The Spoils

As of this writing, The Republican tax bill remains in conference - the Senate and House passed different bills, and so must reconcile them and re-pass an identical bill before it can be sent to the president to sign. The final text is therefore undetermined, and some of the things I'm going to mention here may not be in the final bill while others may appear that weren't previously in either bill. That being said, the specific provisions I'm mentioning are to be considered not on their own, but as part of a pattern.

There are a number of controversial provisions being considered. The one that is most relevant to me personally, as a once and hopefully future graduate student, would be the provision of the House bill that treats tuition waivers as taxable income, essentially raising the tax owed by several thousand dollars per graduate student. It would guarantee that graduate students, who have an almost uniformly low standard of living, would need to have some sort of independent means or take on a much greater debt to pursue their studies.

There is also the provision in both bills that eliminates the deduction for state and local income and sales taxes, which will primarily hit residents of high tax states (read the west coast and northeast) and high tax localities (read cities). But that isn't the entire story on state and local deductions, because while capped at $10,000, the property tax deduction has somehow survived - keep this in mind.

The Senate bill includes a repeal of the Affordable Care Act's mandate that individuals purchase insurance. Aside from being the umpteenth swipe at a law that has long been their bȇte noir, this provision would put a great deal of upward pressure on insurance premiums that continue to rise out of proportion to healthcare cost inflation.

The tax bills would eliminate current tax incentives that have helped develop the wind and solar industry in this country from a pipe dream to nearing large scale viability in less than ten years. Competing sources of energy, namely oil and natural gas, would benefit from the reduced competitiveness of a renewable energy industry that is coming on quickly but still finding its way. A larger proportion of our energy would be created by high-emission sources, accelerating a global trend of climate change that already seems out of control.

The Senate GOP, realizing how grossly over-budget its bill already was, decided to put an expiration date on individual but not corporate tax increases, as a budgetary gimmick. In a few years either the tax rates for individuals will return to current rates - which in light of the elimination of deductions and changes in how inflation is calculated would mean an individual tax increase for those making under 93,000 a year - or the Congress of 2027 will have to acknowledge the budgetary shortfall kicked down the road by this one. Neither eventuality is pleasant. Regardless, the corporate rate will remain lower in perpetuity, most of the benefit from which will be passed on to shareholders rather than workers.

On the side, the tax bill would allow ministers to use the power of the pulpit to endorse political candidates and maintain their tax-exempt status, turning communities of churches into tax-advantaged propaganda tools. Another addition being debated in conference would have the effect of making anonymous "dark money" political contributions tax-deductible, giving wealthy donors an even larger incentive -as if one was needed anymore - to put their fingers on the political scale.

I would invite the reader to take notice of who benefits from each of these changes. They are the wealthy, the oil and gas industries, large scale holders of property, politically-active churches, health insurance companies, shareholders (largely wealthy), corporations in general. The changes tend to take away from the less well off, those with difficulty affording insurance, anyone who lives on the west cost or in the northeast, renewable energy, college and especially graduate students.

These tax bills are, in effect, a transfer of wealth to people who donate to and vote for Republican campaigns from people who do not. The south and non-coastal West, the wealthy, corporations, insurance and oil companies, religious-right affiliated organizations, and rural and exurban areas, are all strongly Republican and all reap profound benefits. I have looked at these bills and attempted, in vain, to find some unifying principle or common characteristic of the groups who will benefit from them other than their simple political support for the Republican Party.

If these bills had significant merits in the form of broad social advantages or ways they could benefit the worst off in society to counterbalance what was taken, such a shameless devotion to ones own political supporters could - potentially - be excused. But this bill can have no such ancillary benefits. Employment is already below 5% and the sectoral composition of the American economy is determined by tastes, geography, and global markets, none of which are significantly altered by the bill. Rosy predictions of the economically dynamic, hyper-prosperous utopia to be achieved by the tax cuts are delusions of grandeur and amount to willful self-deception on the part of the congressional majority.

In spite of the obvious deleterious effects these bills have on the distribution of wealth, on the state of the already wobbly health insurance market, on climate change, on the budget deficit, on higher education, and on the political system, the congressional Republican Party has seen fit to essentially loot the losers and distribute the booty to keep its supporters happy. Not only that, but they have already acknowledged that the hole blown in the budget by such massive tax cuts will have to be covered by cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and non-military discretionary social programs.

Those cuts would directly hit the worst off over the course of years, lowering their standard of living even as they face a looming tax increase when the individual cuts expire. I have heard a great deal from the Republican Party decrying class warfare in my time. It is, however, hard to give any other name to a policy like these tax bills. They are a large scale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, with just enough done for religious and parochial southern and western interests to maintain their support on cultural grounds.

It may be that growing up politically as a college student in the hyper-idealistic first days of the Obama administration has colored my expectations, but seeing a major piece of legislation constructed so cynically turns my stomach. Multiple Republicans have admitted on the record that the urgency to pass the tax bill came directly from the closure of donors' wallets in the wake of their failure to repeal the ACA.

The Republican Party speaks often about principles but it is operating like a party whose only imperative is maintaining power. Using the aegis of tax "reform" to fund giveaways to supporters at the expense of opponents is thuggish and irresponsible. The fact that doing so will have such inescapably bad effects on the society as a whole is something that they are either or ignoring or glibly explaining away on ideological grounds. This nauseating display of bad government has been inflicted on us for less than a year, but it already threatens to leave permanent long term effects.

The "Me" Presidency

This week, the President of the United States used his ubiquitous Twitter account to promote a series of anti-Muslim videos which are both fraudulent and intentionally inflammatory. He then attacked the British Prime Minister after she saw fit to criticize his use of the videos, which were produced in England. Unsatisfied with this performance, he then suggested that Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman and co-host of the morning political talk show "Morning Joe" on NBC, was guilty of murdering a staffer in 2001.

There is little that can be said about the actions themselves that has not been said already. It has been suggested by many, including myself, that the president intentionally causes outrage for the sake of obscuring an inconvenient story in the news cycle or shoring up his political base. There is certainly ample evidence that his Twitter account has been put to those uses. But the scattershot nature of Trump's public indiscretions this week suggests anything but a coherent plan.

He seems to regard his impulses as ends in and of themselves. He says precisely what is on his mind with such cringe-worthy regularity that it is as if he thinks, to quote my favorite movie*, that "every thought that tumbles through [his] head is so clever it would be a crime for it not to be published." This is the man who ridiculed John McCain for being captured in Vietnam, suggested that Megyn Kelly's line of questioning was motivated by her menstrual cycle, claimed that Ted Cruz's father was complicit in the Kennedy assassination, engaged in a prolonged feud with the parents of a Muslim solider killed in Iraq over their criticism of his travel ban proposals, and suggested that a judge then trying a case in which he was involved was incompetent to try it because his parents were from Mexico, all before he was even elected.

Since he became president, he has pettily threatened and/or insulted multiple members of his own party who have dared to criticize his antics, claimed the former FBI Director manipulated the results of the Clinton email investigation as part of a personal vendetta, repeatedly accused the Republican special counsel appointed to investigate his presidential campaign of actively taking part in a partisan witch hunt, engaged in personal insults and irresponsibly over-the-top threats of nuclear war against North Korea, and lest we forget he also all but publicly instructed the Justice Department to criminally investigate his erstwhile political opponent.

These various insults, recriminations, tantrums, outbursts, etc. are the behavior of a person whose self-regard is so excessive that it cannot bear contradiction. Disagreement with him is a sign of stupidity, or weakness, or whatever pejorative occurs to him. He can't let conflicts go because he has to be right. He continues to return, unprompted, to how unfairly he feels he has been treated because he honestly thinks that anyone who really knew him would admit how great he is. That attitude has a self-reinforcing quality, as the people around him who want a part of his power shower him with extravagant praise, confirming his self-image.

