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.

Sometimes Civility is Overrated (cont.)

It seems that my previous post on this topic was premature. The issues of tone and tactics have come into the news this week with an intensity that Roseanne Barr, whatever her other talents, could not have caused. Two more recent events have come to symbolize the issue. First, a restaurant owner in Virginia asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment, the Red Hen, after her workers expressed discomfort with Sanders' presence. Then, in the midst of an intense reaction to that event, Congresswoman Maxine Waters declared that more people who are party to certain egregious administration policies ought to receive the same treatment.

The reaction has been swift and predictable. Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi appeared to rebuke Waters by saying that Trump's "daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable." Senate Leader Chuck Schumer concurred by saying that "harassment" of political figures is "un-American."

CNN's Chris Cillizza and The Washington Post seemed to agree, arguing in strikingly similar opinion pieces that Waters' comments and the Red Hen incident are pushing the envelope beyond appropriate political opposition into a direction that would lead to political violence. It may be understandable that the behavior of the president elicits such responses from the indignant, they say, but countering it in the way Waters suggests erodes the moral distinction between the two sides and promotes instability that cannot, beyond a certain point, be effectively contained.

Civility is presented in all of these arguments as some sort of categorical moral imperative. While it certainly allows the speaker to come off as high-minded and above the fray in the fawning press coverage one gets for saying so, as a tactical policy it is ridiculous. We will be nice no matter how mean you are is certainly a pleasant sentiment, but it is not a path to victory.

The simple fact of the matter is that if we do not treat egregious policy as egregious, we are tacitly accepting it. The methods of opposing an unwise tax cut or  arcane budgetary issue must be fundamentally different from those used to oppose the forced separation of families, indefinite detention of migrants, and the utterly cynical web of lies the administration has purposefully spun around those policies and others like them.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, since she took over for Sean Spicer as White House Press Secretary, has repeatedly spouted the line of the administration even when it was obviously at variance with widely known facts. She insisted to a room of dozens of people, all of whom knew she was lying, that the president wasn't responsible for the separation policy and had no power to alter it, right up to the moment that the national outcry against the policy forced him to. In the wake of Waters' comments, Sanders claimed that Waters was inciting violence (she wasn't) and even had the temerity to contrast Waters with President Trump, who according to her has never encouraged violence in any capacity (he has).

Sanders may well be "just doing her job," but when that job regularly involves purposefully lying to the public because that is the line the President has taken, choosing to accept and continue in it is craven and degrading. When that job involves disingenuously defending the taking of children from their parents and housing them in prison camps, doing so for access to power, prestige, or a paycheck is contemptible.

People who behave this way are not entitled to the respect of anyone. I certainly don't blame the employees of the Red Hen, many of whom belong to communities adversely affected by administration policies, for being uncomfortable serving someone they regularly see lying through her teeth to defend those policies.

The President has already taken us several steps down a very dark path. He has used words like "invade" and "infest" to describe immigration. After permitting the imprisonment of children taken from their parents,  he has openly denied their fundamental innocence, framing them as complicit in a plot to take advantage of hard working regular (read white) Americans. He has expressed the desire to be able to deport people without giving them any legal recourse. He has associated immigrants in general with aggressive criminality, invoking deep seated racial fears among whites by repeatedly calling attention to them as rapists and gang members.

Responding to all this with calls for everybody to just calm down is asinine. We know what happens to societies that continue to embrace such rhetoric and the actions that follow it. This isn't a case of everybody getting overheated. Making the people in power feel the consequences of indefensible actions is the only rational way to fight back, because they've made it exceedingly clear that power is the only argument they respect.

Hand-wringing about civility and the Effects on the Discourse is built on the fantasy that civil discourse still exists under this administration. It does not. Trump himself responded to Waters by calling her a "very low IQ person" and claiming, falsely, that she was inciting violence - adding as a scarcely concealed threat "be careful what you wish for." Insisting on nicety, unity, and compromise in the face of an administration determined to deny the humanity of a large class of people is dangerously close to enabling it. Firm, loud, and yes sometimes uncivil action is the only effective counterattack.

The War on Immigrants

The government's policy of separating the children of immigrants and asylum seekers from their parents during detention has rocketed into the national discussion this month. While I briefly addressed it when it was announced last month, recent press access to facilities where children have been "housed"- read imprisoned - and the heartbreaking personal stories of parents separated from their children have fueled a moral outcry against the policy.

One thing I have found lacking in the reporting on the new policy is how it is part of a much larger campaign of persecution targeted at immigrants of all kinds. Before the child separation policy, the administration stopped or sharply curtailed the numbers of refugees the country was taking in. Many of those who managed to get here were sent back because of small problems in their paperwork.

Meanwhile, people who had been granted asylum and have been here for years or even decades are finding their protected status  has been revoked for no apparent reason. Hondurans who sought refuge here after a debilitating natural disaster there in 1999 found that this year, after they have spent twenty years building lives here, their protected status will no longer apply and they must find alternative protections or leave. There are 86,000 of them. They are not the only large class of refugees to face this treatment.

