may provoke or require violence in getting to the root of problems in the original sense of the word. The question of our time may not be whether Trump or Scarborough is the "real conservative," but whether the Trump movement is alienating Scarborough-style conservatives because it's something else entirely.

The state of exception in the exceptional nation

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and one of the harshest critics of Vladimir Putin. "Over the years many Russians, including me, have come to believe that the [1999] apartment-building bombings in Moscow and elsewhere were organized and carried out by the FSB, the [Russian] intelligence agency, in order to shore up Putin's power grab," she writes in the July Harper's. She admits that "we do not know enough" about these incidents, but insists that "it is certainly too early to exonerate Putin and the FSB," observing that "this paucity of information, too, is one of the signs of autocracy." Gessen is not dismissed out of hand as a Russian "truther," I presume, because Americans simply assume that Putin, if not Russians in general, are more ethically or culturally capable of such things than their American counterparts. Gessen is here to warn us, however, that something similar may be in store for America under Donald Trump. To be clear, she isn't predicting a "false flag" terrorist attack and is not claiming that the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. were anything like that. More precisely, Gessen warns that Trump could use any large-scale terrorist attack as a "Reichstag fire," an opportunity or excuse to impose authoritarian rule on the United States.

Following the political philosophers Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Gessen warns Harper's readers about the potential for a "state of exception" during the War on Terror. Created as a concept and promoted by the pro-Nazi Schmitt and repackaged as menace by Agamben in our time, the idea of the "state of exception" is that during an emergency (real or fake) the "sovereign" has the power to declare that old rules no longer apply and make new rules. In Gessen's summary,  it is less a slippery slope than a cartoon snowball deliberately sent rolling down the mountain. "The emergency enables a quantum leap: The sovereign has to have enough power to declare a state of exception, and then by the declaration he acquires far greater, unchecked power. That is what makes the change irreversible, and the state of exception permanent." In practice, Gessen implies, the state of exception is the rationale for a dictatorship that is the sovereign's real goal, while the emergency only provides the pretext. For Hitler, the Reichstag fire, whether the work of Nazi arsonists or the lone nut actually convicted, justified a state of exception under which he consolidated his dictatorship. For Putin, as far as Gessen is concerned, the 1999 bombings provided a similar pretext. In the 21st century U.S., she claims, the pretext already exists thanks to 9/11. The state of exception was already called into being by George W. Bush, and was perpetuated by Barack Obama, both violating a 1976 law requiring Congress to confirm a state of emergency within six months of a presidential declaration. Gessen is compelled to compliment the last two presidents on their "restraint" for "not utiliz[ing] some of the more extreme possibilities of the state of emergency,' but worries that the current President will show no such restraint.

What, then, is exceptional about Donald Trump? Gessen claims that "he has already shown that he can deftly use the coercive power of the state being at war." Her evidence for this hardly seems to justify her dire warning. "During his first address to a joint session of Congress, Trump orchestrated more than two minutes of applause for the widow of a fallen Navy SEAL," she writes. Perhaps she has spent too much time covering Russia, if she doesn't know that presidents since Reagan have practiced this sort of  "naked cynicism that left no one in the audience any choice but to stand and applaud" by suing soldiers or their survivors as props for applause lines. She sees something extra and sinister, however, in the fact that the Breitbart web site "falsely claimed that several top Democrats had refused to" applaud. To Gessen, "This was a preview of the coercion by national unity that we talk about when we talk about the Reichstag fire." My hunch, however, is that you probably can find evidence of Fox News or radio talkers making similar charges against "unpatriotic" Democrats during the Bush administration.

Apparently, the peril of states of exception depends on the people in power, since Gessen notes that "Not all the periods of exception are remembered as repressive." She cites several occasions in American history when a formal or informal state of exception appeared to justify repressive measures that were soon rolled back, from the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams to the excesses of Joe McCarthy. The difference now, again, seems to be something about Trump. That difference, believe it or not, seems to be that Donald Trump is not merely authoritarian in his temperament, as many claim him to be, but all-out totalitarian. I'd better let Gessen try to explain this.