All of this would be comically grandiose, if a bit pathetic, were he not the President of the United States. But when he is invested with genuine and vast power his qualities are alarming. This is something that we should be talking about constantly, because it is not normal. It has already had effects. Republicans who want to get into his good books compliment him personally in ways that are borderline unseemly as the administration continues to govern chaotically.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) recently claimed, ludicrously, that Trump was among the best presidents he had served with. Lindsey Graham, who last year called Trump "a kook... not fit to be president," recently lamented "this endless attempt [by the press] to label the guy some kook not fit to be president." When they say these things, they are encouraging a man who has shown a savage disregard for anyone other than himself in his reckless use of his platform as the most powerful man in the country.

They think of it as a trade, giving him power in return for him using it to help them enact their agenda. They will find, to their sorrow and ours, that they are empowering someone who does not have their interests at heart except to the extent that they coincide with his own, and will not tolerate the illusion of shared power.

Getting to the end of this, I feel frustrated. Every single thing I've said here has been said before, by me, on this platform. I'm consistently torn between the compulsion to keep pointing out that this isn't normal - in fact it's dangerous - and the self conscious fear that it has become repetitive, boring, or useless. The evidence continues to mount that Trump has already done and is currently doing irreparable institutional harm to our political system. "Limit the damage!" is hardly an inspiring battle cry, and the constant reminder that damage is being done can be both demoralizing and irritating.

But, unpleasantness notwithstanding, this is something that we have to keep talking about. The conflation of the person and the office, the inability to distinguish political and personal criticism, and the worship of power for its own sake are all dangerous trends that are accelerating under this president. If we are going to pursue a more genuinely democratic and egalitarian society, those trends need to be arrested and eventually reversed.




*The movie, for the curious, is The Social Network. The quote, like the rest of the scintillating dialogue in that film, was written by confirmed screenwriting genius Aaron Sorkin.

The Importance of Net Neutrality

Recently, the FCC announced its intent to repeal net neutrality rules next month. That change would allow internet service providers (ISPs) to charge different rates for different internet services a la carte. While in principle this allows individuals to pay for only the parts of the internet they want to use and potentially save money, it also would allow ISPs to control the packaging and pricing of different portions of the internet, restricting access to those parts of it that it wants to discourage people from seeing.

The purpose of popular government is to enact and enforce such rules as tend to promote the sort of society we want to be. Without social rules that are taken seriously individuals that are physically stronger or more wealthy or better connected or luckier will inevitably, intentionally or unintentionally - but usually intentionally - use the advantages they have been given to tyrannize over their fellows.

I don't intend that to be a damming moral judgment on humanity. With the acknowledgment that all power must by definition be wielded by individuals comes an understanding that the difference between power and tyranny is disconcertingly unclear. Ultimately, I do not believe that those terms are really distinct.

That abstract discussion was meant to illuminate the real reason why net neutrality is such a big deal. It may well be that net neutrality would be repealed and not a great deal would change in the short term. It may be that the rise of politically active markets in recent years would police the activity of ISPs and restrict the unethical exercise of the ability to promote parts of the internet at the expense of others.

But we need to remember that in the economic sphere no less than in the political the granting of power is a guarantee that it will, at some point, be misused. It is a sad characteristic of our time, as it has been of others, that we are far too credulous in giving power to governments or corporations in return for something we want right now. We are, myself included, currently giving information about every salient aspect of our lives to technology companies in return for ease and comfort. We have given vast powers of surveillance to national governments in the hope of avoiding large scale terrorist attacks. We have lived for 16 years in a state of perpetual warfare for the same reason.

I feel very strongly that the repeal of net neutrality is an error of similar magnitude. Allowing ISPs to favor the content they want us to see is to renounce the democratization of information that is the internet's greatest achievement. It would amount to a direct swap of power for convenience.

What such swaps guarantee is that ultimately that power will be used to benefit those to whom we have given it, at our expense. When ISPs are permitted to favor content by charging for its competition, they are in effect manipulating us into picking the products they want as the price of receiving an essential product from them. If the electric company were to upcharge me for not using a Kenmore refrigerator, I would rightfully be outraged. Which refrigerator I use, and why, is none of the electric company's business.

In the same vein, which video streaming service I use is not the ISPs problem. Which news sources I wish to view is likewise not my provider's concern. Humanity itself built the knowledge base and infrastructure that made the internet possible. There is no individual or group of individuals that has the right to influence which parts of it we can feasibly see and use.

Brief Comments on Tuesday's Elections

On Tuesday night, the Democratic Party won an unexpectedly complete victory in the slate of state and local elections. The race for Governor of Virginia, expected to be razor-close, was a comfortable ten percent victory for Democrat Ralph Northam, who was generally acknowledged to have been out-campaigned in the closing days.

There were a number of victories that packed an enormous symbolic wallop. A trans woman defeated the state legislator who sponsored the bathroom bill in Virginia, and a civil rights lawyer was elected District Attorney for Philadelphia, the fifth largest city by population in the country. Such results are a clear indication that the upsurge in local activism protesting the Trump Administration has real electoral potency.

The results from Tuesday have shaken Republicans and emboldened Democrats, who are now turning up the heat on the Republicans' tax cut bill which is still pending in the Congress. Both parties look to the 2018 midterm elections and see a potential blowout, unless there are drastic changes in the political environment in the next year.

State and local elections are particularly interesting in gauging the strength of political movements, because they are the races that require the least help from a national party apparatus to contest successfully. In some of the most impressive victories of the night, establishment backing came to the winning Democrat late or not at all. The victory, plainly, was less the victory of the Democratic Party than it was of the left-leaning grassroots.

Establishments by their very nature, even when they are the farther left of two political parties, are fundamentally conservative in outlook - not in the political sense, but in the sense of being set in their ways and resistant to change. Like all bureaucracies, they bring advantages of efficiency and coordination, but they also bring inefficiencies because the uniformity of thinking they encourage prevents them from taking full advantage of local situations as they arise.

If the Democrats would like to replicate Tuesday's success next year, the party establishment will need to enable the kinds of local efforts that provided this week's signature victories. What the Party should not do is think that they can ride the anti-Trump wave and co-opt it for their own purposes. The Republicans made that mistake when presented with a similar situation in 2009-2010. Their repeated refusal to adopt the grassroots instead of patronizing them lead to the utter disgust among their voters that gave us Donald Trump.

The Democrats will have to learn from that example. There is a tremendous amount of local level energy on the Left to be tapped, but in order to draw from it the Party will have to relinquish some control and allow activists to build a genuine grassroots movement. Few activists on the Left trust the Democratic Party right now, and the Democrats have so much to gain from association with them that making some bold first moves to rebuild trust would be a sound investment politically.

The Distribution of Wealth and the Distribution of Power

Recently, in the process of discussing the embryonic tax bill in Congress, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made a comment that is worth considering as a whole. When asked about the Democratic talking point that such a tax cut as President Trump has described would tend to benefit the already wealthy, he said:

The top 20% pay 95% of the taxes, the top 10% pay 81% of the taxes. So, when you're cutting taxes across the board, it's very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class. The math, given how much you are collecting, is just hard to do.

The argument is clear. The wealthy pay such a high percentage of the overall income tax bill that when cutting income taxes it is hardly possible to avoid cutting them for the wealthy if there is to be any significant cut at all. It will be noted that Mnuchin' s comment assumes in advance the practicality and desirability of a large scale income tax cut, but if we concede those points then his logic is straightforward.

The immediate practical objection to a tax cut is budgetary, but for reasons that I fail to comprehend very few people seem to be discussing tax cuts in terms of the budget. The primary argument being raised against the income tax cuts being promoted is that they would serve to give tax relief to those who scarcely need it, and increase the tax burden on the already strained middle classes.

The relative distribution of the tax bill among economic classes is a reasonable topic of discussion, but for me it is only an auxiliary to the larger and much more important question regarding the distribution of wealth. Wealth in this country over the last several decades has become as concentrated as it has ever been in the modern era. In a country of such abundance, there is a strong moral case that to see so much of it in so few hands is unconscionable.

