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“We Gave Up Asking The Astonished Questions ‘How Can They Say Or Do That?’ Some Time Ago”

December 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Nihilism is sometimes an end but more often a means.

Truth can be fuzzy and facts imprecise, but an honest pursuit of these precious goods allows for a basic decency, a sense of order. Bombard such efforts for an adequate length of time, convince enough people that veracity and reality are fully amorphous, and opportunities for mischief abound.

Break down the normal rules (written and unwritten ones), create an air of confusion with shocking behaviors and statements, blast an opening where anything is possible–even “unspeakable things”–and a democracy can fall and tyranny rise. The timing has to be right, but sooner or later that time will arrive.

Has such a moment come for America? The conditions haven’t been this ripe for at least 60 years, and nothing can now be taken for granted.

In an excellent Guardian opinion piece, Ece Temelkuran explains how Turkey became a post-truth state, a nation-sized mirage, and how the same fate may befall Europe and the U.S. She certainly shares my concerns about the almost non-stop use of the world “elites” to neutralize the righteous into paralysis. An excerpt:

This refashioning of a post-truth, post-fact Turkey has not happened overnight. The process has involved the skilful and wilful manipulation of narratives. We gave up asking the astonished questions “How can they say or do that?” some time ago. Truth is a lost game in my country. In Europe and America, you still have time to rescue it – but you must learn from Turkey how easily it can be lost.

It started 15 years ago, with a phenomenon that will now be familiar to you, when intellectuals and journalists reacted to a nascent populism with the self-critical question: “Are we out of touch?” To counter that possibility, they widened the parameters of public debate to include those who were said to be representatives of “real people”. We thought our own tool, the ability to question and establish truth, would be adequate to keep the discourse safe. It wasn’t. Soon we were paralysed by the lies of populism, which always sounded more attractive than our boring facts.

We found, as you are now finding, that the new truth-building process does not require facts or the underpinning of agreed values. We were confronted – as you are being confronted – by a toxic vocabulary: “elite”, “experts”, “real people” and “alienated intellectuals”. The elite, with experts as mouthpieces of that oppressive elite, were portrayed as people detached from society, willing to suppress the needs, choices and beliefs of “real people”.

Events moved quickly.•

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“The Slow And Gradual Nature Of Populist-Fueled Democratic Backsliding Is Difficult To Counter”

December 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

If we are hollow men (and women), American liberty, that admittedly unevenly distributed thing, may be over after 240 years. And it could very well end not with a bang but a whimper.

Those waiting for the moment when autocracy topples the normal order of things are too late. Election Day was that time. It’s not guaranteed that the nation transforms into 1930s Europe or that we definitely descend into tyranny, but the conditions have never been more favorable in modern times for the U.S. to capitulate to autocracy. The creeps are in office, and the creeping will be a gradual process. Don’t wait for an explosion; we’re living in its wake.

From “How Democracies Fall Apart,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz’s smart Foreign Affairs article on the illiberal impulse going viral:

Post–Cold War populists such as Chávez, Putin, and Erdogan took a slow and steady approach to dismantling democracy. These leaders first come to power through democratic elections and subsequently harness widespread discontent to gradually undermine institutional constraints on their rule, marginalize the opposition, and erode civil society. The playbook is consistent and straightforward: deliberately install loyalists in key positions of power (particularly in the judiciary and security services) and neutralize the media by buying it, legislating against it, and enforcing censorship. This strategy makes it hard to discern when the break with democracy actually occurs, and its insidiousness poses one of the most significant threats to democracy in the twenty-first century.

The steady dismantling of democratic norms and practices by democratically elected leaders, what we call “authoritarianization,” marks a significant change in the way that democracies have historically fallen apart. Data on authoritarian regimes show that until recently, coups have been the primary threats to democracy. From 1946 to 1999, 64 percent of democracies failed because of such insurgencies. In the last decade, however, populist-fueled authoritarianization has been on the rise, accounting for 40 percent of all democratic failures between 2000 and 2010 and matching coups in frequency. If current trends persist, populist-fueled authoritarianization will soon become the most common pathway to autocracy.

Even more disheartening, the slow and gradual nature of populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter. Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce.•

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“[It Seems] To Have Been A Shrewd Dog Whistle To A Small But Highly Motivated Part Of His Base”

December 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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While Nero twitters, Rome burns.

There are varyng levels of exasperation about what became possible with the election of Donald Trump, an orange supremacist who waves his penis around like a masturbating Mussolini and exchanges compliments with the murderous kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, making it feel like America has retroactively lost WWII as well as the Cold War. 

Even if we avoid a descent into autocracy and the future doesn’t play out like an infomercial for internment camps (both possibilities), we’re still headed for trouble. Three quick excerpts about the personality, economics and politics of the wholly unqualified hatemonger 62+ million Americans deemed worthy of their vote.

From Garrison Keillor:

He will never be my president because he doesn’t read books, can’t write more than a sentence or two at a time, has no strong loyalties beyond himself, is more insular than any New Yorker I ever knew, and because I don’t see anything admirable or honorable about him. This sets him apart from other politicians. The disaffected white blue-collar workers elected a Fifth Avenue tycoon to rescue them from the elitists — fine, I get that — but they could’ve chosen a better tycoon. One who served in the military or attends church or reads history, loves opera, sails a boat — something — anything — raises llamas, plays the oboe, runs a 5K race now and then, has close friends from childhood. I look at him and there’s nothing there.•

From Lawrence Summers on the Carrier deal:

It seems to me what we have just witnessed is an act of ad hoc deal capitalism and, worse yet, its celebration as a model. As with the air traffic controllers, only a negligible sliver of the economy is involved, but there is huge symbolic value. A principle is being established: It is good for the president to try to figure out what people want and lean on companies to give it to them. Predictability and procedure are less important than getting the right result at the right time. Like Hong Kong, as mainland China increasingly imposes its will, we may have taken a first step toward a kind of reverse transition from rule of law capitalism to ad hoc deal-based capitalism.

The commentary on the president-elect’s actions has emphasized its novelty, has emphasized the difficulties of scaling, and in the case of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has argued that the actions taken were insufficiently forceful because some workers will still be relocated to Mexico. All of this misses the point. Presidents have enormous latent power, and it is the custom of restraint in its use that is one of the important differences between us and banana republics. If its ad hoc use is licensed, the possibilities are endless.•

From Alan Feuer and Andrew Higgins of the NYT:

As the founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, an American group that aims to preserve the privileged place of whiteness in Western civilization and fight “anti-Christian degeneracy,” Matthew Heimbachknows whom he envisions as the ideal ruler: the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Russia is our biggest inspiration,” Mr. Heimbach said. “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.”

Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump mystified many on the left and in the foreign policy establishment with his praise for Mr. Putin and his criticism of the Obama administration’s efforts to isolate and punish Russia for its actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But what seemed inexplicable when Mr. Trump first expressed his admiration for the Russian leader seems, in retrospect, to have been a shrewd dog whistle to a small but highly motivated part of his base.

For Mr. Heimbach is far from alone in his esteem for Mr. Putin. Throughout the collection of white ethnocentrists, nationalists, populists and neo-Nazis that has taken root on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Putin is widely revered as a kind of white knight: a symbol of strength, racial purity and traditional Christian values in a world under threat from Islam, immigrants and rootless cosmopolitan elites.•

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“Charismatic Authoritarians Seeking Political Office Cannot Be Understood Through The Framework Of Traditional Politics”

December 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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As I’ve noted many times, Benito Mussolini is the truest historical analog for Donald Trump, each of them a vulgar, unhinged clown not taken seriously until too late. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re precisely the same nor are their milieus. We can’t prepare for the future by expecting it to be identical to the past, though it can teach plenty  

In “An American Authoritarian,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s smart Atlantic essay, the writer explores the similarities and differences between the two buffoonish, dangerous figures. Early in the piece, she writes that “Trump is not a Fascist. He does not aim to establish a one-party state.” That may be true in form but perhaps not in function. I wonder if he intends to use the office of the President and the loyalists he appoints to create a de facto one-party system even if the ornaments of the traditional arrangement remain. Also: Believing an aspiring autocrat’s more soothing words is usually a mistake. Mussolini boasted in the early 1920s that Italy’s free press was the envy of the world, and a decade later he was dictating front-page stories to newspapers at the point of a Carcano. When it comes to tyrants (and ones with those aspirations), believe the threats and doubt the rest.