A key characteristic of the most frightening regimes of the past hundred years is mobilization. This is what distinguishes the merely authoritarian regimes from the totalitarian ones. Authoritarians prefer their subjects passive, tending to their private lives while the authoritarian and his cronies amass wealth and power. The totalitarian wants people out in the square; he craves their adulation and devotion, their willingness to fight and die for him....To totalitarianism watchers, Trump's campaign rallies, which segued into his victory rallies, including his 'America First' inauguration,have looked familiar and perhaps more worrisome than an imaginary future [Reichstag] fire. To historians of the twenty-first century, however, they will likely look like logical steps from the years of war rhetoric that preceded them, not quantum leaps. A nation can be mobilized only if it knows its enemy and believes in its own peril.

In other words, because Donald Trump is a demagogue, he is a potential totalitarian dictator. By this standard, we dodged a deadly bullet during the Clinton years, given how notoriously Bill was said to crave the love of the people. Had he served a third term and led us through 9/11, perhaps things would be different! But no. Judging from those aspects of Trump's agenda Gessen most wants us to oppose, Trump is dangerous not because he craves applause -- though he clearly does -- but because he's a bigot, and bigots are the most dangerous potential authoritarians or totalitarians of all despite the fact that the most bigoted of Americans have formed a key part of the base for the party of "limited government" for the past fifty years. Let's grant that bigotry in wartime could well be worse than bigotry in general -- ask Japanese-Americans about that -- but that still doesn't prove that bigotry itself or even a fondness for the sound of one's own voice accurately predicts a desire for dictatorship. So is it that Trump is just an egomaniac, or just a greedy businessman, or has bad hair and an unnatural complexion -- or is it the other way around?

Actually, it's a trick question, since Gessen closes her article by warning readers against "the assumption that things were fine until Americans inexplicably elected Trump." The problem isn't really Trump at all, or else he's only part of the real problem that dates back to the turn of the century, for which Bush and Obama share much of the responsibility. The problem, Gessen concludes, is the War on Terror itself.  In her eyes, the 95 Americans killed in "attacks ostensibly driven by jihadist ideology" since September 2001 pale in comparison to the hundreds of Americans killed by police in "killings [that are] extrajudicial by definition" in only the first quarter of 2017. She finds it sufficient to tabulate that "an American has a lesser chance of dying in a terrorist attack carried out by a refugee than of being struck by lightning." No fear that you feel justifies what the state has done since 9/11, Gessen argues, and "to be worthy of the lofty name 'resistance,' the opposition to Trump must aim to break the country's post-9/11 trajectory. It must question the very premise of the war on terror, challenge the very fact of a perpetual state of emergency." In the end, Gessen is somewhat grateful to Trump, since his already-obnoxious presidency has made American civil society "far stronger, paradoxically, than it was before the election." That leaves me wondering what she takes as evidence of a resurgent civil society, though I suspect it may look highly and ironically "mobilized." Her odd mix of alarmism and optimism leaves one wondering again about the resiliency of liberal democratic political order in the face of emergencies that liberal democrats would prefer never to happen. My worry is that the 21st century will see more emergencies, not all of which can be dismissed as irrational fear of strangers or necessarily met by exclusively liberal measures. Liberalism distrusts emergencies because it assumes that political decisions are never matters of life and death. In treating the last election as a matter of life and death, liberalism arguably has betrayed itself without effectively addressing any of the emergencies facing the nation or the world.

Trump on western values: "We want God."

The President is in Poland today to address a summit meeting of the Three Seas Initiative, an informal organization of central and eastern European nations. He's there in part to tout the U.S. as an alternative energy supplier that would never withhold energy supplies for the sake of political intimidation, unlike You Know Who. In case you don't know, in one of his speeches today Trump pointedly recounted the sad fate of the Warsaw Uprising during World War II, when Poles were slaughtered by Nazi occupiers while Russian (I mean Soviet) armies stood by within striking distance, presumably content to let a resistance unbeholden to Moscow get annihilated. In case anyone was still confused, the President explicitly admonished Russia to "cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere." Ukraine is not a member of the Three Seas Initiative, but many actual members were formerly part of the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union itself and are hardly fans of an assertive Russia. For what it was worth, Trump also called on the Russians to end "support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran, and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself." At this point a Russian might interject that Syria and its Iranian ally are frontline states in the defense of civilization as hands-on opponents of the self-styled Islamic State. One Russian in particular may well remind the President later this week that his nation, which claims to have killed the IS's self-styled caliph in an airstrike, is doing more in the defense of civilization than Trump has in his preoccupation with so-called "hostile" states. Choose your own side in that theoretical discussion but acknowledge that the President's Warsaw speech is not what you should expect to hear from someone supposedly in bed with the Russians, unless Trump is more subtle and devious than anyone could believe.