Conservatives and a large number of economists, including those by whom I was taught, would argue that the distribution of wealth is irrelevant provided that living standards continue to improve. In their view, an economic system that allows for a large degree of inequality is justifiable to the extent that its existence provides a rising living standard for everyone, neatly summarized in the common saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" - implying that the relative size of the boats themselves is not important. This argument is stronger than its opponents generally acknowledge, but it has one major structural flaw.

That flaw is an implied premise to the effect that politics and economics are fundamentally separate matters. It is the near universal fault of economists to consider their subject matter in isolation from its social and political context. If it were the case that concentrating wealth had no negative consequences outside of additional consumption and luxury, there would be something to be said for the rising tide argument.

Yet a keen observer of our social and political life cannot fail to notice the spillovers that concentrated wealth tends to have. Especially in the wake of the Citizens United decision, which began the Era of the Super PAC, individual large scale donors have become more important than ever before. The ability of large donors to start or control their own PACs has made them more active in the determination of policy and even campaign strategy.

The entire apparatus that has so disgusted the common people of this country - the revolving door between industry, lobbying, and public office, the appointment of industry leaders to lead regulatory efforts, the shameless subordination of the public good to the cause of reelection - while always present to a degree in government, has been empowered to the point of political crisis by the ability of individual concentrations of wealth to influence the political process.

Legal restrictions on the ability of such concentrations to be politically active are essential if wealth is not to translate very directly into power. Such binding restraints as existed in this country - and those were modest, make no mistake - were utterly swept aside by the Citizens United decision.

It is difficult for me to see the increased advocacy for positions that buoy the influence of moneyed interests in government over the last several decades and pretend that it is unconnected to the corresponding widening of the wealth distribution. In the long run, the distribution of wealth is the distribution of power. Such yawning gaps between rich and poor as we observe in our time are fundamentally incompatible with the continuance of genuinely democratic (small d) government.

An orthodox socialist would observe this state of affairs and draw the tidy conclusion that private wealth itself is the problem. This falls victim to the same flaw as the rising-tide argument, except that the power-wealth relationship in this case tends to run in the opposite direction. A wealthy governing class ruling on ideological grounds is scarcely less oppressive or terrifying than one ruling by naked self-interest.

The surest long term solution is a commitment to a government that has very moderate and limited powers, as well as to an economic system that observes the same principles. Our laws guarantee to everyone the right to property and personal freedom, but the very nature of wealth and power guarantees that the hoarding of either is necessarily restrictive on both the political and economic freedoms of those without them.

Tax cuts may seem like an innocuous and mundane discussion, but they bear very directly on the relationships of wealth and power that make up our political life. It is important when we consider these questions to make sure that the policy we create is consistent with the kind of country that we want to be. While there is not a bill yet, the tax cut discussion thus far seems to be not only a result of our distorted national conversation about wealth, but destined if anything to increase its dominance in our political life.

I'm Very Angry at Senator Bob Corker and Other Observations

This week, the president entered into an absurd, degrading war of words with an influential senator from his own party. Without warning, the President of the United States accused Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) of cowardice for his decision to retire following his current term, and the Senator in turn chose to debase himself by engaging in the exchange of schoolyard taunts.

Usually, I use this space to highlight aspects of the political situation that I don't think get the attention they deserve or place individual events in their larger context. I acknowledge that everything that appears here is my personal reading or opinion, but in general I aim higher than simply expressing my feelings.

This post is about how I feel. The more I think and read about the exchange between Senator Corker and the president, the angrier I get. All of the reporting that I have seen on the subject states at least in passing that the feelings the senator expressed - that the president is an impulsive political amateur who has to be constantly managed lest he do irreversible harm - are general ones among Senate Republicans, and have been present for some time.

It seems that the personal attack on Senator Corker broke his restraint in expressing those feelings. For my part, I am outraged he had the temerity to express them publicly at this juncture. If I were a member of the United States Senate, charged with making policy that effects 350 million people at home and literally billions more abroad, I would be mortified to admit to the world that I had not only countenanced but actively supported the election and administration of a man I knew to be a buffoon.

Yet this is precisely what the Republican Party establishment did. It is an extremely telling fact that throughout the primary process, in spite of the fact that everyone involved was well aware of exactly who and what Donald Trump is, the party chose to coyly feign neutrality for fear of aggravating its base voters. Those same Republicans, as Trump demonstrated his manifest unfitness for the office by pettily attacking rivals with personal insults, discounting the opinions of a judge based on his parentage, declaring that he alone among mortals had the capacity to solve the problems of the nation, denigrating the media for noticing his troubled relationship with the truth, and openly admitting a longstanding pattern of sexual harassment, continued to support his candidacy.

The Republican establishment tolerated and promoted Donald Trump because they believed that they could cash in on his populist credibility to make unpopular pet projects of theirs - repealing the ACA, enormous tax cuts tilted to the wealthy, etc - politically palatable. They were so committed to those goals, and so blinded by their desire to return to power after eight years in the wilderness under Obama, that they were willing to place an erratic incompetent with authoritarian tendencies and a wildly overblown sense of his own ability into the most powerful office in the world to achieve them. It is scarcely an overstatement to say that they have traded the dignity of the presidency and materially harmed the political health of this nation for a tax cut.

I understand that it is important for Republicans to oppose the president when he does obnoxious and absurd things. As someone concerned for the country, I welcome that opposition when it appears. Yet at the same time, I have neither sympathy nor patience for any Republican who complains about their treatment at Trump's hands when they knew all along exactly who they were supporting. It was the credibility of establishment Republicans who decided that the unity of the party was more important than having a competent president that allowed Trump, by the narrowest of margins, to attain the office. The fact that he himself cares for party unity, or anything else at all, precisely to the extent that he finds it useful seems not to have occurred to them.

So for Bob Corker to complain that Trump has insulted him, when insult is the only political skill the president has displayed in three-plus years as a public figure, is disingenuous and infuriating. For him to acknowledge, in the course of a personal spat, the inadequacy of the president he was complicit in inflicting on the country, displays an ivory-tower aloofness so removed from the everyday experiences of Americans under this administration that I am astonished he has the audacity to serve the remainder of his term as an alleged representative of the people. For me personally, it reveals a deficiency of judgment and character unworthy of someone in public office.

Democrats and the States

Right now, the Democratic Party is not only the minority party in both Houses of Congress, out of the presidency, and precariously represented in much of the federal judiciary, but it also finds itself in an advanced state of decrepitude at the state and local level. The situation is at least partly the result of the party's view of government, and its relative indifference to the lower levels of government has contributed to its poor showings there.

The largest debates in the Democratic Party in recent times have centered around the degree to which a federal presence is required in national issues to ensure that they are resolved progressively. Should the federal government provide health insurance directly, or more closely regulate the existing market? Should large banks be broken up or merely subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny? Anyone following the Democrats in the last decade will be familiar with such debates, but the thing I would like to point out about them is that the focus is entirely federal.

This is a general characteristic of modern policy debates, but it is especially so in the Democratic Party. Of the major national issues today, only abortion has been fought out mostly at the state level, and even then the constant presence of the judiciary looms over all state actions on the subject. While it is certainly true that many of the policy issues at stake have important national components, it is undeniable that state and local campaigns have faded into the background to a much larger extent than they used to.

An ideological focus on national policy, while useful in promoting large scale thinking, creates distance between the party and the grassroots.The diversity of regional interests also means that focusing on national policy limits the scope of issues that the party is seen as competent to address. For Democrats, the Obama presidency only exacerbated the problem. 

As became only too clear every time he wasn't on the ballot, the greater part of his coalition was loyal to him personally and not to the vague party apparatus. His administration was defined by a national economic crisis and a series of vicious, high profile legislative struggles, all of which served to further focus all political attention on DC.

The rise of the super PAC following the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United  further magnified the problem for state parties, drawing political money away from the party organization and into outside private groups. The PACs spend to support specific candidates rather than parties, and so vital resources failed to find their way to the state Democratic parties throughout the Obama years. The lack of a strong party apparatus at every level played a significant part in the consecutive wipeouts the Democrats faced in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections.