An excerpt:

A century before Trump, Benito Mussolini burst onto the Italian political scene, confounding the country’s political establishment with his unorthodox doctrine and tactics and his outsized personality. Mussolini’s rise offers lessons for understanding the Trump phenomenon—and why he was able to disarm much of the American political class.

Many Italians did not know what to make of Mussolini when the former Socialist founded Fascism as an “anti-party” on the heels of World War I. His was an outsider movement, born from the conviction that the establishment parties—along with the political systems they represented, liberalism and socialism—were broken or posed a grave threat to Italy.

A mercurial hothead, Mussolini reveled in his role as a political disrupter. His crisis-mongering platforms contained a confusing blend of socialist and nationalist tenets, trafficking in contradiction and paradox, the better to challenge traditional ideas about politics. “Does Fascism aim at restoring the State, or subverting it? Is it order or disorder?” he taunted Italians in print six months before he took over as prime minister.

His grassroots followers spoke more directly, terrorizing Italy’s hinterland as a prelude to claiming control. Taking Mussolini’s incendiary rhetoric to heart, his blackshirts beat and executed thousands of political opponents—including priests—at rallies and on trains, in shops, schools, and taverns. Everyday violence primed the country for an exceptional outcome: In 1922, Mussolini staged a march on Rome and demanded the post of prime minister from the terrified king.

Italians learned in the 1920s what Americans are learning in 2016: Charismatic authoritarians seeking political office cannot be understood through the framework of traditional politics. They lack interest in, and patience for, established protocols. They often trust few outside of their own families, or those they already control, making collaboration and relationship building difficult. They work from a different playbook, and so must those who intend to confront them.•

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“It Will Not Be Pretty”

November 28, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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“He must be taken seriously,” Edward Luce wrote in the Financial Times in December 2015 of Donald Trump, as the anti-politician trolled the whole of America with his Penthouse-Apartment Pinochet routine, which seems to have been more genuine than many realized.

Like most, the columnist believed several months earlier that the Reality TV Torquemada was headed for a crash, though he rightly surmised the demons Trump had so gleefully and opportunistically awakened, the vengeful pangs of those who longed to Make America Great White Again, were not likely to dissipate.

But the dice were kind to the casino killer, and a string of accidents and incidents enabled Trump and the mob he riled to score enough Electoral College votes to turn the country, and world, upside down. It’s such an unforced error, one which makes Brexit seem a mere trifle, that it feels like we’ve permanently surrendered something essential about the U.S., that more than an era has ended.

In “Goodbye to Barack Obama’s World,” Luce looks forward for America and the whole globe and sees possibilities that are downright ugly. An excerpt:

One of Mr Obama’s core traits is to believe that reason governs how people act. It is the perennial failing of liberal technocrats to suppose human affairs are settled by rational argument. When people failed to see the merits of the case — whether Republican legislators, or foreign leaders — Mr Obama would retreat into injured silence. The world has been a disappointment to Mr Obama. When Vladimir Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, John Kerry, the outgoing secretary of state, said: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in a 19th-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.” But that is how the world often operates. The US had done just that to Iraq in the 21st century.

America tends to choose presidents whose personalities are the opposite of their predecessors. Mr Obama, the reasoner, replaced Bush the decider. Mr Trump is a pure bluffer. Much like one of his property deals, Mr Trump will cajole, bully, flatter, and bribe whomever he is dealing with. When he fails — which he surely must — he will declare it a success and divert people’s attention. That is what his outrageous tweets are about. When people tell the truth about him, he will call them liars. When they praise him, he will call them geniuses. When a crisis strikes, he will gamble from the gut. Buyers’ remorse will grip the US public. Mr Obama’s post-presidential approval ratings are likely to stay up.

But Mr Trump will not reverse America’s relative decline. The chances are he will drastically accelerate it. The global role that Mr Obama inherited — and tried, to some degree, to uphold — is now in tatters. It would be hard to overstate the epochal significance of Mr Trump’s election. The US-led international order as we knew it for 70 years is over. The era of great power politics is back. An ebullient Russia, led by the strongman Putin, and an increasingly confident China, led by the strongman Xi Jinping, will deal with a wounded America led by strongman Trump. The long-term trajectory is towards China. But the short-term drama will focus on Mr Trump’s dealings with Mr Putin. How they play out is anybody’s guess. But it will not be pretty. Europe will be the loser. So too will American prestige.•

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“A Trump Presidency Might Change Our Common Conception Of What It Means To Be American”

November 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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In a New Yorker comment piece, Amy Davidson runs through the myriad conflicts of interest and questionable ethics of the professional controversialist about to become our next President, ultimately speaking to the most important if amorphous concern: The mere fact that a demagogue who undermines democracy at each turn was elected could alter what it means to be American.

The writer maintains hope that both sides of the aisle will work to thwart this Simon Cowell-ish strongman, though I wonder if Trump will take much heat from the GOP as long as he’s useful in advancing a conservative agenda.

My bigger-picture concern, though, is that even before the Administration commences, just the very election of such an illiberal provocateur may have caused America to cease being what it was, a very imperfect place that reliably pulled itself from the brink of disaster because of underlying good intentions. No, November 2016 is certainly not as terrible as the time of slavery or the Jim Crow South or Japanese-American internment, but even during those dark moments we held dearly to our central principles even if we were blind and horrible in our distribution of them. Now it feels like something essential has been sacrificed because we willfully opted for evil at a moment when we should have known better and been better. It announced itself loudly and we ushered it inside.

An excerpt:

More important than all these concerns is the way that a Trump Presidency might change our common conception of what it means to be American. In addition to naming [Jeff] Sessions, Trump has chosen a chief strategist who has retailed alt-right rhetoric, a national-security adviser who tweeted out a video presenting reasons to fear Islam, and a C.I.A. director who has called for the execution of Edward Snowden. And this is in a time of relative peace. Where Trump’s instinct for blame and diversion would take him and the country during an emergency—a terrorist attack, for example—is an unpleasant question to contemplate. This is why many people voted for Clinton rather than for Trump. But he won, so what do they do now?

Trump has a shot at being the century’s worst President, but Americans are not in the worst position they have ever been in from which to confront him. We’ve been more economically desperate; we’ve been, in terms of the breadth of the franchise, less free. In the Trump Presidency, as in all Administrations, there will be political fights that define the course of events. There are constitutional tools available, but only if people in both parties, inside and outside of government, are willing to use them—to sustain a sense of non-Trump possibility.♦

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“No Sane American Leader Would Choose Confrontation With China”

November 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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James Fallows wrote these words for the Atlantic just prior to the American election: “What if China is going bad?” Now that we know the U.S. has headed boldly in that direction, the question becomes more pressing.

The journalist is moving forward the “Thucydides Trap” argument made by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who believes insurgent powers and entrenched ones are apt to engage in war despite how little sense such clashes make. Now that the world’s greatest superpower has installed a sociopath in the Oval Office and China’s Xi Jinping works through his own “small hands” complex by ratcheting up authoritarianism, who knows where the tensions will lead?