In fact, despite his acknowledgment that Europe "no longer confronts the specter of communism," his idea of western civilization seems to have been shaped by the Cold War. His civilizational rhetoric seems to have gotten the most attention in the media, perhaps because liberals worry that such talk, coming from an old white guy, is implicitly exclusionary. I suppose it was to some extent, given how much it sounded like simple Republican conservatism. He told the Poles that big government was virtually as grave an internal threat to western civ as terrorism was an external threat.

This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.The West became great, not because of paperwork and regulations, but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

Just as much as terrorism, bureaucracy "threaten[s] over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.If left unchecked, [it] will undermine our courage, sap our spirit and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies." In western civ, Trump says, "We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives....We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive." Religion appears to be inextricable from the rest of it. To listen to Trump today, it wasn't Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War, but John Paul II. Of course, the President may simply have meant to flatter his Polish hosts by praising their national hero, but I had the feeling that he really believes what he said.

[W]hen the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and 1 million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish pope, that day every Communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down.They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II's sermon when a million Polish men, women and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer.A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, 1 million Poles saying three simple words: ``We want God.'' In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future....Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America and the people of Europe still cry out, ``We want God.''

I hadn't noticed many Americans crying for God, but perhaps I'm not in the right social-media bubble. In mine -- which for all I know may be a bubble of one --  the defense of civilization Trump seems so gung-ho for has little meaning if it doesn't defend our right to say "We don't want God" and not just "We don't want Allah." Today, at least, that didn't seem like a high priority for the President. Perhaps he was pandering to a more devoutly Catholic country -- he definitely got the "Donald Trump! Donald Trump!" chants he presumably wanted -- and perhaps he meant the speech to play well with his Christianist constituents at home as well. But an American President can go too far with this God talk, however much it pleases the pious. It can alienate many who identify fully with western civ without identifying with religion at all. The last thing Trump should want to do is tell these people that they're wrong.

Dignity

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, wrote the lead comment for the July 10 issue before the controversy broke out over the GIF showing Donald Trump beating up a CNN stand-in, but after the President had posted his ad hominem tweets against the co-hosts of Morning Joe. "When has any politician done so much, so quickly, to demean his office, his country, and even the language in which he attempts to speak?" Remnick asks, "Every day, Trump wakes up and erodes the dignity of the Presidency a little more." He worries that "the atmosphere of debasement and indignity in the White House ... is contagious." He's probably right to worry, but Trump is not Patient Zero. In purely aesthetic terms, his is certainly the most undignified rhetoric of any President, but in the race to the bottom of indignity in America he is follower more than leader. Meanwhile, a preoccupation with "dignity" probably isn't helping Trump's critics, either in opposition or within his own party. To Trump's base, it most likely looks like snobbery, especially among those for whom the President himself and his family epitomize "class."

Those who find the President undignified tend, like Remnick, to identify his indignity with his petty trolling of opponents. Trump lacks dignity, the argument might go, because he shows no respect to anyone who disagrees with him. But Trump's real fans probably see no sacrifice in dignity in calling things as you see them, and probably consider insults the least of what his enemies deserve. While some Republicans are just as repelled by Trump's social-media shenanigans, those probably matter more to Democrats, not just because Trump is a partisan enemy, but because his trolling habits offend their sense of egalitarian dignity. Their theory of democracy includes an entitlement to dignity; each person is owed respect as a human being, while people's status as equal citizens is threatened when their identities as individual or group members are disrespected. That's why Trump's insults are so often perceived as threats. Protests against those perceived threats, meanwhile, make little impression on observers whose idea of democracy requires a degree of mutual accountability apparently denied by both the subculture of political correctness and a political culture that privileges dissent and "speaking truth to power." From that perspective, appeals to "dignity" simply rationalize an unfair refusal to allow the President or his people to answer in kind attacks on their character that aren't exactly dignified themselves.

