Donald Trump is the Symptom, Not the Disease

Following the defeat of the GOP in November's midterm elections, it seems that the president has determined to follow his own path more stridently than before. Shortly after Congress failed to provide the funding he requested for his signature border wall, he announced the withdrawal of US troops from Syria and a significant drawdown in Afghanistan. That decision prompted the swift resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, the last of the former generals in the president's orbit who were regularly credited in the national media for "moderating" his foreign policy.

The national media and political establishment have reacted with a combination of pearl-clutching indignance and certainty that the inevitable implosion of the Trump administration has begun. Typical is a piece from Max Boot, who wrote that the removal of 2,000 odd soldiers from Syria will constitute "a giant gift to our enemies." Lindsey Graham wailed that Trump was "paving the way for a second 9/11." Dana Milbank has declared in no less venerable organ than the Washington Post that the drawdowns mark the final defeat of the United States in the Cold War. Among such pronouncements, the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth would not be considered out of place.

How did we get here, to the point that the withdrawal of a comparatively minuscule deployment of soldiers in a country with which the United States is not at war and to which we have not been invited is lamented as the beginning of the end for a once-proud nation? Ten years ago Barack Obama won the presidency in significant part on the back of a pledge to withdraw US soldiers from Iraq, a conflict in which the US had a much more direct stake and more than seventy times as many troops in place.

Doubtless, a significant part of this bizarre phenomenon is down to the fact that Donald Trump is president. Without his toxicity or his reputation as a bull with a fondness for china shops it's possible that national media would have simply noted the change and moved on, however grumpily the Defense Department responded. In any case, the decision to withdraw would certainly not have generated the hysteria we see if someone else had made it.

Granted, the decision-making process is not irrelevant here. Someone else would likely have made this decision in consultation with the military leadership and after careful reflection, not in the middle of a phone call with the President of Turkey. But there is a dangerous tendency to assume that because Trump himself is such a detestable individual and his decisionmaking process is tragically shallow that his decisions are mistaken by default.

As Trump's political troubles multiply - particularly with the coming conclusion of the Mueller investigation and Democratic control in the House of Representatives - it will become increasingly tempting and easy for his opponents to condemn all of his positions simply by association with him. The political and security establishments, both of which he has significantly undermined and unsettled, are in open opposition to him. That does not make those establishments friendly to the cause of everyday people in this country.

I viscerally oppose the President. But I do not oppose him on his own account, as so many Democratic and security establishment figures seem to. I do not believe, as obnoxious as he and a majority of the things he wants are, that he is the problem. The problem is a political establishment wholly dominated by corporate wealth. The problem is the repeated use of the US military and security services to enforce our preferred forms of social and economic organization beyond our borders. The problem is the ease with which the white lower and middle classes are convinced to turn on nonwhites rather than the people actually responsible for the state of the country. Donald Trump could resign tomorrow morning and none of those problems would be even incrementally closer to resolution.

It has been very easy for the Democratic Party in the last two years to believe that 2016 was a mistake - a flaw in the process manipulated past recognition by Trump's shadowy Russian allies - and not a verdict on the depressing smallness of Democratic proposals in the face of a populace all but crying out for genuine leadership. In their eyes, they had won. Barack Obama was a two term president and his heir apparent had come to collect her inheritance. The changing demographics of the country were favorable to their coalition. They believed they had a generational working majority secured, and that to remain relevant the Republicans would be compelled to bend in their direction.

Under their interpretation, all that is necessary to restore the proper order of things is the removal of Trump from office and his replacement by a suitable Democrat at the nearest opportunity. I could not disagree more strongly. Donald Trump has exposed with absolute clarity the absurdity of our politics. If we end up enduring his administration only to pretend that everything was fine beforehand, I'm afraid the fissures in our society will come to manifest themselves in still uglier ways.

What Comes Next

The midterm elections are over.  The results were approximately as expected; the Democrats rode a strong advantage in turnout to gain 35-40 seats and control of the House of Representatives, but lost 1-3 Senate seats on the back of an extremely difficult map of seats up for reelection this year and some timely interventions by the president in Trump-friendly states. Democrats made significant gains in state legislatures and took an impressive 7-9 governorships from Republicans, pending a recount in Florida and a potential runoff in Georgia. Democrats have also developed some promising young talent in these elections, particularly Andrew Gillum, who may yet become the first black Governor of Florida, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a likely future Speaker of the House on her way to becoming the youngest woman ever sent to congress.