Moreover, the administration has increasingly used its authority to deport "criminal aliens" to round up residents who got here and have stayed here using entirely legal means because they committed misdemeanors, some resolved and forgotten years or decades ago. They have families and children here, and they face deportation. There have been multiple reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claiming that legal immigrants are involved in gang activity on flimsy or nonexistent grounds to justify deportations.

Yet the demonization does not end there. The use of public assistance is being very strictly construed by the administration to justify maltreatment of immigrants - again, with all the appropriate paperwork to be here. While immigration law states that a person being a "public charge" is cause for denial of entry or deportation, this administration is choosing to interpret that provision to provide heightened scrutiny to immigrants who use any form of public assistance for any period of time. In some cases, sponsors will receive bills for the cost of the assistance provided.

There are two common threads in each of these examples that I would like to point out. First of all, these measures are all directed against people living here legally. People following the legal process to seek asylum are separated from their children. Green card holders are being deported for petty crimes that wouldn't even earn a (white) teenager an overnight stay in jail. Talk from the administration about wanting to encourage legal immigration is entirely and purposefully misleading. Immigrants without documentation continue to live in constant fear that they or those they know will be targeted by increasing enforcement actions by ICE, and that they will as a result be ripped from their lives to be returned to a place that is no longer their home.

The second commonality I would like to point out is that all of these policy changes have the specific effect of stigmatizing and dehumanizing the individuals involved. The deportation of legal immigrants for petty or victimless crime has nothing to do with enforcing the law and everything to do with associating immigrants with criminality. The same holds for those on public assistance. No serious statistical study has concluded that immigration, legal or otherwise, is a net drain on national resources, but more severe enforcement action is meant to associate immigrants with negative stereotypes about public assistance.

This process is extremely important to understand, because it is how we become numb to moral catastrophes like systematically separating parents from their children, or the worse that I fear is yet to come. The administration protests repeatedly that they are simply enforcing the law, which may in some cases be technically correct, but the point is that they have chosen to enforce it more severely than is necessary on people they don't like. Associating people with criminality is meant to reduce sympathy for them. It is a process with which people of color in this country, particularly black Americans, are all too familiar. I remember watching several hours of media coverage of the discovery that Michael Brown had smoked cannabis, as though that had any relevance to the fact that he was shot half a dozen times while unarmed.

Systematic dehumanization as a policy is, unfortunately, extremely effective. Just today audio was released from one of the detention facilities where migrant children are being - again, there is no other word for it - imprisoned. Over the din of dozens of wailing children, crying for their parents, a guard comments drily "well, we have an orchestra here." This is what associating people with criminality and turning them into threats does. Cracking jokes about the anguish of children who don't know when or if they will see their parents again is revolting. It isn't something that a stable, healthy human being does.

The hostility of the administration toward all kinds of immigrants is open and gratuitous. The administration has and will continue to devise increasingly creative ways to establish a pretext to punish or deport them. It makes every single one of us ridiculous when we dare to utter the words "the land of the free and the home of the brave." The brave are, apparently, so frightened of immigrants seeking to build a life here that we are willing to treat them as unfree. The separation of parents from children is sadistic, and the glee with which it is being defended as legal, moral, even Biblical, is nauseating.

A friend of mine, as he reposted some of the stories of the frightening changes we've seen in the last few years, frequently asked "why aren't we in the streets?" I admit, that question haunts me when I think about terrified crying children by the hundreds supervised by impassive, unmoved guards. Why am I not in the streets? Why aren't all of us? While the roots of this administration's behavior lie in a past many of us still aren't comfortable criticizing, its increasing heavy-handedness and depravity demand action. It isn't enough to make our opinions known. We need to organize aggressively to make our power felt.

Sometimes Civility is Overrated

I have watched in the last two weeks as a bizarre saga unfolded in our national media. Roseanne Barr, known best for an extremely successful and recently-rebooted 90s sitcom as well as her imaginative variety of backward opinions, lost her show after comparing a woman of color - Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett - to an ape. Barr has recently been in the news as her show returned because of her embrace of President Trump, both in character and out. As a result of her firing, right-wing media and commentators have highlighted a number of popular figures who have given edgy assessments of the president and his family, as if doing so is somehow equivalent to overt racism in its odiousness and thus reveals an anti-Trump double standard in entertainment.

Late night comic Samantha Bee stepped directly into that cycle by airing a monologue which referred to the president's daughter Ivanka using a rather strong pejorative term. The media firestorm that ensued was brief, vapid and furnished with wall-to-wall false equivalences, but it was illustrative of a problem that is becoming increasingly acute as the Trump administration progresses.