The importance of state and local governments is guaranteed by the preponderance of everyday issues they grapple with. Not only abortion restrictions but welfare benefits, educational standards and curricula, voting requirements and polling districts, congressional districts, and a number of other vital issues are determined primarily at the state level. The absurdly gerrymandered congressional map that now makes it difficult for the Democrats to compete in the House of Representatives is a direct result of their staggering losses at the state level in 2010.

Unless the Democrats invest on a large scale in reinforcing and in some cases rebuilding the state parties, they risk consistent underachievement both politically and in terms of policy accomplishment. Strengthening the state parties includes paying particular attention to issues that are determined at the state and local level and cultivating executive and legislative prospects - not to mention encouraging and facilitating grassroots activism. If the Democrats do not make that commitment, the crisis of legitimacy they are currently experiencing will continue.

Why Does the President Seek Out Controversy?

In the last ten days, the situation in Puerto Rico has continued to degenerate into a full blown humanitarian crisis, the escalating war of words has continued with North Korea, and the president has chosen to use his public platform to talk about football players.

The goals and propriety of the silent protests by those players have been defended thoroughly and eloquently by a number of authors of color and I can add nothing of substance to their arguments, which are in my view unanswerable. Instead, I am using this space to express my exasperation with the Official Opinion of the political establishment that it is politically harmful to the president for him to court this sort of controversy.

President Trump has in this respect governed largely as he campaigned. His regular provocations come with a number of advantages for him, including the ability to control the content of the news cycle and consolidate his support. His pronouncements, whether they concern NFL players, his Democratic opposition, the Republican establishment, the Russia investigation, the 2016 election and his performance therein, or the news media, all have one thing in common - they are popular with the irreverent coalition of Republican voters who supported him most passionately. The fact that what he says is shocking and scandalous to the political establishment only serves to deepen their support, because they voted for him specifically to make that establishment uncomfortable.

The inexorable political logic of the current GOP is that, due to the combination of redistricting and the shifting political geography of the country, the overwhelming majority of Republican members of Congress have more to fear from their primaries than a general election. Given that the Republicans currently have a strong hold on most state governments as well as the Congress and presidency, that means that a majority of the Republican primary electorate is effectively running the country.

Trump is aware of that, as he is aware that he is much more popular with that segment of the populace than any other elected Republican. If he is to win the internal struggle for control of the party, he must maintain that popularity. With his presidency already chock full of reversals in the courts and defeats in the legislature - not to mention the cloud of investigation still hanging over his narrow victory in November - he needs to maintain his base to stay relevant.

It will be noticed that the moments that Trump chooses to pick loud, divisive fights are frequently those times when he has just suffered some embarrassment that he would very much like to avoid discussing. Last week the Senate failed, for the third time this year, to pass a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act. Soon thereafter the president unloaded on the NFL. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, resigned yesterday following revelations in the press that he used private jets to travel at taxpayer expense. This morning, the president decided to attack the mayor of San Juan in strongly personal terms when she criticized the administration's still-sluggish response to Hurricane Maria.

When Trump is confronted with situations that may incur the general disapproval of his base, he moves quickly to re-frame the issue on a partisan basis, or when that fails simply changing the subject to a partisan issue. Doing so makes it easy for his supporters to go back into their accustomed corners and attack familiar enemies, and in the process cements their bond with Trump himself. For that reason, such a re-framing increases his control over the party, as failure to defend whatever the president has said is cast among the faithful as a betrayal. The cumulative effect is to condition the base to view any criticism of Trump as inherently political and therefore suspect.The political difficulties of Senators Dean Heller and Jeff Flake are cases-in-point.

The frequency with which the president renews this cycle - scandalous statement/denial of the issue/fingerpointing/entrenchment - suggests that whether or not he is aware of the mechanism he understands that it is, from his point of view, effective. The fact that so many seasoned political observers seem to misread the actual effect it has is more perplexing. Until his opponents stop chasing him around the news cycle, they will continue to fail to break through with the general public. Such a breakthrough requires a consistent, unified message, and the discipline to keep delivering it in spite of intrusions from the issue of the week. Running around screaming about the Many Inanities of Donald J. Trump will not suffice.

A Political Argument for Single-Payer

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders returned to what he does best - making a ruckus. This time, it came in the guise of his sponsoring a bill to create a Medicare-for-all single-payer healthcare system. In a triumph for Senator Sanders, the bill has 16 co-sponsors in the Senate, including potential presidential candidates Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Its surprisingly wide backing, however, has made it that much more of a flashpoint among Democrats, who are sharply divided on the measure. 

Supporters say it is the logical outcome of the Democratic Party's philosophical statements on healthcare. Those who oppose it do so mostly on political grounds, saying the vast expansion of the role of the state in healthcare would hand Republicans a cudgel with which to hit Democrats in the coming midterm elections. Others point to the herculean effort required to acieve the Affordable Care Act and think it unwise to abandon the only successful attempt to reform health coverage in 50 years. A few Democrats (Joe Manchin comes immediately to mind) have actual philosophical issues with the concept of a single-payer plan, but they are not only a small but also a rapidly decreasing minority in the party, so I will simply note their existence and move on.

The merit of a single-payer health insurance system relative to the current one is a long subject in itself and one I intend to treat in the future. For the moment, I will focus on effectively addressing the political argument against advocating for it.

The first and most obvious counterargument is that the Republicans will accuse the Democrats of wanting "government-run healthcare" or "a government takeover" of healthcare regardless of whether the plan for which they advocate is single-payer or not. The GOP invoked that overheated rhetoric against what was a fundamentally conservative solution to the coverage problem in the Affordable Care Act. That party has fully subordinated its policy notions to political and ideological considerations. Under such circumstances, there is no logic at all to a position that claims a single-payer system is the correct policy but that one shouldn't advocate for it. 

If there was a plausible expectation that the Republicans could be brought to the table on some necessary patches in the Affordable Care Act and thereby set a precedent for cooperative improvements in the healthcare system, the argument against proposing single-payer, which might then put political pressure on otherwise willing partners to withdraw from talks, would have some force. But it took them eight years to develop a health policy more complicated than the word "no," and when they finally did so their abject surrender to political considerations made the bill itself so destructive and incoherent there weren't even enough Republicans willing to enact it. In spite of that colossal and embarrassing failure, they have persisted in the purely partisan attempt at repealing the ACA entirely instead of searching for middle ground.

If, at this late juncture, they have yet to accept the framework of the ACA as the basis for marginal improvements, then the Democratic Party has no reason to throw a sop to insurance companies by propping up the current system. The whole point of the ACA from a political point of view was to build consensus by keeping private insurance, but arranging the markets in such a way as to address the defect of insufficient coverage. But if such marginal improvements in the system of private insurance are too much for Republicans to stomach, why bother with private insurance at all, when our principles tell us that adequate health care ought to be a human right rather than a privilege?

Indeed, if the Republicans are determined to assault Democrats on the healthcare issue as power mad bureaucrats taking over the system, then single-payer is the only option that makes sense for them politically. Activists will applaud the party for taking a moral stand on the issue, and simply by hearing the issue debated openly instead of dismissed in hushed tones the public will become used to the idea. Taking the position would not only unify and energize much of the Democratic Party, but it would prepare the ground for the actual realization of a policy the vast majority of Democrats admit in private is the one they want.

The Republican Civil War

In recent weeks, it has become clear that the ongoing power struggle between the Republican and Democratic Parties is no longer the most important political conflict in the country. While the Democrats have a sufficient minority in the Senate to prevent it from doing much of anything, their ability to make policy is crippled by their lack of control of any branch of the national government and abject humiliation in state governments. They are therefore relegated to an important but secondary role until such a time as they can increase their electoral presence - or as we shall see, unless the president chooses to use them to bend the GOP to this will. Instead, the conflict that will have the most immediate bearing on the remainder of President Trump's current term of office is the ongoing civil war within the Republican Party.