What do those results mean? Or, more specifically, what do they tell us to expect in the next 2-4 years? The most obvious place to start is in Congress, particularly the recently flipped House of Representatives. Democratic control of committees tasked with executive oversight will become a recurring headache for the Trump administration over the next two years, assisted by an unusually large quantity of blatantly unethical behavior on the part of several administration figures (Scott Pruitt comes to mind). Subpoena power is no small thing.

Knowing that the Democrats are likely to spend a great deal of time on the Mueller investigation, Trump has moved to fight it. Immediately after the midterms he removed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from involvement in the investigation, and replaced him with Matt Whitaker - a loyalist who immediately took control of the investigation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Whitaker had previously given a public roadmap for how the Mueller investigation could be stifled, particularly by sharply reducing its budget. The President knows that the investigation represents a political threat, and having questioned its legitimacy since it began he is now beginning to take active steps to impede or end it. The fate of the investigation and its conclusions will be very high profile issues in the first year of the new Congress.

Given the obvious determination of the incoming Democratic majority in the House to bog Trump down in investigations of sundry kinds, he has already signalled his intention to follow his usual instinct and hit back. He explicitly threatened House Democrats, saying that if they chose to investigate him he would use his Senate majority to investigate them. With his own increasing control over his party and the benefit of Fox News faithfully delivering the party line to his loyalists, we should not discount the disruptive potential of such a strategy.

More broadly, the Republican agenda at the federal level will find itself altered or frustrated at most points, because major policy changes as well as federal budgets will now have to go through the Democratic Party in some capacity. There are few things that the Senate can accomplish without the House. The notable exception is judiciary appointments, where an increased Senate majority for Republicans will give the president free rein to appoint whomever he likes.

Speaking of the president, his decision to campaign for Senate candidates and ignore the House was an astute one. Knowing the House was likely lost, he focused on shoring up GOP majorities in the Senate, which gives him more long term influence through judicial appointments. Moreover, a partisan split in Congress more or less guarantees gridlock, which creates a policy vacuum. The Presidency generally fills much of the space Congress leaves open by using executive orders or regulatory changes. President Obama took that path after losing the House in 2010. Provided Trump maintains Republican support in the Senate for executive orders staking out policy positions, Congress will not reach agreement to overturn whatever he does. Challenging executive action in the courts could prove difficult with the success of the Kavanaugh appointment, which gives the right a friendly majority on the Supreme Court. While the Republican Party lost influence as a result of the midterms, Trump will find himself even more powerful within it.

For the same reasons, congressional gridlock tends to empower state governments, which are full of ambitious politicians looking upward and have the opportunity to make enormous political statements in the face of federal inaction. Remarkably, while the national Congress has a partisan split, after the 2018 elections every single state will have one party control of the state legislature. Thirty-six states will have the same party controlling the legislature as well as the governorship. As the Congress devolves into ever more intense political maneuvering, expect dueling state legislatures to take dramatic stands on contentious policy issues, particularly voting rights, immigration, and healthcare.

Finally, there is a very high likelihood of a recession beginning in the next 2 years, and certainly in the next 4. Aside from the fact that it's been almost 11 years since the last one started, there are a number of good reasons to see one coming. For one, extended trade disruptions with China and Mexico are likely to have cost of living implications for the poor and lower middle classes in particular. After the massive tax cuts the GOP recently passed, the federal budget is a ruin and gridlock will likely prevent either party from closing the deficit in its preferred manner. Financial markets will eventually get spooked by the large long term debt and absence of any plan to address it. Add to these immediate pressures the long term structural issues of stagnating real wages, crippling student debt, and scandalous inequality, and there is every reason to question the sustainability of the current economic expansion. The establishment figures in both parties are in increasingly precarious positions relative to their voters, and a new recession would make them less secure still.

