Three speeches: Biden, Netanyahu, convicted felon Trump

We had three notable speeches in the last couple of days: Biden’s speech on stepping down as the Democratic Presidential nominee, Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress, and a rambling rally rant by convicted felon Donald Trump.

Biden’s speech on declining the Democratic nomination

Biden’s speech on stepping down as the Democratic nomination was a dignified, 11-minute statement. (1) It was notable that he slurred some words throughout the presentation and came off as a bit feeble. But he did the right thing for himself, for the Democratic Party and democracy and for the country in stepping out of the Presidential race.

Netanyahu’s speech to Congress

Netanyahu’s speech was disgraceful and was all built around his decades-old goal of getting the US to go to war with Iran. Even Nancy Pelosi expressed her disgust! (2)

It was a de facto campaign speech for Donald Trump and also a chance to repeat yet again his propaganda pitch for his current war and starvation campaign against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. He was arrogant enough to complain about Americans citizens protesting against his policies in the United States. He even made the sleazy insinuation that American protesters were being paid by Iran, offering nothing resembling proof, of course, and called the protesters “useful idiots.”

This authoritarian freak even said that American protesters "should be ashamed of themselves." This from a man who apparently has no shame at all.

He compared his current war to the Allied cause against Nazi Germany. He equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism and criticism of all Jews. He postured about the conflict between Iran and Hamas on the one hand, and Israel and the US on the other, as one between “barbarism and civilization,” stereotypical colonialist rhetoric.

Presumably with the far-right US Christian Zionists mainly in mind, he ranted I a maudlin way about “the lions of Judah, the lions of Israel, Maccabees, and martyred soldiers. And presented it as a cause of "the Jewish people." He offered the slogan, “Never Again is now!”

He repeated the stock propaganda line about Israel fighting for the US. And hinted not at all subtlety that he was planning to invade Lebanon.

Referring to the assassination attempt against Trump, he said, "There is no room for political violence in democracy." This from the guy who backs the violent West Bank settlers and is conducting a vicious war aimed at civilians in Gaza. He really does have no sense of shame, it appears.

Trump’s speech in North Carolina

Thirty-four-times convicted felon Trump gave a campaign speech in Charlottsville, North Carolina. (3) He seemed a little low energy little "low-energy." A little old, maybe? He rambled, as usual, and obviously went off the teleprompter script many times, as he did in his Republican Convention speech. He even fretted out loud about being called "cognitively challenged." (At one point he refers to Biden as “cognitively a degenerate [sic].”)

I was struck watching this one how much he still relies on the reality TV vibes, bragging about the size of his crowds and the TV ratings and so on. He treats his appearances as a show, so the actual references to policy of any kind are basically not part of the reality TV program. He talked a lot about the size of his crowds and the ”record-setting” TV ratings of the Republican Convention (“broke all television ratings”. “The greatest convention that anyone has seen thus far.”

He did lay out some anti-Harris slogans and made a point of always pronouncing her name “Ka-MAL-a.” He called her "Lyin' KaMALa Harris," a "radical-left lunatic" (aka, black and female), and "more liberal than Bernie Sanders," which is probably supposed to mean “too Jewish.” He claimed that Harris supports a “socialist takeover of the entire US health system,” whatever that means. He later says she was the “original Marxist district attorney.”

Convicted felon Trump is obviously defensive about the whole democracy-and-rule-of-law issue, so he’s trying to push back a bit on that point, now. He called Harris “a true threat to democracy.” In Trumpista populist terms, “democracy” for them means rule by Real American white people. Kamala is "nothing," he said, apparently trying out euphemisms for “black.” He said she “destroyed San Francisco,” which is “today not a livable city.” The Republicans just can’t give up their obsession with “San Francisco Democrats.”

Immigration and abortion are particular hot-button issues for violent radical-right groups.

In the speech, he repeated the all-too-common Republican/Christian nationalist lie about abortion-after-birth, claiming Harris supports killing babies after birth. He knows this is something that incites fanatics to violence acts when he makes this false claim, as does ever other Republican who uses it. But he clearly knows the radical position on abortion favored by his party is a weakness, although whether he knows how much of a weakness it is isn’t clear. He took the states-rights position on abortion, and mentioned that he accepts exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. But that’s not how his appointments to the Project 2025 Supreme Court look at it, nor how Republicans have been legislating on it.

In the speech, he repeated the all-too-common Republican/Christian nationalist lie about abortion-after-birth, claiming Harris supports killing babies after birth. He knows this is something that incites fanatics to violence acts when he makes this false claim, as does ever other Republican who uses it. But he clearly knows the radical position on abortion favored by his party is a weakness, although whether he knows how much of a weakness it is isn’t clear. He took the states-rights position on abortion, and mentioned that he accepts exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. But that’s not how his appointments to the Project 2025 Supreme Court look at it, nor how Republicans have been legislating on it.

He knows this is a major weak point. It’s an excellent issue for Harris and the Democrats to use as a concrete example of what the anti-democracy position of the Trumpistas means. If Harris plays it right, Trump will find it hard to push back effectively on those challenges. In this speech, he relied on I’s-not-me-it’s-you gaslighting: "They're a threat to democracy," he said referring to Harris and the Democrats.

Trump then switched to ranting about immigrants with fantasy claims. The news agencies reporting on this should provide more fact-checking, especially when he rambles on about immigrant criminals. At one point while ranting about immigrants, convicted felon Trump says, “You’re not going to teach a criminal not to be a criminal. It’s just not going to happen.”

He relied on the standard, xenophobic, Klan-type, lurid stories about violent crime and typing them to immigrants. In the real world, crime rates are consistently lower among immigrants than among American citizens. But that doesn’t fit with the Trumpista verbal-professional-wrestling image.

At one point, he referenced his Apprentice reality-TV role by saying "Kamala, you're fired!" - reality TV reference. Then went on to talk about all the people Harris fired. Also bragged about the size of his rallies. Nobody but him actually cares about that. But he sounded obsessed with it. Went on and on about his crowd. He referred back to his martyrdom moment when an assassin’s bullet nicked his ear. He rambled on weirdly about the shooting. He couldn't seem to remember the last name of "Cory" - the supporter who was killed shielding his family - and didn't mention the names at all of the two people wounded there to whom he referred in this speech.

He bragged that the Republican Convention broke all TV ratings (in his telling). "How good was the Hulkster?" he asked the crowd, referring to the cheesy and weird shirt-ripping appearance of Hulk Hogan at the convention.

The Democrats of course can’t afford to underestimate Trump. But he does seem less focused than ever in his speeches. In this one, he went into a long and near-incomprehensible ramble about weightlifting and volleyball and car racing that was somehow about why gender transition is bad.

Notes:

(1) Biden Oval Office address after dropping out of 2024 election (FULL SPEECH). Associated Press YouTube channel 07/24/2024. <https://www.youtube.com/live/jgHT9dYJCTU?si=OMQ_q9-cTNGji3NX> (Accessed: 2024-25-07).

(2) X/Twitter 07/21/2024. <https://x.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1816208313572364356> (Accessed: 2024-24-07).

(3) Trump FULL SPEECH at Charlotte rally. LiveNOW from FOX 07/24/2024. <https://youtu.be/c7sQfkQfOhE?si=MD10Tr2STl3RxxzD> (Accessed: 2024-25-07).

Kinnard, Meg & Gomez Licon, Adriana (2024): AP News 07/25/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/trump-charlotte-north-carolina-harris-7c7e6e405fecc8927a63763c76f2db1e> (Accessed: 2024-25-07).

Is there hope for fewer alliances between mainstream conservatives and the Radical Right?

Jorge Alemán takes a (somewhat) hopeful lesson from recents setbacks of the far-right party VOX in Spain to suggest that the noeliberal project more generally is in a moment of crisis. (¿Qué pasa con el odio de las ultraderechas? Pagina/12 22.10.2020):

Hasta ahora las derechas clásicas habían sido ganadas por la extensión del rechazo de la política propio del discurso de las ultraderechas, pero ahora la dominación neoliberal duda sobre si ese es definitiva su camino.

Los teóricos afines al neoliberalismo saben la religión del Mercado no puede sostenerse en el odio, debe encontrar formas más seductoras para sus consumidores. No obstante, por ahora no pueden, temen como siempre el ascenso de fuerzas democráticas y progresistas que ya comienzan a retornar.

[So far, the classical right [center-right conservative] has been winning by continuing their rejection of the politics proper to the discourse of the far-right, but now neoliberal domination has doubts about whether that is definitely the direction they want to take.