Tensions, which have been evident since the days of the primary campaign, boiled over this week when Trump shocked his party by agreeing to a Democratic proposal to tie a temporary raise in the debt ceiling to hurricane relief. His doing so compromised the entire Republican negotiating position both now and in December, and congressional Republicans were correspondingly shocked and angry. One reporter noted that Republican staffers he spoke to used the "full range of expletives" to describe the deal.

Trump's move seems random and erratic, and certainly blows up the tidy partisan loyalties to which one expects adherence in modern Washington. It is, however, only a reflection on the fact that Trump is not and never has been a Republican in the traditional sense, and ultimately either he or the party establishment will have to assert control over the apparatus of that party. Republicans look at this deal and see a total capitulation, but that characterization is only true if one assumes that Trump values what he has given up relative to what he has gotten in return.

What he got, in terms of Republican policy, was less than nothing. But what he got in terms of his own prestige was a spat of flattering coverage that presented him, for the first time since his inauguration, in a bipartisan light. Arcane budgetary issues like the debt ceiling, and the sort of concessions that Democrats will wrest from Republicans in exchange for a raise later on, do not interest him. He was hungry for an accomplishment after months of sustained disappointment, and can now claim that he averted a messy partisan showdown over a disaster relief bill.

On a broader scale, I have gotten the distinct impression that the firing of Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff and his replacement with John Kelly has lulled the Republican establishment into a false sense of security with respect to Trump. The later ousting of extreme right wing voices like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka seemed to encourage the Party in its persistent delusion that it can harness and control Trump to its own ends. Trump is a man accustomed to getting his way, and his core attitudes are much closer to the Bannons of the world than the Kellys and Paul Ryans. If Trump should find the Republican Party as it exists an unsuitable vehicle for his ambitions, he will attempt to bend it to his will and do as he pleases in the meantime.

The cold fact of the matter is that the party lacks any effective means of controlling Trump, while the electoral threat to anti-Trump Republicans is very real. Already, two of the president's most outspoken Republican critics in the Senate - Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dean Heller of Nevada - face primary challengers for 2018 who are explicitly pro-Trump, and have made the president their central campaign issue. Both sitting Senators trail in their respective primaries according to early public polling.

Such challengers to anti-Trump Republicans are likely to succeed in general. In a staggering finding, a recent NBC/WSJ poll found that 98% of Trump primary voters still back him, and this group is in itself a majority of the Republican primary electorate. These Republicans may see themselves as making a bold stand for a more inclusive, 21st century conservatism, but they will find to their sorrow that the base they have cultivated does not agree. Republican voters overwhelmingly blame the congress and not the president for the failure of his early initiatives, a notion which the president has endorsed explicitly and repeatedly.

It may take some time for the effect to be felt, but I believe that Republican resistance to Trump himself, or at bare minimum to Trump-style politics and policies, is doomed. In the absurdly gerrymandered world they created after the electoral bloodbath of 2010, a bare majority of the primary electorate rules the Republican Party and with it - at least for the moment - the country. The Republicans did not foresee that the weapons they used to secure their own power would enslave them to a base that sided with them less because of policy agreement than because of shared cultural fears. The same NBC poll cited earlier found that more than 60% of Trump primary voters said they were threatened by social changes in recent decades - among those who voted for other GOP primary candidates the number was half that.

The data make it very clear that the rank and file voters in the Republican Party side firmly with the president over the Congress and party establishment. The more that individual members of Congress defy him, the more at risk they themselves will be in primary elections. Should the challenges to Heller and/or Flake be successful, even the threat of a similar fate may encourage existing Senators to fall in line or step aside for someone more reliable from the point of view of the president. He has already made it abundantly clear that he has no qualms at all with targeting members of the party he ostensibly heads.

The reason for that is because Trump does not have any attachment or commitment to that party in itself. Donald Trump wants prestige and control. Should he perceive that the Republican leadership are failing to further that goal, he will work with the Democrats if he thinks, as he did in this case, that they will be more useful. But he will also do whatever is in his power to support people within the GOP who support him, and use his large base to do so. That base ultimately, in my view, guarantees his victory. What becomes of the Republican Party in that event I don't pretend to foresee.

What Middle Ground?

Since he was (figuratively) flogged in public over his choice to repeatedly equate neo-Nazis with people protesting against neo-Nazis, President Trump has sought solace in the safer arguments over the Confederate statue at the center of the rally there. He stopped questioning whether the people at the rally really were white supremacists, but he is painting their opposition to the removal of the statue of General Lee as a defense of "history," and "culture," which have broad resonance - although to be sure white supremacists will hear those words as a loud and clear endorsement.

It is clearly a shift designed to move himself onto firmer rhetorical ground, as there is significantly more support among Republicans for keeping the monuments in place than there is for open defense of hate groups. That is a reality that, I admit, I find rather difficult to understand. It seems odd to me that living white supremacists would be given such pointed censure by public figures, but at the same time the symbols of a rebellion fought in the name of white supremacy and in defense of race-based slavery would be treated with such reverence.

The issue is illustrative of the difficulties faced by conservatism - and by conservatism I mean an inclination toward preserving or only carefully modifying the existing social order - in an age of such dramatic upheaval. Thirty years ago, when there was no popular movement to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces, it was possible for conservatives to say that those monuments were simply historical pieces, and not see themselves as associated with white supremacists.

Today that possibility has vanished. One can no longer blithely talk about the history being commemorated by a statue of Robert E. Lee without considering the political and moral implications, precisely because the monuments have been made controversial by previously unheard or unheeded voices. As might be expected, as more and more of the country becomes nonwhite, the challenges to elements of white supremacy are becoming louder and have a more powerful political infrastructure behind them. "History" is not a reasonable defense of a monument when the moral mistakes of the Confederacy are still being made today in less garish form. 

Speaking more broadly, the political logic of conservatism is that social instability is bad and that the most efficient way to maintain stability is to protect the existing social structure, making modifications only as necessary. Yet in times of rapid social change, when that existing structure is inherently unstable, the logic of conservatism breaks down. When preserving the social order as it exists is no longer possible, what is a conservative to do?

The only options, it would seem, are to pick a side or to withdraw. Under these circumstances the most likely thing for anyone to do is to continue to fight the enemy they know. People react to situations that challenge core beliefs by pretending as though they don't exist. Yet, even that denial amounts to choosing a side. Defense of the status quo, at a certain point, is indistinguishable from support for the reactionary forces attempting to reverse the tide of change.

There is a fundamental tendency for chaotic political situations to radicalize everyone, even and perhaps especially those who don't realize it. When the questions being discussed are so fundamental to who we are as a society, the middle ground erodes beneath us. That doesn't mean that more extreme conflict is inevitable and there is no hope of reconciliation, but it does mean that before there can be reconciliation there must be a decisive victory for one side or another. Whether we were in the streets or not, whether we spoke out or not, we will know what side we were on.

Charlottesville

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms the egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides. On many sides. It's been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long time."

That statement was the response of the President of the United States to the violence surrounding a white supremacist rally that had been planned for yesterday in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was cancelled by the state after Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency in response to the breakout of brawls between white nationalists and the counter-protesters who assembled to challenge them. Tensions have remained high since, in particular after a rally-attender drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and wounding more than a dozen others. Trump's statement was illustrative of a number of his personal flaws, but I would like to emphasize less the imperfections of Donald Trump than the exact effect this sort of "condemnation" has.

Trump, it will be remembered, has a long history of coyly not-quite-disavowing figures in the far right and making racial appeals. He developed a curious case of amnesia regarding the history of David Duke, pointedly refused to condemn anti-semitic threats made by supporters against a reporter covering his wife, dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as "looking for trouble,"  repeatedly linked immigration and "the inner-cities" to criminality, cited a judge's "Mexican heritage" as a reason he should not be allowed to preside in a lawsuit against Trump University, and lest we forget he also was the premier champion of the birther movement for several years.