Overall, while the Democrats certainly have a much stronger hand than they did before election day, the next two years stand to be every bit as chaotic and contentious as the last two have been. Probably the instabilities of congressional inaction and the inevitable next recession will make them even more so. There isn't even space here to discuss the 2020 presidential race, which promises to be in full swing in the next 6-8 months. A President Trump fighting for his political life is bound to be even more aggressive than normal. Even after his presidency is over, be in in 6 years or before then, the rot in our society that permitted his rise to begin with needs to be addressed. The check on Trump's power that this election provided gives an opening for his opponents to put him on the defensive. Whether they take it, and how well they use it, will determine the next chapter of our political history.

Beyond Red and Blue

The midterm elections are upon us. In mere days the composition of the Congress as well as numerous governorships and state legislatures will be decided. It is often said that elections have consequences, but that is generally said within a partisan context that assumes that the Democrats and Republicans, between them, roughly represent the country as it exists. The "consequences" discussed are accordingly focused around the parties themselves, rather than the people who make up the country they claim to represent. What I would like to do here is discuss briefly both parties, what either is likely to do if they win, and what that actually means for the vast majority of Americans who don't live and die with the fortunes of their political parties, but do live and die with the consequences of public policy.

I will begin for obvious reasons with the Republican Party. They are frankly the most important party to discuss at the moment because they now control all three branches of the federal government and most of the state governorships and legislatures. One thing that cannot be said of them is that since last year they have been passive with their majorities. They passed a very large tax cut targeted at corporate rates and rates for wealthy individuals. They have confirmed two Supreme Court justices, one in the teeth of credible accusations of sexual assault, and a slew of lower court judges who will influence American jurisprudence for decades.

Meanwhile, the GOP has thrown a number of bones to its evangelical base, the centerpiece of which has been a sustained attack on legal protections for LGBT individuals. The administration, in a reversal of an Obama-era regulation, is fighting in court to remove gender identity as a protected class under federal anti-discrimination rules. The administration has also proposed legally redefining gender to be based on genitalia at birth - a transparent attempt to use a legal definition to legislate trans people out of existence. It would be optimistic to the point of foolishness to think that such a proposal would be the last indignity trans people will be expected to suffer - historically, pretending that people don't exist is a precursor to more intense oppression and violence, not less.

On the other hand, the GOP has had some difficulty with their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. As a result they, and the health insurance system, have been stuck between their insistence on repealing something and their inability to repeal the act's most popular provisions. They claim  that they will continue to protect people with pre-existing conditions, but it's difficult to see how that's possible when provisions like the individual mandate, which were designed to compensate insurance companies for additional expenses incurred by covering people with pre-existing conditions, no longer exist.

The Republicans have told us what they intend to do if they retain control of the government. They will pass immigration laws designed not only to crack down on people without documentation, but reduce the number of people who can acquire it. The president recently proposed sending the regular military to prevent political asylum seekers from entering the country. I would remind the reader that these asylum seekers generally are fleeing political instabilities that can be traced directly to US military interventions in their home countries.

They will pass additional tax cuts, and when the budgetary pressures of slashing taxes appear they will gut domestic spending as well as Social Security and Medicare while increasing the military budget indefinitely. They will also continue to make it difficult for people to vote, which has been done explicitly as a way to reduce voter turnout among nonwhites and the poor. It should be said directly what this program amounts to; a transfer of wealth from the most vulnerable people in our country to the rich, to corporations, and to military contractors, all the while securing a disproportionately white and wealthy electorate to continue to support these policies.

The Democrats for their part have been surprisingly ineffectual in spite of their formal opposition to an outrageous presidency and the series of public outcries corresponding to its unpopularity. Despite a number of close misses, they failed to stop any of the above initiatives aside from the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They have alternated between pretending they are dealing with a ruling party that accepts their legitimacy and offering tepid opposition to its most harmful acts with the air of one delivering a manifesto. They have attempted to cynically exploit public opposition to the president while at the same time kneecapping campaigns that channelled popular anger by refusing to be beholden to corporate money. They have continued to support an absurd degree of military spending and an endless, fruitless war across the middle east.

The Democratic Party has a strong interest in upholding itself as the vanguard of progress and modernity while maintaining its strong ties to corporate, financial, and military-industrial interests, rewarded with campaign contributions. Its measures will be uniformly low risk and plain-vanilla. We shouldn't expect great things from a party that actively discourages its candidates from even discussing universal healthcare as a campaign issue. They will be content with opposing Trump's presidency on account of his Republicanism and advocating for modest reforms that offend as few people as possible.