An excerpt:

The paradoxical combination of insecurity and aggressiveness is hardly confined to China. The United States has all too many examples in its own politics. But this paradox on a national-strategic scale for China matched what many people told me about Xi himself as a leader: The more uncertain he feels about China’s diplomatic and economic position in the world, and the more grumbling he hears about his ongoing crackdown, the more “decisively” he is likely to act. “Xi is a weak man who wants to look strong,” a foreign businessman who has worked in China for many years told me. “He is the son of a famous father [Xi Zhongxun, who fought alongside Mao as a guerrilla and became an important Communist leader] and wants to prove he is worthy of the name. As we’ve seen in other cultures, this can be a dangerous mix.” Ten years ago, when I visited a defense-oriented think tank in Beijing, I was startled to see a gigantic wall map showing U.S.-affiliated encampments and weapons on every Chinese frontier except the one bordering Russia. I came to understand that the graphic prominence of the U.S. military reflected a fairly widespread suspicion that the United States wishes China ill, is threatened by its rise, and does not want to see China succeed. Almost no one I spoke with recently, however, foresaw a realistic danger of a shooting war between China and the United States or any of its allies—including the frequently discussed scenario of an unintentional naval or aerial encounter in the South China Sea. Through the past few years, in fact, U.S. military officials, led by the Navy, have engaged their People’s Liberation Army counterparts in meetings, conferences, and exercises, precisely to lessen the risk of war by miscalculation. “Naval forces are actually pretty good at de-escalating and steering out of one another’s way,” a senior U.S. Navy officer told me.

The concern about a more internationally aggressive China involves not a reprise of the Soviet Union during the tensest Cold War years but rather a much bigger version of today’s Russia. That is: an impediment rather than an asset in many of the economic and strategic projects the United States would like to advance. An example of kleptocracy and personalized rule. A power that sometimes seems to define its interests by leaning toward whatever will be troublesome for the United States. An actual adversary, not just a difficult partner. China is challenging in many ways now, and increasingly repressive, but things could get worse. And all of this is separate from the effect on China’s own people, and on the limits it is placing on its academic, scientific, commercial, and cultural achievements by cutting itself off from the world.

What is to be done? The next president will face a quandary often called the “Thucydides Trap.” This concept was popularized by the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison. Its premise is that through the 2,500 years since the Peloponnesian warfare that Thucydides chronicled, rising powers (like Athens then, or China now) and incumbent powers (like Sparta, or the United States) have usually ended up in a fight to the death, mainly because each cannot help playing on the worst fears of the other. “When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen,” Allison wrote in an essay for TheAtlantic.com last year.

No sane American leader would choose confrontation with China.•

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“I Don’t Think Obama Is Convinced Of His Own Language Of Hope”

November 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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David Remnick has as ably as any journalist met the considerable challenge of analyzing the stunning election to our highest office of a cartoonish Reality TV star who is clearly unprepared for the position, and one who throughout the campaign acted as a Berlusconi aiming to be a Mussolini. Before most of us had closed our laptops on Election Night, the New Yorker EIC had already penned a piece warning that the press would soon normalize this Bull Connor as a condo salesman, who had alternated dog whistles and dog bites to activate our absolute worst nationalistic impulses. The commentary hit the mark as “normalization” has become a recurring phrase of the post-election scrum, and that can’t hurt, though 61.2 million votes and counting says a significant part of the electorate has already deemed acceptable Trump’s vulgar, fascistic stylings. Remnick also penned a heartbreaking piece about the improbable end to the Administration of President Obama, perhaps, at least until now, the truest believer of us all. 

The editor just conducted a Reddit Ask Me Anything. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

Your article the day after the election scared the hell out of me (it was great, but depressing). Has Trump’s somewhat milder behavior in the ensuing weeks changed your mind any or are we doomed? Also, some people are saying Trump is using Twitter in a genius fashion to direct people away from his real scandals? could he really be that smartly manipulative?

David Remnick:

Milder? Hmmm. The appointments of Mr. Bannon, Senator Sessions, and Gen. Flynn hardly seem “mild” to me. As for his use of Twitter, it doesn’t evoke confidence in me. I’m not really sure the best use of a President-elect’s time at 2 AM is to rant about SNL or a polite dissent on the stage of Hamilton. But I admit it sure was an effective tool during the campaign. Effective and deeply worrying…

Question:

Why do you think Hillary lost?

David Remnick:

I think I get the impulse behind the question. No, she did not lose the popular vote. But we live in the system we live in—and the Electoral College persists. Alas. But it persists. And were there, to put it politely, “irregularities”? Well, starting with the DNC hack courtesy of Russian hackers and WikiLeaks…..that seems pretty damn irregular to me.

Question:

Do you think that Trump will repeal Obamacare? Would that be a good or a bad thing?

David Remnick:

I don’t think he will—or not completely. Once people have a benefit, a boon to their lives, that they did not have before, they are loath to give it up. Twenty million people have health care who didn’t have it before. So, start with that….Does Trump want to take that away? I bet not, and he has already said as much.

Question:

As a keen historian of the Soviet Union and Russia, do you find the coming Trump administration problematic in regards to handling Putin?

David Remnick:

jWell, yes. It seems pretty clear that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump over Clinton; we also hear that American intelligence is convinced that Russian hackers worked in that quest, beginning with the hack of the DNC. Putin clearly wants a weaker, more chaotic, more pliable figure at the top. And he appears to have gotten his wish.

Question:

What are the most important steps that the press can take to help safeguard American civil rights in the new political climate?

David Remnick:

We should do our jobs—write and broadcast fairly, rigorously, and fearlessly. That is a good start. And we can get out into the country more deeply, and into the world more widely. And that is, I know, a hard thing in an era of cost-cutting. But it is absolutely necessary.

Question:

How do you think history will remember Obama?

David Remnick:

Kindly. His Administration made the hard decisions to rescue a failing economy; got as close to universal health care as it is politically possible to get; embodied a level of tolerance never seen before in the White House; went eight years without scandal; etc etc

Question:

Were you personally reassured by President Obama’s answers and demeanor in the conversations you had with him after election day?

David Remnick:

Not entirely, no. And I don’t think Obama is convinced of his own language of hope. He is, after all, playing a role: the assuring still-in-office President, who is hoping against hope that Trump will be less bad than feared. We shall see.•

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“American Politics Is Always Somewhat Fluid”

November 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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This election revealed an evil that existed deep in the hearts of enough people, ill feelings previously stilled by expectations of civility. It was unloosed by the most disgraceful political campaign in modern times, one steeped in bigotry, hatred and disrespect. It’s like a good deal of white people, especially older ones, realized they could no longer control the world around them and decided freedom wasn’t for them–or at least for others–as if our constitution were a toy to be taken from disobedient children.

President Obama, a master of understatement, explains in a Q&A with Spiegel/ARD, that he feels the changes to our country revealed by this close election may be overstated. Except, wow, not. There’s no modern parallel to what just happened, when a candidate openly espousing white nationalistic memes and dancing like a vulgar, fascistic clown, was able to not only come close but win. Maybe the the citizenry wakes up in due time and we become America again, but it’s hard to take the long view on this one.

The opening of the interview conducted by Klaus Brinkbäumer and Sonia Seymour Mikich:

Question:

Mr. President, Donald Trump won the election, revealing massive discontent and rifts within American society. Did the amount of anger actually surprise you?

President Obama:

I think it’s important not to overstate what happened. The truth is that America has been closely divided politically for quite some time. That was reflected in some of the challenges I had with the Republican Congress. What was unusual in this election is that my approval in the United States is as high as it has been since I was elected. And the economy is going relatively well. I think what is true is that there’s been an underlying division in the United States. Some of it has to do with the fact that economic growth and recovery tends to be stronger in the cities and in urban areas. In some rural areas, particularly those that were reliant on manufacturing, there has been weaker growth, stagnation, people feeling as if their children won’t do as well as they will.