The problem is the undue veneration of political decorum. Democrats, ironically, are mostly to blame for it. The Democratic Party in general and the Clinton campaign in particular decided to attack Trump on the basis of his unorthodox behavior, seeking to paint him as a threat to normalcy, and thus someone high-minded Republicans, moderate and conservative, should reject. In so doing, they enshrined normalcy, politeness, and standard methods of political operation as goods in and of themselves. That position was out of touch with the state of the country and handed the president a weapon with which he could bludgeon them at his leisure.

I say that the defense of decorum for its own sake is out of touch because decorum is, at bottom, a form of political mutual disarmament. If elites from disagreeing political groups are to continue to interact in good faith, it is necessary to establish certain boundaries to acceptable conduct or the struggle for power will descend inevitably into violence. There is of course nothing at all wrong with such tacit agreements in the abstract.

We do not, however, live in the abstract. At a time when the hostility of the ruling party to its opponents is so utterly open and the slow undermining of the political and economic rights of working people and people of color is so systematic, to focus on the language over the message of opposition seems willfully obtuse. One might as well protest to the captain about poor crowd control on the sinking Titanic.

Rules of political conduct exist to provide stability to a process of changing power dynamics that is itself inherently unstable. But in order for them to be effective all relevant parties have to subscribe to them to some minimum degree. For decades, the Republican Party has shown a continuously decreasing respect for such unwritten rules in its relentless, intelligent, and largely successful bid for power. President Trump would no doubt do away with them entirely if he could, and the party under his control has increasingly adopted his inclination in this regard.

The fact that the Democrats are correct when they point out the president's determined norm-busting makes their commitment to maintaining norms rather than beating Trump all the more bewildering. If the parties involved no longer agree about how to conduct political conflicts, then adhering to unwritten rules is utterly pointless, and amounts to unilateral disarmament.

As things stand, he can and does use three years' worth of Democratic pearl clutching about his impoliteness to deflect sharp criticism and play the persecuted hero. If decency really matters to them, why don't they denounce these people attacking me so harshly?

The Barr-Bee media frenzy is a crisp case in point. Trump allies have taken to the airwaves to wonder why Barr has lost her show and Bee has not. It is patently absurd to compare open racism to a personal insult, but be that as it may Trump supporters see validation and are correspondingly motivated to defend their man.

None of this is to say that politeness and decency are not valuable, or that they don't have an important place in civil society. They do. But we also need to wake up. When the people in power don't really care about those things, trying to kill them with kindness only makes you look weak and hypocritical. Obscene actions deserve obscene responses. It is only when we stop pretending that everything is fine and take the problems in our society seriously that we will be able to confront them effectively. 

The Normalization of Cruelty

Two pieces of news have caught my eye in recent weeks. The first is the impending confirmation by the Senate of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA. Haspel has been an unusually controversial nominee because she, as director of a CIA black site in the George W. Bush years, oversaw the torture of a number of prisoners. Under questioning at her confirmation hearing, she refused to acknowledge that the actions over which she presided were immoral. In spite of this and the vehement opposition of Sen. John McCain (himself a torture victim) her confirmation has been made all but certain because of support from Democrats, in particular the influential Mark Warner of Virginia.

The second piece of news has been less high profile but if anything more disturbing. As part of this administration's increasingly ruthless crackdown on undocumented immigration, the Department of Justice has announced plans to criminally prosecute anyone crossing the border without documentation. This means in practice that when families are detained their children will be regarded as having been smuggled into the country. They are to be separated from their parents while their parents await court dates. One proposal currently being evaluated is to house the children in units on military bases.

These two stories may not be obviously linked, the fact that these things are happening right now is indicative of how anesthetized we have become to acts of barbarism committed in our name by our government. Under conventions on torture adopted by the United States, we have a legal obligation to criminally prosecute anyone found to have ordered or carried out an order to torture. The Nuremberg Defense ("I was only following orders!") is explicitly rejected by the convention. Instead, we are elevating someone who took part in this shameful activity - who is in effect a war criminal - to lead a highly secretive unaccountable bureaucracy. Mark Warner says he believes she would refuse an order to resume the use of torture as an interrogation method, in spite of the fact that she did no such thing when given the chance and failed even to say that having followed the directive was wrong.

The psychological effect of 9/11 created a political environment in which there is no moral imperative higher than the prevention of terrorism against the United States. Anything at all that the state deems necessary to maintain that level of control, it receives. In the last 20 years we have tortured people, held them for years without legal recourse on scant evidence, killed hundreds of civilians while trying to "surgically strike" terrorism suspects with unmanned aircraft, and occupied two countries on an essentially open ended mission all in the name of security.

Similarly, we have come to accept that the utter removal of people from their existing social contexts, even those who have never known any other place as home, is justified because they or their parents failed to acquire the appropriate documents before living here. We accept uncritically that the designation of an action as illegal justifies whatever punishment the state decides to wield against it.