Whoever ends up winning in these elections, I do not expect the result to be good policy. That is not to say I do not think it matters who wins. The political and media elite may be extremely concerned with the harm the president is doing to their security and credibility, but I am far more concerned with the contempt the Republican Party clearly has for marginalized people of all kinds. It has not and will not hesitate to use any given opportunity to enrich the ruling class at their expense, and has stood idly by while Trump and others representing it have used authoritarian and pre-genocial language to describe them.

If the Democrats win Congress and accomplish nothing at all aside from preventing Trump and his party from having their way, I think that qualifies as a substantial good well worth turning out to vote for. A Republican win would only serve to embolden a president who has already expressed utter disregard for any authority other than his own whim.

That being said, we should not confuse the Democratic Party for a friend of common people. Until that party is severed from its corporate funding apparatus, it will do right by average Americans only when it is made to. But a Democratic victory followed by a sustained pressure campaign on that party to take its stated principles seriously could do some genuine good. It is for that reason that I hope for Democratic victories, even if I am less convinced than others about their inevitability. Voting is an extremely useful tool for activism, but it isnt the only or even the most important one. The organizing fight post campaign will determine the fate of the issues in front of the next Congress. I think that job will be significantly easier and the result less harmful if the Congress in question is controlled by Democrats.

Crossing Lines

After an uneven but not disastrous appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court seemed certain. Then Senator Dianne Feinstein released a letter she had received from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, alleging that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they attended high school together. The uproar in Congress and the public discourse that followed has asked almost every possible question about the situation except for the ones we ought to be asking.

There has been a comprehensive and devious movement among Republican commentators and several lawmakers to question Dr. Blasey's credibility. The presidential Twitter itself has declared that if the events in question were "as bad as she says" then she obviously would have reported it to police - sexual assaults are incidentally the most widely underreported crimes in the country, for reasons that the response to Dr. Blasey ought to make obvious.

Anyone listening to the chorus attacking her will have heard the melody before. She's seeking notoriety and attention, she's politically motivated, was she drunk too?, why talk about it now?, and on it goes. All of these questions are inevitably directed at the accuser, but how seldom do we inquire with a similar urgency about the behavior of the accused? A woman who has been forced to leave her home after receiving death threats is accused of seeking notoriety while the cult of masculinity that educates our young men goes unexamined.

The fact that Judge Kavanaugh is a public figure has led to predictably ludicrous accusations that Dr. Blasey's story is a political fabrication. Burying women sharing their experiences under charges of partisanship and bad faith is nothing new, and a phenomenon with which the Democratic Party is also quite familiar. The Democrats weren't nearly so unanimous in siding with women when Al Franken stood accused of groping multiple women and harrowing tales of physical and psychological abuse by Keith Ellison became public, and their ruthless defense of Bill Clinton in the 1990s is now justly infamous.

So many of the defenses offered for Kavanaugh are testaments to his private character from individuals who know or have worked with him. What these seem to say, roughly, is that only a horrible person would do something like sexually assault someone, that they don't believe that he is a horrible person, and therefore he cannot have done what Dr. Blasey alleges. It's an argument that suffers from a questionable premise. Is it really true that only those who are utterly depraved, forsaken souls cross lines of consent?

I don't think so. We exist in a culture that will go out of its way to excuse and normalize sexual aggression on the part of men, from something as simple as an inappropriate advance to physical violence. Young people in this country learn very early in their maturity to regard sex as a contest in which a male tries to convince a female to give him something. That framework subtantially colors how we think about issues of sexual assault, consent, and harassment. Instead of asking why a man feels justified taking liscense with someone else's body, we blame a woman for placing her body near him as though his behavior is perfectly acceptable. 

Such a framework also lends itself to the rejection of abuse claims made by male victims who are ridiculed for not being sexually dominant, and ignores the possibility of any other interaction than that between a cis man and cis woman altogether. Because of that focus I am speaking about relationships between cisgendered heterosexual people in this post, but the explicit exclusion of all other relationships from our dominant paradigms of thought should not be diminished, even accounting for such modest progress as has been made in recent times.