There are cultural, social and demographic issues that came into play. They’re not that different from some of the issues that Europe faces with immigration, the changing face of the American population. I think some reacted there, and Trump was able to tap into some of those anxieties. 

American politics is always somewhat fluid. In this age of social media, it means that voters can swing back and forth. I mean, there were probably millions of voters who voted for me and supported me and this time also voted for Donald Trump, and it just indicates that some of this is less ideological and more just an impulse towards some sort of change.•

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“All Is Not Lost, But The Situation Is Genuinely Quite Grave”

November 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Wrote several times before the election that a landslide Trump loss at the polls on Election Day would be a death in the gutter for the contemporary GOP, but that America itself would slip from the curb if it somehow chose a bigoted, fascistic clown. Sadly, the latter has occurred.

It’s not that the country hasn’t flirted with such things in the last century. The 1930s were a time when some U.S. titans of industry spoke openly and admiringly of Mussolini, even Hitler, for being autocrats who could reign in their citizens and produce a pliant workforce. Not even World War II completely quelled that madness. In 1946, just a year after the Allies defeated the Axis, thousands of citizens attended a Madison Square Garden rally that urged the revival of Nazism. There have until now always been enough good, informed, sane people to pull us from the precipice.

Not that we were ever saints free of large-scale atrocities or institutional prejudice, but there was a belief among many of us that “a more perfect union” was what we were genuinely moving toward. Even those who didn’t feel we were living in a “post-racial society” after President Obama’s election may be shocked to learn that there was this degree of hatred right below the surface just waiting to be activated. Trump gave it license, speaking and acting disgracefully as he did, awakening a monster. This election may have also been about economics and other matters, but it mostly about an amoral opportunist activating the worst in us. 

That’s not to say the new Administration will convert America into a Putin-level autocracy, but a cadre of mediocre, sociopathic, bigoted wingnuts can lawfully cause no small manner of mayhem. And that’s really the best-case scenario. Many people could end up dying long before they should because of our political descent. Things can get ugly, the gloves coming off. You might still think that good will prevail and our liberties preserved, but does anybody really know that or anything else anymore? No matter how events unfold, we can never rest again believing that the worst can’t be realized. That dream is over.

It can happen here. It did. 

From Matthew Yglesias at Vox:

Many American administrations have featured acts of venal corruption, and Trump’s will likely feature more than most. The larger risk, however, is that Trump’s lack of grounding in ideological principles or party networks will create a systemically corrupt government. Such governments, Wallis writes, “are rent creating, not rent seeking, governments” that operate by “limiting access to markets and resources in order to create rents that bind the interests of the ruling coalition together.”

This is how Vladimir Putin governs Russia, and how the Mubarak/Sisi regime rules Egypt. To be a successful businessman in a systemically corrupt regime and to be a close supporter of the regime are one and the same thing.

Those who support the regime will receive favorable treatment from regulators, and those who oppose it will not. Because businesses do business with each other, the network becomes self-reinforcing. Regime-friendly banks receive a light regulatory touch while their rivals are crushed. In exchange, they offer friendly lending terms to regime-friendly businesses while choking capital to rivals. Such a system, once in place, is extremely difficult to dislodge precisely because, unlike a fascist or communist regime, it is glued together by no ideology beyond basic human greed, insecurity, and love of family.

All is not lost, but the situation is genuinely quite grave. As attention focuses on transition gossip and congressional machinations, it’s important not to let our eyes off the ball. It is entirely possible that eight years from now we’ll be looking at an entrenched kleptocracy preparing to install a chosen successor whose only real mission is to preserve the web of parasitical oligarchy that has replaced the federal government as we know it. One can, of course, always hope that the worst does not come to pass. But hope is not a plan. And while the impulse to “wait and see” what really happens is understandable, the cold, hard reality is that the most crucial decisions will be the early ones.

Trump’s first 100 days could also be the last 100 days in which America’s system of republican government can be saved.•

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“Believe The Autocrat”

November 15, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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For many of us the idea of a tyrant in the White House is unthinkable, but for some that’s all they can think about. These aren’t genuinely struggling folks in the Rust Belt whose dreams have been foreclosed on by the death rattle of the Industrial Age and made a terrible decision that will only deepen their wounds, but a large number of citizens with fairly secure lifestyles who want to unleash their fury on a world not entirely their own anymore.

I was in a coffee shop in New Jersey yesterday (not in a downtrodden area) and listened to a casually dressed man in his sixties have a loud phone conversation about the incoming Trump Administration. He laughed gleefully as he talked about how the new President would crush the protesters, jail journalists and chase Mexicans and Muslims from the nation at gunpoint. There were sexist obscenities hurled at Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and also Katy Perry, who supported the Democratic nominee. He didn’t seem to be a computer-friendly Facebook user but a likely Limbaugh listener who wanted to Make America White Again. You could say this was an isolated incident, but I had conversations with hundreds of Trump supporters over the last year from the Tri-State area and Florida, people with decent jobs or good pensions, who expressed the same. They wanted to roll back the advances of women and people of color and “stand up for white people,” hoping to somehow silence or imprison a reality that now seems foreign to them. That doesn’t take a village but an autocrat.

In “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” an excellent New York Review of Books essay by Masha Gessen, the writer addresses the spooky parallels between Russia and this new U.S., as we begin what looks to be a Trump-Putin bromance. An excerpt:

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.•

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“A Host Of Taxes That Affect Only The Very Richest Americans May Be Eliminated”

November 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In the hours after Donald Trump’s heartbreaking victory, many liberal talking heads and talk-show hosts urged all Americans to “work with” a President-Elect who degraded Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, women, disabled people, POWs and threatened mass deportation and the building of a wall. That advice was stupid. 

They somehow thought he was only bullshitting long enough to get into the White House and then would moderate, but as 2016 wore on, you had to be a fool to think so. Now that the Breitbart anti-Semite and white supremacist Steve Bannon has been named Chief Strategist, let’s hope there’ll be an abrupt end to all this ridiculous conciliatory nonsense from liberals who seem to not get that this isn’t business as usual. Opposition is the only option if you believe in America as a beacon of the world and one that ensures justice for all.

Trump actually is going to break some of his promises, the ones regarding ending crony capitalism. Every venal right-winger is going to have his or her (but mostly his) hand in the till. You can’t “drain the swamp” when you’re campaign has been aided and abetted by all manner of sea monsters.

But he is going to keep most of his other promises: altering tax codes to benefit the already wealthy, harassing and hampering women and immigrants and all shades of non-white people and besieging basic freedoms of speech, assembly and the press. U.S. citizens have been bamboozled before, but this may be the big con to beat all. Nothing in my lifetime has brought us closer to large-scale failure.

Paul Sullivan’s New York Times article examines the new Administration’s aim to enrich those who least need it and further exacerbate wealth inequality, writing that “Mr. Trump’s estate tax plan seems tailored for someone like himself.” Anyone impressed by the President-Elect’s vow to not accept a salary should think about that. The opening:

If Donald J. Trump follows through on his campaign promises, a host of taxes that affect only the very richest Americans may be eliminated, along with almost all tax incentives to be philanthropic. As a result, wealthy families may find it much easier to amass dynastic levels of wealth.

At the top of the list is the estate tax. Currently, the rules are straightforward: A married couple is exempt for the first $10.9 million in their estate, and they pay a 40 percent tax on the amount above that.