Theorists aligned with neoliberalism know the religion of the market cannot be sustained by hatred, that they must find more seductive forms of politics for their consumers. Nevertheless, for now they cannot, fearing as always the rise of democratic and progressive forces that are already beginning to return.]

He is basing his larger observation also on the apparent rejection of Trump in this year's eletion in the US and on Angela Merkel's refusal to make common cause with the far right in Germany. The implication is that because the far right altervatives have an alternative form of politics that supports the established economic order but not the liberal political order. So allying with the far-right remains a chronic temptation for the conservatives parties.

Alemán argues that not only will Trump lose, but also "un estilo político primario con bases megalómanas y paranoicas que solo se afirman en el odio" [a primary political style with megalomaniacal and paranoid bases that are only affirmed in hatred.}

Americans opposed to Trump are at the moment in a don't-count-your-chickens-before-they-are-hatched mode about the Presidentioal election. It's not over until the election and the post-election challenges are finished and Joe Biden is sworn in as President.

But at least in the US political context, Alemán is more confident that I that the defeat of Trump will also mean the end of Trumpism. Not after the Republicans Party backed Trump so enthusiastically for four years, the NeverTrumpers at the Lincoln Project notwithstanding. The prospect of the Republican Party remaking itself in the mode of, say, the Eisenhower Administration is virtually unthinkable at this point. Radical right ideology will continue to drive the Republican Party. And thare is little pospect that "the fever will break," as establishment Democrats endlessly hope.

Bunker Boy and Biden address the politics of monuments, and Biden's is actually worth listening to

Bunker Boy read a maudlin speech at Mount Rushmore yesterday whose text obviously bored him to death except during the sentences inciting his elderly white core constituency against the scary black demonstrators. It's always mildly entertaining to hear him recite names of people he mostly couldn't identify if asked during a press conference or ordinary conversation.

NBC News has a YouTube of its live coverage, Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore event, with his speech beginning just after 1:15:00. Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore event:

Although the removing-statues moment is almost exclusively about monuments to the Confederacy, Trump praised statues of Washington and Jefferson in a bored tone. He didn't even allude to the, uh, special character of Confederate monuments.

Status Quo Joe did address the Confederate monument issue, as Eddy Rodriguez reports in Biden Says We Should 'Protect' Columbus, Washington and Jefferson Statues Newsweek 03/30/2020.

The monument protests come up at two different points in this video, just after 33:30 and 1:01:00. Biden delivers remarks on the Trump's response to the coronavirus Washington Post 06/30/2020:

SQJ managed to make a decent point about monument symbolism. Although he wouldn't be himself if he didn't manage to garble the message a bit. Still, he does make the point that Confederate symbolism stands for white racism and treason and people generally understand that's what it stands for, despite the Sons of Confederate Veterans types babbling about Heritage and their sacred honuh of their great-great-great-grandpappies.

Without explicitly offering advice to protesters, he actually managed to sound like he was giving a sympathetic suggestion to protesters to keep their focus on Confederate monuments and not blur the message by making issues of those whose symbolism is not so clearly identified by the general public. When pressed on the unauthorized removal of Confederate statues, Biden understandably expressed a preference for normal procedures, citing the Mississippi Legislature's recent decision to dump the Confederate-themed official state flag:

But I can understand, I can understand the anger and anguish that people feel by having for years and years, then under the statue  of Robert E. Lee, who, if you're an African-American. So, it's a difference. It's always better to do it peacefully. But there's a distinction between, in, those monuments, and - I shift responsibility and I'm not, I think,  the elected officials where those statues are have a responsibility to move. Put them in museums. Get them down.

But don't expect, if you have sittin' in front of you all these years, and we finally, finally, are going through another phase of maybe responding to the systemic racism in America, and what's we seen happen is, don't be surprised if someone pulls down the statue of Jefferson Davis. It's better that they do not. But it's fundamentally different than pulling down the statue, or going into the Lincoln Memorial and tryin' to pull, you know, a - not Lincoln Memorial, that's a bad example - the Jefferson Memorial, and grabbing Jefferson off his chair. [my emphasis]

That is not nearly so clear for most other public monument themes. I'd be happy to help someone pull down a Grover Cleveland statue. But good luck trying to explain the symbolism of that in a 15-second TV report. Hint: Cleveland's explicitly expressed philosophy of government was, "though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."

Trumpism and pre-Trumpism

Another reminder that Bunker Boy is bad in his own unique way and is changing the US government radically for the worst. But Trumpism also didn't appear out of nowhere. The Republican Party created it, and the Democratic Party far too often abetted the process.

Angela Dewan and Jennifer Hansler report (CNN 06/08/2020):

The US' credibility has taken another dent over the past two weeks. Current and former diplomats told CNN the events at home were "scary" and "heartbreaking" to watch -- and also undermined their mission. A current State Department official said that America's "moral standing is challenged."

But the erosion of the country's moral credibility didn't begin with Trump. America's so-called war against terror and the abuses that came with it, such as those in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, was a major turning point. Some of that was remedied under the Obama administration, but even then, the US continued to violate rights abroad as the wars trundled on.

Trump's three years in office have expedited that erosion, in part by his failure to lead by example at home, said Rob Berschinski, who worked for the US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor during the Obama years. [my emphasis]

The American political system is currently badly broken. From asymmetric partisan polarization to the militarization of the police to the collapse of the will of Congress to maintain essential Constitutional checks to the massive corruption of money in politics to the massive inequality and institutionalized white racism that underpins the system, the problems cannot be fixed only by substituting a minimally competent President for Bunker Boy.

Al Gore, who was rightfully elected President in 2000 but was blocked from taking office by a system already badly failing, wrote about the cycles of security scares in American history, with particular reference to the post-9/11 one, wrote in The Assault on Reason (2007), published the year that Season 5 of The Apprentice began:

Former Supreme Court justice William Brennan commented on this cycle once, writing, ''After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary. But it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along."

There are also reasons for concern this time around that what we are experiencing may no longer be the first half of a recurring cycle, but rather the beginning of something new. For one thing, this war is predicted by the administration to last for the rest of our lives. So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity. Some have expressed the view that over time it will begin to resemble the "war" against drugs - that is, it will become a more or less permanent struggle that occupies a significant part of our law enforcement and security agenda from now on. If that is the case, then when - if ever - does this encroachment on our freedoms die a natural death? [my emphasis]

Bunker Boy Chaos

Is this a man who will submit to a free and fair election?

Not if he can help it.

Indeed, Trump appears to have no interest in being president in the traditional sense. He’s king of the white people in the red states. Anybody who voted against him is an enemy.

To the extent that MAGA means anything, it means restoring the social conditions of the Deep South in the 1950s, an impossible delusion. [my emphasis]

That's Gene Lyons in 2020 is bad, and it’s not half over Chicago Sun-Times 06/04/2020.

He also explains some basic facts about President Bunker Boy:

Chaos is Trump’s only talent. Empowered by false bravado and Daddy’s (and/or Russian mob) money, Trump blunders into something he does not and cannot understand — the casino business, airlines, professional football, now the U.S. government. He listens to nobody, makes one foolhardy blunder after another, bankrupts or otherwise destroys the enterprise, betrays everyone who trusted him, and blames everybody but himself for the disaster.

However, Trump impersonated a business tycoon on a TV show. Millions bought the con. It’s taken him three years and a viral pandemic to bring America to a state of near breakdown, but he’s finally got us there.

So now this most godless of men has taken to posing in front of religious shrines with a Bible. [my emphasis]

Joe Conason notes, "Under ordinary circumstances, open dissent from high-ranking military officials against the actions of civilian political leaders would signal a danger familiar to other countries." (A Timely Warning From The Generals National Memo 06/05/2020)

But in the recent case of former senior military officers issuing serious warning about the illegal use of the military inside the United States:

Speaking out in defense of constitutional order, these retired officers articulated a fundamental principle: Unlawful orders to fire on fellow Americans are not to be obeyed. We live in a republic, not a dictatorship. And should Trump or his cohort harbor any militaristic fantasies about the upcoming election — which he appears likely to lose — well, this uplifting episode marked a line that they shouldn't dare cross.

Wesley Clark talks about the issue in this CNN clip: Retired general: Mattis' statement does two powerful things 06/04/2020. This is an additional clip from the same day from Clark on Sen. Tom Cotton couldn't be more wrong.