The systematic, potentially long term separation of parents from their children because they came to this country to build a life for those children is an act of inhuman cruelty. Torturing human beings, whatever the cause motivating it, is barbaric. Is the illusion of control over social and international problems so important to us that we are willing to sacrifice our humanity for comfort?

It disturbs me that we look on historical social breakdowns that end in autocracy, war, genocide, or all three as if they are zoo animals - curiosities to be studied, important to know about, but fundamentally foreign to us in some sense. We don't have to wonder how and when political violence will become acceptable in the United States. It has already become so. Do not allow the fact that it is being used on people who we so naturally categorize as others - foreigners, immigrants, terrorists, and do we not frequently allow those categories to overlap in our cultural discourse? - to blind you to the reality of what it is.

Whether it ends in social disaster on a historic scale is immaterial, because by allowing the barbaric treatment of others as the usual course of things we are normalizing it. By saying there is a line between those who deserve to be treated as human and those who don't we implicitly open up for debate the correct placement of that line. We may find, before all is said and done, that we don't much care for where the line has been established.

The Establishment Party

On Friday the Democratic Party sued the Russian government, several members of the Trump campaign, and Wikileaks for allegedly conspiring to influence the 2016 election. The lawsuit itself will very probably go nowhere and accomplish nothing for a variety of reasons. For one, foreign governments are in general immune from legal action within the United States. For another, there is very little publicly available evidence that such contact as Trump campaign officials had with Russians was in itself illegal - the people who have thus far been charged have been charged not for the actions themselves, but for lying about them to investigators.

The suit itself throws into sharp relief the direction taken by the Democratic Party under the Trump Presidency. It is in effect a direct extension of the argument it made against him during the campaign. Trump isn't like "normal" Republicans. He is exotic and dangerous to the norms and structures of the government, and as such even (or perhaps especially?) the comfortable and respectable should fear him. He isn't even really, purely American, because his election was manufactured by the Russians!

It isn't difficult to divine what this argument is designed to accomplish. It aims, as the Clinton campaign did, to capture a population that is by temperament thoroughly Republican but disturbed by some aspect of Trump's behavior or government, and subsume it into a working majority of Moderation. Even the choice of the bogeyman in Vladimir Putin evokes the Cold War paranoia that is practically embedded in what is left of the American middle class.

The practical consequences of such a strategy are revealing. The party has discouraged and in a number of cases openly opposed candidates to the left of the party norm, in spite the evidence given by the 2016 primary and recent local elections that such candidates can generate an enormous amount of enthusiasm. This is done, as it was in 2016, for the sake of giving the party the "best chance" to win in a favorable environment. The hearts and minds of the upper middle class are not in general receptive to principles rooted in a democratic socialism.

The central strategic question at issue in the Democratic Party is really how one sees the 2016 election. The party leadership genuinely believes that Hillary Clinton was unjustly denied the presidency by the combination of Russian meddling and James Comey trying to protect himself from being accused of protecting her. The strategic errors of her campaign, the hubris and insularity of its leadership, and the lack of enthusiasm born of the candidate herself running as fast as she could from an energetic base don't seem to be factors that they have taken seriously.

The Democrats, myself included at the time, banked on the quintessential moderate, establishment-approved candidate in the hope that she would be the more comfortable choice in light of the profound unfitness of her opponent for high office. That was a mistake. It permitted an ignorant, boorish man whose only guiding principle is the single-minded pursuit of controversy as a means to fame and wealth to define himself as a roguish disruptor. This at a time when the electorate was registering an almost unprecedented disgust with the direction of official policy.

The bizarre thing is that the popular backlash to the Trump Presidency has been so powerful that in spite of their strategic buffoonery the Democrats remain likely to be swept to power in at least one house of Congress. I can't help but wonder, though, at what they could accomplish with this kind of popular angst if they were willing to take bold policy stands and use this opportunity to change the contours of the public discourse.

The party has actively discouraged discussion of a truly universal health insurance system, for example, in spite of the fact that the electorate which elected Connor Lamb in a Pennsylvania special election - in a district that preferred Trump to Clinton by an overwhelming 20 point margin - said that the most important issue to them wasn't Russia or Syria or taxes or even Trump himself, but health care.

The Sanders campaign was disappointing in many respects, but one thing it demonstrated unequivocally was that campaigns that embrace causes unflinchingly can be made financially viable without the money of a top dollar donor. Yet the Democratic Party has increasingly focused on large donations from wealthy liberal benefactors without significant critical examination of how those donations unreasonably empower the people who give them, or consideration that the super-rich as a class might have material and personal interests that are fundamentally incompatible with those of the rest of the country.

The Democratic Party, having run an establishment candidate against Trump and failed to beat him, has observed Trump remaking the GOP in his own image and resolved to make itself a party of the establishment. Granted, that decision still leaves a place in the party for activists and working-class advocates, but it is a fundamentally secondary and inferior place. I have grave doubts about whether the political overlap between the upper middle class voters the Democrats are courting and the young, working class base that is providing the real political energy on the left is significant enough for the strategy to be effective in the long term.