The most alarming and disheartening thing about that list is that it is a very, very partial one. What puts Trump's statement quoted at the top in the tradition of those other comments is that it explicitly refused to call out the white supremacists as the cause of the violence. Those in attendance were seen shouting adapted Nazi slogans like "blood and soil," and "Heil Trump," adding a few of their own, including "White Lives Matter," and "Fuck you, faggots." They surrounded and attempted to intimidate counter-protesters. At the end of the day, one of their number ran a car into a crowd.

That level of repulsive violence and hate being openly established as their creed, Trump proceeded to implicitly equate their position with those of the counter-protesters. "On many sides" he said. Twice. He may as well have responded to the Nazi invasion of Poland by saying that everyone got a bit heated and it was time to calm down. The purpose of the rally was to provoke and frighten. A feigned neutrality on the part of the president only serves to embolden those promoting hateful ideas.

Earlier today, in response to a chorus of criticism of his non-denunciation, the White House added a statement including white supremacists in the condemnation the president issued. Yet the omission of the words "white supremacy" was not, as we have already noted, the primary issue with the original statement. It is the equation of white supremacy with those opposing white supremacy. This is not a "two sides" issue. When the position of one side is predicated explicitly on violence and intimidation, both sides are not to blame when violence ensues. It has been a legal and moral principle for millennia that self-defense is a reasonable justification for the use of force. When one side attacks, both sides are not to blame. Pretending otherwise is enabling the aggressor. That is what Trump is doing.

In the national discussion regarding Trump and his relationship with extremists in the last two years, one thing that has been ignored is that those defending Trump and those opposing him are not agreeing because they are talking about different things. Trump says that he thinks racism and neo-Nazis and white supremacists are bad, and a number of people will point to that as proof that he isn't helping these groups. But when he repeatedly associates nonwhites with criminality, when he attacks immigrants as taking things from "real" Americans, when he espouses a militaristic and aggressive view of the world, when his administration attacks any program or law designed to weaken racism or homophobia - when, in short, he adopts a significant portion of the platform of white supremacy and the alt-right/fascist movement - we can hardly be astonished that the leaders of that movement support him.

He can denounce the name of the ideology or claim that it isn't what he believes as much as he likes, but when he keeps doing things that those who do espouse that ideology want and when he keeps giving room for that movement to flourish under his aegis, he is culpable. The unspoken truth here is that Trump will never denounce white supremacy and white supremacists with a full voice, because people who have the political attitudes and vocabulary of white supremacists but can't bring themselves to espouse hate openly are a large fraction of his support. This problem is not going away. I applaud the counter-protesters who held their ground yesterday. If fascists and white supremacists are going to march in the streets, they need to be opposed.

We are rapidly approaching the point where we will all find it necessary to take sides. The groups represented at that rally are increasingly numerous, and their views are increasingly influential and represented in government. The political will necessary to oppose them and do so firmly is what is required, and only relentless activism can produce that will in elected officials.

The Generational Divide in the Democratic Party

Lately there has been far too much going on within and about the Trump administration to devote much attention to the Democratic Party. Yet that party has been scarcely less divided of late than the Republicans, both of them enduring significant rebellions against the party machinery.

For the Republicans, that rebellion has been fueled by two things: 1) racial and cultural fears excited by rapid social change and 2) long term economic trends that have negatively impacted rural areas and the white middle class - both Republican strongholds. The party elite, being very far removed socially from both sets of stressors, are not alarmed by them except as an abstraction. To put it mildly, the corresponding divergence between words spoken to the voters and actions taken has been notcied.

For the Democrats, there is a simpler but perhaps even messier fracture along generational lines. A lot of words have been spent in the last two years comparing the plight of the Democrats to the Republicans, in terms of a grassroots insurgency against a stodgy and feckless party leadership. The generational element is what distinguishes the two.

Regardless of self-described ideology, older voters in the Democratic primary chose establishment pillar Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Younger voters, again across ideological lines, did the reverse. Why?

I personally did not support Senator Sanders' campaign and I thought- and still think - that its tactics were crass and shabby, and that the campaign itself was far too eager to blame its own limitations on "the establishment." That being acknowledged, the glory of the Sanders campaign was that he was a left of center candidate who was willing to make bold, decisive proposals. I do not of course speak for my generation - still less those who voted for Senator Sanders - but I certainly understand and at root sympathize with the impulse that drove his support.

The preceding generation of Democrats came of age politically in an America where conservative ideology was dominant, government was a swear word, and the Democratic Party felt compelled to de-emphasize direct government action in its program. Bill Clinton was among those on the forefront of that effort, which bore electoral fruit. What it did not do is predispose Democrats of that generation to boldness or visionary thinking.

Small but concrete improvements may be the bread and butter of good government, but in extraordinary times such as those in which we have lived since the financial market crash of 2008 they seem depressingly inadequate. A new generation of Democrats has come of age in that time, electrified by the passion of the Obama campaign and disillusioned by the bruising fights of his presidency. In the middle of a decade-long political brawl with enormous stakes and a number of looming policy crises, the Clinton campaign seemed tepid and spiritless by comparison with the brash Sanders. 

We were presented with an exceptional administrator and clear practical thinker in Secretary Clinton, but what we wanted in our hearts was a leader. Bernie Sanders was not that leader, but he sounded the part far more than she did. It is a leader for whom the search continues, so far as I am concerned. There are a number of plausible candidates for that mantle. What I know with certainty is that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are not those people.

One point that Senator Sanders made that I agree with is that a party can hardly be expected to achieve great things if it won't even propose them. The Democratic Party is currently held together by a shared sense of horror and outrage at the unmitigated disaster that has been the Trump presidency to date. What it needs, as has been noted repeatedly, is a message. But the best possible message to cover a timid program won't do. A more aggressive platform and a messenger with credibility are both required. For all of Secretary Clinton's merits, she did not have the latter. We need leaders worthy of the moment. For now, we have to keep waiting for them.

Trump and Mueller

I have written at length here about the early contours of the conflict between President Trump and the established norms and organs of government. To be honest, I'm growing somewhat tired of having to write about it so regularly, but the calm efficiency with which longstanding and important checks on personal power are being discarded is horrifying - and the disinterest in or outright ignorance of the process on the part of the public even more so. This week we have learned that the conflict has taken on a more aggressive and very personal form as a direct conflict between Trump and Special Prosecutor  Robert Mueller.

Mueller, a former director of the FBI, universally well regarded public servant, and Republican, was appointed on May 17 as the special counsel to deal with the FBI inquiry into whether Russian interference in the 2016 election extended to direct cooperation with the Trump campaign. This decision, the reader may recall, was taken in the wake of two events - the March 2 decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation after it was revealed he had undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador during the campaign, and the shocking May 9 dismissal of then-FBI director James Comey, who had been in charge of the Russia investigation, by President Trump. After Comey's firing, as Sessions had been recused, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the call to put the investigation in the hands of an independent figure due to fears of executive meddling.

Since before Mueller's appointment, Trump has been waging a campaign to discredit the investigation. He has attempted to paint it as the revenge of Democrats for losing the election, in spite of the fact that none of the principals involved in setting the investigation up in this way has been a Democrat. He has denied repeatedly that the Russians actually interfered in the election - in spite of his own UN Ambassador and Director of National Intelligence openly contradicting him - because he cannot abide anything that raises questions about his razor-thin margin of victory in the election. He even attempted to warn Comey off of the investigation on several occasions before abruptly firing him.

This week, however, it was revealed that the White House's campaign to fight the investigation has been far more aggressive than previously reported. The Trump team is apparently investigating not only Mueller, but the political and personal backgrounds of his entire team in an attempt to mine information that can be used to discredit the investigation in the eyes of the public. In addition, they are looking at ways to deal with potential criminal indictments, including a examination of the power of the president to pardon his family, close aides, or - astonishingly - himself.