Donald Trump, Richard Nixon and the long radicalization of the Republican Party

One thing that often gets obscured in the entirely justified outrage over Trump's criminal conduct and contempt for Constitutional institutions is that Trump is very much carrying on the radicalization of the Republican Party that has decades-old roots.

There are several ways to break down the trends. Eisenhower's Administration in retrospect is a model of "moderate" Republicanism, although he gets more credit for a peaceful foreign policy than he deserves. His "tripwire/massive retaliation" nuclear policy was a genuinely high-risk position. And he actually threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.

The Goldwater candidacy in 1964 was a major marker in the process. But it did not yet define the national party. The Nixon Administration was path-breaking in authoritarian usage of Presidential power. But his nuclear arms-control policies, his diplomatic bridge-building to China, and even his Vietnamization policy diverged from the positions that the Goldwater right and the John Birch Society types favored. Nixon used wage-and-price controls to limit inflation, and even proposed a limited form of national health insurance that was arguably more comprehensive than "Obamacare".

Jerry Ford established a major precedent for Presidential impunity for serious crimes by issuing a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon. He also elevated the careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who have the dubious distinction of being two of the most destructive characters in American politics.

The Presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was a decisive turning point for the Republican Party, representing a convergence of neoliberal market fundamentalism, a general endorsement of hard right politics, and focused authoritarianism. The Iran-Contra affair was itself a real Constitutional crisis, which the Republicans took in stride and the Democrats didn't dispute as actively as they should have. Old Man Bush expanded Republican official impunity by pardoning Iran-Contra criminals. And Bush's own actual role in the possible (I would say likely) 1980 "October Surprise" dealings with Iran.

The fall of the Warsaw Pact and the decline in the fall of the USSR changed the international picture so dramatically that it makes it hard to describe the nature of the continuity and change during the Bush-Quayle Administration. They initiated a serious of closing military bases that would have seemed like a pacifist dream a few years before. But they also conducted the first Gulf War, which in retrospect was a fateful escalation toward what became the current Middle East situation. In general, the Bush family ties to the Saudi monarchy that Craig Unger ably described in House of Bush, House of Saud (2004) have had serious negative consequences for US foreign policy and the well-being of ordinary people in the Middle East.

But since the 1994 midterms elections which marked the so-called Gingrich Revolution, the radicalization of the Republican Party has seemingly proceeded steadily. They keep getting more authoritarian, more crassly oligarchic and rightwing, more bitterly divisive, and generally more fanatical and sleazy. And this is definitely not a case of Both Sides Do It. Nothing remotely similar has happened on the Democratic side. In fact, one of the most important defining facts of American politics since 1994 has been the asymmetric polarization beteen the two political parties.

But I always want to give Richard Nixon his due in this process. Henry Steele Commager (1902 – March 2, 1998) was a major liberal American historian in the 20th century. He was a classic "Cold War liberal" in the Truman years, very much a supporter of Truman's containment policy against the Soviet Union. During the 1960s, he became an activist critic of the Vietnam War and actually developed a sometimes radical critique of American politics based on his understanding of how Cold War foreign policy was undermining the liberal principles on which the US government and Constitution were based. In other words, an imminent critique founded on his focus on the democratic elements of classical liberal political theory.

A collection of essays published in 1975 under the title The Defeat of America features that perspective, in particular with relation to the Nixon Administration. Including the essay from which the title of the book is derived, which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books (10/05/1972 issue). He had this to say about how Nixon was undermining the system (text from the book):

Basic to an understanding of the usurpations, duplicities, and irresponsibilities of the Nixon era, then, is paranoia, which has a life of its own, and which still lingers on - even after the "end" of the [Vietnam] war and the rapprochement with China - polluting the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the country. Certainly there is little evidence that Mr. Nixon or his underlings think the new relationship with the Soviet Union and China justifies the mitigation of their own paranoia about "national security," or their conviction that any attack upon official policy is itself a potential threat to security. How else explain the vindictiveness of the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg and the readiness to subvert justice in that prosecution; how else explain the political skulduggery that persisted long after the 1972 election, the persistent use of the FBI and the CIA for political purposes, the readiness to employ provocative agents, the contumacious boast at the POW dinner that reliance on secrecy, even useless secrecy, would go on and on; how else explain the determination to bomb Cambodia back to the Stone Age? ...

Is the crisis of the present so imperative that it requires an unconstitutional revolution - requires, that is, abandoning the separation of powers, discarding limitations on the executive authority, weakening legislative control of the purse, repealing the Bill of Rights, subverting the traditional rule of law, and covering with a fog of secrecy the operations of government? Clearly Mr. Nixon and a good many of his followers think that it is. Now we are back with the phobia about communism and paranoia about national security. [my emphasis]

It is noteworthy that Commager viewed the approach of Nixon to government and politics as an attempted "revolution". Or, as he puts it, "an unconstitutional revolution"; Commager would later describe Nixon's impeachment as a legal and constitutional revolution. But he viewed the Nixon version as being revolutionary in the sense of revolutionary dictatorship as in the Terror during the French Revolution, which both classical liberal and conservative political theory regard as a cautionary tale of arbitrary excess. And which Edmund Burke, a godfather of modern reactionary political thought, used as his prime bogeyman.

It was from reading Commager among others that I first became aware of the pragmatic criticism that a big problem for US foreign policy has been a failure to understand revolutionary processes, even losing sight of the revolutionary traditions in the US itself. That is still true today, for both parties. But the Republicans have long since become accustomed to thinking and talking in terms of revolution, or "unconstitutional revolution" in Commager's somewhat awkward phrase: the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, the Tea Party, today's armed protests by Trump cultists in favor of unrestricted spread of the COVID-19 virus, the lunatics of QAnon, even Alex Jones' advocacy of murdering and eating his neighbors. (On the latter, see: Oliver O'Connell, Alex Jones says he'd kill and cook his neighbours to feed his kids Independent 05/01/2020. Though I don't recall ever hearing that cannabalism was a feature of the French Terror.)

Meanwhile, on the "other side of the aisle," when Bernie Sanders talked about having a "revolution" involving broader voter participation and national health insurance of the type that is standard in European democracies, conservative Democrats professed to see vision of guillotine blades dropping. A good illustration of how asymetric partisan polarization works in American politics.

But going back to Tricky Dick, his administration established a practice of authoritarian illegality that took deep roots in the Republican Party. It also established a defensive mentality among Nixon's hardline fans that the law should be just another political tool in the partisan war. One used only by Republicans, of course. The rabid allegiance of Trump's cult followers is the most recent flowering of that attitude. It won't be the last. And it won't be eliminated by Democrats chasing a chimera of Bipartisan harmony with today's extremist Republican Party.

A more radical critic of the Nixon Administration, the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose perspective was not restricted to the liberal political tradition, formulated this view of the situation at the time of Commager's observations quoted above (Countervrevolution and Revolt, 1972):

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. ...

The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution. It runs the whole gamut from parliamentary democracy via the police state to open dictatorship. Capitalism reorganizes itself to meet the threat of a revolution which would be the most radical of all historical revolutions. It would be the first truly world-historical revolution. [my emphasis in bold]

For anyone who is wondering, by "world-historical revolution" Marcuse had something more drastic in mind than simply national health insurance. Which, as I mentioned, was an entirely respectable idea in 1972, even among some senior Republicans, and not seen as remotely "revolutionary" in the then-mainstream of both parties.

Everyday Republican ghoulishness on the COVID-19 pandemic

Rightwing Republican Sen. Ron Johnson made his case that mass deaths from corona virus are no big deal in a USA Today column titled, As we learn more about the coronavirus, try to put things into perspective 03/30/2020.

Johnson clearly tries to minimize the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States:

Each year, approximately 48,000 Americans commit suicide and an estimated 67,000 die of a drug overdose. That level of individual despair has occurred in a strong economy with near-record low levels of unemployment in virtually every demographic.

Imagine the potential psychological and human toll if this shutdown continues indefinitely, unemployment reaches 20% or higher, as some now predict, and we sink into a deep recession or depression. ...

Every premature death is a tragedy, but death is an unavoidable part of life. More than 2.8 million die each year — nearly 7,700 a day. The 2017-18 flu season was exceptionally bad, with 61,000 deaths attributed to it. Can you imagine the panic if those mortality statistics were attributed to a new virus and reported nonstop?