The bottom line is that if the Democrats take power but remain in hock to corporate money and the respectability politics of the upper middle class, all they will have accomplished is the power to establish limits on the damage President Trump can do. That is, to be sure, a worthy goal, but it is by definition a shortsighted one. What positive good would such a Congress accomplish?

When Trump leaves office, however he ends up doing it, the basis of their power would be revealed to be nothing more profound than the conservation of the status quo. That is an aim which fails to meet even the modest standards of progressivism the Democrats have set for themselves in recent decades. If the holding of power is all the Democratic Party really cares about, this doesn't present much of an issue. But if it is to be an organ for legitimate, positive change for a society desperately in need of it, more ambitious goals and more democratic (small d) politics are required.

Infinite War

In the last couple of weeks, national news coverage has been mostly concerned with rapid developments in the Mueller investigation and the related hubbub concerning the imminent release of former FBI Director James Comey's memoir. The far more important news has come from Syria, where it has been claimed that the regime of Bashar al-Assad has once again directed a chemical attack on a civilian population. Assad as well as his Russian and Iranian allies deny the claim, and have invited an international organization to investigate the claim.

Assad, if he is indeed innocent on this occasion, has not made himself seem so by using chemical weapons repeatedly in the course of the civil war that has gone on for seven years. Presidents Trump and Putin have engaged in some unusually intense saber-rattling, making a US-Russian conflict seem uncomfortably possible.

Yet the President is known to be ambivalent about US involvement in Syria and the Middle East in general. The Washington Post featured a fascinating piece of reporting detailing the tension his position has produced between him and high ranking military officials. Its description of the Pentagon's position left me slack-jawed, and for that reason I will quote it directly.

For America's generals, more than 17 years of combat have served as a lesson in the limits of overhwelming force to end wars fueled by sectarian feuds, unreliable allies and persistent government corruption. "Victory is an elusive concept in that part of the world," said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who led troops over five tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. "Anyone who goes in and tries to achieve a decisive victory is going to come away disappointed..."

 ...His remarks reflected a broader Pentagon consensus: In the absence of a clear outcome, winning for much of the U.S. military's top brass has come to be synonymous with staying put. These days, senior officers talk about "infinite war."

"It's not losing," explained Air Force Gen. Mike Holmes in a speech earlier this year. "It's staying in the game and... pursuing your objectives." 

Infinite war. Even saying the words in seriousness is an act of hubris. In a way though, it is the only possible conclusion from the premises given by current US foreign policy. If the lesson of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc is that no amount of external force can destroy an effective insurgency short of destroying the population itself, and if the policy of the United States is that neither withdrawal nor wholesale destruction of the population is acceptable, then the position taken above is the only one still available.

The problem, of course, is that the policy is bad. In spite of the fact that the military is openly admitting that "winning" these conflicts is not really feasible, in the last ten years our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has expanded to Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. We are continually pouring resources into a region-wide conflict which we admit cannot be won in the traditional sense in a vain attempt to maintain some sort of control over the situation for as long as possible.

This is not to say that the shape of our involvement hasn't evolved. The full scale occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush were anathema to his successor President Obama, who nonetheless failed to abandon either the logic or practice of the open-ended, conceptually preposterous War on Terror. Since then we have instead engaged in widespread localized use of special forces, and an exponential increase in the use of lethal drones.

This makes the United States a faceless, looming, frequently deadly presence in countries already plagued by violence. Aside from significant questions about the morality of military intervention in the first place, our approach is unlikely to temper anti-American sentiment region-wide. The unavoidable conclusion is that Trump's reservations about military action in the Middle East are, whatever his reasons for harboring them, correct.

Infinite war, the constant application of violence in a region for no greater purpose than to bend the local political arc somewhat more in the image of the United States, is an atrocity. It is an act of imperial hubris sufficient to strip the United States of whatever moral credibility it retains on the world stage.

At some point, we are going to have to acknowledge that our fears cannot justify the human cost of our actions. The impermeability of the US is not a goal for which the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the distruption of tens of millions is a reasonable price to pay. The turbulence of our domestic politics notwithstanding, we bear a responsibility as citizens to do what we can to police the use of force in our name abroad, especially when it is unjust.

Meeting with Kim Jong Un

The world was shocked two weeks ago when news broke that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had used South Korean diplomats to extend an offer to meet directly with President Trump. The terms he offered were a discussion of denuclearization in exchange for a security guarantee from the United States toward the North Korean government. Even more surprisingly, the president accepted.

Since, administration officials have walked back Trump's acceptance somewhat, saying the administration wants to see proof of North Korean willingness to actually dismantle their nuclear capability before having the meeting. At the moment it is unclear when, if ever, the meeting will actually occur.