While "speaking truth to power" is a slogan of the left, the privileging of dissent is a general American tendency, arguably inevitable in a polity and culture that value "freedom" more than anything else. We've reached the point where the absence of something like Fox News or MSNBC marks a country as dangerously authoritarian in many eyes. Dissent is the health of the state from this perspective, while any suggestion that dissent goes too far sounds like a call for the suppression of all dissent. When the only proof of a free (if not a good) society is your ability to bitch at the leaders, an unlevel playing field of discourse becomes increasingly apparent to whoever supports the party in power, belying the rhetoric of egalitarian dignity, and attacks on opponents' dignity will seem increasingly appropriate and gratifying. In an ideal republic mutual respect and mutual accountability are perfectly compatible, but that's not where Americans live. Accountability arguably is the higher priority here, and that may require us to endure some undignified times.

21st Century Presidential: American politics as wrestlemania

A regular correspondent of this blog likes to harp on Donald Trump's association with Vince McMahon as a performer for McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment. I tended to dismiss such comments, attributing them to the writer's obsession with wrestling. Now, however, the President himself has invited comparisons by retweeting an animated GIF showing himself manhandling some WWE personality, over whose head is superimposed a CNN logo. What followed further illustrated the cultural divide in the country. The liberal media, along with some establishment politicians, predictably recoiled in horror and disgust, drawing the equally predictable conclusion that Trump was promoting violence against the media. Little of this outraged commentary showed any awareness that the GIF was no more than a variation on memes that have been around for some time and have nothing to do with advocating violence. You'll see what I mean if you look at comment threads on the popular sports news websites. Whenever someone or some team beats someone else in decisive fashion, you'll often see GIFs much like the Trump vs. CNN graphic. People like to take clips of the wrestler Randy Orton using his finishing move, the RKO, "out of nowhere!" on an opponent, and superimpose heads or team logos over the heads of Orton and his victim. With the President, whoever created the CNN GIF has the advantage of footage showing Trump himself as a sort of wrestler. That GIF no more advocates violence against CNN on Trump's behalf than any of the Randy Orton GIFs advocate violence against the person or team symbolically taking the RKO -- because the victim in all these GIFs has already been defeated. The Trump GIF was clearly meant to signify an apparent Trump victory over CNN last week, when the news channel retracted one of its stories about links between Trump people and Russia, leading three reporters to resign.  I suspect that at least some media people understood this, but still found Trump's recourse to retweeting GIFs and memes, the practice Trump himself now describes as "21st Century Presidential," beneath the dignity of his office. This only allowed Republicans to score more points, as they have for years now, against liberal/Democratic humorlessness.

Those chiding the President over the GIF, one of his supporters told CNN this morning, need to stop taking everything (especially themselves) so seriously. He also cited the self-evident fakery of professional wrestling to dismiss any thought that the GIF incited actual violence. I doubt he changed any minds, as liberals are hardwired, it seems, to believe that Trump and the people who support him are inherently violent, just as the values they espouse are inherently cruel. I want to elaborate on the important distinction between"cruelty" and "toughness" in the near future, but it's enough for now to note that this latest outrage over a presidential tweet exposes something about the President's critics (as distinguished from his opponents) more than it exposes the President himself. They do take a lot of things too seriously, just as their opposite numbers refuse to take seriously a lot of things they should. What Trump does on social media could be equated with wrestlers cutting promos, boosting themselves while belittling their antagonists in order to keep viewers (or followers) interested, but you could just as easily say that about social media as a whole: a lot of chest-beating trash talk with hardly any genuine threat behind it. Depending on the measurements you use, professional wrestling has declined steeply in popularity from its modern peak in the late 1990s, -- though I've found the evolution of wrestling fandom increasingly fascinating -- but that may be because public life has become so much more like wrestling in our time, with people getting "worked" at every level of their lives, that the actual matches hardly seem special anymore. Rather than a poor imitation of sport, it's become a poor imitation of life, while the Trumpster lays the smack down for real from coast to coast.