Once again, I'm reminded of Steve Earle's protest song, "Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)::

Yeah, I know, that sucks that your HMO
Ain't doin' what you thought it would do
But everybody's gotta die sometime and we can't save everybody
It's the best that we can do

The first time I recall hearing a politician make this kind of argument was from then-Vice President Spiro Agnew, who brushed off antiwar critics' citing of American deaths in the Vietnam Ware by saying that more people were killed in traffic accidents in the US every year than the total number of Americans being killed in traffic accidents every year.

The argument didn't really catch on. Because even simpletons can grasp the difference between deliberate, systematic killing in war and many thousands of discreet accidents. Some war critics no doubt noticed that the number of Vietnamese dead were left out of Agnew's comparison. But even war fans were more focused on the sacrificial value of those Americans who died in combat. And the military, of course, has a moral obligation to honor the combat dead as well as a very practical reason for doing so. If people regard soldiers dying in war as pointless loss, they aren't likely to cheer for the wars or encourage family members to enlist.

Chris Hayes did a book based on his own experiences covering armed conflicts called War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). As the title implies, it focuses heavily on how people are motivated to fight, kill, and sacrifice themselves in war. "War finds its meaning in death," he wrote. "The cause is built on the backs of victims, portrayed always as innocent. Indeed, most conflicts are ignited with martyrs, whether real or created." And the number of soldiers or innocent civilians lost in a war become the justification for continuing the war. "The cause, sanctified by the dead, cannot be questioned without dishonoring those who gave up their lives."

That's why it's rare to see a politician sluffing off the significance of combat deaths, as Agnew did. And politicians who did not serve in the military, or who like Donald Trump made real effort not to do so in the case of conscription during the Vietnam War, are more likely to go out of their way to praise and idolize soldiers and those killed in war, at least in their public statements.

But deaths from COVID-19? It's hard for people to imagine those as patriotic sacrifices. The combat dead of the First World War were honored by their fellow citizens as patriotic sacrifices and remembered as heroes. The victims of the "Spanish" flu epidemic at the end of the war were unfortunate, tragic deaths to be mourned.

So when Sen. Johnson and other Republicans, including the Mad King Trump himself, seek to minimize the seriousness of COVID-19 deaths, they are being callous and morbid. But they don't risk drawing immediate charges of being unpatriotic the way someone dismissed the soldiers lost in a current war would be.

The crassly partisan motives of Republicans for doing so is not hard to see. Trump has been downplaying the significance of the virus and has been recklessly irresponsible in his statements about it and his formal policy responses to it. On February 26, he made this remarkable statement, “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low. ... When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done." [my emphasis] And that is only one example among many. (Aaron Blake, Timeline: Trump’s efforts to downplay the coronavirus threat Washington Post 03/31/2020)

This MSNBC Deadline report contrasts Trumps's panicky backtracking in his daily (de facto) campaign press conference yesterday, April 1. Trump’s Revisionist History On Coronavirus 04/01/2020:

Given Trump's April 1 warning that we could be seeing 100,000 to 240,000 COVID-19 deaths, maybe Sen. Ron Johnson will share with us what to him would be an acceptable US body count of deaths over the next year under which no special measures are justified.

Some reporter should also ask Sen. Johnson whether the body count for the flu that he seems to consider a purely natural result might be affected by a health insurance system which provides universal coverage so that everyone can get prompt treatment when they get flu symptoms instead of opting to tough it out for fear of getting hammered with unpayable hospital bills.

***************
As we see from the following two articles, both by Eric Litke, the Johnson article was cited by The Intellectualist with the headline, "Americans Should Go Back To Work, Because ‘Death Is An Unavoidable Part Of Life.’" Ironically, The concluding lines on the two Litke articles are different, too:

• Fact check: Did Wisconsin senator say Americans should go back to work? USA Today 04/01/2020: "We rate this a False Headline."
•   Did Ron Johnson say Americans should go back to work because “death is an unavoidable part of life?” PolitiFact 04/01/2020: "We rate this Half True."

It's not cited in the Litke articles, but Business Insider also ran a story by Joseph Zeballos-Roig titled, GOP senator calls on Trump to reopen parts of the coronavirus-stricken economy because 'death is an unavoidable part of life' 03/31/2020.

A gloomy prediction about America's post-November future

Neil Buchanan takes a series look at what would happen if Trump continues into a second term in How Much Worse Will Trump Become, and How Quickly? Verdict/Justia 02/13/2020.

Obviously, any serious look at that question is not going to provide a pretty picture:

After all, brutal dictatorships ... — even Hitler’s Germany - were not an unending horror for every person in those countries, from one second to the next, day after month after year. Many people suffered horribly, but as Trump’s supporters might as well be arguing: “What about all of the laws Trump didn’t break (this week, anyway)?” Or, in this context, what about the people who will not directly be affected by Democrats being prevented from winning elections?

Thinking about this question, of course, must of necessity involve thinking about how things will change over time. It will take Trump and the Republicans some number of years to do all of the things that they surely will do, if only because they will go through a process of breaking the habit of thinking that something might stop them. “That’s right, we can do this now, can’t we? Why were we still restraining ourselves?” [my emphasis]

The gradual process he describes allows some people to tell themselves at each step, "Things aren't really that bad." While things keep getting worse.

But he sounds downright fatalistic about this part:

There is now virtually no question that the following predictions will come true:

1. Trump will deny that he lost and will refuse to leave office.
2. Republicans will enthusiastically support him. (Remember, 75 percent of Americans wanted the Senate to hear witnesses last week, and 90 percent of Americans want background checks for gun buyers, but Republicans do not care. This is no longer a majority-rule system - nor even a “huge-majority-rule” system.)
3. The Supreme Court will not stop him.
4. Even if the Court does try to stop him, Trump will channel Stalin’s “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” invocation of raw power and defy the Court.

There are then two possibilities. First, Trump’s opposition acquiesces and hopes for the best. Second, they do not acquiesce, and we have what amounts to a civil war (quite possibly one in which the word war is not rhetorical).

Sending impeachment to the Senate: "A Very Strange Debate"

I hope to soon be proved wrong. But I just don't see how Nancy Pelosi's gambit of holding the articles of impeachment against Trump back from formal submission to the Senate until McConnell and his crew agree to call witnesses during the trial is a sensible play.

David Super (A Very Strange Debate Balkinization 12/23/2019) argues:

The notion that, by withholding the articles of impeachment, House Democrats can extract procedural concessions from Senator McConnell, is preposterous. As Senator McConnell has pointed out repeatedly, threatening to withhold something he does not want provides little leverage. It is like my saying I will refuse to dump a thousand gallons of toxic sludge on your lawn unless you give me a million dollars. On the other hand, ... permanent Senate rules and the decisions of Chief Justice Roberts, not Senator McConnell, will set the rules for a Senate trial and are likely to give the House’s impeachment managers ample opportunity to subpoena Administration officials. Senator McConnell clearly knows this; the Democrats would do well to tailor their strategy accordingly.

He makes the safe and obvious assumption that, as it look now, the Senate would acquit Trump in a trial. Clearly, we will never know what happens if the Senate never takes up the charges.

Super also reminds us of the stakes:

As for the questions of whether President Trump really has been impeached if the House never sends articles of impeachment to the Senate and whether the President would prefer to prevail in a Senate trial or to never have one, I do not know and I do not care. The former is a question of empty symbolism: the President’s place in history will not be determined by such technicalities but rather by his unprecedented relationship with Russia, by his transformation of the mores of the presidency, and by his throwing sobbing immigrant children into cages. The second question represents an unhealthy substitution of personal concerns for advancing the well-being of the country: we should be focusing on restoring our political institutions – which includes in part communicating with voters in ways they understand – and on ending our shameful treatment of immigrants rather than on the vanity of one man. [my emphasis]

He mentions several possible angles and motives possible in Pelosi's current stance. He doesn't mention the Occam's Razor explanation: that she never wanted to do impeachment and this is her way of burying it now.

So far, the only obvious results from his play that I can see is that the Republicans are arguing that Pelosi holding the charges back from the Senate shows the Democrats know that there charges were concocted. I don't know how seriously people in the FOX News bubble take their propaganda points. But whether they believe the charges against Trump are bogus or not, the current situation gives them an obvious talking point.

But Pelosi needs to formally send the impeachment article to deactivate that talking point and to achieve the most plausible immediate goal, which Super describes, "establishing once and for all which senators are willing to accept what the President has done may play an important role in reforming or replacing the Republican Party."

More thoughts on the Christianity Today editorials

I suppose it's possible that the Christianity Today editorial endorsing Trump's removal from office is freeing up some white evangelicals to voice their criticisms of Trump a bit more openly than they felt comfortable doing before.

But I'm very skeptical of the proposition.