The reaction to Trump's decision has ranged from skepticism to scorn. Few people of whom I am aware seem to think that this sort of meeting is a good idea. Given Trump's track record in office to date, I think concern over his personally negotiating delicate international issues is warranted. But the criticism I've seen, or at least most of it, has not been of Trump personally negotiating with the North Koreans, but of the concept of negotiating with them at all. It is that rarest of issues - one on which the security establishment and Rachel Maddow agree. I also think their view is deeply flawed.

As things stand, North Korea is a nuclear power. It is a nuclear power that is purposefully developing the missile technology necessary to hit the United States. The North Korean government insists that such an armament is meant to act as a deterrent. It is nearly 70 years since the Korean War began and the US still has nearly 40,000 soldiers based in South Korea, with a slightly larger number nearby in Japan. The potential for renewed active conflict has always been uncomfortably present.

The North Korean nuclear project was intended by them as a guarantee against US power both as an implied threat and as a potential bargaining chip in negotiations. While they have possessed nuclear weapons for some time, it is only in recent years that their missile technology has progressed to the point that a North Korean nuclear weapon could plausibly reach the United States.

That Kim has chosen this moment to reach out suggests to me that the North Korean leadership realizes that its moment of maximum leverage is approaching. If the US government maintains its position that North Korea having the capability to strike the United States is unacceptable, then Kim should be able to trade denuclearization for lifting of sanctions and international guarantees against military action toward North Korea.

That establishment opinion in this country is so utterly against that sort of negotiation is reflective of the degree to which we have gotten caught up in the "us vs them" aspect of the disagreement. It is the same mentality that drove the opposition to a similar - and thus far successful - negotiation with Iran. Any deal that gives "them" anything they want is branded as a shameful capitulation. It is implied in this line of argument that not only is the United States entitled to achieve its preferred outcome, but that the use of force would be justified to achieve it.

The correct policy in cases like this, where nuclear proliferation is a serious concern for local US allies, is to engage in a vigilant but good-faith negotiation that ultimately accepts such concessions as are necessary to achieve the objective. Doing so is not weakness, it is a pragmatic commitment to fulfilling our obligations to our allies without destruction or slaughter.

We appear to have "learned" the lesson of World War II to an extent far beyond its usefulness. How frequently is the argument used in our public discourse that we shouldn't appease hostile actors? Yet how often do we question whether our geopolitical adversaries merit the comparison? It is an argument that, if accepted, would justify almost any aggressor in history. Ironically, Hitler himself applied this very logic to the unprincipled pillaging of Germany by the victors of the First World War in order to justify his waging of the second.

The kind of thinking that rushes to military options and ridicules negotiation has burned us already since 9/11. We were told many times that Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq was collaborating with terrorists and providing weapons of mass destruction. We were told that sanctions and negotiations couldn't possibly solve the problem and the only solution was military. We later found that the "intelligence" used to justify the invasion of Iraq was exaggerated for the explicit purpose of preparing the public for war. We were told we had to invade Afghanistan because bin Laden was based there, yet 17 years later  we maintain a military presence in that country in spite of the fact that we killed bin Laden 6 years ago in another country altogether.

We have fallen too easily and too completely into a line of thought that assumes that our most serious international disputes can only be solved by the military. We are correspondingly over-eager to employ it. Criticism of negotiation as weak feeds this narrative, whether a Democrat or a Republican is the one being criticised. It may be easy to ridicule Donald Trump - and easier still to ridicule him meeting with Kim Jong Un - but those of us opposed to the president and his policies ought to take greater care that in opposing him we do not stake out positions that feed into harmful narratives.

The Importance of the West Virginia Teachers' Strike

For a week now, every county in West Virginia has shut down its schools because teachers in the state are on strike. Their demands include a raise and more state resources for the state employees' health insurance fund. They had been scheduled to receive only 2% this year and 1% each of the next two years, while being expected to pay more for their insurance costs.  Many teachers have already been working multiple jobs to provide a living for themselves and their families, and they decided to act. 

When word of the impending strike - which is technically illegal in West Virginia under a law banning strikes among public employees -  got out, state authorities seriously considered pursuing a court order forcing the teachers back to work. They passed a bill empowering the governor to disperse demonstrations by force, if necessary.

The teachers did not back down, and school boards in every county in West Virginia voted to close when they struck. Shortly thereafter, the hilariously named Governor Jim Justice announced that West Virginia teachers would instead receive 5% raises and committed to forming a task force to address issues with the insurance fund. Teachers' unions have for their part have continued to demonstrate at the state capitol until the legislature approves the deal. The state House and Senate are currently reconciling the differences in their two approval bills so that one can be sent to the governor to become law.

The strike demonstrates an important point about what politics really is and how it is done effectively that I would like to address at some length. The teachers were initially informed that there simply wasn't any money in the state budget for their raise. True as it may be in that state or many others, why on earth is there not sufficient money in state budgets to adequately pay the people training the minds of our children?