The result of those paradigms is a deep tension. On the one hand, almost everyone understands intuitively that sexual assault is a bad thing. Yet simultaneously we try to reject claims when victims come forward because we are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that our society fosters an environment in which something so horrible is so frequent. We don't want the people who cross lines to be people we know and like, and we certainly don't want to find out that we ourselves are guilty.

I am myself quite certain that some of my own actions in the past have made other people uncomfortable. There may be a broad spectrum of kinds of mistreatment, from harassment to abuse and violence, but they are all informed by the same cultural permissiveness and none of us is immune from its influence. Coming to grips with how my personal actions effected other people has been a long and difficult process. I regret my own participation in a culture of sexual entitlement among young men. Men, as a gender, need to have more candid and introspective dialogues - particularly with the women in our lives - about consent and how to combat the harmful effects of our sexual socialization. We have to take responsibility for changing our culture because we are the only ones who can. Honestly acknowledging the social problems that enable damaging behavior forces us to ask questions that make us uncomfortable, but the very fact that they make us so uncomfortable should alert us to the reality of the problem.

That is why the defense of Kavanaugh, dependent as it is on assaulting the credibility of his accuser and denying the event rather than wrestling with questions about rape culture and the presence of alcohol within it, turns my stomach. Not just because it insists that a woman is attacking an upstanding citizen and permanently changing her own life for no good reason whatsoever, but because it pretends that the sort of thing Dr. Blasey describes is in itself not really a problem.

Kavanaugh, if he makes it to the bench, will likely bring with him a background that implicitly expects the sexual subservience of women to men, and that has significant implications for public policy. He does not recognize it himself, or at least does not acknowledge it publicly if his response to Dr. Blasey's allegation is any guide. While that is certainly an issue with someone nominated for the highest judicial seat in the land, it is more importantly a widespread issue embedded in our culture that needs to be systematically addressed.

An Extremely (Self) Important Editorial

Scarcely a day after excerpts from Bob Woodward's book about the early Trump administration were made public, including a number in which senior officials are quoted delivering scathing assessments of the president's character and capacity to perform his job, the New York Times published quite an interesting editorial. In it, an anonymous administration official described what amounts to a low-key conspiracy among certain administration figures to frustrate or block entirely those of the president's impulses they find odious.

I say interesting because the editorial was very revealing, but not in the way the author seems to have intended. Whoever the author was - my personal suspicion is that it was Chief of Staff John Kelly - they didn't tell us anything about the president or his character that hasn't been widely reported on since the beginning of his campaign. They did, however, tell us a great deal about the attitudes and character of the people in the administration who clearly think they're saving us from him. A quotation to illustrate:

"To be clear, ours is not the popular 'resistance' of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office."

It would be difficult to construct a more perfect example of the hubris of the official Republican Party in their dealings with Trump and the argumentative contortions they will perform to justify their support for him. I would encourage the reader to read the editorial in full, then remember that the author presumably voted for Trump, then sought and accepted a high level appointment in his administration which they still hold.

How difficult it must be to justify that collection of behaviors if the author genuinely believes that:

"the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright. In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the 'enemy of the people,' President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic."

It's a tension that is at the core of the Republican Party in the Age of Trump. On the one hand most elected Republicans will admit off the record that they are disgusted by Trump's amorality and alarmed by his behavior. On the other hand, they appear to have no significant qualms about putting that person into the most powerful single office in the world provided he advances a certain portion of their preferred agenda. What it really amounts to at bottom is that they're annoyed that Trump is the person they need to advance their agenda, but they value that agenda much more highly than the collateral damage having a man like Trump as president causes.

So our author postures as a protector of all that is good and American from the man they serve - apparently poorly - and presumably helped elect. It seems utterly nonsensical until you realize that the author and the Republican Party generally believe that Trump, danger to the health of the republic though he may be, is preferable to a Democrat.

The Republican Party seems to regard Democrats in general as not just misguided and power hungry but as dangerous to America, and has done so since the Cold War. International conflict with the Soviet Union, which aggressively promoted Stalinism worldwide, provided a backdrop against which conservatives could paint even the vaguest of Lefist notions as tainted by totalitarianism and death.