Tweets and twits

Since the administration of John Adams, presidents of the United States have been satirized, vilified and caricatured by opposition media with little regard for the dignity of either the office or the men who occupied it. The vilification and caricaturing of President Trump is nothing new, nor is it unprecedented in its vulgarity or obscenity, though the hostility shown toward him may be more inescapably pervasive in our age of cable news and social media. What seems unprecedented to many is the manner in which the current President talks or tweets back at his critics. Some previous presidents -- notably Andrew Jackson, whom Trump sees as something of a model, and Harry Truman -- were known for their salty or straight talk, depending on who was listening, but in their days millions of Americans didn't receive every overnight outburst from a President on their cellphones. Today, it is feared that President Trump further debases our public discourse every time he lashes out on Twitter. He faces a new storm of criticism after lashing out at Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, and his fiancee Mika Brzezinski, the co-hosts of MSNBC's middle-of-the-road Morning Joe show. No one seems to know what specifically triggered the President, but Morning Joe has often criticized him, despite allegations from the likes of Eric Alterman that the hosts actually toady to Trump. In any event, the President went on a typical ad hominem (and feminam) attack, calling Scarborough "Psycho Joe" while mocking Brzezinski's supposed poor facelift in lurid terms and, as always when he attacks media figures, accusing their show of failing in the ratings. For his trouble, he has been rebuked by Republicans as well as Democrats, but what else is new? Meanwhile, his spokespeople defend his right to go tit-for-tat with those who mock and slander him.

Since the days of Adams and Jefferson, media figures have been vilified and caricatured nearly as often as their officeholding targets -- and in those days they could be challenged to duels or beaten in the street, depending on their perceived social status. If anything is new now, it's that the President or other top politicians don't have to rely on surrogates to heap mud on their media enemies. The freedom with which politicians can spew unfiltered opinions or insults alarms some people and simply disgusts others. Forgive me if I read like a Republican for a second, but I fear a double standard is at work here. Trump's tweets are condemned, by presumed political allies as well as partisan antagonists, for degrading the dignity of his high office. But there seems to be no regard for that same office or its dignity when the opposition takes rhetorical or pictorial potshots at this particular President. It can no doubt be argued that in a liberal democracy dissent should have more license than authority, and it will almost certainly be argued that Donald Trump is the first cause of any debasement of the office he occupies. It's still unconvincing to blame Trump alone (or the Republicans, or conservative media, or the alt-right) for the perhaps terminal decline in American civil discourse, especially when millions of people can vent their bile onto those millions of cellphones. Let's concede that the President's trolling of Morning Joe was childish, if only in order to ask whether it was really much more childish than anything you see online daily from his friends or foes. Let's concede that it's beneath the historical dignity of the Presidency, to the extent that most of his predecessors would find Donald Trump contemptible, but let's remember that ours is a democratic republic in which the President is widely seen as the one true representative of the American people as a whole. Why should we presume (or even want) him to be more dignified than we are?

The Iconoclast

What kind of nut would ram his car into Ten Commandments monuments in two different states? The answer seems to be a self-described born-again Christian who admits to psychotic episodes, during which he flirted with Satanism, and strongly believes in the separation of church and state. The man arrested this morning for destroying a freshly-installed monument outside the Arkansas state capitol is believed to be the same man who wrecked a monument in Oklahoma in October 2014. "[N]o one religion should the government represent," he reportedly says in a Facebook post prior to his latest exploit. Oklahoma was eventually compelled to remove the Commandments monument from its capitol, but Arkansas is required by state law to keep a monument near its capitol grounds. While the perpetrator's core idea is admirable in the abstract, it's probably inseparable in fact from a madness that may have reclaimed the poor fool. The depths of his previous madness are detailed in a letter he wrote to an Oklahoma newspaper in 2015. I was tempted to describe him as a non-lethal terrorist, but "vandal" is more appropriate, since the only life he appears to have threatened was his own. I can't sympathize with any believers who feel aggrieved by this attack, but at the same time this country doesn't need people like the attacker taking the Constitution into their own hands. We might well ask how much more sane all the other people are who lash out against the way the political winds are blowing.