Behind the scenes, Trump aides are defending the move by noting that the Clintons used a scorched-earth public relations strategy against congressional Republicans and special prosecutor Kenneth Starr during the Lewinsky scandal. The ad nauseam and apparently compulsive transference of every questionable action by Trump or his team to the Clintons notwithstanding, it bears notice that when Bill Clinton approved this strategy of defense he most certainly did have something to hide. Declaring political total war on an investigation as increasingly damaging revelations about what has been found dominate the press does not build a credible case for one's innocence.

I have seen it insinuated by a number of news outlets and close friends who tend to be left-leaning that Trump is desperately trying to cover up obvious malfeasance and is crassly lying to the public about his efforts. None of the known facts, inasmuch as I am aware of them, directly contradicts that view. But I see it as being incomplete without a serious picture of the psychology of the Trump family. 

Donald Trump is not a person for whom norms, convention, loyalty (to one other than himself), or conventional standards of right and wrong bear serious weight. He was taught by his hardscrabble father, and has in turn taught his own children, that the only arbiter of right is success, that winning is all that matters, and that one either takes advantage of this world or is taken advantage of by it. We know that at minimum the Trump family and campaign were aware that the Russians were trying to help them. Anything on the spectrum from that to outright collusion, whatever actually occurred, was I am sure viewed by the Trump family as an opportunity to have an extra weapon with which to bludgeon their enemies in the struggle for survival.

Trump's fight with Mueller, by extension, does not for him have anything at all to do with right or wrong, good or bad, legal or illegal. It has everything to do with a direct and very serious challenge to his authority. Trump believes that the world is ruled by the strong, and the strong destroy their enemies by using whatever means are required. He sees himself as a strong man. In the bleak social-Darwinian world the Trumps inhabit, as for Plato's Thrasymachus, "justice is nothing else but the interest of the stronger."

With this knowledge in mind, it is possible to make sense of Trump's actions and gain a plausible picture of his future dispositions. This investigation is an existential threat to his power and, as he sees it, his inevitable greatness. If there is a tactic he can use to discredit it, he will use it. He sees the probe as the attempt of his vanquished enemies to bring him down at what should be his moment of triumph. For someone as preoccupied with his self-image as Trump, such naked aggression must be met with overwhelming force. As he himself told Greta Van Susteren during the campaign, “If somebody hits me, I have to hit them back. I have to. I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘I’m wonderful, I’m a president.’ I want to win."

Even the most casual student of the American revolution will note that this mindset is precisely the one that gave the Framers nightmares. They desperately feared that the powerful executive office they had created would one day be occupied by an unscrupulous self-seeker with populist instincts and insatiable ambition. I can think of no more apt description of the president. While he hasn't lead a coup or executed any of the more outlandish fever-dreams of his opposition, he has done something no less pernicious in steadily undermining or openly ignoring the restraints on the exercise of his personal authority, not as President of the United States but as Donald Trump. It is safe, I think, to say that Trump does not see those two descriptions as distinct.

I've said it here a number of times already, and I am resigned to saying it a number more before all is said and done, but there is absolutely nothing more dangerous for separation of powers or truly democratic government than the removal of restraints on personal authority. It is a sign of our deep partisan divisions that we have not yet realized as a nation that we are ruled by a man who will take every possible opportunity to empower and enrich himself. Perhaps a number of us know and don't care, provided he suitably punishes the other side. Regardless, the structure of our government is in a precarious position.

This Is Not Normal

This is not normal. It is an obvious statement, but one that bears constant repetition in our time or else we will fail to notice the utter degradation of the executive branch as it happens. Over the last week the New York Times has broken a series of stories about a meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Russian lawyer - known to be close to members of Putin's ruling circle - during the campaign. This lawyer apparently enticed the younger Trump into a meeting by offering damaging information about Secretary Clinton, which Don Jr. was informed before he accepted the meeting had come from the Russian government. He took Jared Kusher, the president's son-in-law and close adviser, and then campaign manager Paul Manafort to the meeting with him.

To summarize, the son of a presidential candidate took two close advisors from the campaign, one of them the campaign manager, to a meeting at which he intended to accept help in an American presidential election from a hostile foreign power. The law explicitly prohibits a campaign from accepting "anything of value" from a foreign national and this situation seems to place Jr. and potentially others in legal jeopardy.

That meeting was, given the most charitable possible interpretation of the actions and motives of the people involved, an act of breathtaking stupidity and irresponsibility. But there is very little reason to believe that such an interpretation is plausible. The Trump campaign and Trump administration, especially the president himself, have dismissed the extensive evidence that Russia interfered in the election with considerable scorn. There is video of Don Jr. himself calling the Russia stories a desperate invention of the Democratic Party, not long after the email exchange took place. We now have been given proof that at minimum the Trump family and two principal campaign figures were aware of the effort by the time he won the nomination. 

The only possible interpretation of those denials, Trump's included, is that they are knowing and shameless lies. While no one has an email addressed to the president in which he is told the Russians were interfering, it is literally incredible that Manafort, Kusher, and Don Jr. would all be aware of such a consequential piece of information and the candidate himself would not.

The thing that jumps off the page at me when I read the email is that Don Jr. is told that the information he's being offered "is part of Russia and its governments support for Mr Trump." The casual tone implies that this is not new information. There is no "Russia is offering to support your father! This is huge!" Just another instance of an ongoing project to be noted. It is very suggestive, and I have a hard time believing that campaign principals and the candidate were not well aware of Russian efforts before the email was sent.

I don't pretend to know exactly what happened during the campaign last year. I admit that before this email was reported on, I had assumed that no campaign aide would be so utterly careless as to accept a meeting like the one Don Jr. and Kushner attended, least of all keep an email record of it. That being said, the unending train of deceptions has become impossible to ignore. I'm not sure exactly what Trump's people are hiding, or how important it is, but when people lie so brazenly and consistently it becomes obvious that they are hiding something.

As for Trump himself, there may be no way to be sure whether or not he was aware of the meeting. Yet, the same day that Don Jr. confirmed the meeting, Trump himself gave a speech in which he promised damaging new information on the Clintons. Is it entirely coincidental that on the very day that his son is offered allegedly compromising information and sets up a meeting to receive it, Trump would himself preview soon-to-be-released new dirt? Given the consistent pattern of deception and continuous new revelations of irresponsibility on the part of Trump associates where Russia is concerned, it is difficult for me to assign that development to chance alone.

But let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact of the matter is that a large (as of this writing a minimum of eight participants were present) meeting took place on the pretense of America's chief geopolitical enemy  supporting a presidential campaign, and that campaign did not scruple to accept the offered help regardless of whether any useful information was actually ever exchanged. The immediate legal jeopardy may be with regard to campaign finance law (Don Jr.) or misrepresentation on security clearance forms (Kushner) but the real shame is that a winning presidential campaign openly courted the assistance of a foreign rival. That is dangerously close to treason.

Reflections on the Fourth

Today is the 241st birthday of the United States. I have seen around me today a riot of patriotism as people feel a very deep and emotional connection, as we all do, to the place that we call home. Yet seeing that enthusiasm gives me pause. What we are celebrating today is the Revolution of 1776. The moment when the United States told the world that it didn't belong to another country, it belonged to the people who lived here. The very radical principle, as every one of those involved with that extraordinary movement understood, that "all men are created equal."

That phrase makes me extremely uncomfortable, as it should every American. Our system of government is nearing a quarter millennium in age, and yet we still wrestle with the clearest enunciation of its purpose on a daily basis. I see the flags and I think about Philando Castile. I hear fireworks and I remember families are being broken up at this very moment by deportation. The songs commemorating the occasion all talk of freedom and brotherhood, but our society is wracked by fear and mistrust.

Everyone these days acknowledges that the principle of equality is obviously correct, but we still haven't taken in the full implications of the statement. If all of us are equal, then none of us should be taken from our families and returned to a country we haven't called home for decades. If all of us are equal, then all of us should have equal reason to trust law enforcement and the courts to deliver true justice. If all of us are equal, then all of us should have access to an upbringing, an education, and a livelihood that reward our talents above our social standing.