Mr. Trump’s campaign proposal seems straightforward: Repeal the estate tax — the death tax, in his words. …

The Trump plan, as some attorneys and accountants have read it, would allow the wealthiest heirs to never pay capital gains taxes if they did not sell what they inherited. This would be difficult for those with a modest inheritance because they generally sell and spend what they get. But it might not be for people with a large inheritance, like Mr. Trump’s children, who would receive a portfolio of income-producing real estate and golf courses, which they could borrow against and never sell.•

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“[It] Will Not Cover The Most Important Projects”

November 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Shaping a turd into a circle and poking a hole in the center does not make a donut. Some who otherwise abhor Donald Trump are still enamored with his pledge to rebuild infrastructure, a very necessary priority, but they’re neglecting to notice the details of his plan reveal a cruller made of crap.

President Obama noted recently in a Carnegie Mellon address that the government is here to do the hard, unglamorous, unprofitable work that private enterprise wants no part of, “dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.” The Trump plan, however, will neglect the tough jobs that could pay off long-term dividends (e.g., repairing highways, modernizing schools, etc.), instead being a windfall for a few without a return for the many.

From Lawrence Summers at the Financial Times:

I have long been a strong advocate of debt-financed public investment in the context of low interest rates and a decaying US infrastructure, so I was glad to see Mr Trump emphasise it. Unfortunately, the plan presented by his advisers, Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross, suggests an approach based on tax credits for equity investment and total private sector participation that will not cover the most important projects, not reach many of the most important investors, and involve substantial mis-targeting of public resources.

Many of the highest return infrastructure investments — such as improving roads, repairing 60,000 structurally deficient bridges, upgrading schools or modernising the air traffic control system — do not generate a commercial return and so are excluded from his plan. Nor can the non-taxable pension funds, endowments and sovereign wealth funds that are the most promising sources of capital for infrastructure take advantage of the program.

I am optimistic regarding the efficacy of fiscal expansion. But any responsible economist has to recognise that, past a point, it can lead to some combination of excessive foreign borrowing, inflation and even financial crisis. As Dornbusch showed, in emerging markets this can happen quite quickly. In the US the process would take longer.

Even without taking account of the likely costs of the infrastructure plan (which the Trump team badly underestimates) or the proposed defence build-up, the Trump tax reform proposals are too expensive. Many, like the proposed abolition of the estate tax, will only benefit the high-saving wealthy.•

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“These Actions Affect Hundreds Of Thousands Of Workers”

November 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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If you’re wealthy and amoral like, say, Peter Thiel, then you should be fine during a Trump Administration. But if you’re a working-class person who’s benefited from President Obama’s executive orders on Labor, oh well. It’s funny we experienced a backlash against “elites” (if that’s what it was) the year after U.S. middle-income earners had the biggest spike in household income in 50 years. That’s because 2016 was about Identity Politics, not economics, but as Karl Rove used to say, elections have consequences. The ones who went for it are the same ones who fell for the “Family Values” crap that neither Newt Gingrich nor Rove cared about. They just wanted power to further loot a corrupt system. That’s about to happen again, and a painful number of Americans are going to feel like Trump University graduates.

From Laura Clawson at Daily Kos:

With Donald Trump having vowed to, on his very first day in office, repeal every executive order President Obama has signed, let’s take a look at some of what that means. Obviously, Obama’s immigration actions are on the chopping block. But Obama has also made a number of moves to make workers’ lives better, which we can also wave good-bye to. 

The orders apply to workers at companies with federal contracts—if a company wants federal money, it might have to live up to a slightly higher standard than otherwise. Obama signed a $10.10 minimum wage for federal contract workers. And an order against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. And an expansion of equal pay protections. And paid sick leave. And a ban on labor law violators getting federal contracts—because, come on, if a company actually breaks the law, it really shouldn’t get federal money. These actions affect—or affected, or would have affected—hundreds of thousands of workers.•

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Not Clear How It Will End, But Right Now Hillary Clinton Leads The Popular Vote By About 170,000

November 9, 2016 in Politics | Permalink

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“Franken, Who Is Jewish, Said He Immediately Was Struck By What He Called ‘A German Shepherd Whistle'”

November 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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In most of the world, radical politics is a result of bad times. In America, that’s not so.

In 2000, when we had an abundance of peace and prosperity, the country decided to change course, electing George W. Bush, an affable man clearly overmatched by the job. He was surrounded by hacks and butchers who gave us a needless war in Iraq which destabilized the region, as well as waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and the Patriot Act.

No lessons were learned. After a surprisingly quick recovery from a calamitous economic collapse in 2008, America is on the rise again, though that’s not often mentioned. Not only have jobs been added at a steady pace, but household income for the middle-class and impoverished rose in 2015 at a rate that hasn’t been seen in five decades. Nearly 92% of citizens have health insurance today. We’ve taken a global leadership position in the fight against climate change, and with the proper investment and immigration policies, we stand to be one of the big winners in alternative energies, space exploration, medical science and AI. All of this has transpired while civil rights among minority groups has rushed forward without violent conflict.

Donald Trump, it has been said, is a backlash against not only these gains by minorities but also the collapse of the Industrial Age, but the numbers don’t support that latter contention. His supporters aren’t mostly those squeezed from factories–many are doing quite well–but those who wish to return to a time of superior standing by white males. The GOP nominee has no talent for governance and would be a disastrous leader for the nation. He’s guilty of almost every evil he’s accused others of because, as often is the case, the last one who should talk is the one who talks. Trump’s a singularly sociopathic bully who’s been buoyed by the ugliest identity politics imaginable, not economic concerns.

There are other reasons for this brutal campaign season. Our new tools haven’t fostered a better society, as was promised, but instead destabilized what we had, which was pretty great. These technologies allowed us to disappear into echo chambers and confirm our worst impulses. The blurring of news and entertainment has also laid us low, and that extends far beyond alt-right websites and Sean Hannity. CNN, Jeff Zucker’s clown car of infotainment, enabled Trump’s awful ascent, using it as cheap content during those vital early months. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times also initially treated Trump as a laugh riot, portraying him as a slightly irreverent uncle rather than someone who’d belittled Mexicans as rapists and African-Americans as inherently lazy. 

It wasn’t just media people who helped Trump, because it takes a village to undermine an essentially stable democracy. Political and business figures from James Baker to Peter Thiel to Rudy Giuliani have tried their damnedest to slide the nuclear codes and Constitution into the pocket of this miserable, moronic Morton Downey Jr. character. His rise is their fall. This doesn’t even get into Russian hacking, Wikileaks and the eleventh-hour shenanigans of the FBI, stories which will unfold for years.

But mostly you have to put the political surge of the hideous hotelier on the people. Regardless of how the election swings on Tuesday, who would have guessed there were so many among us who wanted to make the nation white again, just waiting for a monster, a Berlusconi who dreams of being a Mussolini, to activate them? America is a great idea, but it’s no better than its citizens at any given moment, and the Constitution can be torn into pieces even by a despot with particularly short fingers.

In his last act before Election Day, Trump released a final missive from the troubled, paranoid mind of Steve Bannon, a TV ad that seems, unsurprisingly, bigoted. From Ed Pilkington in the Guardian:

The Democratic senator for Minnesota, Al Franken, has accused Donald Trump of launching an antisemitic TV advertisement along the lines of the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Franken, who is Jewish, said he immediately was struck by what he called “a German shepherd whistle, a dog whistle” in a new two-minute advert from the Trump campaign, launched as the countdown to Tuesday’s election intensifies.

The film features lurid shots of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve interspersed with images of three prominent Jewish people: Janet Yellen, who chairs the Fed, the progressive financier George Soros and the Goldman Sachs chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein.

“The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election,” Trump is heard saying in the advert. “For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind.”