Part of the reason that state budgets operate on such thin margins is that Medicaid costs - a large proportion of which are paid by state governments - are rising because of large and sustained increases in medical costs. The national government has a similar problem, with the added cost of Medicare in the mix. 

That being said, state governments have been slashing tax rates and eliminating certain taxes altogether at an alarming pace for two decades. The cuts are made in the name of competitiveness and ostensibly to bring business and new residents to the state in question, but in tandem with medical inflation they have left the states with relatively little cash on hand. Other priorities - education in particular - have been shortchanged as a result.

This is a much more serious problem than is frequently discussed. States, cities, and towns across the country are falling over themselves to give preferential treatment to large corporations in exchange for huge influxes of investment. The calculation is an easy one to make - local leaders get glowing press and photo-ops, and a tangible place and number of jobs for which they can claim credit. Favorable tax treatment, zoning privileges, and exemptions from certain regulations have all been used to lure big business and in the process advantage large corporations against smaller local enterprises. Meanwhile, public priorities at the state and local level suffer for lack of funds.

Our national discussion about what it means to be a democracy tends to be centered on the right to vote and regular elections, which are undoubtedly vital. But more is required for a government to be genuinely by and for the people. If voters are to be the passive recipients of whatever policy their elected representatives devise, then those with proximity to representatives - via campaign donations, lobbying or even personal relationships - will have an advantage in the policymaking process.

This is where the West Virginia teachers come in. If the decisions made in our governments do not align with our social priorities then the people making decisions need to be made sufficiently uncomfortable to reconsider their plan of action. Direct action is the only way to make that happen. An event like a statewide teachers' strike is felt in every corner of society. People no longer have the option of turning a blind eye. Teachers are such sympathetic figures and the fact that they are poorly served by state governments is so widely known that when people are forced to choose sides the decision is a simple one.

There are a number of power struggles across our society in which the potential efficacy of direct action is not well appreciated. But the example of people willing to take up the struggle has a salutary effect on other groups considering taking action themselves. Already, Oklahoma teachers have indicated that they intend to follow the example of their West Virginian compatriots. The last twelve months haven't given us a great deal to be happy about, but this is something that ought to be supported and celebrated. If we are lucky, it may spark a wave of activism that would genuinely improve peoples' everyday lives and help refocus social priorities.

Wayne LaPierre and the Good Guy with a Gun

On Thursday, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre gave a combative speech in opposition to new proposed gun control measures. After a recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida that left 17 dead, the surviving students took it upon themselves to become advocates. The resulting debate has been unusually fierce even for our highly charged political climate.

LaPierre made the argument that is familiar to all of us by now. The only thing that stops a malicious shooter is a well intentioned one. He holds that any significant restriction on the ownership of firearms undermines a freedom fundamental to the defense of other rights and interests. How is one to resist force, after all, if not with equal force? If mass shootings are to continue, then the real way to fight them is by providing armed guards.

What can be made of the argument that an armed citizenry is the best defense against an oppressive government? The specter raised in LaPierre's speech is one of an all-powerful, distant elite ruling a terrorized populace. It is also exactly as real as every other ghost story ever told. Oppressive governments everywhere are able to oppress because they have the support of a subset of the population sufficiently wealthy and well connected to enforce control.

From a government control perspective there is little difference between a population that is disarmed and one that is uniformly armed, as the underlying structure of power is largely unchanged. In fact, if we take LaPierre's argument about resisting oppression seriously, the only way to operationalize it logically is by disarming the powerful and arming the powerless.

The question at the heart of the gun issue is often framed in terms of individual rights, but I don't think that is the clearest way to state it. The basic question, as I see it, is whether we feel that the ability of individuals to project force against one another is above social regulation. How we decide that question may not in general change the ability of a government to repress, but it will have a significant bearing on the kind of society we live in.

If we do believe that society cannot regulate the capacity of individuals to inflict harm on one another - rather than simply punishing such harm as it occurs - then there will never be very much between me and anyone who decides, for any reason at all, that I'm the person they want to kill. In a society where mass shootings have become horrifyingly commonplace, every individual is well aware of the danger.

Humanity as a whole is extremely vulnerable to the trap of the quick fix. When we are made significantly uncomfortable - in particular when we are afraid - we are likely to pick the fastest possible way to remove the discomfort without regard to its source. Such decisions may not be well discussed in the public forum before they are made, but that does not prevent them from having far reaching consequences.

If we react to our continuing fear about mass shootings by demanding armed guards wherever there is a risk, there will eventually be armed guards in more or less every public space. Yet armed individuals can only defend against an ongoing act, because their existence does not address the underlying social, cultural, and policy factors that cause mass shootings. The best that can possibly be expected from them is reduced casualties.

The most probable result of seeing more people with more guns in more places is an increasing paranoia about the dangers of everyday life. A generation that grows up in an environment where mass shootings are a regularity and armed guards are present on a daily basis could hardly keep itself from seeing the world as a hostile place from which it needs to be protected. People who feel that way support authoritarian regimes and oppress feared minority groups. The only thing that is ultimately secured by a frightened people asking for protection is the power of the ruling class.