This is the perspective from which the editorial was written, and in which the GOP has operated in its dealings with Trump. If a boorish, ignorant huckster with authoritarian leanings and a wildly inflated sense of his own ability is necessary to get people to vote for an agenda that sacrifices everything from the environment to the social safety net at the altar of capitalism, then so be it. Ultimately, what the editorial writer and their apparently like minded colleagues are trying to protect is not America but the power of the Republican Party and its backers. By conflating the two, they show that they possess scarcely more perspective than the delusional president they serve.

Patriotism

Our political conversation took a brief hiatus this week from its focus on the coming elections and Mueller investigation to memorialize the death of Sen. John McCain. McCain has been a fixture of American politics for almost 30 years and was renowned for his freewheeling, individual political style as well as his intense devotion to his idea of the United States and its place in the world.

Memorials to him have almost universally used the word "patriot" to describe him, noting in particular his time spent in North Vietnam as a prisoner of war and his insistence throughout his career that the US is not only a force for good in the world, but is indeed the beacon of hope for all humanity. Even the official slogan of his 2008 presidential campaign was "Country First." Considering these evaluations set me to thinking about what patriotism is, in what senses it is and is not a virtue, and the degree to which it is exploitable.

The word patriot internalizes a number of tensions and unclear notions we have about the societies to which we belong. I would say that a patriot is most naturally defined as someone who feels passionately connected to their country, but the term "country" is extremely slippery. Is it the land a patriot loves? The people who live there? The cultural traditions those people espouse? The government that rules them?

We have been taught to confuse these very distinct questions by the 18th and 19th century notions that dominated the founding of and early mythology around our government. The philosophical justification for the nation-state presupposes the unity of land, people, and government. It is a tidy, utopian category that masks the very real divergence of interests in any community and the natural fluidity of cultural and economic life.

We might also suggest that a patriot puts country over party or the greater good over some parochial interest. But that way of speaking is just as subject to conceptual problems. How does one define the greater good? Is the national interest the sum of individual interests? But what then when conflicting interests inevitably arise? The notion of the national interest or the greater good is a phantom that disappears every time we get too close to pinning it down.

What is really at issue here is how we group people in our minds. The nation as a concept is not definable and therefore useless in any attempt to understand political realities. It does not exist as a thing outside anyone's mind. Only socioeconomic networks and the power structures that govern them are real. Where those structures begin and end is entirely arbitrary and has no moral significance whatsoever.

There is certainly nothing wrong in the abstract with what might be called public spiritedness or a commitment to the safety and prosperity of ones community. But that spirit, directed by a powerful elite using effective rhetorical tools, all too often turns into something that has nothing at all to do with the actual good of the community.

The natural desire to see our friends, family, and community be safe, happy, and comfortable has been effectively weaponized. For instance, instead of engaging directly with the actual social issues raised by protesting athletes, critics have accused them in grave tones of disrespecting the flag and - worse still - the troops! Symbols of communal unity are coopted to mask real injustices and paint people who challenge those injustices as subversive and dangerous.

The people who are well treated by the established order have every incentive to respond this way. When it is pointed out that our social and economic system aggressively advantages the advantaged, the only way for a powerful minority to maintain majority support is to make the common people feel like they have a direct stake in the power of the powerful. They enlist our love for our communities in the defense of the social system as it is.

None of which is to imply that the feelings of loyalty to the community that John McCain undoubtedly held and which so many of us hold are not a powerful positive force. His unusual fortitude and courage during his military service are proof enough of that. It is because they are so powerful that we would do well to subject the causes for which they are invoked to very close scrutiny. Only the very best causes are worthy of the best of motives. McCain's passion was admirable, but I think it also had a tendency to blind him to the consequences of his actions for people who were beyond the scope of his consideration. We ought to take care that it doesn't do the same to us.

The Whole Russia Thing

On the heels of the most recent indictments by the Mueller investigation, President Trump held a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. After the summit, the two presidents held a press conference that could most charitably be described as awkward. In it, Trump appeared to be unnecessarily defrential to Putin, to the point of challenging his intelligence agencies over the array of influencing tactics used by Russian figures during the 2016 election.