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Franken told host Jake Tapper the advert was acting as a “dog whistle to a certain group in the United States”. He called the political commercial “an appeal to some of the worse elements in our society in the closing argument” of the election.•

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“Trump Staged A Hostile Takeover Of The Republican Party”

October 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump’s Presidential aspirations are a push of the flushometer from disappearing down the vortex, but the stench will likely linger, for all of us but especially for the Republican Party.

Even without the burden of being fronted by the orange supremacist, the GOP is a dysfunctional mess, now openly discussing blocking the Supreme Court nominees of a potential Hillary Clinton Administration, but Trump’s resistance to playing nice, part of what catapulted the hideous hotelier to political success, threatens to salt the earth for Republicans. In 2016, we’ve witnessed an extreme example of identity politics, and it would seem those on the right who identify with Trump’s inflammatory shit show are at least equal in number to those who still embrace the party itself. A devastating loss on November 8 won’t make that division disappear.

From Demetri Sevastopulo at the Financial Times:

Trump has sparked a populist fire that has already radically altered the landscape of US politics. After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the GOP vowed to reach out to Hispanics and other minorities. Now many establishment Republicans worry that Trump’s campaign rhetoric, tapping into a community that feels abandoned by the political elite and fears that their white culture is under threat, has dramatically turned back the clocks on that effort. After the ­election the Republican party will face a bitter fight for its soul, as the pro-trade wing led by Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, faces the wrath of the anti-establishment Tea Party and the anti-trade and anti-immigrant Trump supporters.

David Gergen, a politics expert who has advised four presidents, stressed that the 2016 race had completely upended American politics. “An Arab ambassador emailed me a few months ago to say, ‘We have reached a new milestone. For the first time in history, it is easier to understand the politics of the Middle East than the politics of America,’ ” he said.

“Trump has essentially run as an outsider who staged a hostile takeover of the Republican party. If he loses, as is expected, he will still have won the votes of some 50m voters or more, and they will represent a continuing, potent force, roiling with resentments.

“Before Donald Trump brought his wrecking ball to the party, one might have thought it highly likely that Republicans could reunite after yet another losing election. But one of Trump’s many, ugly legacies is that the chances of the party losing its coherence — or even breaking up — now seem better than 50:50.”

“Trump took the Tea Party and made it the Trump Party,” said John Feehery, a former top Republican congressional aide, causing a “major realignment” of the GOP. If Clinton wins the presidency, Ryan will find himself in an impossible position, since trying to deal with the growing anti-establishment, pro-Trump caucus inside his party will complicate any efforts by the ambitious politician to work with the White House towards implementing his preferred tax- and trade-related policies.

Grotesque income inequality in the US — illustrated by the fact that fewer than half of American households are now considered middle class — coupled with the pessimism that emerged from the lingering effects of the financial crisis, created a perfect storm that allowed a candidate like Trump to emerge.•

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“There Would Then Be Little To Stop The President From A Simple Power Move”

October 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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  • America is not a “nation founded by geniuses, so it can be run by idiots,” as the Foxworthy faction of the GOP would have you believe. Our Forefathers’ greatest gift may have been to realize they were deeply flawed, that the Constitution was no Holy Grail, and that it would need to be amended, to be a living, breathing thing. We’re only as good at any given point as our interpretation of what America means. It’s up to us.
  • While longstanding traditions give our system a resilience new democracies don’t enjoy, our foundation, strong though it may be, can collapse. Most Americans are raised believing the checks and balances of our federal government will keep our system from imploding, but the strength of those levers are dependent on a number of other factors. For one, the Fourth Estate, journalism, needs to be healthy to serve as a watchdog. Due to technological disruption and changing customs, that industry isn’t faring well right now. This problem informs another: We must be an educated populace that holds democracy dear and wants it for all citizens. Also: The person holding the office of the President needs to be a sane, reasonable figure not given to autocracy, because the occupant of the Oval Office has copious opportunities to abuse power. If the President does attempt to shred the Constitution, the Congress and the Senate must act boldly to remove that person. That’s our last line of defense short of revolution.

In an excellent Politico article “Yes, American Democracy Could Break Down,” Yascha Mounk lays out exactly how things could fall apart, if not in the time of Trump, then at some point. An excerpt:

If you game it out, there are at least three likely scenarios that lead to a crisis. The first case would be Trump ordering the federal bureaucracy to do something blatantly unconstitutional—like, say, closing down mosques or prosecuting political opponents. It is likely that many senior bureaucrats would refuse to comply with such an order, either resigning in protest or simply disobeying the relevant instructions. In a political world in which leading politicians and most voters have a deep commitment to democratic norms, this is an effective form of resistance: The press would be likely to cover the story prominently. Public opinion would rally against an administration that insists on issuing illegal instructions. The President would back down. According to Constitutional scholars like Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who has written extensively about limits of executive power, this is exactly the kind of mechanism by which, despite its vastly expanded powers, the executive has effectively been constrained since 9/11.

But all of this assumes that we can still count on a shared commitment to democratic norms, and have a President who is sensitive to widespread outrage. So what would happen if a President Trump decided that he would rather persist with an unpopular course of action than risk looking weak? Or if public opinion didn’t swing against him in the first place? (Since many recent polls show broad support for discriminatory policies against Muslims, this is hardly an unimaginable scenario.)

In essence, there would then be little to stop the President from a simple power move: firing all bureaucrats who disobey his orders, and replacing them with loyalists. There is, in fact, a clear precedent for this in American history. In the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon instructed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed by Congress to look into his illegal activities during the Watergate scandal. When Richardson resigned his post in protest at the President’s attempt to interfere in judicial proceedings in such a blatant manner, Nixon instructed Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do his bidding. When he, too, resigned in protest, Nixon turned to Solicitor General Robert Bork—who duly complied. By the end of the night, Cox was gone.

If a President Trump took a leaf out of Nixon’s playbook and repeated the Saturday Night Massacre at an even bigger scale—including rank-and-file bureaucrats as well as political employees in his purge—it would undoubtedly sow chaos and deplete federal agencies of much-needed expertise. But finding a team of hacks to follow his orders, however haphazardly, would not prove difficult. If he wanted to close down mosques, or have his cronies prosecute political opponents, he probably could.•

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“Then There’s A Long-Term Implication For The Civic Life Of The Country”

October 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, the Worst American™, is the GOP nominee, so we all probably owe an apology to Sarah Palin for disqualifying her from sitting a heartbeat from the Oval Office because she was ill-prepared, ignorant, fact-challenged, mean-spirited and generally unfit. Why did we focus on such mundane matters?

Steve Schmidt, who chose Sarah Palin for the GOP VP slot in 2008 and then chose to not vote for her, is interviewed by Andrew Prokop of Vox about the sewer-water campaign of the hideous hotelier and what is likely to occur in the aftermath of a Trump flameout on Election Day. The political adviser sees the finger-pointing, paranoia and bigotry perhaps birthing an alt-right cable channel and a UKIP-ish factional movement. Whatever happens, it will likely involve further fracturing America.

The opening exchange:

Andrew Prokop:

Stepping back a bit from the swirl of allegations about Trump’s personal behavior in the news, what’s your big-picture view of the state of the Republican Party right now, and our politics in general?

Steve Schmidt:

One of John McCain’s famous quotes was quoting Chairman Mao: “It’s always darkest before it’s completely black.”

The Trump campaign is over — Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president. The question that remains here, the open question, is the degree of the collateral damage, right? The Republicans are going to lose the US Senate. The question is how many seats can they lose in the House. It is possible but not probable yet that they lose the House majority. So the question is, how far below 40 percent is Trump in the popular vote?
 
Then there’s a long-term implication for the civic life of the country, the vandalism being done, which will culminate for the first time in American history with his refusal to make an ordinary concession where he grants to the winner legitimacy by recognizing the legitimacy of the election. I think it’s very clear he’s going to go out saying it’s a rigged system.