Trump's Evil Empire?

Neocons probably are the only people on Earth complaining that President Trump is too diplomatic. Michael Gerson in particular longs for the days of President Reagan, whose 1983 "Evil Empire" speech against the Soviet bloc reportedly inspired liberal dissidents around the world. Trump, Gerson laments, offers little aid or comfort to today's dissidents because he's more interested in currying favor with their oppressors. Gerson finds Trump's direction dangerous not only because of the President's supposed "personal fascination with authoritarianism," but because it represents an abandonment of "soft power — the superiority of a spiritual ideal of freedom to a materialistic vision of historical forces — that allowed the Cold War to be won." Having written that, Gerson can't really be taken seriously, but his column reminds us of a point of convergence between neocons and neoliberals in the Democratic party, among whom must be included Presidents Clinton and Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton. Whatever their differences over American domestic policy, all these neos appear to agree on a theory of international order from which Trump allegedly dissents.

According to Gerson, Trump's "simplistic" foreign policy "assumes that the current order in oppressive countries can be indefinitely preserved — as long as it is not destabilized by meddling outsiders." Neos like Gerson believe to the contrary that "the instability of oppressive governments emerges from within," and that international indifference to sovereign oppression eventually destabilizes the international community as a whole.

[Oppressive governments] prevent the diffusion of choice and power, which is the source of economic and social success in the modern world. Monopolizing power encourages cronyism, corruption, resentment and discontent. Strongmen can succeed for a time by feeding hatred of enemies, real and imagined. But this is the path of arrogance, mediocrity and insurrection. In such societies, a few eyes and mouths open — often resulting in imprisonment or house arrest. These are the dissidents whom Trump seems intent on betraying and discouraging. The message is thereby sent that the United States values the good opinion of strongmen more than the dignity and liberty of the people they rule. This is resented, and remembered.

In the Middle East context that most interests Gerson -- the column criticizes Trump for supporting the Egyptian government that took power after the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown by a coup d'etat -- this theory helps account for the rise of al-Qaeda and explains its strategy of attacking the U.S. for propping up oppressive regimes in the region. In the more specific context of Syria, Gerson incorporates what I've called the Obama Doctrine while implicitly criticizing Obama himself  for his limited application of the doctrine. It was Obama's own opinion that Syria's tyranny was the necessary and sufficient cause of the uprisings against Bashar al-Assad. Gerson clearly agrees with that assessment, but thinks that the U.S. had a strategic responsibility, which Obama largely failed to live up to, to shore up Syria's liberal democratic opposition with words if not also with deeds. Gerson's column appears as the Trump administration is again threatening to attack Syria over the use of chemical weapons, over the opposition of his supposed authoritarian buddies in Russia, so what exactly Trump is doing wrong?  His, apparently, is a sin of omission. He is thought either incapable or unwilling to articulate a utopian vision of a liberal democratic (much less secular) world order built with U.S. support. Gerson fears instead that Trump would sacrifice the liberal democratic aspirations of millions of people around the world to the more self-interested objectives of  his war on terror, but also fears that the sacrifice will be in vain, as he predicts implicitly that thwarted reformers will continue to lash out at America, whether they take power eventually or not.

Gerson acknowledges that "The United States must find common interests on a daily basis with governments that it finds oppressive and unjust." At the same time, he insists that "it is also in our national interest to hold up an ideal that speaks to current dissidents and future leaders — who are often one and the same." In other words, if the U.S. doesn't stand up for liberal democracy against tyranny, tyrants will only be replaced by radicals who will most likely end up tyrants themselves and enemies of the U.S. While Donald Trump may not be the smartest guy in any room, I'd bet that he's never fallen for the neo idea that democracies never fight each other, much less the idea that ideas won the Cold War. His career as an international businessman probably has immunized him to dreams of global harmony while reinforcing the idea that competition is eternal. He probably doesn't stake American power on our being on the "right side of history" or any similar idea. That may be why his foreign policy has baffled most observers so far. It seems to have more to do with tests of will or strength than with promoting American ideals, while Trump may be learning on the job what American interests actually are. Only gradually will Trump, his diplomatic corps and his military advisers show whether they mean to interact with other nations, or the international community as a whole, any differently than their neo predecessors have. So far, the international community, with some isolated exceptions flattered by the President, doesn't like what they've seen, but we may not really have seen anything yet. For the moment Trump is stepping into to battles started by his predecessors. The real test of his foreign policy may be whether or not he starts something of his own.