Nicole Lafond describes a more optimistic take in The Evangelical War Over Impeachment Has Been A Long Time Coming 12/27/2019:

... according to several prominent evangelicals who have long been critical of Trump, Christianity Today’s editorial, and the subsequent fallout, was the moment at which a conflict within the evangelical community that had been bubbling up for at least three years - and, according to some, for decades - burst into the open.

“This is ultimately about a community deciding, and really wrestling with whether it’s more committed to these cultural values that have been associated with the faith or the fundamental values of the faith itself,” evangelical author and pastor Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove told TPM Friday.

The anti-Trump faction of the evangelical community has been active since the early days of the Republican primaries, evangelical leaders said. But impeachment was the catalyst that encouraged this section of the population to speak out before 2020.

The controversy of the last week “certainly reveals the turbulent waters of white evangelicalism in the U.S.” Shane Claiborne, an evangelical author who founded the activist group Red Letter Christians, told TPM. [my emphasis]

The only thing that will really convince me that a shift away from Trumpism is happening among white evangelicals will be national election results that show a distinct change in voting and/or voting participation that shows white evangelicals shifting away from the Republican Party. As Digby Parton continually reminds us, in the minds of its Republican adherents, conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. And after Trump leaves office, conservative ideologues will criticism Trump for not having been the Perfect Conservative.

But Trumpism is very much a result of the Republican Party's brand of True Conservatism. If in a post-Trump political world, a shift of white evangelical sentiment in public opinion polls toward Trump himself won't mean anything other than the Republican Party is doing its usual post-Republican-disaster rebranding. The Republican Party will not shift away from Trumpism unless the parties core base voters stop voting for them. Otherwise, there's no reason at this point to expect anything but a continued radicalization of the party. And the Republican base at this point is almost synonomous with white evangelicals.

If we define cultural conservatism as not liking any church music written after 1950 and thinking that smoking pot is tacky, then it's possible that we could see signifiant numbers of culturally conservative white evangelicals be jolted by the Trump experience into recognizing what the Republican Party has been for the last 40 years.

But this is why I keep coming back to the context of authoritarianism is understanding Trumpism. For authoritarians, the conservative "these cultural values that have been associated with the faith" are not distinct from "the fundamental values of the faith itself.” For them, there is no playing off one against the other.

And Republican conservative "cultural values" are deeply embedded in a broader white-identity narrative of: abortion-as-murder; sex as sin; black people as lazy, inferior, dangerous, and bad parents; Latino immigrants as dirty and degenerate; and, last but definitely not least, wimmin as inferior but threatening. As Lafond writes:

Part of the Republican Party’s Nixon-era Southern strategy - which also weaponized racial dogwhistles to recruit white Southerners in the wake of the Voting Rights Acts and the Immigration and Nationalization Act - the Republican Party’s effort to court southern white Christians has been a point of tension within the evangelical community for years.

The effort, coordinated by preachers, political operatives and conservative donors, sought to mobilize voters around “pro-family” values, most notably evangelicals’ opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

In a recent book, Wilson-Hartgrove credited that movement with fomenting an all-out culture war in the last decade by painting America as a country in moral decline that needed a fighter willing to step up and take America back.

“Trump became a champion of that agenda as a fighter, somebody who was willing to be more extreme than your average Republican in defending that,” he said. [my emphasis]

The antiabortion cause has taken on such fanatical dimensions that it can serve as an all-purpose excuse for going alone with pretty much any kind of brutality and cruely against living, breathing, human beings. The metaphor as abortion-as-Holocaust has long been common as dirt among antiabortionists. Here's Pat Robertson saying something I remember hearing him saying in the early 1990s:

Wendy, we have fifty-five million babies that have been aborted in this country since Roe v. Wade, fifty-five million, that is a holocaust. You figure, Hitler at the height of his monstrous evil killed six million people, six million; we have in this land of the free and home of the brave, we have killed fifty-five million. (Brian Tashman, Robertson: US Abortion ‘Holocaust’ Worse than Nazi Germany, Will Lead to ‘Wrath of the Lord’ Right Wing Watch 06/25/2013)

As always with far-right ideologues and especially with the antiabortion theme, we have to remember that they lie like breathing. So don't take any statistics from Pat Robertson as having any validity without verifying them from some decent source. (Also, six million is the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust; the number of deaths for which Hitler was responsible is much larger.)

Now, what Robertson is saying there very plainly means that he thinks Hitler Germany was more moral, much more moral, than democratic America today. People like him will comma-dance forever over what such a sentence really means. But there's no point. It's obvious and clear what he means.

And that formulation is a free pass to support any atrocity done by the antiabortion party. Kidnap thousands of migrant children? Nothing in comparison to our Sacred Cause? Expel all 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US even if it means massive suffering and tens of thousands of deaths, maybe more? We have to think about the Precious Unborn Babies, and, hey, Those Peolple are not part of Our Culture anyway.

I've come to the point that I find it difficult to even entertain the possibility that antibortionists who would associate themselves with a nazi-friendly formulation like Robertson's actually believe their own talk about Unborn Babies. Because I've been around long enough to remember the Vietnam War as a contemporary event. And I've never once my life ever heard a single Republican say we should oppose a war because it would kill Precious Unborn Babies. And all of our wars do that. If Republicans actually have the level of emphathy it would take to imagine a month-old fetus as being a human life that has to be protected, they would never have taken the positions on wars that they do. Not ever. I just don't believe them when they claim their devotion to the Unborn.

The 2020 election will not be decided by Republican base voters defecting to Democrats. It will be decided by Democratic turnout. What the polls are currently showing is that the gender gap is growing significantly. (See Digby's Watch your step Trumpie. That gender gap is a chasm. Hullabaloo 12/27/2019) So there could be significant numbers of women who did vote for Republicans in 2016 and 2018 who will shift their votes to Democrats. And some of the evangelicals among them may be significantly influenced in their choice by things like the Christianity Today articles.

More on (a few) white evangelical conservatives trying to distance themselves from the embarrassment known as Donald Trump

The Christianity Today editorial supporting the Senate to convict Trump on impeachment charges got predictable pushback from the Christian Right. CT has followed up with a supportive piece by their president, Timothy Dalrymple (The Flag in the Whirlwind: An Update from CT’s President 12/22/2019)

It doesn't distance itself from the position of the earlier editorial, on which I commented here a few days ago.

But it does contain this somewhat puzzling qualification, noting that the impeachment editorial was signed by editor-in-chief Mark Galli:

CT does not have an editorial board. Editors publish under their own names. Yet Galli has stood in the trenches for men and women of faith for over three decades. He has been an outstanding editor in chief. While he does not speak for everyone in the ministry — our board and our staff hold a range of opinions - he carries the editorial voice of the magazine. We support CT’s editorial independence and believe it’s vital to our mission for the editor in chief to speak out on the issues of the day.

For whatever reason, CT does not formally call "the editorial voice of the magazine" an editorial board.

Aside from a Mad King Trump outburst on Twitter, some of the usual suspects did an open letter to CT, the signatories including noted Christian scholars Michele Bachmann, Gary Bauer, James "beat-the-kids" Dobson, Mike "the Huck" Huckabee, Cindy Jacobs, Robert "let's-have-a-civil-war" Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, and Ralph Reed. (Melissa Barnhart, Nearly 200 evangelical leaders slam Christianity Today for questioning their Christian witness Christian Post 12/22/2019)

Neither of the two CT pieces use the word "white" anywhere. But the problem they are addressing is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of white evangelical Christians. As Nathalie Baptiste notes (A Christian Magazine Called for Trump’s Removal. Top Evangelicals Say It’s A Liberal Plot. Mother Jones 12/20/2019):

White evangelicals have always been Trump’s most unwavering allies and voting base, but the impeachment question may have begun to splinter even that group. An October Public Religion Research Institute found that 99 percent of white evangelicals opposed impeachment. (In contrast to the 86 percent of Black Protestants who disapprove of the president.)

You can find stories written by reporters of major media outlets who venture out into the wilds outside the Beltway Village bubble and quote mysterious self-identified evangelicals out in the "heartland" explaining why they support Trump. It's only a mystery to people who somehow haven't managed to catch one of the basic facts about American politics, which is that there is a massive overlap between "self-identified white evangelicals" and "white people who really don't like black people (or Latinos, or gays, or immigrants, or wimmin) very much".