I think what you’re gonna see is Steve Bannon monetizing 30 percent of the electorate into a UKIP-style movement and a billion-dollar media business.

And I think the Republican Party has an outstanding chance of fracturing. There will be the alt-right party; then there will be a center-right conservative party that has an opportunity to reach out, repair damage, and rebuild the brand over time. America, ideologically right now, is a centrist country — it used to be a center-right country — but it’s by no means a Bernie Sanders country. Not even close. The market will demand a center-right party.

The last implication for it behaviorally is it exposes at such a massive scale and at such magnitude the hypocrisy of the Tony Perkinses and the Jerry Falwell Jrs. and the Pat Robertsons. These people are literally the modern-day Pharisees, they are the money changers in the temple, and they will forever be destroyed from a credibility perspective.

There are millions of decent, faithful, committed evangelicals in this country who have every right to participate in the political process. But this country doesn’t ever need to hear a lecture from any one of these people [Perkins, Falwell, etc.] again on a values issue, or their denigration of good and decent gay people in this country.•

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“He Has A Long History Of Falling For Cranks And Grifters, And Trump Is Just The Largest”

October 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Whenever a racist (Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan) needs assistance, Peter Thiel is quick to cut a large check. 

According to a New York Times report, the bloodthirsty Silicon Valley big deal just infused the odious Trump campaign with $1.25 million. In David Streitfeld’s article, a confidante reveals the reason for the gay immigrant’s support of a bigot: “The investor feels the country needs fixing, and Mr. Trump can do it.” Yes, an irrational ignoramus with the depth of an off-color bumper sticker is the one to cure what ails us, even though his stated economic and immigration policies would clearly be ruinous.

At the convention, Thiel revealed he was troubled that the nation was fixated on cultural issues like the homophobic “bathroom laws” in places like North Carolina. He failed to mention it was members of his own party who manufactured the controversy by proposing, and sometimes passing, prejudiced legislation aimed at rebuking the national legalization of gay marriage. 

As I’ve mentioned before, being a billionaire in America doesn’t mean you’re especially decent or particularly intelligent.

Another deep-pocketed Trump donor is wealthy hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who’s no stranger to handing over large sums of money for crackpot ideas, though none so far have had so much potential for devastation as helping the hideous hotelier into the White House. 

From Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:

So why does Mercer feel such allegiance to Trump? Is it Trump’s policies, élan, and extraordinary judgement and poise?

Maybe. But based on Mercer’s past, it’s more likely that it’s that Mercer is an incredibly easy mark. He has a long history of falling for cranks and grifters, and Trump is just the largest.

Mercer is a relative newcomer to big-time Republican politics, but not to writing big checks to people with exciting proposals to change the world.

For instance, in 2005 Mercer’s family foundation sent $60,000 to Art Robinson, an Oregon chemist, so Robinson could expand his huge collection of human urine. Robinson, who believes that a close analysis of urine can “improve our health, our happiness and prosperity, and even the academic performance of our children in school,” has now received a total of $1.4 million from the Mercer foundation. He’s used this to buy urine freezers and mail postcards to puzzled Oregonians asking them to send him their urine, among other things.

Robinson, who also feels public education is America’s “most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism,” ran for Congress in 2010 against Democrat Peter DeFazio. Mercer, smitten with Robinson’s vision of low taxes and large-scale urine collection, co-funded a Super PAC that spent $600,000 on ads supporting him.

Mercer also funds the peculiar organization Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, to which Robinson belongs. The group’s other members hold varied beliefs, such as that low doses of radiation are good for you, that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that the U.S. government did not stop the San Bernardino terrorist attacks because it’s “on the other side.”•

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“Today’s GOP Is, In His View, A Vehicle For Racial Resentment”

October 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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As it lies prostrate and dying in the gutter, the modern GOP is suffering the final indignity of being on the business end of a golden shower from a creepy, orange clown who needs to drain the overflow of too many Diet Cokes.

Had it not been protected emotionally by the echo chamber of Fox News and practically by gerrymandering, perhaps the Republican Party would have experienced a corrective comeuppance years ago and not continued to career toward annihilation. The government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 were just such a Waterloo for Newt and other nuts, forcing some sanity into the party.

Eight months after that second power play failed, Fox News was born. Perhaps not coincidentally, compromise hasn’t been on the table ever since nor has there been a true path to the Republican nomination for those unable to pass a conservative purity test that’s poison in the general election. Now it’s too late for this iteration of the former Party of Lincoln. It must start at the bottom and conduct a real rebuild, and not just in a small, surface way. It needs to go big or it may as well go home.

The ascent of Trump has come as a shock to some among the faithful who somehow didn’t get the memo, even after the Tea Party and Birtherism, that the GOP has spent half a century pandering to racists, stoking Angry White Man disease, a profitable business but also a costly one.

From Molly Ball’s Atlantic piece on health-care wonk Avik Roy and other disenfranchised Republicans:

In the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future. Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion. One former top RNC staffer told me he no longer speaks to his once-close colleagues; a conservative policy expert who runs a think tank in Washington, D.C., says he’s become adept at steering conversations away from politics and toward college football. Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.

Of the various explanations that have been advanced in such quarters to explain Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, Roy’s may be the most explosive. Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters. The element of the party that he once dismissed as a fringe, in other words, now seems to form its core.•

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“I Would Have Gone Right After Him”

October 7, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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The wonderful New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff has a brief interview with David Letterman, in which the retired talk-show host shares how he would have handled a Donald Trump interview during this Baba Booey of an election season. The thing is, Letterman had ample opportunity to address Trump’s descent into utter bigotry and failed miserably.

Like many of us, Letterman watched in horror as Trump used his Birther bullshit to try to disqualify the first African-American President as being “not one of us.” Justifiably, the talking head labeled his frequent guest a “racist.” So far, so good. For some reason, the host later backtracked and apologized on-air to the hideous hotelier for the accurate assessment, pretty much groveling in the process. It was a shocking and disappointing reversal for someone who built his career on cutting through the bullshit. Now that it’s far too late, Letterman has a plan.

From Itzkoff:

Question:

Jimmy Fallon seemed to try a different approach, by not even addressing Trump’s controversies, and it got a negative reaction. How would you handle Trump as a guest now?

Donald Trump:

If I had a show, I would have gone right after him. I would have said something like, “Hey, nice to see you. Now, let me ask you: what gives you the right to make fun of a human who is less fortunate, physically, than you are?” And maybe that’s where it would have ended. Because I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t know anything about trade agreements. I don’t know anything about China devaluing the yuan. But if you see somebody who’s not behaving like any other human you’ve known, that means something. They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription.•

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“Trump Became Dependent On The Shock Jock”

October 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Whether it’s Howard Stern or that other shock jock Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump’s deep-seated need for praise has made him a mark for those who know how to push his buttons. In the 1990s, when the hideous hotelier was at a career nadir, he was a veritable Wack Packer, dropping by the Stern show to cruelly evaluate women and engage in all sorts of locker-room banter. Trump tries to dismiss these un-Presidential comments as “entertainment,” but his vulgarity off-air is likewise well-documented. He wasn’t out of his element when with the King of All Media but squarely in it. And it wasn’t just two decades ago. Up until 2014, Trump was still playing right along, allowing himself to be flattered into conversation he must have realized on some level was best avoided.

For Stern, who’s become somewhat less of an asshole as Trump has become far more of one, the joke was always that ugly men were sitting in judgement of attractive women. The future GOP nominee, however, was seemingly not aware he was a punchline. He’s a self-described teetotaler who somehow has beer goggles for himself. 