The church-state playground

While most observers cared only to learn what the Supreme Court would do about the President's proposed restrictions on travel to the U.S., the high-court announced a historic decision today on an unrelated topic. In Trinity Lutheran v. Comer a 7-2 majority ruled that state governments could not discriminate against churches, but are required under certain circumstances to give money directly to them. The state of Missouri started the trouble by refusing Trinity Lutheran's request for public funding to resurface its playground. the Missouri constitution forbade the disbursement of public money to any house of worship. According to the majority on the court, Missouri unfairly denied Trinity Lutheran a government benefit to which it was entitled. According to the Chief Justice, that was "odious to our Constitution." The decision endangers similar laws in other states, collectively known as "Blaine Amendments," enacted during the 19th century and attributed in retrospect to anti-Catholic bigotry. The majority gave several opinions to make the implications of their decision uncertain. Some justices emphasize that states are not now required to subsidize religious activities, arguing only that churches can't be denied access to a state-funded playground repair program. Rookie justice Gorsuch, however, isn't so sure a clear line can be drawn separating a church's religious activities from  ostensibly non-religious activities like maintaining a playground. That he expressed this caveat while voting with the majority suggests that Gorsuch will have more to say on the separation of church and state down the line. The two dissenting justices, Ginsburg and Sotomayor, make no distinctions between religious and non-religious activities; if a church receives money from Missouri's playground fund, that state is supporting religion, period.

Writing the dissent, Sotomayor hints at another future battle by affirming that under the First Amendment, "the government cannot, or at the very least need not, tax its citizens and turn that money over to houses of worship." This is an argument that could easily cross conventional liberal-conservative or secular-religious lines: the Supreme Court has entitled Missouri churches unfairly to a benefit toward which they don't contribute. If people are going to complain about their precious taxpayer dollars going to other categories of deadbeats, shouldn't they protest now against their dollars going to churches? I imagine that even devout Americans would agree that churches should pay in for whatever they get out of government -- and if taxing churches became commonplace no one would worry about endangering their tax-exempt status by speaking from the pulpit on political questions. If discrimination due to religion is wrong, it should be no less wrong for state and federal governments to discriminate in favor of churches by exempting them from taxes than it is to discriminate against them by denying them taxpayer-funded benefits. If that line of argument doesn't persuade people to have churches taxes, maybe it'll persuade them to dissuade churches like Trinity Lutheran from stirring up trouble by asking for government handouts. Time will tell.

'Disruption is never restful'

George Will greets the impending battle between Walmart and Amazon to become what the New York Times calls "the predominant seller of pretty much everything you buy" with something like glee. For him, it'll be the climax of a dramatic cycle of creative destruction, the sort of thing that made America great. If you don't like the idea, Will likely sees you as part of the problem with America, just like most of the politicians, including the President. None of you get what's cool about this, but once again Will tries to explain it to us:

In the accelerated churning of today’s capitalism, changing tastes and expanding choices destroy some jobs and create others, with net gains in price and quality. But disruption is never restful, and the United States now faces a decision unique in its history: Is it tired — tired of the turmoil of creative destruction? If so, it had better be ready to do without creativity.