The Christian Post article linked above does mention someone criticizing Mark Galli for supposedly dissing those pore, picked-on white evangelicals that the Mean Libruls criticize just because they're so prejudiced against some many people. Why cain't them Libruls show some respect for POPs (people of prejudice), huh, answer me that!

Here's how Dalrymple dances around that particular (white) elephant in the room:

Out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness. It has alienated many of our children and grandchildren. It has harmed African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American brothers and sisters. And it has undercut the efforts of countless missionaries who labor in the far fields of the Lord. While the Trump administration may be well regarded in some countries, in many more the perception of wholesale evangelical support for the administration has made toxic the reputation of the Bride of Christ.

Galli’s editorial focused on the impeachment, but it was clear the issues are deeper and broader. Reasonable people can differ when it comes to the flagrantly partisan impeachment process. But this is not merely about impeachment, or even merely about President Trump. He is not the sickness. He is a symptom of a sickness that began before him, which is the hyper-politicization of the American church. This is a danger for all of us, wherever we fall on the political spectrum. Jesus said we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. With profound love and respect, we ask our brothers and sisters in Christ to consider whether they have given to Caesar what belongs only to God: their unconditional loyalty. [my emphasis]

But Dalrymple makes sure to not identify the Christian Right's political goals with the President they criticize because his a serious embarrassing, sleazy criminal:

The problem is not that we as evangelicals are associated with the Trump administration’s judicial appointments or its advocacy of life, family, and religious liberty. We are happy to celebrate the positive things the administration has accomplished. ...

Similarly, this is neither a criticism of the evangelical Trump voter nor an endorsement of the Democrats. The 2016 election confronted evangelical voters with an impossible dilemma: Vote for a pro-choice candidate whose policies would advance so much of what we oppose, or vote for an extravagantly immoral candidate who could well damage the standing of the republic and the witness of the church. Countless men and women we hold in the highest regard voted for President Trump, some wholeheartedly and some reluctantly. Friends we love and respect have also counseled and worked within the Trump administration. We believe they are doing their best to serve wisely in a fallen world.

Authoritarian atttudes toward women are bound up with the antiabortion position, and militarnt antiabortion groups in the United States have been a key element in spawning not only "mainstream" partisan fanaticism but also the hardcore, violent far-right brand. And the fundamentalist version of "faimily" (patriarchal, heteronormative, excessive sexual repression) and "religious liberty" (effectively treating conservative Christianity as a state religion) are very much part of the authoritarian, anti-democratic "sickness that began before" Trump. Pretending that Trump is somehow an anomaly for today's Republican Party is ducking the reality of the asyymmetric polarization with see in the radicalism of that party.

And, "Friends we love and respect have also counseled and worked within the Trump administration. We believe they are doing their best to serve wisely in a fallen world," applied to people who willingly serve in appointive positions in the Trump Administration is a mealy-mouthed version of "they were just following orders."

Will Trump fans go back to grumbling rather than howling after he's ousted?

Gene Lyons did a recent column called t’s Trump himself, not his supporters, who should scare us Chicago Sun-Times 12/05/2019:

Trump, however, continues to draw adoring crowds to his professional wrestling-style extravaganzas. Like a WWE spectacle, it’s staged as an apocalyptic contest between good and evil: Donald J. Balboa versus Evil Adam Schiff. ...

His removal, Trump predicts, “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” ..

Ho-hum. At a recent rally in Sunrise, Florida, the president warned that “the same maniacs are pushing that deranged … impeachment. A witch hunt. And a lot of bad things are happening to them. You see what’s happening in the polls? Everybody said: that’s really bull***t.”

The crowd roared happily when Trump said the naughty word. Because that’s what they love about him. He’s rude, crude and he talks like Uncle Otis down at the body shop. Woo-hoo!

But it’s all just part of the show. As for civil war, almost everybody understands that Trump’s a world-class bull****ter. That’s a big part of the fun.

Sure, soreheads overreact. They also get all worked up when WWE champ Brock Lesnar battles The Fiend. Or when Auburn plays Alabama. But everybody’s back at work come Monday morning.

I like Gene Lyons' professional wrestling analogy is a good one. The fans howling for him at his Nuremburg rallies so far haven't gone out afterward and started burning buildings in minority areas or the like.

He also suggests that the comparison some people make of today to the pre-Civil War days is less appropriate than the white South after integration. I agree that the Deep South of the Massive Resistance against integation is more of a parallel to today than pre-1860. After all, in the 1850s there had already been a mini-civil-war in Kansas, a real shooting war with opposing guerrilla groups fighting each other. We haven't hit Bleeding Kansas politically yet.

I was still attending my rural Mississippi high school when it was first fully integrated, and it went remarkably smoothly. It did make a big impression on me that something that the white adults had been saying my whole life would be a horrible disaster obviously turned to not be. I even had a journalism class my senior year in which the teacher and all the other students were black. The teacher had a master's degree from UCLA, which may have made her the best-credentialed teacher in the county at the time, and she had some great stories about the intrigingly weird people in California.

But I'm not quite so optimistic about the prospects for Trump's followers. Post-intregration, there was still a thriving segregtionist-minded subculture in the Deep South, and not always entirely "sub". And an important difference from now is that the liberal-conservative/segregationist-integrationist split was genuinely bipartisan then. Now we have one continually self-radicalizing national party that's operating on a white nationalist ideology. Also, there was no equivalent of FOX News back then.

And the period between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to the integration of Southern schools nearly 20 years later did contain a lot of ugliness, and not all it coming from the mouths of George Wallace and Ross Barnett and similar leaders. Including grassroots violence and killing in all too many instances.

He also refers to a piece by Anne Applebaum, How America Ends The Atlantic Dec 2019 and specifically to this argument of hers:

Within the living memory of most Americans, a majority of the country’s residents were white Christians. That is no longer the case, and voters are not insensate to the change - nearly a third of conservatives say they face “a lot” of discrimination for their beliefs, as do more than half of white evangelicals. But more epochal than the change that has already happened is the change that is yet to come: Sometime in the next quarter century or so, depending on immigration rates and the vagaries of ethnic and racial identification, nonwhites will become a majority in the U.S. For some Americans, that change will be cause for celebration; for others, it may pass unnoticed. But the transition is already producing a sharp political backlash, exploited and exacerbated by the president. In 2016, white working-class voters who said that discrimination against whites is a serious problem, or who said they felt like strangers in their own country, were almost twice as likely to vote for Trump as those who did not. Two-thirds of Trump voters agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.” In Trump, they’d found a defender.

I share the reservation Gene Lyons expresses about that argument. It actually sounds like a version of the diner visits a lot of the press like to do and then inform us that old white people don't feel "listened to" and express vague, more-or-less polite gripes about strange people showing up around town. These kinds of white-people-are-the-real-victims argument coming from white Repbulicans call for some critical thinking, not just taking that pitch as face value. Because, yes, corporate press reporters, racist white people have been known to lie about their racism.

I do think there's a lot to be said for there being an authoritarian core of a third or so of the US population, a lot of whom are genuinely racist white people. But that makes more sense to me as a general framework for why Trump's fans respond to the issues they do and react that way at his public hate fests.

Stanley Sloan and the state of NATO

The "crisis in transatlantic relations" is something that has been part of NATO politics pretty much since the day it was created.

This book was published in 2004 - complete with a blurb at the top from Status Quo Joe Biden himself!

In September 2004, the Wilson Center held a conference on the topic The Crisis in Transatlantic Relations.

The differences over the Iraq War didn't stop the expansion of NATO to include Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, followed by Albania and Croatia in 2009 and Montenegro in 2017.

Trump's election to the Presidency has brought a new chapter in the Crisis in Transatlantic Relations. The latest episode made the news again this weekend when Stanley Sloan, a US expert on NATO, was vetoed by the State Department as a speaker at a scheduled NATO conference in Denmark, which as a result was cancelled by the Danish Atlantic Council, which was sponsoring the event. This kind of State Department intervention to veto a speaker with thoroughly Establishment credentials is unusual, as Mariel Padilla reports (NATO Conference Is Canceled After U.S. Ambassador Barred a Trump Critic New York Times 12/08/2019):

Mr. Sloan, a visiting scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont, a fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, planned to speak about the future of trans-Atlantic relations.

One day before he was set to leave for Copenhagen, Mr. Sloan was informed that the United States Embassy in Copenhagen had vetoed his participation because of his previous criticisms of President Trump, Mr. Sloan said on Facebook on Saturday.

Carla Sands, the United States ambassador to Denmark, did not want Mr. Sloan to participate, and the Danish Atlantic Council “had no other option” than to revoke his invitation to speak, Lars Bangert Struwe, the secretary general of the council, said in a statement.