It is not, of course, to say that America has been on the whole a negative force in the world. I myself believe the opposite. The words of human rights and personal freedom are so powerful precisely because they are an indictment of society as it exists. When we look at an idea that is so clear and bright and obviously just, we cannot help but notice how shabby our actual existence seems by comparison. In spite of the numerous, frequent, and sometimes egregious violations of our own founding principle that we have engaged in, we were still willing to hold it up as an ideal. The common people of the world were utterly taken with the idea. They remain so to this day. More good has come from the willingness of a group of people to take up that cause than any government or any country on its own could possibly accomplish. We and the world owe that to the Founders.

But right next to the celebration and inspiration we need to remember how far short they and we have fallen from the ideal. It is now so often repeated that it has nearly become trite, but the man who wrote that "all men are created equal" owned other human beings as property. He kept one of them as a sex slave from the time she was 14. A significant proportion of the people who signed and fought and died on the side of those words also owned slaves. They were themselves largely aware of the contradiction, and yet it persisted through generations. 

We are all partly light and partly dark, and the society we have built is no different. But as Americans, we have been given a unique responsibility as the legacy of our forebears. They were willing to rebel on the notion that every person alive has a right to their freedom, and that necessarily includes the right to participate in the government that rules them. If we really do care about freedom as much as we say we do, and if we are going to call ourselves Americans with pride, we have to do the only thing that defines the American project and makes it distinct. We must continuously and relentlessly evaluate ourselves against the ideal that gave birth to us, and not flinch from acknowledging where we do not measure up. We have to make a choice, at each moment, to mold our society into what is best about our heritage. 

So here's to America. Not to what it is but what it aspires to be. May we never stop striving to achieve it. Happy Birthday.

Our Unhealthy Fascination With Hypocrisy

For the last week, I have read through every political post or link I have come across on social media. That admittedly masochistic project was motivated by a desire to get into other peoples' heads by looking at the arguments they make or endorse, in particular the form of the argument. The ways in which we make claims or argue with one another says a great deal about what we think of one another, and I wanted to get a sense of that directly from regular people saying what they think, instead of reading about attitudes in a news story or a poll.

I was struck, from beginning to end, by how determined we all are to show that our opponents are hypocrites. This form of argumentation has been elevated to an art form by the president, who responds to every revelation of his own inadequacy by hurling the accusation back at the revelator, but he did not invent it. It has always been a cheap ploy in all kinds of argumentation and it knows no ideological boundary. What was surprising to me was exactly how pervasive it has become.

What's wrong with that kind of argument is that it doesn't address the issue. If someone disagrees with me on some public policy issue, and I respond by pointing out some time in the past when they supported a similar policy to mine, or some vaguely analogous issue in which they followed a different principle, or point out some ideological inconsistency of theirs, what I am certainly not proving is that they are wrong on the issue. What I am doing instead is ignoring their argument by claiming that I needn't acknowledge them as an advocate for their position.

In effect, when I call my opponent hypocritical, I am saying that they are either too foolish to have thought the issue through or too cynical to care about the underlying principle. In either case, I'm saying that they are wrong because of their characteristics as an individual, and not because of flaws in their argument on the issue at hand. It is a textbook ad hominem fallacy.

While those negative imputations may be true of many in public office and relevant to discussions of their desirability as representatives, they do not have a place in a reasonable discussion of serious social problems between adults.

It's too easy to simply say that someone who thinks differently than I do is shortsighted, shameless, and impervious to reason. Certainly there are a number of individuals who are any or all of those things, but when we start using the existence of disagreement as a suitable criterion for applying those labels, then we have crippled our ability to communicate with one another. The result is what we currently have - a feedback loop in which increasing polarization leads to increasingly harsh and uncompromising propaganda, which leads back to increasing polarization and on it goes.

I am deeply troubled by the way in which we reduce individuals entirely to their politics. What's more, the longer that goes on the more likely it is to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat people as enemies they are likely to become enemies. It does very real damage that is not easily reversed.

On my way to closing, I would like to point out that these observations are not an exercise in tone policing. Some truths are harsh, and many harsh truths are relevant to discussions of public policy, not least as they relate to race, foreign policy, and the federal budget. That being said, how we engage with other people matters and how we think about other people matters. If we start to erode those boundaries, our political divides will continue to widen.

Philando Castile and America's Mid-Life Crisis

On Friday, a jury in Minnesota acquitted Jeronimo Yanez, until recently a police officer, of manslaughter in the shooting death of Philando Castile. The details of the case may be found here, but in summary Mr Castile was shot seven times while reaching for his driver's license, as ordered by Mr Yanez, after having informed the officer in good faith that he had a legally registered firearm in the vehicle. Mr Yanez responded to that information inappropriately and created a confused, ambiguous situation in which he panicked.

Stories like this are commonplace. John Crawford III, Michael Brown,  Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner among many others have died in police interactions under circumstances ranging from fishy to egregious. In none of their cases was an officer held responsible in any legal way for their deaths.

It has been said frequently on the right that events like these are seized by the opportunistic to inflame racial tensions. The truth is that not only the events but the controversies surrounding them are symptomatic of a racial divide in our country that has existed from the beginning. The fact of the matter is that the high ideals of the country that declared in its founding document that "all men are created equal" have been paired with a social system that has been consistently and explicitly white supremacist.

The fact that the previous statement is still a matter of contention in public debate is a staggering indictment of our collective understanding. The ugliest moments in our national history all have been openly motivated by a sense of white racial superiority, from slavery to the systematic deception and destruction of Native Americans, to Jim Crow, to exploitation of Chinese laborers, to brutal repression in the Philippines, to Japanese internment and beyond. It continues today with the backlash to the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. Not only that, but the moments of greatest internal division and conflict have been precisely those moments at which some important aspect of white power has been directly challenged. The Civil War and Civil Rights Movement stand as obvious examples, but it should unnerve us more than it does that the most efficient predictors of how someone voted in 2016 are negative attitudes toward racial and religious minorities.

Call it America's mid-life crisis. After 241 years, America has realized it isn't the country it always thought it would be. The conflict between our principles and our practice has at times become uncomfortably open, but we have always found it easier to address the symptoms than the disease. That is no longer a plausible way out. Current demographic trends indicate that within 25 or so years white people will no longer be a majority of the US population. America can be a democracy, or it can be a country ruled primarily by and for white people. It cannot long remain both.

It must be said that those who are representatives of the interests of primarily white populations recognize the situation. There is scarcely any other possible explanation for Voter ID laws that are written explicitly to be restrictive against the minority vote, or lobbying for intense restrictions on legal immigration in spite of explicit evidence that current immigrant communities are assimilating just as quickly as their predecessors. While I doubt that those who champion these policies are in general quite so nefarious or direct - though there are a number who are - one can hardly fail to notice that their collective effect is to politically empower white communities at the expense of others. The mind will always find a palatable justification for the convenient conclusion, but that does not make the policies themselves any less brazen.

Thus, like the person dealing with a proverbial mid-life crisis, America has a choice to make. We could acknowledge that we aren't who we thought we were, accept that, and make the changes we would like to make going forward. On the other hand, we could also stubbornly cling to a notion of ourselves that bears no resemblance to reality and make ourselves more ridiculous than we already are. Historically at its best moments America has found a way to face up to a distressing truth and embrace the difficult work of improving the world. At its worst, it has hidden behind comfortable delusions and refused to address festering problems.

One of the most enduring legacies of Barack Obama's presidency will have been the inspiration and empowerment of an entire generation of black activists, who saw a black man in the presidency and realized that the world they and their children deserve is possible. I am not qualified to pronounce on this directly, but I believe it is a safe statement to make that the patience of nonwhite communities is finite. The longer that White America shoves its head in the sand, the more difficult it will be to have the interracial dialogues that need to be had for progress to be made without significant violence. We, and by we I mean white people, need to start listening to what people of color are saying and take it seriously before we stop talking to one another at all.