Notice how the "net gains" are taken for granted as a historical constant. Notice, too, that they are net gains by a consumerist standard, presuming that by "gains in price" Will means lower prices. And notice, while you're at it, the columnist's fatalistic assumption that all creativity is destructive, that steps can't be taken by a protectionist President or anyone else to preserve jobs without utterly extinguishing creativity. For Will, creativity is inherently competitive, and to question the pervasiveness and mercilessness of competition it to lobotomize the nation. "Americans just now are being plied with promises that the political class can, and is eager to, protect them from the need to make strenuous exertions to provide for themselves in an increasingly competitive world," he writes. To question the necessity of strenuous exertions dictated by economic competition is to question the natural -- that is, the spontaneous order, the "fecundity" of which is undermined by politicians or professors pretending to be "clever and farsighted enough to forecast the outcomes of complex systems." High up on his Hayekian hobby horse, Will writes that "The interacting processes that propel the world produce outcomes that no one intends." In effect, Will is telling us not to hold creatively destructive entrepreneurs, or competitors whose "creativity" consists entirely of cost-cutting, personally responsible for the human consequences of "disruption." All that activity is simply nature at work, while any attempt to regulate that activity for humane or patriotic purposes is just plain destructive -- and boring.

Recalling the poet Philip Larkin's line, "Most things are never meant," Will asks, "Who really wants to live in a society where outcomes are 'meant,' meaning planned and unsurprising?" He has a psychopath's enjoyment of "surprise," apparently, responding to the spectacle of creative destruction like lower-order moviegoers thrilling to Transformers wrecking cities. The desire for stability or security is not as contemptible as Will makes it out to be, so long as it isn't constrained by short-term thinking. Nor should either stability or security be confused with stasis, as Will would have us do. It would be wrong for politicians to tell us that we'll never need to make "strenuous exertions," but should we need to exert ourselves so, it should be for some better reason than that millions of people want to make more money. There is no law that I know of that says we have to adapt or die because The Market says so, yet Will regards the audacity of people saying no to The Market as akin to Stalin launching a Five-Year Plan, even though Stalinism itself could be described as a form of creative destruction. Whatever Friedrich Hayek actually thought, George Will is less interested in preventing a planned economy than in preempting protests against the economy. Like God, The Market for Will cannot be wrong, and it is heresy in his eyes for anyone to say otherwise. An aging prophet of The Market, Will stands ready to damn America for failing to heed his god.

Nothing special about these elections

The Democratic party is now 0-4 in special congressional elections since the inauguration of President Trump. Desperate to look like winners, the Dems invaded four Republican districts from which Trump elevated the incumbents into Cabinet positions or other federal posts, in the hope that a quickly unpopular president's coattails would drag the GOP nominees down to defeat. While all of these elections were closer than normal, in none were there enough Republicans willing to renounce their party to spite Trump. More to the point, in none were there enough Republicans willing to vote Democratic to spite Trump. They may be more confident that a Republican Congress can check Trump should he really go overboard, or they may just hate Democrats more. This losing streak actually makes the Democrats' situation look worse than it did in November. They've wasted incredible resources, including unprecedented millions in donors' money, on a set of Stalingrad like battles, obsessed with the prestige of turning a red district blue, in the hope that victory would prove that everyone sees Trump the way they do. As a result, they allow Trump to say that these elections were referenda on him, and that he won every time, when my suspicion is that they had relatively little to do with him. In some of these districts he ran well behind the congressional candidate last fall, and I doubt that many voters considered their choices in the special elections acts of loyalty to the President. The fact is that Trump with all his flaws does not give Republicans reason enough to repudiate everything they stand for by voting for a party still perceived to represent everything they oppose. All these races were longshots for the Democrats, and while I can understand their desire for a win, their faith that Trumpophobia was strong enough to win for them borders on the delusional. It seems as if they'd rather flip a red district than wait 'til next year and do the hard work necessary to win back their regular Rust Belt voters without alienating the rest of their base. There's still plenty of time to get to work on that, but an extra round or two of soul-searching may now be necessary. The opposition party in this country -- whether the Democrats or whatever might follow their crack-up -- has to mean more than opposition to Trump or opposition to "hate." This country needs a "left" to check a capitalist society's tendency toward plutocracy -- the Democrats have been sleeping on that job for some time now -- but it needs the right kind of left, and I don't know if anyone on the left has figured out what that looks like. I especially doubt if they'll find what it looks like in Republican congressional districts.