Mr. Sloan said the decision had left him “stunned and concerned about our country.”

Sloan has been tweeting about the incident.

It is here for your viewing: https://t.co/S2eiZ9ruH0 https://t.co/ZwTAkcmlut

— Stanley R. Sloan - Defense of the West (@srs2_) December 8, 2019

The page he links contains further links to his work, including his notes for the speech that he couldn't deliver because Dear Leader Baby Trump doesn't want to hear people criticizing his bumbling, fumbling, laughingstock of a foreign policy, Crisis in transatlantic relations: what future will we choose? The speech itself is largely boilerplate Atlanticist assumptions and is thoroughly conventional. He states his perspective as follows:

• I support liberal democracy as the best, albeit not perfect, political system for our countries.
• My outlook on how to defend the West is influenced as much by this ideological bias as it is by the need for governments to defend against physical threats.
• Finally, in my years of working on transatlantic relations I’ve analyzed and written about many “crises.”
• It’s my judgment that the crisis currently facing the West is the most dangerous of any seen in the past seven decades.

NATO has never been overly disturbed by incidents of member states departing from liberal democracy, e.g., the military government in Greece 1967-1974, various military governments in Turkey and Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian Islamist government today, Viktor Orbán's authoritarian regime in Hungary.

Since NATO is an alliance focused on Europe, he takes a Eurocentric view:

Of course, “the West” is more than the transatlantic alliance

When the term is defined broadly, it certainly includes Eastern democracies such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Ultimately, however, the members of NATO and the European Union represent the heart of what we call “the West.’

We could quibble with how he uses "the West" as a normative standard, i.e., Japan is part of "the West" but Russia isn't? But it's not the kind of thing that would raise anyone's eyebrows on Morning Joe.

Sloan makes the sensible point that miltiary budgets are always a matter of political decisions, "so the transatlantic alliance will be perpetually plagued by a 'burdensharing' problem."

He does make an explicit if general criticism of the Trump Administration:

Meanwhile, the American guarantee of European security has, under President Trump, become very uncertain. Mutual trust among leaders of alliance nations is at an all-time low.

The [recent NATO] London meeting did little to reassure us.

And, the threat from Russia has become even more intrusive.

Russia’s Putin is getting a helping hand from our president as well as from radical right populist politicians here in Europe.

He sketches out his (also thoroughly conventional) view of challenges from Russia, China, and international terrorism.

Sloan's description of what he sees as the possibility of a "radical negative change" in NATO sounds like a lazy recitation of decades-old Cold War talk, with Moscow as the mastermind of a European Communist movement replaced by Moscow as the mastermind of a European fascist movement. Actually, Putin's government seems far more interested in encouraging political chaos where it can rather than promoting some ideology encouraging Putin-style governments in other countries.

And what would such a presentation be without an invocation of "Munich"? He describes in his "radical negative change" scenario:

In this hypothetical scenario, Trump continues the process of abandoning US international leadership and decides to remove all US forces from Europe.

Trump tweets that he and Vladimir Putin have agreed that such a move would promote peace and security in Europe.

In response, European allies discuss creating strong, integrated European defense structures to replace the transatlantic NATO one.

But they find it too challenging politically and financially.

Even the overwhelming cost estimate projected in 2019 by the IISS for the EU members to create a defense system as capable as that of NATO turns out to be overly optimistic.

Several member countries suggest that the EU should follow the US lead and sign a peaceful relations accord with Russia, in which both sides pledge to take no aggressive actions against the other.

Even though some commentators immediately label this “the 21st century Munich,” most European governments decide they have little choice.

In addition, this move toward accommodation with Russia strengthens illiberal pro-Moscow parties throughout Europe.

That leads to the election of several national administrations that lean toward fascist forms of governance and away from liberal democracy. [my emphasis]

Not a particularly creative formulation. But, as John Kenneth Galbraith observed, the "comfort of convenient belief" can be very attractive in itself. (The Culture of Contentment, 1992) But it often renders its adherents incapable of recognizing important changes and developments not included int he conventional wisdom.

Galbraith also reminds us of the consequences of the kind of threat inflation previously associated with Western views the USSR and justified by the Munich Analogy:

The natural focus of concern was the Soviet Union and its once seemingly stalwart satellites in Eastern Europe. Fear of the not inconsiderable competence of the Soviets in military technology and production provided the main pillar of support for American military spending. However, the alarm was geographically comprehensive. It supported expenditure and military action against such improbable threats as those from Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia and, massively, tragically and at great cost, from Vietnam. From being considered a source of fear and concern, only Communist China was, from the early 1970s on, exempt. Turning against the Soviet Union and forgiven for its earlier role in Korea and Vietnam, it became an honorary bastion of democracy and free enterprise, which, later repressive actions notwithstanding, it rather substantially remains.

Which is also a reminder of the risk of threat inflation in relation to today's Russia. And that's a big issue for NATO, an alliance that has expanded greatly in the last three decades but has nevertheless been an alliance in search of a mission since the fall of the USSR in 1992.

The comfortable conventional view of China that Galbraith described there has now been replaced by China as a pressing threat.

US and NATO foreign policy would be well served by a couple of changes: (1) a more pragmatic and realistic view of threats, which also means one not deferential to profit goals of the armaments industries; and, (2) burying the Munich Analogy, which main consequence has long been to encourage a dangerous habit threat inflation.

What a very Republican Administration looks like

Digby Parton gives us a rundown on the latest Trump news in World mocks Trump at NATO summit: Impeachment has him coming unglued Salon 12/04/2019:

As promised, the House Intelligence Committee released its report on the Ukraine investigation on Tuesday. It was another of those days when everyone on TV was madly reading a pile of documents trying to find any nuggets of new information while at the same time attempting to give the public a sense of the larger narrative. This time there was no William Barr on hand to spin things in favor of the president, so the media managed to tell the real story. It is actually more devastating than anticipated.

To make the whole thing even more frantic and surreal than it already was, on split-screen TV President Trump could be seen in England making an utter fool out of himself and the nation at the NATO summit. He was predictably unable to maintain a sense of dignity or pride, lying and whining at every turn. It was a very strange news cycle, to say the least. [my emphasis]

She also provides a great reminder of why I have never been an enthusiast for NeverTrumpers who pretend that Trumpism is something other than the Republicans Party that have progressively radicalized itself:

In a surprise revelation, it appears likely that the ranking Republican member of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was in on the scheme at least as long ago as last spring. The report includes phone records that indicate Nunes was speaking to Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his Ukrainian-born colleague who was recently indicted by the Southern District of New York. Oddly, in all those hearings over the past few weeks during which Nunes ranted and raved about various made-up conspiracies, he never uttered a word about knowing any of the people involved in all this. [my emphasis]

As Digby, who has no illusions about the nature of the institution called the Republican Parry, rightly concludes, "Our president is an utter fool. Those guys in that video all know it, and so does the leadership of the Republican Party. Imagine how much better off the whole world would be right now if that party's elected officials would do their constitutional duty and put an end to this nightmare."

Trump is responsible for his own actions as President. But the disaster known as Trumpism was brought to us by the Republican Party, not by Trump on his own.

The other NATO leaders don't all show admiration for Dear Leader Trump. Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron appear to make fun of President Trump Euronews 12/04/2019:

As Digby notes, Trump continued his erratic and irresponsible handling of foreign policy and basic diplomacy. "He later refused to commit to NATO's collective defense pledge if whatever country was under attack wasn't 'paid up' on its dues, revealing once again that he remains obstinately ignorant about how NATO funding works."

Julia Ioffe has provided us with a description of the kind of destruction the very Republican Party Trump Administration (Trump Is Waging War on America’s Diplomats GQ 12/03/2019:

... the administration — through three years of attempted budget cuts, hiring freezes, and grotesquely personal attacks—has eviscerated the country's diplomatic corps and put highly sensitive matters of national security in the hands of politically appointed novices. They are people like Gordon Sondland, the Trump donor who became America's ambassador to the European Union, who is now playing a starring role in the Ukrainian imbroglio that imperils the Trump presidency. It is no accident that impeachment hangs on a matter of diplomacy — and a stand-off between the country's top foreign policy professionals and the president's political allies, national security amateurs installed to do Trump’s bidding rather than the country’s.