There can and should be a robust debate about the best way to achieve two objectives; address the conditions that lead to mass shooters, and make it harder for would-be mass shooters to get the necessary equipment. Arming more people, be it at home or in public, does neither of those things. It therefore cannot prevent mass shootings. It is genuinely that simple.

We  do need to put work into remedying the social and cultural conditions that turn individuals into mass shooters. We do need to provide better resources for disturbed people before they decide to act, and also for those who see someone they know at risk. But we also need to realize that these events require both intent and opportunity. Saying that gun control is not a significant part of the solution is equivalent to saying that opportunity plays no role in mass shootings, and it is equally absurd.

Why Did the Russians Interfere?

On Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller handed down the first indictments of foreign nationals from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Thirteen individuals were targeted in all. The indictment describes a sophisticated operation designed to use social media to promote their favored candidates (Trump in the Republican Party, Bernie Sanders in the Democratic), discredit candidates they opposed (Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz), and encourage partisan division as well as social unrest.

This moment, when the specifics of the Russian operation are being officially discussed for the first time, seems like a good one to take stock of what Russian interference means and what it does not mean, as well as evaluate how we've been talking about Russia for the last two years.

The reporting on the Russia investigation has frequently bordered on the hysterical. Such respected figures as Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe have referred to Russian campaign actitivities as an act of warfare. Repeated, unironic references to Trump or his associates as Russian agents, or to the president as taking marching orders from Putin appear across left-leaning media. This is important, because while there is an abundance of evidence that Russia attempted to influence the election and succeeded in at least some degree, there is no evidence at all that this was a masterminded plot by Putin to install a compromised puppet in the Presidency of the United States.

That distinction matters. Understanding precisely what Russia did and didn't do - and why they did what they did - matters. One could read eighteen months' worth of media coverage on this issue and emerge with no more sophisticated idea of Putin's motivations than a notion that he is an evil genius who spends his days and nights dreaming of world domination and how to destroy democracy. The reader may be unsurprised to learn that I, writing from the midwest, do not have privileged access to Vladimir Putin's internal monologue. That being said, it's not terribly difficult to imagine what calculations he is making.

During negotiations with the Soviet Union over a reunified Germany's membership in NATO in 1990, the NATO countries - led by the United States - made it clear that in return for the Soviets' cooperation on Germany they would renounce any intention of expanding NATO into eastern Europe. NATO, which began as a political association and became an explicitly anti-Soviet military alliance in the course of the Cold War, was reasonably regarded by the Soviets as a hostile organization. NATO expansion into eastern Europe began only a few years later and has continued to the present.

Moreover, Russia's brief experiment in liberal democracy during the 1990s was not successful, to put it mildly. Mismanagement, corruption, and economic collapse are what most Russians associate with that decade. Putin may be a natural autocrat, but the Russian people generally agree with him that the influence of the United States in Russia after the Cold War was the cause of a great deal of misery. His popularity is by no means as universal as he would like us to think, but it is nonetheless genuine. The vehement hostility of the US toward Putin personally only serves to reinforce his image.

So, when Russian operatives attempt to use social media to exacerbate social tensions, it is because Putin's experience of socially tense democracy leads him to believe that doing so will keep the US from projecting significant power in what he regards as the Russian sphere. When Russian operatives lend support to the Sanders and Trump campaigns, it is because those two candidates were the only ones in either of the major parties in 2016 who openly supported calming tensions with Russia.

None of which, of course, is to say that the Russian campaign was justified. Far from it. I would say that in general this kind of blatant manipulation of any country's political process by another government is indefensible. It is morally wrong. What I mean to emphasize is that while we may be justifiably outraged at the act and want to bring those responsible to account, we should also realize that the structural problems with our relationship with Russia are not going away. A serious conversation to address them is long overdue.

The Mueller investigation has already exposed that the Trump campaign was aware of and enthusiastic about Russian efforts on their behalf. That is deeply disturbing, although not illegal. Whether there was a formal or tacit connection between them has not yet been revealed, but if convincing evidence of it exists I have yet to see it. Donald Trump has and will continue to provide us with frequent occasion to note the negative effects he has on the country, but the overwhelming likelihood is that he is no more a puppet than Vladimir Putin is a Bond villain.

The Democrats, for their part, have encouraged the Trump-As-Russian-Puppet narrative because it provides an explanation for their 2016 loss that does not require them to critically examine their own performance. Admittedly, it is a fine line to walk in their case between legitimate outrage at what did occur and politically motivated grandstanding about what may not have. Yet not only does their singular focus on Russia risk an overreach if the investigation finds no evidence of illegality, it also validates the fearful, xenophobic, America-against-the-world mentality that Trump embodies. They would do better to stick to what is known and use this moment to develop a sensible and coherent policy toward Russia.