In “How Howard Stern Owned Donald Trump,” a sharp Politico Magazine piece, Virginia Heffernan writes knowingly of the dynamic between the two men. The article’s one glaring error–it initially stated Stern hasn’t revealed if he would vote for Trump or Hillary Clinton when he’s repeatedly stated he’s supporting the latter–has been corrected. An excerpt:

Today, as the Republican nominee, he may fashion himself as a boss and a master of the universe. But what comes across in old tapes of the show, resurfaced recently by BuzzFeed and other outlets, is that Trump, like many of Stern’s guests, was often the one being played. By nailing him as a buffoon and then—unkindest cut—forcing him to kiss the Howard Stern ring, Stern and his co-anchor, Robin Quivers, created a series of broadcasts that today showcase not just Trump’s misogyny but his ready submission to sharper minds.

Why would people subject themselves to Stern’s hazing? Generally, his guests in those days—if not strippers and professional opera buffa types—had to have been brought pretty low, so that a combination of psychological fragility and hunger for celebrity made them vulnerable to his mock camaraderie. That’s why it’s important to remember that Trump in the period of his appearances on the show was deeply in the red. By the time he was a regular, he had blown it all in Atlantic City, run out on his vendors, left his imperious first wife, Ivana, for the commoner Marla Maples, earned the yearlong silent treatment of his namesake son and reported a loss of nearly a billion dollars. (Even a businessman of cognitive impairment would have to sweat that one.)

His 1987 business advice memoir, The Art of the Deal, which briefly conferred valor on Trump’s scattershot career, was now a distant memory. Trump’s gilded glory belonged to the suddenly despised ’80s.

But Stern took Trump’s calls, and even had him into the studio. He gave Trump free airtime, as would cable news much later. And so Trump became dependent on the shock jock. He even admitted at times to being addicted to Stern’s show, telling Stern during one episode that he was late to at least one “really important” meeting, because he couldn’t tear himself away from the broadcast. Trump’s attention was evidently sliding off the dreary business of becoming solvent again. He was finding his calling as a carny.•

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“My Relationship With Trump, If You Could Call It A Relationship, Goes Back More Than Three Decades”

October 5, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Somewhere prominent in the annals of great insults is “short-fingered vulgarian,” an enduring epithet repeatedly spit in the face of the hideous hotelier Donald Trump from the wonderfully poisonous pages of Spy. The aggrieved party wiped the saliva from his cheek with his wee baby hands, but he couldn’t forgive or forget this taunt for all times.

The description may not possess the extreme brevity of the Beckett curse “critic” or the Reagan Era diminution of “liberal,” but it’s a gift that keeps on giving, long after the end of the Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen publication or the heyday of the Magazine Age itself. The lacerating line reemerged in major way earlier this year when a variant of it was employed by Presidential aspirant Marco Rubio, a rare moment of momentum for the Little Marco that couldn’t.

The slight had its genesis in a 1983 GQ feature about the orange supremacist penned by Carter. It was then a simple observation which surprisingly began a war of words between the men, and though the editor was pretty much forced occasionally to accept the status of bemused frenemy, most of the time Trump wanted to wrap his hands around the journalist’s neck, if only it were anatomically possible.

In an excellent Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, Carter analyzes this Baba Booey of a campaign season, while revealing that an unintended consequence of the profile he penned 33 years ago may have been that it abetted the political ascent of Bull Connor as a condo salesman. The opening:

In 1987, Michael Kelly, later a celebrated editor but at the time a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, took Fawn Hall, a secretary to Oliver North, as his guest to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Hall had been caught up in the whole Iran-contra scandal, and her arrival shocked the swells of Washington, who were used to seeing business, political, sports, and movie grandees on the arms of major news organizations. Thus began a tradition of media companies prowling the nether regions of their coverage to come up with the tabloid oddity of the moment for their novelty guest.

Novelty guests don’t know they’re novelty guests. They just think they’re guests. That evening in May 1993, Vanity Fair had two tables and we filled them with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Bob Shrum, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Peggy Noonan, Tipper Gore, and Vendela Kirsebom, a Swedish model who professionally went by her first name and who was then at or near the top of the catwalk heap. I sat Trump beside Vendela, thinking that she would get a kick out of him. This was not the case. After 45 minutes she came over to my table, almost in tears, and pleaded with me to move her. It seems that Trump had spent his entire time with her assaying the “tits” and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife. “He is,” she told me, in words that seemed familiar, “the most vulgar man I have ever met.”

The next time I saw Trump in that giant ballroom of the Washington Hilton was in 2011. This time he had come as the guest of Washington Post heiress Lally Weymouth. It was at the beginning of Trump’s lunatic “birther” rampage, and he was probably quite pleased with himself at being in the midst of all this sequined ersatz Washington glamour. Much as Trump loves to be the center of attention, the attention he got that night didn’t go according to plan. First, President Obama ridiculed him mercilessly from the dais. The fact that the president’s birther tormentor was in the room appeared to give him a lift—he was seriously funny and his timing was flawless. Then the evening’s headliner, Seth Meyers, stood up and really went to town on Trump. Weymouth’s table was right beside us, so I got a ringside view of the poor fellow as he just sat there, stony-faced and steaming—and of course unaware, like everyone else, that while Obama was launching his jokes he was also launching the attack that would kill Osama bin Laden. To think that next spring Trump could be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as the commander in chief renders one almost speechless.

My relationship with Trump, if you could call it a relationship, goes back more than three decades. I first met him in 1983, when I was reporting a story I was doing on him for GQ magazine. Trump was eager for the national attention that a big article in a national magazine could bring, and so we spent a good deal of time together. There were a number of aspects of the resulting story that he hated, including, but not limited to, an observation that he had remarkably small (if neatly groomed) hands.

This summer, The New Yorker published a story by Jane Mayer about Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump’s book Trump: The Art of the Deal. Mayer wrote that that issue of GQ, with Trump on the cover, was a huge best-seller. She reported that this sale encouraged S. I. Newhouse Jr., the proprietor of this magazine (as well as of The New Yorker), to urge the editors of Random House (which he also owned) to sign Trump up for a book. Which they did. The trouble with this narrative is that the Trump issue of GQ sold hardly at all. At least in the traditional way. Word was, the copies had been bought by him—Trump had sent a contingent out to buy up as many as they could get their hands on. The apparent intention, in those pre-Internet days, was to keep the story away from prying eyes.•

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“Will Trump Blame The Media If He Does Poorly?”

September 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In last night’s Presidential debate, Donald Trump was slowed by a case of the sniffles and a case of being a complete fucking idiot. The sniffles may go away.

There might something to predictions made by artificial hive minds, though I wouldn’t bet the house on it, let alone the White House. But you do have to credit UNU for knowing before most of us that Trump was a legitimate contender. A few hours before yesterday’s debate, UNU conducted a Reddit AMA and made the predictions below. None of them really required a great leap of intelligence to answer, and only the hideous hotelier’s less-P.U.-than-usual behavior tripped up the AI.

Question:

Who wins the debate tonight? Does it matter for the election?

UNU:

Clinton wins the debate tonight ‘by a lot’ and ‘i believe’ the debate matters for the election.

Question:

Will Trump come off as A. Presidential, or B. Impeachable?

UNU:

Impeachable.

Question:

Will Donald Trump use the phrase “Crooked Hillary” during the debate?

UNU:

It’s likely.

Question:

Will Trump be aggressive, or on his best behavior?

UNU:

Aggressive 99%.

Question:

Lester Holt is doing a good job of controlling the debate?

UNU:

Totally disagree.

Question:

Will Trump blame the media if he does poorly?

UNU:

It’s likely.

Question:

Roughly speaking, how much impact could this debate have on the overall election?

UNU:

Roughly: A lot

Question:

Who would you rather have babysit your kid, the Donald or HRC?

UNU:

Clinton by a lot•

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