And this is an interesting effect of the Republican's America First government is having on US influence in world affairs:

Meanwhile, China continues staffing up across the world, including in Africa, where the U.S. has an especially high number of unfilled jobs. According to Australia’s Lowy Institute, which issues an annual Diplomacy Index, China just surpassed the United States in diplomatic muscle. The United States, which for decades after World War II had the highest number of embassies and consulates, has been outpaced by a rising adversary. [my emphasis]

This is bad. But it does mean that a new President in 2021 would have a great opportunity to restart the State Department on a professional basis. Hopefully with a pro-peace emphasis.

Anti-democracy coup in Bolivia

What's happening in Bolivia is clearly not a demand to repeat elections! It's a full-blown coup. The decision of the government leaders to resign doesn't look to have been voluntary, although there are a lot of details not yet known publicly.

Marco Teruggi reports (Se consumó el golpe en Bolivia: renunció Evo Morales Página/12 11.11.2019: my English translation):

El anuncio hecho por Morales era entonces cuestión de tiempo. La ofensiva golpista ya había tomado los principales espacios, y las renuncias de funcionarios se fueron sucediendo, la mayoría bajo amenaza y persecución.

La renuncia de Morales y Linera fue seguida de persecusiones: las autoridades del Tribunal Supremo Electoral, María Eugenia Choque y Antonio Costas, fueron detenidos y esposados por la policía, en un escenario de sucesión de imágenes y noticias mezcladas entre la confusión, la militarización, y la euforia golpista con gritos y evocaciones a la democracia y a Dios.

Luego de los anuncios desde Chapare, renunció la presidenta del Senado, Adriana Salvatierra, quien debía asumir la presidencia. Lo mismo sucedió con quien debía seguir, el primer vicepresidente, abriéndose un escenario de preguntas que serán resultan a medida que tome forma el reordenamiento conducido por la Policía Nacional, la Fuerza Armada, los dirigentes golpistas, los empresarios que financiaron, y quienes respaldaron la invalidación de las elecciones desde el primer momento: el gobierno norteamericano.

En ese contexto se sucedieron las denuncias respecto a la seguridad de Evo Morales, quien denunció que existe una “orden de aprehensión ilegal” en contra suya, y que su domicilio fue asaltado por grupos violentos. La situación de Morales se repite en el caso de varios dirigentes y militantes del proceso de cambio bajo amenaza de persecución.

[The [resignation] announcement made by [President Evo] Morales was therefore a matter of time. The coup offensive had already taken over the main spaces, and the resignations of officials were taking place, most under threat and persecution.

Morales' and Linera's resignations were followed by acts of persecution: the authorities of the Supreme Electoral Court, María Eugenia Choque and Antonio Costas, were arrested and handcuffed by the police, in a succession scenario of images and news mixed into the confusion, militarization, and coup euphoria with cries and evocations of democracy and God.

After the announcements from Chapare, the president of the Senate, Adriana Salvatierra, who was to assume the presidency, resigned. The same was the case with the person next in the succession, the first vice president, raising a series of questions about what will result as reordering takes shape led by the National Police, the Armed Forces, the coup leaders, the businessmen who financed it, and those who supported the invalidation of elections from the outset: the American government.

In this context, complaints regarding the security of Evo Morales, who denounced an "illegal apprehension order" against him, were reported, and that his home was raided by violent groups. Morales' situation is repeated in the case of several leaders and militants of the process of change [i.e., supporter of Morales] under threat of persecution.}

This coup is a wretched development for Latin America.

Mexico has offered Morales asylum. Emir Olivares Alonso, Tras renuncia de Evo, México le ofrece asilo de requerirlo La Journada 10.11.2019: "Following the military coup that led to Morales' resignation and the political crisis in that nation, the administration of [Mexican President] Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered asylum in his embassy in that nation to 20 officials of the Bolivian Executive and Legislative." (My translation)

By the way, there is another government in the Western Hemisphere that is laying the propaganda groundwork for claiming elections were invalid and the results should be resisted by violence if their side loses.

Think I'm exaggerating? Have you been following the news from the US since 2016?

Authoritarianism and its enablers

Paul Waldman has a useful if somewhat eclectic look at the current American authoritarianism, The Trump depression (and we don't mean the economy): Key symptom of autocratic regimes Salon 09/15/2019.

What particularly resonates with me in Waldman's piece is his discussion of the enablers, as district from supporters. One of the lessons of the Weimar Republic to me is that if enough people want to do away with democracy, and enough people are indifferent to it.

One of the most significant things about the end of the Weimar Republic is that in a technical, constitutional sense, Hitler's regime never did away with it. The Weimar Constitution was never formally abolished under the Nazis. The government just ignored it.

He quotes Elizabeth Mika:

The Democrats' ambivalent response to Trump's lawlessness contributes to the problem:

Demoralization and disillusionment with the Democrats' ability to understand and respect the wishes of their supporters, and to effect change, are likely to result. ... Their ambivalence of course serves to embolden Trump and legitimize his actions. One necessary action to take is to contact and confront our representatives, let them know what we think and publicize it through social media. We are the people. They work for us, after all.

This is true. Sam Seder on The Majority Report has recently said that the Founders of the US Constitution foresaw a President like Donald Trump, but what they didn't foresee was a Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House or Chuck Schumer as Senate opposition leader who would simply decline to use their available powers to effectively counter a President like Trump.

I don't think that's literally true, but it makes an important, realistic point. The famous separation-of-powers enshrined in the US Constitution and now generally considered to be essential for any constitutional democracy was based on a Montesquiean/Madisonian idea that setting up parts of the government as having complementary but also competing institutional roles would allow the effects of personal ambitions and institutional self-protection to have not only the usual corrosive and inevitable side-effects, but would also serve as a check on tyranny and on one Branch of the government overstepping its proper role.

The concept is not that everyone would put aside politics and "divisiveness," because it basically didn't occur to them to rely on an idea so foreign to everything they knew about human history. And they certainly didn't think that functioning of the government would always be benign. That was the whole point of having checks-and-balances and a democratic electoral basis for the government, so that it would limit the worst abuses and force the government to pay attention to the demands of the public.

Yes, it's important to remember that they were making a government for a political community of property-owning white men. But it was the world's most far-reaching experiment in democracy at the time. And was so perceived by other nations in the world, especially Europe and the Americas. And the Constitution is still in effect, so what the Founders understood about it is still very relevant to today's politics.

Did the Founders think that it was possible that the politicians elected under that system might do such a bad job that they the system itself might fail? They clearly did. So in that sense, they understood the potential for fecklessness on the part of leaders of the Pelosi-Schumer kind. Heck, they were familiar with female sovereigns in Europe, including queens of England, so at least some of them must have imagined the possibility of a female Speaker of the House, too.

I wonder what Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) would have thought of Pelosi's defense of Trump and presumably Kavanaugh against impeachment.

Here is Madison channeling Montesquieu in Federalist #47:

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. ...

From these facts, by which Montesquieu was guided, it may clearly be inferred, that in saying, "there can be no liberty, where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates;" or, "if the power of judging, be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," he did not mean that these departments ought to have no partial agency in, or no control over the acts of each other. His meaning, as his own words import, and still more conclusively as illustrated by the example in his eye, can amount to no more than this, that where the whole power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free constitution are subverted.

Pelosi and the House Democrats have a real Constitutional responsibility here. If they are capable of managing it right - not a foregone conclusion! - an impeachment process against Trump and/or Kavanaugh would benefit them politically. But there are no guarantees. Wht they do have is a Constititional responsibility.

Trump's white nationalism: A menace that needs to be effectively resisted

Will Bunch uses the (political) f-word in I can’t stop thinking about the little girl behind Trump and the hate she’s being taught Philly.com 07/21/2019:

And so the bigger point raised by Wednesday’s American hatefest is the question of what are we going to do about American fascism? The signs right now are not good. The leaders of the Democrats in Congress — the ones with the most leverage to actually do something — are not only running out the clock on impeaching this unfit president but putting a lot of their eggs, at least this week, in one basket: Wednesday’s long-delayed testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller.

But the Mueller gambit could backfire, and in fact it probably will. ...

America’s weak body politic is absorbing Trump-Russia and other presidential wrongdoing that same way that it once absorbed the Access Hollywood tape, when Trump’s own words about sexual assault didn’t derail his election. The ability of Team Trump to steamroll congressional subpoenas and basic requests for information are making the Democrats look weak, because arguably they are. It hardly helps that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems stuck in the 1990s, seemingly unable to grasp the severe threat to American democracy on inglorious display in North Carolina last week. [my emphasis]

n other words, normalization of Trump continues even as his white nationalist focus intensifies.