The domestic reaction was almost universally negative. Republicans and Democrats alike chorused that the president had shamefully subordinated himself in tone and body language to Putin while siding with him against the assessment of the American intelligence community. Retired eminences of the security establishment such as John Brennan and James Comey have spoken of Trump being manipulated or influenced, and edgy commentators in Democratic circles have used words like "treason" and with memorable specificity even questioned whether Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.

This narrative is almost comically simplistic, and its dominance has had the unfortunate effect of obscuring realities about our realtionship with Russia that ought to be well understood by the public. Is it probably true that portions of the Russian government, directed by Putin, were involved with the hacks on the DNC and with ad buys designed to favor a Trump victory? Yes it is. But the gulf between that and the president being a paid agent of a foreign power is very large indeed.

The really central problem with the Trump-as-Moscovian-Candidate narrative is that its logical conclusion demands a ludicrous degree of hostility toward Russia as a major world power. People who hold or have held high office are comparing Russian activity in 2016 to the September 11 attacks. I need not remind the reader that the response to those attacks included but was not limited to two major invasions in the Middle East and central Asia. 

This level of rhetoric, which has reached well into Democratic congressional leadership, has serious implications for our long-term relationship with Russia that deserve a great deal more consideration than they are being given. Trump got a lot of heat for saying that America is not blameless in the deterioration of relations between the two countries in the last decade, but even if it is for all the wrong reasons, in this instance he's right. 

Vladimir Putin may be aggressive abroad and repressive at home, but he also didn't invade two Middle Eastern countries. He may be undermining the Ukrainian government, but our government is involved in a military and clandestine way against the ruling elites of two Russian allies, Syria and Iran. He may be threatening NATO members in the Baltic, but it was the United States government that chose to continue expanding NATO up to Russia's own borders following the Cold War - after by all accounts pledging not to.

None of this is to imply a qualitative moral equivalency between the Russian and American governments. But the difference to me is more like the one everyone recognizes between armed robbery and premeditated murder. One may be in fundamental ways worse than another, but neither of them is a particularly upstanding activity. When we complain of Russian opposition figures going missing or being killed, we ought not to forget the frequency or the impunity with which people of color in this country die at the hands of law enforcement. Why is it really that we hear fabulously wealthy Russians described as 'oligarchs' while their American counterparts are 'businessmen'?

The natural reaction of an opposition party is to seek anything available with which to bludgeon the party in power, so while I am significantly annoyed by it in the Democratic Party, I also expect it from them. The press seems to have learned nothing at all from its servile attitude toward the administration in the lead-up to Iraq. They make news out of absurdly bellicose comments, particularly toward Russia and North Korea, because those comments fit a negative narrative about Trump which is extremely lucrative. The consequences of that narrative for international relations aren't afterthoughts, because they aren't thought of at all.

I will say again here for the sake of clarity and because I know this is likely to be misunderstood, that the closeness between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government is extremely disturbing and fishy. As far as I am personally concerned, whether that fishiness reached the level of a crime as technically described is less relevant than the fact that the Trump campaign was so eager to inquire about and encourage such help.

Yet while he has gone out of his way to be nice to Putin personally, many of Trump's policies are in opposition to Russian interests internationally. He has repeatedly threatened war against Iran, which is a key Russian ally, as is Syria, whose pro-Russian offical government has been repeatedly bombed by the Trump Administration. He has armed anti-Russian Ukrainians, something the Obama administration flatly refused to do.

What this implies to me is that Trump was quite willing to accept Russian help in the election to his own benefit, and now he is exercising his own power as he sees fit to expand American authority and by extention his own. If the price to be paid for that ability is being a little nicer to Putin than is considered reasonable by the American political establishment, so be it.

All of which suggests that while we ought to be horrified by and contemptuous of the sordid means the president was willing to employ to aid his bid for power, we should not permit that horror to be the foundation of a bellicose nationalism every bit as dangerous internationally as the one he represents. We are deluding ourselves if we fail to notice that the United States government has long been playing a political game with Russia that is about power and nothing else whatsoever.

Who rules in Ukraine is a question that certainly has a substantial moral component, but it has no dimension that seriously affects the well-being of the common people of the United States. Power politics is played for the powerful, and a party which claims to be the Democratic One ought to be more sensitive to that fact in its foreign policy pronouncements. It certainly shouldn't be promoting the rhetorical basis of a new Cold War for partisan advantage.